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Castle Paradox
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NeoSpade
Of course!
Joined: 23 Sep 2008
Posts: 249
Location: Wales GB
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 Posted: Tue Sep 23, 2008 1:00 pm Post subject: Thella demo now downloadable! |
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| Hi I'm NeoSpade, and I'm new here, I've just downloaded my first game its called Thella (demo) could someone check it out and tell me what they liked, disliked, and thought needed changing in this version? Thanks. Please be gentle, this is my first time uploading... |
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TwinHamster
♫ Furious souls, burn eternally! ♫
Joined: 07 Mar 2004
Posts: 1352
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| Posted: Tue Sep 23, 2008 1:19 pm Post subject: |
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It's always helpful to post a link to the game: Link!
Welcome to the forums and I hope you enjoy your stay. |
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Calehay
...yeah.
Class B Minstrel
Joined: 07 Jul 2004
Posts: 549
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| Posted: Tue Sep 23, 2008 3:23 pm Post subject: |
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Here's a notepad file I wrote while playing. Hopefully it all makes sense.
| Calehay in Notepad wrote: | Telling not showing
Grass a bit busy, tiles quite blocky
trees are top down
quite a few run ons
Battles not only easy, but devoid of any real user input.
Font nearly unreadable. When making a custom font, think more of how the letters will work together.
Difficult to tell where to go in town.
Consider perspective on water
Heal spell seemingly worthless
Perhaps it would be best to not make the player go through the dungeon again?
Perhaps when introducing the thief, you should have our first battle with him have an item to steal?
Fear not believable in scene with pirate, in general, scenes should be *scenes,* and not just textboxes flashing on the screen.
Map flash before "...Akrothalassia was reduced..." You have to use a blank map to get the effect you want.
Why did I have to push a button before "Makra palace is home...?"
Quite a few spelling errors.
Focus on breaking the grid more.
Walked through door onto dark tile, looks somewhat sloppy.
There's no sense of depth in this hallway. One trick I try to use is create an overhead tile with an outline of the top of the wall closest to us (or, if you want to do something like Breath of Fire, create the entire wall) start about halfway down in the tile and layer it over your floor tile. This way, it starts to break the 2D plane, and you're giving more of an idea that this is a *room* and not just a bunch of pixels on the screen.
Consider perspective on the Bookshelves.
Quite a bit of "big block of text" syndrome. Consider "acting" with your text boxes, in addition to, again, giving the characters some movement to do, even if it's just walking back and forth. This adds interest, and breaking up the text boxes also avoids a player response of tl:dr.
Guards walkabout is probably the worst of the bunch, but overall, I think they work.
Just want to note, since you might miss it. "...that should raise the moral of the people..." Moral should be morale. A common mistake a lot of people usually don't catch on first glance.
I'll talk more on story later,
Really like FF's music, huh?
Ship's not that bad for a firsts. Avoid gradient wood, though. Mast is sort of small and shapeless.
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Alright, the story:
I can't really tell you if this is a good/bad/whatever storyline since you've only shown us a small fraction of it. However, your characters are kind of flat and we really haven't learned much of anything about them. For example, Thella's mother. All we see if that one scene with her in the beginning, and then she's dead. We haven't had any time to learn about her relationship with her daughter (which, depending on how it's shown, could help the impact of her death.) She's just a peripheral character who doesn't really matter that's tacked on. The same thing goes for Bran. What kind of kid is he? Try introducing these types of things in their first interactions with the Player Character.
I though the castle's scene was quite rushed. I personally am quite against the "narrator explains all" type of exposition, but many RPGs do it. Even so, I think we needed a bit more time to get into where we were instead of just walking back and forth between three rooms. Maybe a chance to explore the town, where someone's talking about the war, etc. It's also a little strange that the Player character found out a war was still going on through a book in the library.
Of course, all of this is sort of tear down and start fresh in a new .rpg file sort of stuff, so I'm not sure what you'll take out of it. I'd just suggest start looking at how expositions are handled in books, movies, and other games to get a feel for how to explain a situation without just having some omniscient presence just blurt it out.
Battles:
I'm going to say that the battles in your game were not really that fun or interesting. I'm probably in a bad position to give advice on this now as I've noticed that I'm becoming much more bored with typical RPGs battles in general. I'll just say that you might want to try some tried and true boss formulas (much like in Darkmoor Dungeon) to help spice up things a bit.
