Cryptex of Time - Exclusive Demo
Community Forums/Showcase/Cryptex of Time - Exclusive Demo
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| So here it is. My first "real" game ever (not counting the 3 week compo game I made before) It seems like it will take some time before I can release the "official" demo so I decided to prepare a demo for you guys. The game is now in Beta-stage and I would LOVE to hear all different opinions about all elements in the game. Music, sfx, design, levels, gameplay.. you name it. I'm both curious and excited about your reactions. Hopefully it's mostly positive. Now I know I stretched my trial on Molebox somewhat (not allowed to distribute files with trial) but as this is just for you guys I hope its ok. Otherwise I just remove the file. Also remember that this is not the real demo and I really don't want to see this one anywhere else on the net, ok? Now here it is: try it and remember to give me hardtime criticism! Video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VMWBKb7EwHE **EDIT** I've now removed the download links. Demo is not available anymore for Blitzcommunity. **EDIT** OBS: You must save the file on your harddrive and then start it from there. You cannot open it in a temporary folder (eg choose Save and not Open when prompted) |
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| Dowloading now. Thanks for posting a demo. |
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| ..downloading..let see whats coming out of your kitchen :) |
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| Oh, I would also like to know your system spec if you're playing it. I've had some problems on a laptop here at home with Vista installed and I just don't know whether it's just another software underneath that is giving the laptop a hard time or the actual game (stops after a while) |
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| ooh! Demo! Yah! |
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| Thought this was really good, easy to pick up and play and great presentation. I've never been a fan of puzzle games but I can see this one doing well. Ran fine here on vista 64bit, x2 Athlon and Radeon x1900. It did crash though; after I had completed the Maya world and it was doing the tutorial of Egypt, I got a memory access violation. There were quite a few grammatical errors in the text, you might want to paste them into word as most would be spotted by its grammar checker. Ahh, one other thing, the level where you have a limited amount of rotations was a bit misleading, I thought a rotation would be every time you click the mouse to rotate and then let go again, not each time it clicks once as you're rotating. |
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| Thanks Pete for testing the game and for your kind words. I believe the crash must be due to my fast packaging of the demo (where I removed alot of files not necessary for the demo). I will look into it as this does not happen on the full version of the game. The grammar will be corrected by the testteam and will not be final dialogue. I'm a Swede and do need help with that one. Thanks for all feedback. About the rotationlimitation I am not sure how to present it so the player understands. Using words like "steps" or "clicks" doesn't just work either. Did you discover it right away or did it ruin your gameplay experience? |
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| It didn't really spoil it, I just looked at the counter and suddenly noticed I only had 4 left, so I just failed the level, but after that I realised what was happening, wasn't a really big thing. I'd say something like "Remember, one notch of a wheel to the left or right counts as a rotation!" |
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| I watched the video - looks like a very polished puzzle game. |
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| OK had a quick play (got limited time right now). Noticed some things, hope they help. 1) When you enter your name there is a flashing cursor and after yuo type a few letters, when it flashes on and off the whole name keeps jerking as it centres with and without the cursor, it looks odd. 2) It takes ages to load 3) On the title screen the lower part of the O of OF is truncated. 4) On the title screen it would be nice if the ticks were in time with the music... 5) on the enter name dialog you can't enter as many characters as your example which is your name :-). If you enter all Ms they come out the side of the dialog when the cursor flashes on. 6) on the select player dialog, when you click one the parchment disappears, this is an odd transistion. 7) options screen: Off/Max etc are too small to read easily. The back button writing is a bit thin and hard to read when mouse is over it + it looks to bright. The particle effects when you click are nice. When you click a new sound level a click at the OLD sound volume plays, it would be better if a click at the NEWLY selected sound volume played instead. The parchment has a dodgy black edge. 8) Credits: How about fading the title music into the credits instead of cutting it. Scrolling is a bit jerky on my machine. 9) the game has a folder as an icon on the task bar and says "Not Responding" yet it's running. This is confusing. 10) The game needs an icon in the top left of windowed mode. 11) Is there going to be a full-screen mode? 12) music is nice 13) title page looks great. 