Decision Remark

I wanted to inform you about a new indie Adventure RPG made using Construct. I have tried to put a lot of effort into making the game... so hopefully you can do the same by playing it and giving it feedback.

Screenshots, info and download of the game are availible here: http://gamejolt.com/freeware/games/adve ... mark/1291/

Let's get straight to the point.

The game was bad. BUT I assume it only because you are still underaged and new with Construct.

In http://gamejolt.com/freeware/games/adve ... mark/1291/ you say that;

"the graphics are a bit cutesy, and a lot of the focus is on action, rather than story or something else."

I played the game (with a great pain) to phase 7, I did not find any of this action! Where did you hid this action!

But let's get on to ways you could improve your game. First of all, there are lot's of bugs and mistakes. I made a list of some of them below.

• When you are close to the game area's border and moving, the player animation does not change sometimes.
• You didn't tell me that I had to press enter when entering new area.
• Mostly I feel the music is making my head explode, and more than once I though my computer was freezing. Also there isn't mention where did you get, or who made your music and sound files.
• Why the controls must be on opposite side of keyboard? I mean there's only 2 buttons, don't put that far away from each others. I think people can remember that A button is (A)ction anyway... Change controls for example to Crtl and Shift or A and S
• Player should know where to go without arrows on ground.
• More variety to the background, e.g. plants, rocks...
• You can make the white apple monster (second charecter in game), grow infinite size by eating apples, and leaving room, and coming back again and eating apples and so on.
• In phase 3 first zombie (grey face, brown dress) moves through wall. Though he might be a ghost or something.
• It's very irritating that player's animation change from side animation to top-down picture when moving different directions.

Also there are some problems in level design, like when you leave from the game's first room you go LEFT. Then you appear to next room from RIGHT side. And the same other way. This makes remembering game's world/map a bit harder and it's confusing.

One big mistake in the hole game is that it's too easy to go around those enemies who keep moving in a circle or moving on a line.

MAKE IT HARDER! People get bored, if you don't make your game challenging. But, don't make it hard in a bad way, like the flamethrower guy, how appears on the screen so fast, you don't have much change to avoid him if you see him first time (Reflex games are another thing).

Though I wasn't sure where all of the NPCs enemies... I was afraid to touch them, because I didn't want to start from to beginning. If the game saves at some point, you should tell that to the player somehow!

On a positive side, I though the game was a bit scary on some levels, like in phase 6 and in fact in all of them.

I quited on phase 7. Slowly I get up from my chair, shooked my head and I felt I had to rest a while on my bed.

I was glad it was over.

Still there remained questions without answers.

Who was I?

Why people where vanishing me with their bare touch?

Thoughts swirling on my head...

Should I have talked to the scary girls? What those ladies where doing there? Who was that guy with a flamethrower?

...I fall asleep holding me pillow tight against my chest, thinking, just maybe, just maybe I should have rescued those poor little girls.

That and answer to many more question I may never find out.

This is pretty good work for a first game. The part that I found the most fun was changing characters and eating the food to make the ghost/white dude get bigger. You should play that part up more. With a little more work this could be much more exciting. I would add:

• have the enemies hurt the player instead of restarting the level
• make the enemies chase you
• allow you to talk to more people
• make it a requirement to switch to different characters more often
• add more game content (the game world felt empty)
• add a short back story

I also quit on Phase 7. I avoided the weird yellow glow because I was afraid it would kill me (like the fire) or make me disappear. You might want to change that to just hurt the player. After dying from the dude at the bottom several times I tried walking around in the yellow glow but it didn't seem to help. I was lost at this point and couldn't figure out how to get past the level so I stopped.

Looking forward to the next game!

For Phase 7, scidave, follow the red carpet when you start and go down to the middle and talk to the girl in the purple dress. Then go down more and talk to the girl with gray skin at the bottom right corner of the screen. You will get a water gun, and hold down Enter to spray water. While holding down Enter, start moving left and you will spray the moving guy, which will then cause a Star to appear where the yellow glow is. Make sense?

You can probably get back to where you were by pressing "Load Game" at the title screen... in case it wasn't clear anywhere else.

It also appears I have a few things to clarify... the white guy who eats apples is actually a white crocodile (to me, anyhow).

