Grapple Force Rena - Serial Web Game!

Hello, everyone! It's me, Tim!

I've been working pretty hard these last few months, and I'm finally ready to show off what I've been working on! Behold: http://rena.battlestudio.com - Grapple Force Rena!

It's a 2D action platformer, made in the style of Genesis-era 16 bit games. You control Rena, a brave young girl with mysterious magic bracelets that let her shoot out magical "grapple beams", letting her grab and swing across any surface or grab and throw her enemies!

This is a kind of unique project, made possible entirely by HTML5 and Construct 2 - when I say it's a "serial web game", I mean it's something like a webcomic, which is constantly updated with new content - but a game! Each page on the website has one course of the game playable, complete with story segments! Over time, more and more of the story will be revealed - at least one new course every 2 weeks!

I've learned a lot while making this game, and I still have much to learn as I push forward with the game's unique format - I hope I can share what I've learned with all of you in the future! Thank you so much for your attention!

Looks good! I always love to see new concepts even on the style things are published. will check it out later!

WoW, Very very good

Congrats

Thank you very much for the kind words! I really hope I can keep making this game and keep updating it with new courses!

Really nice game...

I'm interest did you test it on mobile or ipad?

Most of my mobile devices are old and I don't own any Apple stuff, but my engine tests ran really well in the iPad browser. I built a native Android version too, which ran pretty smoothly even on my off-brand Android hardware. I don't want to get too deep into mobile development until I have more to test on, though!

I actually came up with a pretty novel way of scaling the game that works like integer scaling but adapts to any aspect ratio - it detects the size of the screen and sets the zoom level based on that, and positions all the HUD elements based on where the screen edges are. It still looks off on some devices with odd screen sizes, though - the further you get from a multiple of 360p, the more there's a chance that things might get cut off. I'm still working that out!

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wooow, too good.

Your game looks beautiful.

There is one feature I'd like to see in the game. Let the user click and avoid all the talking.

I really dislike all the talking. Not my style.

Other than that, the game looks really nice.

Joke's on you - you could skip the dialog at any time by pressing "Enter!" You suffered through all my cheesy dialog for nothing!

You're not the first person to bring this up, though, so I added a little prompt in the upper left corner of cutscene segments making this explicit. Hope that helps!

(Also, thanks for the kind words!)

This is awesome, I hope I can eek out this level of polish in one of my games. Everything - the sprites, the menus, the dialog boxes, and the transitions are all top-notch.

So polished, great job.

Don't worry, everyone! It's not THAT polished.

https://storify.com/BattleJenkins/so-long-suckers

It looks good, nice style and it looks polished. It would have been nice to have a prompt to skip the dialogue, I didn't see any sort of tutorial or explanation of the controls, however it wasn't hard to figure out with your description of the game and a little guess work (wasd is pretty common). It'd be nice to see some interesting boss battles in the future.

Ps. Using pure html5 and construct 2 should make the game work on all browsers and mobile devices as long as you don't use the parts of it that are unsupported by some browsers. (These things include WebGL shader effects, Browser media and multiplayer functionality, I'm pretty sure you're safe). I say this because I've been developing with construct 2's html5 and testing it's limits for a few months now, and I've tested on at least 3 browsers and on android. I'm not 100% sure but I think I also ran a test on IOS once and it went fine as well.

Thanks for the kind words!

I did end up adding a prompt to skip the dialog - maybe you still have an old version cached, if you tried it earlier?

You can see it up in the upper left corner, there.

Also, the website does have a section for controls, in addition to a "How to Play" section that hashes things out in more detail!

http://rena.battlestudio.com/controls/

http://rena.battlestudio.com/how-to-play/

If these were all too easy to miss, let me know!