Castle Paradox

[Newbie_Power]

plotscript, gototitlescreen, begin
game over
end

PLOTSCRIPT OF THE MONTH!
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TheGiz> Am I the only one who likes to imagine that Elijah Wood's character in Back to the Future 2, the kid at the Wild Gunman machine in the Cafe 80's, is some future descendant of the AVGN?

[Rya.Reisender]

I think I'll use it for my next game.

[Newbie_Power]

USE IT NOW.
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TheGiz> Am I the only one who likes to imagine that Elijah Wood's character in Back to the Future 2, the kid at the Wild Gunman machine in the Cafe 80's, is some future descendant of the AVGN?

[Rya.Reisender]

Too late I already stated that it's the final version. :p

But I'm thinking of doing a Fatal Maze 2 with all the features demanded... in some years.

[Stewie]

Oh since when has that stopped anyone? Even "real" developers tinker with their products long after they're released.

And if you say it's out of neccessity I swear to God I'll pinch your eyeballs out...
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C:\DOS
C:\DOS\RUN
RUN\DOS\RUN

[Newbie_Power]

[Rya.Reisender]

Lol, it's not that important and doesn't even fit into the game, maybe you wanna continue playing!

[Newbie_Power]

Put the script in the game. I know it takes a ton of effort, but it must be in there!
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TheGiz> Am I the only one who likes to imagine that Elijah Wood's character in Back to the Future 2, the kid at the Wild Gunman machine in the Cafe 80's, is some future descendant of the AVGN?

[RedMaverickZero]

Geeze man, if there's something that great worth playing even longer, you could have a text box come up say, there is still adventure ahead, do you want to keep going, or would you rather escape the maze while you can.

Then just have a textbox with a choice, saying yes will advance one script, saying no will advance to the game over script.

VERY easy. And by all means, take everything we said to heart and make this game the best you can. We wouldn't be so hard on you if we didn't want you to become good.
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---------------Projects----
Mr.Triangle's Maze: 70%
Takoyaki Surprise: 70%

[TMC]

Hey RMZ flaming isn't valid feedback. With the vitriol you threw, I can't believe you honestly care.

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OK, I beat the game. I reached the boss at level 22. It was a bit on the easy side (I casually beat him on the second try, without any healing at all), and I had a lot of staves left - clearly I pickup-scummed too much (overestimated the difficulty) - but only 4 spare hp potions.

Wow, things got interesting towards the end. I thought this was just a small gameplay demo, but you managed to make a fun, complete game out of it (while still partly unfinished/unpolished). Too bad the last two enemies (which probably didn't appear enough) didn't add as much as the rest - I never did anything against the snails except poison and wait for them to die, and I got along fine against the robots for a long time before even figuring out exactly what the were doing. In the same token, I think you could have done with a couple more enemies, especially on level 1 which got very boring before you get to the worms. I agree with Moogle's suggestion (and most of what he said about the game).

I think the healing scheme wasn't right. I think rationing out healing potions makes it easy for a player to ruin their game as levelling up becomes a smaller source of healing by the high levels, yet healing potions are picked up very rarely. I had 25 when I entered level 2, but I had horrible luck again and had only picked up ONE by the time reached the robots (I think).
If you had given the later enemies more experience, that might have worked. As it is, any player who didn't realise how precious the potions are might have ended up having to start over.

I don't like the fact that most battles make the player weaker (towards the end where level ups are rare, anyway) but you can run from most. In addition, the harder battles just didn't give you much reward for sustaining a lot of nearly unavoidable damage. Making robots unescapeble was a good idea but didn't do much because they are rare. If you disable running though, then you shouldn't lay out the map as a maze! I wandered back to the starting room on the second floor after nearly reaching the end! At this point, I just ran from all battles to get back to where I was. Normally however instead of running I saved the game a lot.

Battles do have a tendency to denegrade to killing off all the enemies except one and milking them. Greed prevents this from happening, but occasionally I did it anyway because I wasn't sure if I had enough of whatever staff. However by the end, I did this rarely and I'm not sure if I actually needed to do this afterall.

Some of the graphics (eg snail and ninja) look like you drew their outlines quickly with the mouse and then didn't adjust the lines afterwards. Hmm, I thought you were practising pixelating? Also, the shading on the ninja is really bad, and the limbs looks like blobs. Adding lines where the limbs join the body also doesn't seem like a good choice. The final boss looked worse. On the other hand, most of the enemies look fine to good. (I liked the magician, except for its head)

The magicians could be horrendously frustrating when you get unlucky and they manage to cast sleep on you 5 times consecutively. They're difficulty was about right earlier in the game, but it seemed a bit much later on when they have a damage dealer next to them. I think making their sleep attack cost MP, and their attack charge MP would have been a good mechanism to prevent the RNG from ruining your day. Or, you could have made their Sleep shorter.

The difference of a gameover command is nothing but a bit of polish, merely an easy spot to add, but definitely not "awful". IMO it's worth mentioning, but not complaining about.