I think that sums up what I have to say. I want to make sure I say that this is definitely not bad for a newbie game. (There are some really, really horrid ones out there, like mine.) As they say, practice makes perfect. |
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Calehay |
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Raekuul
Delicious!
Joined: 31 Mar 2004
Posts: 641
Location: Nowhere
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| Posted: Tue Sep 23, 2008 3:25 pm Post subject: |
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Ugh... my login timed out.
Welcome to Castle Paradox. Here's a can of SPAM and a wooden hammer. Don't accept any dairy items from any hamsters, except for TwinHamster, and make sure that you equip the teddy bear before fighting That One Boss.
WRT to the game: As far as I've gotten (1 Battle, @ first forest save point), these are my notes.
- "To Loose Everything," I think you want "To Lose Everything."
- This font is hard to read, but it is still readable with some effort.
- Door that goes nowhere... why not use a closed door tile and a wall? Unless you just forgot to link the door in this upload...
- Hey, a weapon shop that won't just sell to any boy and his dog that walks in! A nice quirk, but I'll have to get further in the game before I can tell you whether this is a good thing or not.
- A rule of thumb that I go by is that the first battle in the game, with the default weapons and armor, should take 3-5 physical attacks per enemy. The Gob that I fought took much more than that. Long battles = bad thing, unless it's a boss.
Hope that was helpful!
EDIT: Gah! Calehay ninjask'd me.
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A broken clock is still right twice a day. |
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NeoSpade
Of course!
Joined: 23 Sep 2008
Posts: 249
Location: Wales GB
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| Posted: Wed Sep 24, 2008 12:10 am Post subject: |
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heh, thanks for the reviewing guys, I'll get to work on some of this now, this first demo was a bit rushed, I'll fix all the nessasary parts of the game, (and also fix those shadows on the walk abouts, the reason the heal spell does so badly at the begining is because its figured out = Pure damage, Base attack Stat: Int, base deffence stat: Default, Target stat: HP. Its useless at the begining lolz, my mistake, but I was going for realism, so the first two characters being small children aren't that strong.
The music...yeah...I was wondering if anyone would help me out with that...
Well thanks for the heads up, I'll get to work fixing this game now, the new demo will be out soon, with a new font and less spelling errors!
Edit:
I'm adding a few new enemies to the mix right now, and I'm also deepening the story a bit, you guys have been really helpfull, oh and also, I'll make a reason for backtracking through the forest...oh and how can I make the guard look better? more shading? less shading? less busy? |
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NeoSpade
Of course!
Joined: 23 Sep 2008
Posts: 249
Location: Wales GB
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| Posted: Thu Sep 25, 2008 10:35 am Post subject: |
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| The lastest update to the game has been added! It isn't any longer than before, but I have acted uppon the information given to me, hope you like the new version, please tell me what you think about the update! |
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Newbie_Power
Joined: 04 Sep 2006
Posts: 1762
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| Posted: Thu Sep 25, 2008 12:55 pm Post subject: |
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The first thing I notice is that the font has an oversized lowercase 'a'. It looks like a capital letter most of the time. It needs to be made smaller so that it's the same size as other lowercase letters.
Some typos exist. Quiet is spelled as 'quite' in one textbox that describes the forest. Severe spelled as 'sever' in one of the textboxes where the mother speaks (I think).
The trees in the forest are FLAT. They have less detail and shading than the grass. Same with the bushes. The grass needs a bit less contrast so that it's easier on the eyes. It's not really about the number of colors, it's more about how you use those colors, so you can still create detail with less colors.
You'll still have to break the grid yourself, though.
I detailed the tree so that it has a better shape. It's not the best way to draw a tree and it won't tile very well, but hopefully it gets the point accross in creating volume. I used Thella as a reference to what the light source is.
Some speech bubbles in the cutscene where Thella speaks with the boy don't appear above her head like they're supposed to, instead seemingly being blocked by the logs. At the same time, some speech bubbles show up like they should, so I can't pinpoint the problem.
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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? |
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Arwym
FooBAM! Games (Formerly PF Games)
Joined: 13 Sep 2008
Posts: 33
Location: Puerto Rico
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| Posted: Thu Sep 25, 2008 10:37 pm Post subject: |
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This looks interesting.  I'll download and check it out!
By the way, follow Newbie's advice. He knows what he's talking about. :3
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