Demo is available

ringthehat · Posted: Tue Feb 10, 2009 5:49 pm Post subject: Demo is available

Here are some screenshots (gif formatted this time, flickr doesn't believe in not converting bmps to jpgs).

The game starts out at night, so the palette will be darker than it is set during the day. The night patelle levels might be a bit too dark, so those might be adjusted. Some other highlights:
-Palette gradually changes during the dawn and evening
-There are some caves where you need a lit torch to see around you; otherwise its mostly dark (no grues though).

From part of the into sequence:

Leaving Orob by night:

Heading east on the road at night:

In a different town later that night:

During morning:

Outside the mayor's:

Talking with a mayor:

An Inn:

Shrine:

Night is falling:

Evening in a small town:

Random battle during the evening:

Boss battle:

Cave:

A different mayor:

TwinHamster · Posted: Tue Feb 10, 2009 6:18 pm Post subject:

Hey, that's pretty neat if the lantern in the caves works the way it looks in the screenshot!
Otherwise, everything looks pretty solid.

I'll try to check this out sometime soon.

ringthehat · Posted: Tue Feb 10, 2009 7:54 pm Post subject:

Here's a choppy gif of the torch being used:

Pepsi Ranger · Posted: Wed Feb 11, 2009 6:09 am Post subject:

The screenshots piqued my interest so I gave it a playthrough.

Is the online demo up to date with some of these screenshots? It seems like there's a date from November on the game, and I'm pretty sure I've done all I can do, and yet your screenshots tell me otherwise.

I'm still trying to find the throwing cards (Orob and the Big River Camp are empty, it seems), and the gold nugget, which I assume is the secret of the Cave of Raeb, doesn't clear the log, which makes me wonder if there's some other secret to the cave that I either haven't found or has yet to be implemented.

In any case, I really like this game. This is one of the few that I'll be looking forward to when it's complete. And judging by the structure of design, it doesn't seem like the wait will be that long.

Suggestion #1: You have some interesting gameplay mechanics in place. You don't, however, have many interesting NPCs in place. You might want to consider differing their conversations a little more. It seems you already have some dialogue plotscripts in place (which is obvious considering some NPCs walk away while you're talking to them--a negative effect to using plotscript for dialogue), so you could use that to create dialogue that depends on the time of day, which I see you sort of do with the "Good Morning" tree, like giving the player warnings of night creatures and whatnot (but in more interesting ways, of course). Right now they suffer from RPG Dialogue Cliche Syndrome, which is an illness where everyone speaks in typical RPG fashion. You're not making a commercial game set aside for millions of people with short attention spans, so have fun with it.

Also, to solve your "Inattentive NPC" problem while keeping your dialogue plotscript intact, you can use the command:

ringthehat · Posted: Wed Feb 11, 2009 7:54 am Post subject:

Thanks for the feedback, Pepsi Ranger.

[quote]Is the online demo up to date with some of these screenshots? It seems like there's a date from November on the game, and I'm pretty sure I've done all I can do, and yet your screenshots tell me otherwise. [code]

The demo is up to date. The November date on the game is leftover from the last time I worked on the game (ie, years and years ago) before the recent stint.

msw188 · Joined: 02 Jul 2003 Posts: 1041

When an NPC calls a script it passes 2 arguments. The first is the argument assigned from custom; the second is the NPC reference number to uniquely identify what NPC called the script. If you want to make a generic script to work in any given NPC, you should the 2nd argument to determine what NPC you are stopping. You should also use "read NPC" to determine what type of move type they started with, so you don't turn a pacer into a wanderer after having a discussion.

EDIT: there are also ways to allow one argument to encode multiple kinds of information, as long as the info is relatively small. For example, my version of what you are doing uses the first number of the NPC argument to tell the script how many choices the NPC has for what to say, and the rest of the argument is the textbox number of the first choice. If you'd like advice on how to do this, I can assist you. It might be a good idea to re-ask in the plotscripting forum, so that others can see it as well.
_________________
My first completed OHR game, Tales of the New World:
http://castleparadox.com/gamelist-display.php?game=161

This website link is for my funk/rock band, Euphonic Brew:
www.euphonicbrew.com

ringthehat · Posted: Sun Feb 15, 2009 3:47 pm Post subject:

I must have missed the part about the second argument passed in when reading through the plotscript stuff. That is what i needed to know for now. Thanks!

Newbie_Power · Joined: 04 Sep 2006 Posts: 1762

I think it's cool that the focus of the game is based on running away and choosing battles very carefully, but I don't think the game makes this clear enough. There runs the risk of the player thinking the game is supposed to be played normally.
_________________

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?