[Feedback Request] Nikwi Beta

[Bad Sector]

This is actually a reply-to-post convertion... seems that nobody realized that the last reply to my "Nikwi Alpha" post contained a link to a new much improved version... so i'm doing a "normal post" since i really need feedback on this :-).

Because i still have problems with my FTP (actually with any FTP - but the guy here told me that it'll be fixed in one-or-two days), i still can't provide direct links. I've added a screenshot as an attachment to comply with the rule - but in the site you'll find in "full resolution" and two of them.

Nikwi shots and beta download can be found at http://www.slashstone.com/more/nikwisite/ (the game is around 230KB)

This is an updated version with new graphics for the tiles. This one contains new collision and response code and six levels. These levels will be included with four chocolate-themed more in the shareware version.

The idea of the game is that you're actually in the dream of a young boy ("Nikwi") who likes sweets. In his dream he wants to eat ALL the sweets he can find in his mind's candy world - and avoid running his dreams into nightmares by not getting into the monsters and obstacles.

Well, the story is not that strong... but you get the idea (it's not included into the "finished" part of the game anyway :-P).

The game will contain 30 levels (if you think that's very few... well, you haven't played the game... it isn't that easy to finish even these six levels :-P) with five sweet-based themes (vanilla and cakes, chocolate and biscuits, lollipops and candybars, chocolate cakes and ice creams). Currently only the first 3 themes are completed (it takes me about a day -actually 14-16 hours of work... but that's how much i spend for this game every day- to make a theme and the levels for it - including monsters, scripting, playtesting, etc).

I really want to hear comments on this game since i've spend almost every no-sleeping hour of the last two weeks writing it (i haven't even gone out of my home more than 1 hour a day... sometimes not at all). So i want to hear what you think about it, so i can fix the fixable things :-) (some things i cannot fix due to lack of time... this must be finished beforce 16 December).

The only "known" issues are about collision response: when you put Nikwi near some weird-shaped tiles and you press the direction key towards these tiles, if you keep pressing it Nikwi will start to "flow" for 5-6 pixels. Also if you do it while Nikwi is falling, it's fall speed will increased a lot. I don't know why that happens, but i'm trying to figure out (it isn't a showstopper though... every time i complete a section -theme- of the game i'm trying to finish it from the beginning and this wasn't an issue... although i want to get it fixed because it looks bad at my opinion). And sometimes he may be get stuck inside a tile (well in reality, the collision and response code converts the tile-based level to vectors so the collision and response is done via arbitrary vectors instead of tiles and rectangles... but well, that means nothing - it is a bug that needs to be removed). Again i have no idea about the cause of this :-/.

Update: I can access the server now! :-)
So the Nikwi Beta page (http://www.slashstone.com/more/nikwisite/) is now on the Slashstone server.

Direct download link: Get from here (http://www.slashstone.com/more/nikwisite/nikwibeta.zip) (around 230KB)
Screenshots:
1. Vanilla shot (http://www.slashstone.com/more/nikwisite/nikwishot1.png)
2. Chocolate shot (http://www.slashstone.com/more/nikwisite/nikwishot2.png)
3. Lollipop shot (http://www.slashstone.com/more/nikwisite/nikwishot3.png)
4. Chocolate cake shot (http://www.slashstone.com/more/nikwisite/nikwishot4.png)

[Bad Sector]

No replies? :-(

I've added some new screenshots (http://homepages.pathfinder.gr/badsector/nikwisite/betaver/page6626.html)

I'm still waiting for the tech-guys here to fix the FTP access.... how difficult could it be to configure a network to not block port 21?

[Bad Sector]

Which sprites need polish?

I also think that the lollipop theme is my best :-). The chocolate cake theme (last shot) needs some fixes here and there (shading) and an extra tile for variation (like the other themes), but beyond these i can't think anything else.

[David De Candia]

I got to here:

"It is known to have many bugs. There is no warranty that this program will not damage your system or that it works as you expect it to work."

and got scared and backed off. I think this message attached to the name Badsector caused too many alarm bells to go off. Perhaps others are feeling the same...

If it has many bugs, fix them first and then repost. That's about all I can suggest.

Sorry.

David

[Bad Sector]

I got to here:

"It is known to have many bugs. There is no warranty that this program will not damage your system or that it works as you expect it to work."

and got scared and backed off. I think this message attached to the name Badsector caused too many alarm bells to go off. Perhaps others are feeling the same...

