Mr. Twinkle 0.1 Beta

Community Forums/Showcase/Mr. Twinkle 0.1 Beta

Teddyfles(Posted 2005) [#1]


Alright, here is the first public Beta of Mr. Twinkle. It's a bit short and easy probably, but in the final version the levels will get more challenging after level 1, and have more puzzle elements.

During play press F on your keyboard to see framerate and gamespeed. Framerate depends on your computer, and will probably be equal to your monitor's refresh rate. Gamespeed should be 100 (percent) an all systems. Please report any strange behaviour or other bugs/suggestions/comments in this thread or mail it to [a mailto:gj_alsem@yahoo.com]gj_alsem@...].

Download link (updated): MrTwinkle_0.11_Beta.zip (2.12 MB)


Moses(Posted 2005) [#2]
Not bad, the graphics twitched a little when i was would go forward then backwards or backwards or forwards. It only happen for a second. Other then that, not problems.


Genexi2(Posted 2005) [#3]
Everything runs fine here, couldnt find anything broken either.

Only thing I did notice and not quite like is that the collisions for the character on his (or "it") sides feel a bit too far out, makes jumping over objects (and enemies) a little trickier since you have to watch out for that.


xlsior(Posted 2005) [#4]
Looks very nice, appropriate music, etc.

- The 'press fire' in the start screens is somewhat disruptive: during the actual gameplay I have my hands on the cursor keys and the control key for jumping, but when you die you have to look for the 'enter' key again.

Especially since it's not entirely clear that enter is considered 'fire', since there isn't a whole lot of firing involved... If anything, I would have expected the fire to be the same as the jump key.

You may want to accept the jump key as well, or maybe even make it a 'press any key' instead.

The other thing I ran into is that it was overall pretty smooth, but sometimes when you turn back and forth it gets really choppy for a moment, taking the 'speed' out of the gameplay.

Oh. and there must be a bug somewhere because I keep dieing. ;-)
(I'm -so- bad at these kind of platform jumpers. Not my type of game, I also suck at Mario Bros.)


John Pickford(Posted 2005) [#5]
I like this. A bit of a slavish Mario clone in terms of the mechanics but a very stylish one. Love the music too.


Teddyfles(Posted 2005) [#6]
About the twitching/choppiness, did you guys have some other software running while testing maybe? On my system it only happens when I have some other heavy software running in the background. So I'm not sure whether it's something I can stop from happening, but I'll take another look at it.

About the "Press fire" thing, I agree, xlsior. I already had my doubts about it, seeing as there actually isn't a "fire" button in the game. So yeah, this will be changed.

John, yeah I know the comparison with Mario is unavoidable. But I think the game is distinct enough from Mario to at least avoid copyright problems, right? :)


Grey Alien(Posted 2005) [#7]
It's good. Polished and consistant. Ever play Great Giana sisters? No graphic glitches here but then my PC is a P4 3.2GHz 1GB RAM, Radeon 9800Pro, so...

Are you going to sell it?

Is it intentional that your glubi gets reset to 0 when you die? I guess so. How about a counting up noise at the end of the level?

I look forward to 0.2.

btw fps = 75 and gamespeed = 100

I am making a platform game two and got the odd spike in draw times on poor systems and have made a recent post about it in the Blitz Plus programming forum. I thought it might have something to do with images caching in video ram and the first use being slow and someone else seemed to back this up.


Réno(Posted 2005) [#8]
twitching > same here. I assume your X,Y ( player, origin, all moving abjects... ) are floats. Try to do something like drawimage image,ceil#(playerX),ceil#(playerY),4... make your origin like origin ceil#(oriX),ceil#(oriY)... etc. If not Blitz convert them to int, and that's not a good way for drawing. By !


Caff(Posted 2005) [#9]
Looking good!


Grisu(Posted 2005) [#10]
Mostly smooth. Stuttering here a bit as well.
AMDXP2100, 512MB DDR, Radeon9600xt

Nice job.

Some thoughts on the menu:
- Add "ESC" for switching back from sub-menus
- Instead of just "Music on/off" make the option scaleable like for the sound effects

Loading:
Don't know how you have structured media loading,
but try to pre-cache the "always" used images right at the game's first start.

