A book manuscript as well?? Dang. When do you have time to breathe?
I took major advantage of a snowstorm that closed my area down for a week. Bought a dozen of AM's games (The Secret Order and Queen's Quest series) and just relaxed... May re-purchase the Lost Lands series on my own account if it looks like I'll get a minute to play.
Now we're running again and it's tax refund time so I'll have to schedule my breathing around customers.
Once I could get out of bounds I really started suspecting there might be a secret somewhere. But at that time, I started looking for a message like "What are you doing here!??!" I may check on your other ones if I ever get time. Then again, I might be looking for ways to escape again!
Dang, it's been a while since I was on itch. Running a business and all...
Susan was in the Lost Lands series. Which I now know why I had trouble finding it. Lost Lands is FIVE-BN, not AM. Still, they do pretty good work as well.
If I ever get a little caught up, I'll be more than happy to try it again!
I feel coyote timing should take it from Nintendo Hard (technically possible) down to Normal People Hard (realistically possible) but it's the author's project...
> could you have alt-tabbed/hit escape during it closing?
> but i also didnt see any missing sparks.
Definitely no pausing, but it could have been caused by the slight lag induced by having both running? But I also noticed the sparks were ... "quicker?". Not sure of the word I want but they were less noticable when I could see them. I'm gonna blame the lag for this.
> downside of squeezing a 1.6gig game into less than 200MB :P
90% compression and still looked halfway decent? I'm impressed!
> i have worked very little on the story, my group partner handled most of that and honestly i cant remember any comment about dogs
Huh. I could have sworn one of the tablets said something about someone sneaking a pet on board. Will go dig back through all the tablets again.
Welp. Apparently I mixed that up from somewhere else so Nevermind!
> super easy, but its a bit against the design intensions. however i could add it to the "end credits" something like: "you found x of n story elements"
Sorry, yes. I meant a final total at the end or in the credits just for curiosity's sake; not something that shows as part of the normal gameplay.
Yeah, it was something about the graphics engine skipping a check because a frame wasn't being drawn (my 60 vs their 144) so the check wasn't being done on mine. I dunno, I don't play with graphics but very little (try BitBlt via Basic to mask three images together some 25-20 years ago).
I didn't even consider notepad! Man, that would've been so much easier!
Alright, now to try it again!
Edit:
Finished both versions now and have some more feedback. Mostly minor stuff now.
Fuse box closes entirely in one version and stops halfway when the power goes out in the other one. I probably only noticed because I was playing them side by side. Probably not worth the risk to fix.
Graphics compression artifacts? Many selection outlines are missing or inconsistent. Viewed from one angle they're fine, from another they're invisible.
Could not track down the kitchen issue until I played the download for that section. No outline, no hot cursor, no visible sparks.
Finally, I swear I could hear a dog. After one comment about pets, I thought I'd find one once the power was back on. But the "barking" stopped once the power was fixed.
I wonder if it would be too tricky to display a "score" of how many of the tablets you found. They tell the story, it'd be kinda nice to know if I found all of it.
> oh i misunderstood, you were actually completely stuck after removing, and inserting the fuse? oh man - i am sorry. very little changed from build 2>3, build was done in a rush and i didnt test it :S
Correct. I could look side to side a bit (maybe 135 degrees total?) but that's it. Very odd how minor and unrelated adjustments can wreak havoc on code, isn't it? Found a bug in one game that only occurred because my monitor is slower than theirs.
> im amazed you actually managed to get to press something in the elevator even :P
> i must remedy this immedeatly!
Purely blind clicking! Since the mouse doesn't lock to the canvas, I started from above or below the game and moved vertically while clicking.
> just to confirm, the WebGL is playable (though has no trigger for the ending :P)
> i shall debug and fix the mentioned issues and upload build 4 today :D
> thank you again for making me aware of this!
"No trigger" is why I tried the download. I'm kind of amused that I made this choice and then uncovered a bug that prevented me even reaching that end!
You are very welcome. I'll either await the update or play the web version later.