I don't know any program (or game) that gives you warranty that it won't damage the system or anything. It's usually hidden in the license, but i simply said it. But now that you point it, i think that i was a little bit "too much" on this message.

Also this one was for the Alpha version... which had many bugs. The beta fixed most of them (not all... there are a few i don't currently know how to fix :-().

I was in a hurry to upload the new version that i overlooked the contents of the download page.

And, well, Bad Sector is just a nickname :-P. It has a meaning, but unless you are a diskette, you won't have problems :-P :-P.

Check the updated site (http://www.slashstone.com/more/nikwisite/) (on the Slashstone server, finally) for the corrected download page :D.

[David De Candia]

Hi Badsector,

I screwed up my courage and took a look at your game. :) I particularly liked the tasteful use of colour and thought the graphics suited the game very well. I also liked the way you were keeping the gameplay nice and simple. I didn't have any trouble with the controls.

Obviously, it is still in a very raw state however. Here are a few points that came to mind:

1. It had no sound or music.
2. It was not clear how to restart on death
3. There seemed to be no menus / configuration / help screens
4. It's a bit too hard. It took me a while to realise the bird droppings were killing me. They are too small I think. Especially when they land on the... hmmm... apples? or mushrooms? Needless to say, I died a lot.
5. One or two jumps were harder than they should have been at such an early stage in the game. For eg, I had trouble exiting screen 1, as I kept missing the jump up to access the lollipop.
6. Two different .exe files? One for fullscreen and one for windowed mode? Seemed a bit odd to me...
7. Looked like some of your sprites could use a little antialiasing. Some were a touch jaggy - but this may have something to do with your target resolution.

Overall, I thought the game showed promise. Something about it reminded me a little of Conan on the C64. It really needs sfx and music to bring it all to life and the difficulty needs to be a touch easier. The birds poo a little too much I think!

Could be a good game on a mobile phone perhaps...?

David

[adamw]

I had a few minutes here, so I downloaded and checked it out. First, great small size right now. Try to maintain that as long as you can.

I agree that you need some start up information obviously (menu, how to play, etc).

I realize sounds will add a bit to size, but that is obviously needed. Some nice background music - perhaps cute and light - will really help as well.

I agree that the game is just too difficult to start with. Not by much. I did have trouble with the controls. Arrow for jumping wasn't reacting in a way that felt natural. I got stuck on the first level and quickly lost interest and gave up. (I often lose interest, so don't take any offense there). I think a few levels that are just super easy would help. There's been alot of talk around here on how to ramp up a game - and research shows the easier the better. People like easy games!

You should even at a minimum make sure it's clear how to start again after you die (a message that pops up when you die would be fine). And how to quit the game too!

On the good side, the graphics were pretty good! Nice style I think. Pooping birds are fine - and I really felt the tension in my gut when the piles are lying about - and can kill you! You could do better with the indication that you're dead. Floating glasses wasn't clear to me - I thought maybe I had ghost powers or something....

Anyhow, keep going with it! I think it shows lots of promise.

[Anlino]

Yeah, start of with a couple of tracks where you just jump around. This game actually reminds me of Dangerous Dave, perhaps you should download it to get some inspiration? Created by John Romero. You can download it from www.abandonia.com.

[Darky]

For some reason, the game is lacking some sort of 'detail.' I think it's the background. Add a bit of pizzazz to the background and you'll have yourself a nice looking game!

[Bad Sector]

Thank you for your replies :-).

The good thing: i finally finished all the 30 levels of the game!

Also i finished the title screen. Today i'm gonna work on the menus and transitions. I'll also put some extra. This demo was only "gameplay demo".

As about sound... well... that's the bad part. I'm not going to put music there. The reason is i need a lot of practice before i reach a state that i can produce "hearable" music, which i figured out the hard way after trying to write some music with a software sound/music synthesizer (http://www.slashstone.com/more/ss/) i wrote. I was able to produce nice loops etc, but i wasn't able to produce a "main tune". I think i need to spend some time with my module collection hearing how things sound and how their authors make them. And probably try to get one or two books on the subject.

But at the meanwhile, i can't make music. And i can't hire a musician too... i'm way too short on money (i barely have enough money to come to the cybercafe). Also i doubt any musician will like to work with the unfinished and buggy interface of the software synthesizer. Or even agree the idea of having separate one column patterns and arranging them to channels using multiple order lists instead instead of having multi-column (one for each channel) patterns and one order list.

My last try on making a module player sucked a lot (http://badsector.demoscene.gr/index.php?section=bmod), so i'm not going to try it. Also i lack samples (one of the reasons i prefer synthesized music over sample-based is that i don't have to mess with figuring out where i can find samples)...