Game:
- Make the green blob "look" at the direction he's heading.
=> Not facing to front all time.
- Use another tile image for blocks that fall down if you walk over them, so the player has a chance of detecting them.


Teddyfles(Posted 2005) [#11]
Grey Alien

Giana Sisters you say eh? Uhm, well, I er... *starts sweating*... N... no... never heard of it. Why do you ask?

...

ALRIGHT! I admit! I grew up with Giana Sisters on the Amiga and it's the game I played most for at least the first 10 years of my life. So yeah, it was kind of an inspiration for Mr. Twinkle. :)

And yes, even though the gameplay is familiar, I'm hoping to sell it. Although I'm quite new in the indie game industry, so I don't really have an idea of what kind of deal I'm looking for yet.

And the counting up noise at the end of the level is a good idea, thanks.

Réno

Thanks for the tip. I indeed let Blitz convert floats to ints by itself, so I'll try what you said.

Grisu

Thanks for the menu ideas. I'll keep them in mind.

About the media loading, I'm already doing it the way you described. Most images are always in memory, only the large background images of each level are loaded when the level starts. Also the music is loaded when a level starts, which is what takes the most time.

The idea behind the enemies that are always facing to the front is that they can't see where they're going, so when they come to the end of a platform they fall of. The enemies that look in the way they are moving turn around before the fall of.

I thought the recognizable falling blocks weren't challenging enough, but perhaps you're right. It is a bit misleading to make them look just like other blocks. I'll think about it. :)


xlsior(Posted 2005) [#12]
The idea behind the enemies that are always facing to the front is that they can't see where they're going, so when they come to the end of a platform they fall of. The enemies that look in the way they are moving turn around before the fall of.


Sounds like a pretty good idea!


Réno(Posted 2005) [#13]
Joystick support ??


Teddyfles(Posted 2005) [#14]
The game should be playable with a digital joystick (or gamepad). Not with an analogue joystick, as I don't see how you could properly play the game with one of those.


Steve Elliott(Posted 2005) [#15]
I've always liked this game because it's so playable - could be made harder though.

Would you consider adding vertical scrolling for when a jump is made at the top of the screen though? Your character dissappears off screen and so is tricky to judge where you're going to land.


Grey Alien(Posted 2005) [#16]
teddyfles: I wouldn't worry about the GGS thing, after all you have totally different graphics, music and gameplay really (I'm glad to see my sensors were on full power though ;-) ). Don't wanna hijack but check out my platformer if you've got the time, I find it useful to keep seeing what others are doing in theirs:

http://www.blitzbasic.com/Community/posts.php?topic=46591

Reno: what's so bad about letting blitz convert floats into ints when drawing? It does this in my game and either rounds up or down. Could u elaborate please?


Teddyfles(Posted 2005) [#17]
Ok, new version is up for download: MrTwinkle_0.11_Beta.zip (2.12 MB)

The link in the first post is also updated.

I changed a few things in the timing code. Not sure if it will stop the twitching on all systems, but I don't really see what could cause the twitching, except for other software running in the background.

Steve Elliott: Vertical scrolling would be too big of a change to build in at this stage. It's planned for the sequel. :)
I did however change the level a little to avoid the problem of jumping offscreen.

Oh and the final game will get harder after level 1, but I want to go easy on the player in the first level. :)

Grey Alien: Don't have time right now, but I'll try your game too later.


Braincell(Posted 2005) [#18]
Looks smooth and nice here.

Make the blocks that fall thru after you walk on them tremble. That would be the classical way.


Grisu(Posted 2005) [#19]
Tested 0.11
*No stuttering for me anymore!

Ideas:
1. Add a small changelog to rhe txt-readme

2. The green blob
Ok, for the eyes, but at least you should animate him a bit
while moving. It won't look so static.
Perhaps make his glubber head go up and down a bit:


3. Do you have transporter belts inside the game yet?
They could slow you down while moving "against" them.
Or speed you up the traveling dir.