It's very likely just me (since I kept getting very close) because I simply can't do fast and precise at the same time consistently. I would almost guarantee that a frame-by-frame would show that I'm pressing the key very inconsistently with regards to timing.
In all seriousness, I would say to wait and see if you get any complaints.
First time, I visited the kitchen first because that was what I managed to click on and then the engine room. After restarting due to not being able to leave the fuse box, I went to the engine room first thinking maybe I did something out of order. Same result, of course: can't leave the fuse box to do anything else. Might need to close the fuse box? Hard to tell what I'm facing without the cursor but I've tried closing it.
I wouldn't call it exactly "clunky". More that running into something at a shallow angle (say impacting a wall at a 2-3 degree angle) causes you to stop. Mostly takes adjusting to since some games cause you to slide along it and some cause you to stop.
Anyway, I'm constantly amazed at what first-years post on here. I've been programming on and off since the mid 80's and my "specialty" (if we really stretch that word) is file access and string manipulation. Then I come on here and see someone post "Yeah, I was bored and whipped this up before dinner" and I get humbled even more. But that wasn't where I went in life...
Anyway, thank you very much for sharing your work and listening to me try to pine the good old days that never actually existed!
I don't think I've heard of the phrase "coyote time" but I think I've encountered it before. Often enough to mess me up on games that don't use it. I guess that would explain the one time I did make it. I thought I was seeing things since I swear I was falling and THEN jumped over.
Thanks for sharing the game with us!
Edit: Yeah, that's definitely what I saw. I tried again and managed the first jump maybe 25-30% of the time but never twice in a row to make the second one.
Dead end? Unsure how much there is to do but once you open the fuse panel, you're stuck there. Replacing the fuse works but you can't do anything else.
These are in the downloadable version.
It would be nice if the mouse was faster and the movement likes to get hung up but this looks like a very interesting start.
Alice's Journey is the one that hooked me. I still play it regularly although I can almost play it with my eyes closed. But there's just no way I could rank the best ones! I do like the gimmick in one series (I think your character is Susan, aka the Warmistress). Plays through similarly to any other although you have a liaison that helps you out in their world to a minor degree. In the bonus chapter, you play as the liaison in roughly the same events.
An indicator of some kind might help some people but I'd probably never be satisfied with any edge scrolling. I have two major issues with it that I don't think can be surmounted: 1. I have minor sensory issues and the screen scrolling on its own just because I moved the mouse out of the way is irritating. 2. It's too slow when you have to cross a screen width and/or too fast when you just need a little movement; it just doesn't reflect what I'm going with the mouse. I've just never found any edge-scrolling setup to be comfortable. I've never even used Windows' Taskbar auto-hide. I did find the speed-up-when-holding-left-mouse gimmick. But I found it when I tried to click something at the edge which made me miss.
If the right mouse button was unused, I'd request a right-mouse-drag if possible (preferably with the ability to mirror each axis). That works for me because there's a direct link between the mouse and the movement making it deliberate.
As for inventory, I think it would be a tremendous help if you could just set it right back down in the same spot. Not pull something out of your inventory and put back (because I could see that messing with scripting) but set the item you just picked up back down so there's no chance of getting things out of order.
I love these kinds of games; I own a large chunk of Artifex Mundi's catalogue.
Mouse-at-edge scrolling in games needs to die a fiery death. It's cumbersome and unneeded.
That said, the only issue I encountered was being able to pick something up that I couldn't use, had no inventory space for and seemingly couldn't put down.
I absolutely love this concept but I'll never be able to manage it. I see exactly what needs to be done but my fingers won't cooperate that well. Be nice when someone uploads a playthrough.
For those old enough to remember, this is a no-frills Simon Says game.
The only problem I had is that it doesn't adjust to the canvas: you'll probably have to play it full screen. On my 32" monitor, I don't full screen anything, it's too big.
I could start the XBOX game but then I couldn't move or aim after the first try so I just stood there and waited to lose. Also, could only sporadically fire (which didn't help since I couldn't aim).
If I could have quit the level after losing, I could have at least tried the rest of it...