So the game will feature only sound effects (pre-synthesized). I would like to have music, but i can't put it in there :-(.

Another bad thing is that i don't have much time to finish it. I need to have it completed at 14 December - that is i need to have it finished in five days! The reason for that is that i am moving from Athens back to Samos at 16 December and i will have a lot of problems if i have nothing done by then. It's personal issues, but they do affect my game development. A lot.

I'm currently working around 16 hours per day and probably i'll increase that in order to have the game finished on time. I have to do lots of things, but that what i think was the most difficult part - level design - is done. It was hard because i had to design a different theme every six levels, add new monsters while the game progressed and make sure that the gameplay wasn't exactly the same after every few levels or the player would be bored. I had to figure out how to do that without making the game complex... and i think that i achieved it. Although in it's pure heart is still a "jump and avoid the monsters" game :-).

Now i need to finish the game screens (title, config, help), transitions (between levels or screens - i don't like the "instant" change the game has now), fix some parts of the code (like the collision response), make some minor changes in the first levels (there is one point at the third level that triggers a nasty bug in the collision response code that i can't figure out how to fix - so i need to change the level a bit to not trigger it) and put the sound in.

I hope that i can manage to do it in five days :-).

@David De Candia:
I'm going to put all these things at these days. I was busy making graphics, levels, code and scripts and now i'm gonna focus on the "details" part :-)

@adamw:
I will change some parts of the first two-three levels, but i already think that they are very easy (at least compared to other levels).

@Anlino:
I have spend lots of hours playing Dangerous Dave and i'm the moderator of the John Romero's game development forum on it's site, for around three years now. So, well, yeah, i know about the game :-P. I've actually studied a lot the older John Romero's games because they were very addicting - to me anyway (i'm not going to make a game that i won't like playing).

Nikwi is inspired by the Apple II version of Dangerous Dave.

@Darky:
I thought about adding some animated background, but when i tried it, it sucked a lot of CPU. I'm using "static parts" to make the game not render the same things over and over - only those who move - but the animated background was invalidating the "static parts buffer" almost everywhere, thus forcing it to be redrawn. The game already has lots of things moving on screen (bitmap particles) and i can't afford losing the "static parts buffer". Note that this is not an issue when the game runs in fullscreen mode under Windows because SDL uses hardware acceleration (the game runs much smoother there)... but it seems that in windowed mode and in Linux it always uses it's own software blitters, which seem to be slow.

I could redesign the engine to use "dirty rectangles", but that will take a lot of time which i currently don't have. When i started it, i thought that current machines are fast enough to not need such things and i went with the simple straight approach of redrawing the frame at everytime. When i saw that it wasn't as fast as i thought, i added the static buffer part, but i'm not able to add anything else right now.

Adding a static background may be an option, but i'll try that later, if i have some time.

[Vectrex]

there's a bug where you can move left and right against a wall and get stuck. You need to snap the player to the tile grid when he hits a wall to stop interpenetration

[Bad Sector]

I've added a title screen (http://www.slashstone.com/gimme/nikwixshot1.png), a credits screen, a static background (http://www.slashstone.com/gimme/nikwixshot2.png) and a message (http://www.slashstone.com/gimme/nikwixshot3.png) that appears when you die (i've also added a "Get the icecream" message once the icecream appears). Also i've added transitions between screens, levels and when you die (currently four transitions: "reveal", line wipes, crossing lines and SNES-like mosaic).

I've changed the mode from 32bit to 16bit in order to save space (half the space for images) and increase speed. The quality change is not noticable except if you try hard to notice it :-P.

A problem i met with the change was the background gradient, which under 16bit mode had considerable banding. In order to "fix" this, i added some noise effect - which also made the background look better. Then i thought to add some background image and i figured out a cheap way to do that: i've used scaled candy sprites from the game to shade slightly the center of the background. Then i used a plasma function to add some additional variety to the shading. The results are a lot better than the plain old gradient and with zero additional size :-).

@Vectrex:
The collision detection/response is done in a different -more complex- way than simply using the level grid: the grid and the player are converted to vectors and the collision detection/response is done with these vectors.

[Anlino]

Really good, bad sector! Looks nice! Is there a updated demo as well?

[Bad Sector]

No. The game is really close to the end. In fact i only need to fix one bug in the code and put sound effects in. After that it's finished, so the "proper" shareware version will get out with 10 levels and all the bells and whistles i've added since the last demo :-).