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[nyarla]

"Love the Underside references. "I will now bestow upon you the power to jump""

I actually don't remember this in The Underside.

Oh, haha.. I thought it was a reference to the whole mole-giving-you-the-jump-ability bit at the start of The Underside.

About the walking faster up a hill... true that it doesn't affect the gameplay at all, it's just a minor vibe-related thing. If you don't mind it then cool, I just thought I'd mention it as it makes the movement feel a bit unpolished to me...  I wasn't necessarily saying you should have him slow down while going up a hill, Sonic style.. just, how demolam said, adjusting the velocity when moving both horizontally and vertically, so that his apparent speed stays the same..  Anyway rock on!

[alspal]

nice game so far.
I think it would be nice: when you walk into/out of a house the door should be open then you see it shut - that would be really awesome, and make it feel like you just walked through a door!   
and might look a nicer if you disable the menu options in the properties, the file/options/help look quite ugly 
not sure if anyone has mentioned yet, but it might be nice if you use textblitter for the healthbar text so that it fits your pixel style, and the bullet shoots too far from the gun.

[mr. podunkian]

it seems like you're using MMF, which is good to see these days with everyone jumping ship to gamemaker. the way i handled going down slopes in the underside was for every pixel you move sideways, move the player one pixel down, and then if it's colliding the floor, move the player up one pixel. what happens is if you're running on the floor, it'll move a pixel down and then shove you back up, but if you happen to be moving on a slope, it'll move a pixel down and keep you there. it's a surprisingly easy and effective fix.

as for the game itself, i thought it was cool. i felt a lot of similarities between this and the underside, but it also felt a bit different because the levels felt really open compared to the sort of confined, caviness of the cave story/underside.

at the same time, i feel like this is one of the game's biggest problems too -- so much time is spent navigating dead space, and i think that adding more enemies, obstacles, or even landmarks/graphical details will help break the levels up. maybe move some of the character's houses to within the levels?

i think someone mentioned this earlier in the thread but the parallax is also kind of funky in that the "further" layer of the parallax moves quicker in relation to the "closer" one, which is disorienting and awkward.

i especially liked the music. i think it was kind of my favorite part of the game.

two fixes for the complaints about load times:

1) break the levels down. i do this a lot in TU when certain levels take too long to load, i just split them in two (for instance the first part of route66 and the second part of route 66)

2) add a fade-out-fade-in transition (not the built in MMF ones!). this helps because it's more obvious that the game is loading if you're staring at a frozen screen, than it is to stare at, say, a black screen.

wa wa we wo.

[JaJitsu]

alastair:

Thats a good idea with the door, I might put that in.

I have already disabled the menu.

Yeah i didn't realize the font didn't transfer -.- duh.


podunkian:

Glad you liked the game!
I'm going to try the slope thing.

1. Yeah I might have to do this. such a pain though @_@

2. er.. I don't know how.


Any other tips and trick with MMF would be extremely helpful!

[FranticPandaKev]

i especially liked the music. i think it was kind of my favorite part of the game.

Cheers, this kinda stuff makes me work harder on the upcoming level tracks :D

[mr. podunkian]

well it may be too late for this now, but by externalizing all of your levels, you can radically simplify the coding process because you only have to really write code for one frame instead of dealing with global events and all of that nonsense.

beside that, there's nothing that really stands out as being technically wrong with the game! if you have any specific problems, i can help you through them, because by now i'm the master of finding hacky solutions to MMF problems.

i especially liked the music. i think it was kind of my favorite part of the game.

Cheers, this kinda stuff makes me work harder on the upcoming level tracks :D

great! the music was catchy and retro-sounding without being annoying, as retro-sounding music tends to be sometimes in indie games. i look forward to hearing more.

[Relix]

I don't really like the jumping in this, there needs to be somekind manual control in it.
I've a lazy mans solution for it, when you tap the button, you only make a small jump, but if you hold the button, you continue jumping until you've jumped the maxium height or release the jumping button, this can be done with a simple boolean value.

(Don't know how others make their jumping solutions)

Otherwise, don't have much to add - overall it feels nice.

[JaJitsu]

podunkian: Yeah right now i have everything on global events. Its not bad, but making the levels is the pain cause I have to make it in paint then transfer over to MMF rather then just put tiles in like a level editor.



Relix: Yeah that sounds good. I'll mess around a bit to see if i can get that jump.

[mr. podunkian]

... why can't you make the levels directly in the editor...?

[JaJitsu]

wouldn't that be a huge amount of objects?

[mr. podunkian]

well, you can use backdrop objects, or 'bake together' groups of tiles that you'll use often...? though i remember with the underside, using such a high volume of tiles on a layer that was higher than the first one caused the game to be slow. i don't know if this still applies -- maybe test it out?

[dbb]

Just played through the demo. Nice! Really promising. Reading through other people's comments, I don't think I've got much new to say. I agree that some of the areas feel a little empty; especially in a couple of parts where you have to wait for an area to load, walk straight through it, and then have to wait for the next area to load. Kind of breaks the flow. But I'm guessing that there will be a fair bit more content in the finished game.

Physics-wise, I'm one of the people who found it a bit weird that you walk uphill faster than you can on flat ground; if anything it would be slower. You're right in that it doesn't cause a problem gameplay-wise, but I do think that it would help with the overall feel of the game.

Also, while I'm being nitpicky, I noticed that the main character seems to switch which hand he's holding the gun in depending on which way he's facing. It might be worth having a separate sprite for each direction rather than just flipping it; again, not something that affects the gameplay at all, but might add a bit of polish.

The fact I'm being so nitpicky shows how good the game as a whole is, so far; I'm really looking forward to being able to play through the whole thing. I think the humour is just right; it made me smile without getting in the way of the game.