itch.io

My point about Cocktail isn’t that it’s a bad item, it’s that it’s an EXTREMELY bad item, in a superfast action game where you often have little time to react to, sometimes, over a dozen pursuers at once. As I said: it’s much more perilous to collect a Cocktail that to be caught by a ghost. I’ve picked it up accidentally, which is even easier to do since powerups rotate through items. And new players won’t even think to check the encyclopedia. I think my point stands.

I understand the obtrusive gimmick, I think it’s a little too obtrusive. I’ve stared at the board after losing a life and waiting for the next life to begin, unable to find the remaining dot in the short time available, or else confusing it with an untriggered boost panel or banana peel. (In one case, the dot was beneath or beside the peel?)

I’m not sure Jungly Steps was the level in question, if that’s based on the Pac-Mania map then I never had the problem in that game. I can only speak to my own experience. Others might not have it, but then again, it is a problem I have. To not mention it would negate my own perspective. I suggest that superfast maze games are best served when the layout can be easily and instantly perceived.

Anyway, no one says you have to abide by any of this, I’m not the final arbiter of game quality. I just hope my input is helpful.

1. Cocktail is egregiously unfair if eaten on accident, it becomes, by far, the most dangerous action in the game, much much worse than getting caught by a ghost. Players just leaping in to play expecting a fun game will get caught by it, since the only place its behavior is documented is in the “Paclopedia.” Please consider changing it to something less terrible.

2. My first game lasted three hours, and only ended, on Round 158, because I was getting sick of playing it. I think it should probably ramp up in difficulty a bit faster.

3. Two themes always left me groaning in annoyance, and both times it was from the graphics used. The tall grass theme can make it practically impossible to tell where the last dots are, and the similar jungle-ish theme has flowers in the maze wall graphics that make it less clear where the barriers are. They made the game rather less fun. Of course fun is in the eye of the beholder, but I feel like I should chime in that I didn’t like that element. Maybe others will agree with me, and combined our impressions will accrete into a snowball of change. Who knows.

4. I was disappointed that Trog didn’t appear in the one game I’ve had so far. How long does it take Trog to show up?

I’m hoping this is still being worked on, it was such a nice little game!

Yay, I’m glad this project is still underway!

Aww, well I care about it at least. It’s cool!

If you’re looking for inspiration, there is an old PC-98 game with a similar premise (Castlevania but with hot girls) called Rusty. It’s gotten some increased buzz lately.

• On Subweapons: my comment is based that I kept running out of subweapon uses in the late game.
• Rope section: I maintain that it’s too much. This is going to become “that section” for many players. Maybe it’s because this is basically the only place with ropes beyond the first use. And it’s weird that your reward for intuiting that there’s a secret passage behind that waterfall (risking losing a life to try it) is the most frustrating sequence I saw in the game. I observe that the difficulty is caused by the fact your arc coming off a rope is mostly downward. It just seems fiddly and too precise. I like that bats come after you during it though! Maybe make the rope jumps easier, but make the bats slightly more common, or adding the occasional platform to land on?
• Cheap shot: While I fell for it multiple times, I kind of like it? This isn’t supposed to be Ducktales after all, and finding good ways to challenge the player is, itself, a challenge. I think all it needs is a memory aid.
• What you call the Death Hallway in CV1 is one of my favorite parts of that game! I’ve played through it many times, and it’s one of the few places that challenges me any more. And the mixture of the demonesses and the fire-dropping eyeballs is a good changeup from the axe knight/medusa heads of CV1. I still think there should be a little more of a tell (just a few frames) for the heights of the fireballs though. If there was that, it would make the enemy much fairer, and that in turn would make the hallway better.
• The Bone Pillar thing isn’t really huge, since I expected to lose a life after getting knocked down there anyway.
• On the Castle, I was talking about the level checkpoint. The Castle could stand to be split into two levels maybe, although then maybe each of them would be a little light. It feels like one-and-a-half levels in length.

On wrestling with the engine, I had a situation like that with Gamemaker long ago. You’ve done so much with it to get to this point, it seems a real shame to throw away all that work. Maybe you could figure out what broke the game? I’d offer to help, but it’s been so long since I worked with Gamemaker I don’t know how much help I would be. Maybe I could still do something though?

P.S. the motorcycle skeletons are great!

That you’ve gotten this far is terrific! i am impressed by the effort and I think the game is definitely worth finishing. You’ve gotten so much done with this. I think it’s worth playing, even without bosses. Given the longer length of the levels than in a Castlevania game, I actually don’t think you need a lot more content, other than bosses (it could use some bosses).

Here are my observations, which are those of an obsessive Castlevania player, regarding fine-tuning the game.

• The game is much more harsh with subweapon uses than the Castlevania games. Arguably Castlevania gives out way too many hearts, but then they’re also intended to be a source of bonus points, which isn’t the case here. Still, it feels like major subweapons should consume two units instead of three, or else (preferably) the game should give out slightly more.
• The rope secret area in the caverns is too much. The purpose of a challenge like this is for the player to demonstrate that they recognize how the mechanic works, and stick around just enough to demonstrate competency. After doing something like that, the player should be thinking, “Wow, I did it!” and look forward to doing it again, instead of “Ugh, that was a hassle,” and dread the repeating the experience.
• Demoness monsters need a tell for which height they throw fireballs, and a slight delay, because the player is likely to have to close in to destroy them and they take so many hits. I refer you to the wind-up of the axe knights in Castlevania
• The cheap shot jumping monster just after the first two demoness room in the castle, should have some memorable background element at that point. Cheap shots are a time-honored element in games like this, but the player should have some assistance in remembering they’re there. Here, the player needs to build up a flow to get across the jumps in this area, and this enemy disrupts that flow. That’s okay, but the non-descript nature of this area makes it easy to forget that the enemy is there, and makes the player prone to dying here again and again.
• The four demoness room seems a bit too much, considering reducing to three
• In the bone pillar (I’m going to call them by their Castlevania name, I’m not sure what they are in this) tower area, it’s possible to get knocked back onto the platform behind the pillar on the left side at the bottom. This spot is inescapable.
• Castle level is much too long, consider adding a checkpoint in the middle

That’s as far as I’ve gotten so far, good work!

