Wednesday, July 27, 2011

Spike's Quest Test Demo #3





Download: http://www.bullockarts.com/miscjunk/S.Q.%20Test%20Demo%20%233.zip

Spike's Quest Test Demo #3
Released on 7/27/11

This demo is to test the following:
- Spike's animation
- 3D/2D parallax background (optional through config.exe)
- New tile system allows more new tiles.
- Customized folder layout (do these custom folder themes work on all computers?)

Run the config.exe before running the demo and select which background mode you'd like to test. There's 2D and 3D mode and of course there's your screen resolution setup.

Spike's animation is still a bit buggy and it certainly doesnt look perfect just yet... Still a work in progress!

If you find a bug, check the bug log. If its not listed then report it!

That is all. Happy testing! :)

7 comments:

  1. Wow, this is looking great! Very nice work so far! :)

    Some feedback, after playing with it a while:

    - I actually like the 2D background more than the 3D background. The 3D effect was neat at first, but the more I played the game, the more the 3D background ended up making the 2D foreground feel very flat and artificial. Conversely, when I switched to the 2D background, it all integrated very well, and neither the background nor the foreground either dominated my viewing attention or detracted from the other.

    - I really, really like Spike's animation. It's great! I assume you consulted Super Mario World for the fence-climbing animation? :) That said, the jumping animation felt kind of stiff and awkward, although since you talked about it in your post you might already know this. I would recommend maybe adding a third state that Spike enters at the top of the jump, rather than just one going up and another going down.

    - Also on the topic of jumping, you should make it so that Spike stops ascending as soon as the jump button is released, rather than having him go up all the way the moment the button is pressed. If you go through 2D Metroidvania style platformers, they all do this, and it enables for much greater precision jumping on the part of the player.

    - I noticed that the game doesn't seem to handle the situation very well where the user is pressing multiple keys at the same time. If I press both the left and the right key, for example, both of Spike's walking animations are displayed, one on top of another, and he's frozen in place. I would suggest that you just make one key win over the other if both are pressed down. It doesn't really matter which; the choice is arbitrary either way.

    - Along the above lines, I've noticed that ladder handling can be a bit iffy. Pressing left or right while climbing a ladder makes Spike immediately fall off, which I don't think is a good user experience - I'll often hold left or right while climbing a ladder in anticipation of reaching the top since I want to move in that direction when I get there. I would suggest you just ignore left and right arrow key presses while on a ladder; if the player wants to dismount the ladder halfway up, they can use the jump key to do so.

    - I also noticed a bug in that when you hold the down arrow by a ladder, Spike will just keep "climbing" down forever, despite the fact that he's at the bottom. I think you should detect whether or not Spike is at the bottom of the ladder, and ignore the down arrow if he is.

    - I also noticed a bug with the fences: if you're holding up while climbing a fence, the jump key does nothing; it's only when you're not moving that the jump key functions when you're on a fence.

    - One minor thought: when making the window resizable, could you maybe maintain the aspect ratio? If I resize it vertically or horizontally without resizing it in the other direction, the picture can very easily get squished or stretched, which doesn't look very good.

    - Also, I think you should consider displaying the controls either in the readme or within the game. it took me a bit of experimenting to figure out what the jump key was.

    That's everything that I wrote down while playing it. Again, great job! I'm really looking forward to seeing more from this! :)

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  2. Also, I just found a couple more bugs surrounding ladders: if you jump while either holding up or down on the ladder, both the jumping and the climbing animations are displayed, and both the jump and the ladder changes to Spike's position take effect. This looks especially funny when you hold down on a ladder while jumping; Spike slowly floats up the ladder in a permanent jump animation state while the climbing-down animation plays underneath.

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  3. I've downloaded the game and unzipped it twice now. Both times, Whether I try to run the program as administrator or not, neither config.exe or S.Q. Demo #3.exe will load, just show a single black frame and the program quits. I do, however, show the custom folder theme.

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  4. Edit- I thought it might me worthwhile to add that I am playing this game on a 32-bit windows vista OS, and haven't tried it on my 64-bit windows 7. The 64-bit ran Demo #2 perfectly, might that be why it won't load on 32?

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  5. @GabuEx

    Your bug finds have been logged... Many thanks! :D

    @Davemon1

    That's odd... The game was programmed to run in 32 bit mode. I'll explore this one a bit more. Would you be willing to become an active tester so to help me fix this problem?

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  6. where's the download? when I get to the website, it just has random links.

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    Replies
    1. I lost the domain name a few months ago. I'll try to re-upload them to my Google cloud and see if I cant direct the links that way later on.

      sorry for any inconvenience :P

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