Jardinains 2! Public Beta 1
Community Forums/Showcase/Jardinains 2! Public Beta 1
| ||
| Well, it's taken...oh, several years longer than I'd wanted it to, but Jardinains 2! is nearly finished. I've just released the first of my (hopefully few) public betas. Visit Jardinains2.com to grab a copy for yourself, or click below: Windows version OS X version (sorry, no Universal Binary yet) Enjoyez-vous, and lemme know whatcha think! |
| ||
| Any screenshots anywhere? |
| ||
| ...not as such, no. I'll put some up when I get the chance. Feel free to take your own, though! |
| ||
| Pretty good fun |
| ||
| The graphics and sounds are really impressive! |
| ||
| Thanks! Like I said, it's taken me faaaar too long to get this all put together, but I'm pretty happy with it so far. It's all XML-driven, which is nice for digging through config files and the like. Basically, I've made the engine about ten times more intricate than I needed to, but I like the result. |
| ||
| Pirate Gnomes = Amazing. Great game man, keep it up. :) |
| ||
| Heh. I'm working on the ninjas. |
| ||
| Its the Gnomes and their comic animations that make this fun, rather than the game itself I feel. The lack of powerups at times makes the actual process of destroying blocks a rather slow affair, which IMO the Gnomes can't make up for. Didn't work on my system in Directx mode. Just got the surround, ball, and explosions. No blocks, gnomes, or bat. OpenGL was fine though. Was not keen on the ball animation either. Sort of just seems flickery to me, and it would look better IMO if the trails did not appear when its on the bat at the start of a level. If you could speed up the action as far as block destroying goes. It would improve the game no end in my opinion. Either that or use the Gnomes in a lemmings-esque puzzle solving game. They really are great. |
| ||
| Hey! I downloaded 4 times your demo (windows version) but every time I get an error message 'missing files' or 'setup corrupted'.... |
| ||
| Geehawk--if you can bounce the gnomes enough times (6-8, depending on the type of gnome), they'll yield a powerup. Given this, there's almost an overabundance of powerups in the game. As for the gnomes making the game--well, without the gnomes, it's basically just another variant on the classic 30-year-old ball breaker, no? The DirectX issue is odd. The game uses 100% BlitzMax code (no external or 3rd party modules,) so I'm not sure exactly what I'll be able to do to fix this...I assume your video drivers are up-to-date? As for speeding up the action: I plan to make more "advanced" level packs for folks who are used to a bit brisker gameplay, but my target audience is casual and all-ages. In the first version, I got a lot more "too tough!" mail than I did "too easy!". The ball used to move faster, but my private test pool said it was too fast (even though it was perfectly fine for me.) In the interim, though, you can make the game as challenging as you want it to be by trying to keep as many gnomes in the air as you can... degac--Hm. What browser are you using? Is there a chance you could try using a different browser to download the game? I've got a simple PHP script serving up files for now, but there could be an issue with the headers it's trying to send or something... |
| ||
| Neuro, there's a screenshot up in the gallery now. |
| ||
| The bouncing Gnomes thing is okay, but for example on the 3rd level big diamond shape it takes absolutely ages to free up any Gnomes, all the while with no power ups. After a couple of Gnomes, and no useful powerups, they all start appearing right on the top level and you have to fight your way right through the blocks, slowly, to hit them, again with no power ups. Basically the time between Gnomes seems too long at times. On that 3rd screen, which I've played numerous times, its just taken me over 2 minutes of block bashing, before the first Gnome becomes free. Meanwhile there are another 9 waiting at the top. Impossible to bounce the Gnome without losing a life, so another 2 minutes pass whilst I break blocks to get to another gnome. All the while you are just bouncing a ball against blocks its just a Breakout game, and it seems to me the majority of the time that is all you are doing. Yes its more challenging trying to keep the gnomes up, if they are there, but given the ball is the important thing I'm more inclined to concentrate on that. I dont think a faster ball is the answer, but if the Gnomes could be bounced to destroy blocks that might be different ;-) Anyway that is all just my honest opinion, you did ask for feedback. Maybe I'm just crap at breakout type games, seeing as it takes me so long to bash the blocks without any powerups, but then I'm just a casual gamer I need all the help I can get. |
| ||
| Geehawk, thanks for the input--I agree that level 3 is more tedious than fun, and I do appreciate the feedback. I didn't mean to sound quite as defensive as I did above. Ball-breaking gnomes, eh? That could be interesting--though it'll have to wait for the next round of feature creep... |
| ||
| Perhaps Knight Gnomes in suits of armour, could break blocks ;-) last night I got a double ball powerup, twice. 4 balls, that sped things up a bit lol. |
| ||
| Jardinains is the game that first introduced me to Blitzmax. Not only have I had hours of fun bouncing gnomes off my paddle and listening to the extra-catchy background music, I've also learned a new programming language. I've fiddled with demos of BlitzMax off and on for well over a year now, even creating a couple of functional games. Just yesterday, I finally purchased licenses for BlitzMax and MaxGUI in order to get down to some serious work. It all started with Jardinains. Great work! |
| ||
| Was looking forward to this one. Installed it, clicked on "Launch" at the end of the installation procedure, heard some music... and then lost my display because the refresh rate went to something my monitor couldn't handle. Given it's fine with anything from 50-120Hz, I was more than a little surprised and disappointed. If it wasn't something from a Blitzer, I'd never give it another thought. Disappointing. [edit] I should add my monitor is a fairly vanilla 17" CRT - never had a problem with it like this before unless I've done something silly with it myself - and certainly not with the default setting of a game. I was genuinely surprised. [/edit] |
| ||
| Worked OK here. Athlon 3200+, 1Gb, XP Pro, Radeon 9800. Nice game and effects, thought it was quite funny too. Good work. |
| ||
| I haven't tried this demo yet because... What monitor refresh rate does this force? My monitor does 60Hz and 60Hz only. I take a dim view of any app that blindly tries to force my monitor to display a signal it can't handle, frankly. Why was this 'feature' ever added to bmax? Does bmax allow detection of supported rates? If so, why isn't it being used by people? Sorry for the mini rant. |
| ||
| Hm. I'll need to review my code--I've got a rather involved resolution detection algorithm which checks for various "friendly" resolutions and uses one that (should) work. Starts trying 1024x768, then down to 800x600, then down to 640x480, then whatever graphics mode it can grab. It also scans for a "maximum" refresh rate--come to think of it, this could be where it's going wrong. I'll dig into it. In the interim, you can force a video mode by editing data/prefs.xml... |
| ||
| Now I think about it, I seem to remember bmax reports refresh rates of 0Hz on win98 machines (was this fixed?). Maybe LineOf7s is using win98? I am but, as I said, I haven't tried the demo yet. |
| ||
| i wasnt aware bmax could force refresh rates. |
| ||
| Cool game, I had fun playing it. If you change the fullscreen/window option, but click Ok at what it currently is, it will change it, yet its already on that option. |
| ||
| big10p: Nah, WinXP SP2. Tom Darby: If you're looking for 'maximum' refresh rate, and the refresh rate is what's killing me, then that's probably a good place to start looking. ;o) I'll edit the prefs file and have another go. You're lucky you're a Blitzer! :o) |
| ||
| This is a great game! Super polished, and those little bastards throwing flower pots. Its so satisfying to smack them offa their perches and bounce them around. Great job on this! Super fun! |
   |