Oops, I said Brunswick, I should have just said Georgia; Brunswick won’t be for another couple of weeks. (Not that any one of you should care, but I like to be accurate.)

Aaah, I had thought the puzzle was that there was a sequence to popping the bubbles, and they could only be popped in that sequence? Then I reached a point where no more would pop. I’ll try that, thanks.

I think this has to be a bug, because I’ve tried popping every remaining bubble from every direction and none are popping. I remember that one of the mice moved quite early in doing that room, with no apparent way to move it back? And I didn’t notice bubbles popping if there was an object on the other side; it’s always been pretty vague to me what causes a bubble to pop. The closest I’ve been able to determine is that there is a sequence to it, only a single bubble can pop at any time, and I have to try them all until I find it. Is this not the case?

I don’t know how to become popular. I’m just a roomba, what do I know from fame?

Its cool, and I think I found nearly everything, but I can’t figure out how to get the last dust in the secret party room.

Nice! Like Rally-X Championship Edition! I managed to get a score of 73,120. You make so many terrific games!

Well hold on a moment, I found some more broken items and programs, there'll be another update soon.

I'm still playing this. High score so far is 18,120.

This is great!

Although this version does have my extra notes and stuff. If you want that, I could just send them to you I suppose.

Honestly, I think it's going to be nearly impossible for me to fix Dungeon at this point. It's weird though, there's several Dungeon adventures on Loadstar issues. Obviously at the time people didn't have this trouble using it. It makes me wonder if the version on Loadstar Compleat isn't broken, it does use the problematic REL files.

The version on Loadstar Compleat is mostly the same as this anyway.

The version that's up now should have the fixed 1581 disks in it.

There's so many wonderful things in Loadstar's "pages."

 Thousands of programs, artworks, musical pieces and articles. A lot of them, it's true, fall under the category of things there are better equivalents of now, like there was a spreadsheet published on Issue 15 that's nice to have if all you have is a Commodore 64, but is sadly insufficient these days.

But the saving grace of Loadstar nowadays is the art, music, and
computer games! I have long maintained that games don't go obsolete, and even the clunky games written in BASIC have a real interest and worth to them, and I'm not just saying that because, if you hunt through its issues, you'll find a few I wrote myself.

gumpy over on loadstarce.com made fixed versions of the 1581 images. I'll be including them here once I'm sure they're okay, but they're available on the Internet Archive here.

Yay! I'll try it out!

A cool idea! I have a problem though in that pressing I sometimes causes the game to blank out, forcing me to reload.

It's a cruel twist of fate the Morton can jump higher than Marwin can survive falling.

I know someone who worked for Paws many years ago, who says this is awesome, and it's the kind of thing their artists would have loved to create back in the day.

But... where's Odie?

The bug that allows you to pass through monsers exists in arcade Pac-Man too, although there it mostly hits when the monsters aren't vulnerable.

I tried to post a screenshot, but I got an error saying "post: body: expected text between 1 and 20480 characters." The score in the screenshot was 52 points, lasting 32 seconds.

I had a game that went slightly longer, with a score of 57; I think the time was 37 seconds. I notice, when the game last that long, that the stars in the background scroll by in a repetitive manner, separating out into discrete lines.
This doesn't seem to me to be a very good score, but it seems like success is partly luck, in not getting a configuration of rocks that herds you inescapably into the corner.

I don't know if anyone's reading this, but I figured it's as good a place as any to mention it, a person ported a number of Videlectrix games to the awesome farflung futuretech of the Apple II: http://deater.net/weave/vmwprod/sb/

The Dungeon Maker has a couple of bugs. Most significantly, it doesn't work correctly in two-drive mode, which is how I've set up Dungeon for use for playing so you don't have to swap disks so much.

For storing items, Dungeon uses the Commodore-specific REL file format, which is difficult to simulate without also simulating a Commodore disk drive. If it weren't for that, I'd put the Dungeon files in a local directory in the distribution to play from there. It's weird how 34-year-old design decisions can affect emulation now.

There is at least one other significant Maker bug that I don't know what triggers it, that can once in a while cause the infuriating DISK ERROR when its time to save your work. I'm not sure if it also happened on normal hardware.

I'd love to find Jon Mattson too, he made several nice games for LOADSTAR, but we don't know what happened to most contributors. Jon Mattson, Ian Adams, Barbara Schulak, J.C. Hilty, and now, David Caruso II.

Ah, that co-author listed is Jon Mattson. I don't think he was a co-creator, he made two of the adventures LOADSTAR published for Dungeon. He was a prolific LOADSTAR contributor and made several other programs for it, including one game system of his own. But Dungeon predates his time with LOADSTAR, I think.

What information did you uncover? Is it online somewhere? It'd be nice to see, maybe I could dig something up? In particular I'm interested in the "IFC Systems" that presumably published this before LOADSTAR.

Aah! It would be great to hear about that!

AH! It's been a long time since I played Phantasie, and even then only for a short while, and the PC version on a compilation. I should look into that!

It is the same version as was on LOADSTAR, the disk image is the LOADSTAR image but with extraneous files removed. The source code to Dungeon is presumed lost along with whatever happen to its creator.