4. Loading Screen
Instead of just displaying "zzzz", you could give better info:
- give the levels / world names that are shown:
eg World: Magic Forrest
Stage 1-2: Entrance
- give a rough percentage of things loaded:
just make a small grey preview screem of the world the player will visit next in greyscale and color it during loading the media. eg a) monsters, b) ground, c) sky
- in the end the "loading" text message will just switch to "press fire" when done. No screen change needed that "cuts" the game experience. Smoother transition! :)

5. High-Score
- too easy! ;)
- give it more live!
eg. adding monsters fyling around the screenie + background.
- add main menu entry for viewing it.

6. Exclude media from exe. So you can make patches easier without having people downloading all anew.

If I get on your nerves too much, just yell. - I like doing polishing stuff. :)


Teddyfles(Posted 2005) [#20]
Lenn
I had already though about it, but after reading you comments I made the blocks tremble before they fall. (Not in the Beta yet though.)

Grisu
No, you're not getting on my nerves, it's very useful stuff! Just don't be sad if I don't use it all. :)

1.
Changelog is a good idea, I like changelogs, but I don't plan on releasing a lot of Beta versions, so in this case it might not be that useful.

2.
Giving the enemies that are always facing front some more animation is actually a good idea. A few extra frames should make it less static indeed, thanks.

3.
Don't have transporter belts yet. I do already have "launchers" that launch the player in a certain direction. Not the same thing though, and transporter belts shouldn't be very hard to implement, so I might do it later if I feel I need more variation.

4.
I kinda like my picture of the sleeping computer :)
But I guess I could make it a bit more interesting. Although showing a percentage wouldn't be very useful. I think loading the music takes more than 90% of the loading time.

5.
Final version will have a completely filled High Score list with some hard to beat scores. :)
But livening up the High Scores it a good idea.

6.
Sorry, I only paid for MoleBox standard edition, so I can't make a separate file for the data, and I don't want to include the data unpacked.

EDIT: Oh wait, I can make a separate data package with MoleBox standard! So, another useful tip! :)


Grey Alien(Posted 2005) [#21]
Only thing with the sleeping computer, nice as it is, is that it looks like it's asleep and thus not doing anything. Maybe it should seem in action. I think the Amiga used to have a zzz pointer when the processor was doing something, didn't it, or was it an hourglass?


Teddyfles(Posted 2005) [#22]
Hehe, yeah, the Amiga had this default Zzz-cloudy-thingy as a loading pointer. Maybe that's why the Zzz-thing in Mr. Twinkle "feels right" to me. I'll try to find a way to combine it with a more dynamic loading screen though. :)


Grey Alien(Posted 2005) [#23]
Maybe the user should sleep whilst the game loads ;-)


Grisu(Posted 2005) [#24]
^^^^that was my point... :)

How many Vidmem is needed for these main backgrounds you use?
Perhaps you could load them up at first startup?
And I would suggest at least to cache them in the system memory. When needed shift them into vid mem... much faster and with todays 512+ MB Ram no big deal!


Teddyfles(Posted 2005) [#25]
Cache in system memory and then shift into video memory? How do I do that in Blitz?


Grisu(Posted 2005) [#26]
There were some funcs for this in the bc showcase, but links are down... :(

Only found this one:



The idea is: while the gfx mode starts you load all tmp images into system ram. When needed switch them to vram.


Teddyfles(Posted 2005) [#27]
Ah I see, nifty trick.

But, I'm just going to stick with loading the large background images from the hard drive. Saves me a lot of trouble and like I said, most of the loading time is caused by loading the music anyway.


Grisu(Posted 2005) [#28]
ok, what audio format you use for the music?


Teddyfles(Posted 2005) [#29]
The music is in OGG format. Sound effects are WAV and are pre-loaded when you start the game.


Grisu(Posted 2005) [#30]
oki doki.

Any new levels that need *T*es*t*ing? :)


Teddyfles(Posted 2005) [#31]
Resring = testing, I presume? :)

Check your mail...


Grisu(Posted 2005) [#32]
my old profile e-mail isn't the fastest. Still waiting.. may have got filtered out. :(

Please retry "s.sarbok at gmx.de"