Thanks for the feedback as well SacceuS. A lot of your complaints were design choices that were done intentionally... except for the "sticking animation near the wall error" which I knew about but had somehow slipped by me. And the "infinite growth" which sounds like a bug. The game starts out kind of easy, but there are 27 Phases which gives plenty of time for the game to get harder. The game saves when you see the screen where it announces the Phase... that is, the screen with the grass. So long as you don't press New Game at the Title Screen to start playing over or the save system doesn't glitch, you should now have a save file which can be accessed by pressing "Load Game" at the Title Screen. Also, I made both the game and music and sound files.

First things first, I assume that you are young and this is your first game (or one of your first)?

I played to Phase 16. You have some good ideas going. Switching characters to alter the level slightly is a nice idea, though you only used it once in 16 levels, and the ride on the big bug where you had to constantly go from island to island to keep afloat (I'm guessing it was water) made a nice break from the, honestly, monotone gameplay.

Now there are a lot of things you need to improve on to make your game more compelling.

Your graphics consist almost solely of solid shapes with maybe a little texture in them. This becomes really confusing after a while, since the colors alone does not tell the player how the character will interact with say the big greenish yellow cloud in the level with the guy with the flamethrower. I thought it was a noxious cloud and stayed away from it at first. You might know what color in what level does what, but no-one else does until they've tried touching it.

Your characters also need improvement. Take a look at some anatomy tutorials, and if you're going to go the pixel route you should take a look at some spriting tutorials. There is a thread here on the forums with links to some of them, including "So you want to be a Pixel Artist?", by Tsugomori, one of the best ones you can find on the net.

Sprite tutorial forum thread

So you want to be a Pixel Artist?

Also, pick one perspective and stick with it. Changing between side and top perspective is just confusing.

Your music needs a lot of work. What you have now is mostly disjointed notes and sounds on a loop.

I'd suggest sitting down with some music and listening to it over and over, each time focusing on a different aspect and how it plays out with the whole. Musagi is a free program which have a function that tells you when your notes dissonate with each other. I doesn't help you with constructing melodies, and more advanced composers can make dissonated notes work for them, but for a beginner it's a good tool to start with. You also get some aweosome NES style instruments that come with it.

http://www.drpetter.se/project_musagi.html

Your gameplay pretty much consist of walking around very large areas and touching a star to go to the next level. Not very exciting. First, you could reduce your levels sizes by half. Since there's not much going on in your levels you don't actually need the space, it only makes the player bored when there's a huge stretch of land to cover and nothing more/else to do.

As a player, I don't understand why I can't keep certain things when I move to a new area. Take for example the shoes with makes you go faster. You give them to your player in a level and when he moves to the next one, he loses them, for apparently no reason. If you're going to take stuff away, at least explain why.

In short, you need to tighten up your gameplay to keep your player interested. Add in some way to combat the enemies. I did get a bow eventually, but it was pointless to use it. It only slowed the enemies down slightly and I think I ran out of arrows, even though there was no arrow counter.

Also give the enemies something more to do than just bouncing around the same pattern. Have them roam around a little on their own and when they spot the player, have them charge at him. And give the player a health bar. In a slowpaced game like this, instant death easily becomes frustrating. There are a great number of ways to do simple, but effective, AI. A good place to start is the Ghost Shooter tutorial. It's very basic AI but after doing the tutorial you can easily experiment with it and do more inventive stuff with it.

Just continue making games and try to improve =)

A lot of your complaints were design choices that were done intentionally...

To be perfectly honest, you need to drop that mentality if you want to improve. No matter how much of a design choice it is, if a player tells you he had a problem with a part of your game and consider it a problem, chances are it's an actual problem. And from what he wrote, I'd agree with him. That is why game studios play-test their games, because it's easy to get to get blind and not see issues that others see, just because you're used to seeing/doing it.

I thought the white guy looked like a bunny

Thanks inkBot, I'll try to drop the mentality and listen more.

About the largeness of the levels and slow-pacing... do you think it would help if the environments looked more varied, or is that not enough?

It looks like I have quite a few changes ahead of me. A lot of the features which seem to be a negative after all, are ones which probably took me more time, instead of less time, having in the game... the arrows, size of world, and it probably would have been just as easy to not make the boots "disintegrate" after moving out of the field. I don't mind but I just see how ironic it can be to try to design a game.