14) map screen is cool. Nice scaling/panning etc. The main menu button and treasures seem to only show half the height of the button like they are tuncated by the bottom of my 1024x768 screen. Is this intentional? 15) Treasures screen overlays map. OK, but I went to click on a treasure and it disappeared. There's no "OK" or "exit" button so it's a bit confusing. 16) The Maya screenshot is ace. 17) There's something about the buttons. They look nice but also "rendered" rather than really excellent...these things all inform users subconciously as to the quality of the game. Specs: P4 3.2GHZ, 1GB RAM, XP SP2, Radeon 9800XT, SB Audigy 2, desktop res 1024x768 18) Hints: Parchment has a dodgy black edge. Click is hard to read and messy and the arrow is too close to it. Skip could be a bit bigger too. Can you make "Annie" a bit cleared as I didn't see it at first. 19) The Hint dialogs and animated help is good. Yeah check the grammar. One hint says point the mouse at the side to turn the wheel, I'd simply say "move the mouse to the side ..." 20) The Go text on the Go button is too thin. 21) in-game menu. The white flash as it appears is distracting. The menu could do with being vertically centered. Aha I see you plan full-screen and to show the map but they don't work yet. 22) Even Menu is slightly hard to read due to highlights. 23) The game doesn't pause or stop the music when not focused. 24) Haha, I kept wanting to drag up and down like a "normal" match 3. 25) I likt the glint on the gems as you rotate them. Somehow though they feel a bit washed out. Perhaps the gold could be darker? 26) Have you tried an all grey spindle as the red is distracting. 27) The controls work really nicely now. I remember discussing them with you a while back. They are very casual friendly. 28) I got a "Cryptex too high" message just as I removed the top one. Is that supposed to happen. No I'm not lame at playing it, I was just writing this at the same time :-) 29) Nice victory sequence. How about "Save and Exit" (I use this in my games) or "Main Menu" to be clearer. Dosgy parchment again (the top part has some "disconnected" portions of parchment!). No mouse over noise on the buttons. 30) Aha, on the map I thought each dot was a level, but now I realise just the big ones are. Perhaps the difference could be made more obvious somehow? 31) You talk about time a lot but there is no obvious counter. It would be really nice to see when the next wheel is going to fall via a gauge or something, would add tension... 32) Nice yellow orb explosion 33) The x10 or whatever text the flies off seems a bit plain/generic. 34) I tried random spinning and it was quite successful until I got to low gems although I guess on levels where the time limit goes up with spins it's not wise. 35) Is it possible to remove gems and have none left (or no matches) before a new spindle drops in? 36) There's a nice graphic of some gems in a circle in the top left, but it doesn't do anything right? It's confusing as it's the same look as the menu button. Prhaps you could put the game name there? Ah OK, jus tgot to level 3 and she explained what it was for. Maybe it should say "Remove" on the rim of the circle? OK that's it for now, I gotta program my own game. This is amazing for a first game, well done and the best of luck! |
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| 'Some' things?! lol. :P |
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| Downloading... P.S.: Ever seen the bug reports on MS products? These are only some things... :D |
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| lol - Grey's the man for testing your game. Very thorough - which is a good thing. |
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| Grey Alien: Some would have never ever spoken to you again after such a list but I am overwhelmed by the time and effort you put into this to improve my game. Lots and lots of thanks!! I will reply to a few of your 'things' here. 1) I am aware of this jerking and am blaming SpriteCandy as I was lazy and used the inbuilt InputText which is reacting this way. I will look into it. 2) I know. This is a compressed vs. alphachannel matter :/ also I try to load as much as possible in the beginning instead of having small loads within the game.. maybe it's better to spread it out ingame more.. opinions? 3) Ill look into it 4) As the music starts much earlier than the clock its hard to know when the game is finished loading and the MainScreen appears. Also, just as I created this demo I decided to try out a new maintheme which is the one you are listening to. Im not sure if it's the best one though. 5) Damn you.. I know about the M's and I hoped noone would try such a stupid name :D you can never cheat can you? 6) Ill look into it 7) Ill look into the sound, shouldnt be more than moving a line of code really. Artwise, we'll see if I have time (read energy) to change sizes. 8) Fading music.. will do. Normal Smoothscroll is used via SpriteCandy. Won't change anything I think. 9) I think it does that when loading doesnt it? Then it kinds of freezing. Still Ive seen it as well and havent got a clue what to do about it :/ 10) Coming up 11) Yes, hopefully. Ive stumbled apon problems when loading in the textures again into memory. Is it a total NO NO to tell the player that the changes will appear when restarting the game when it comes to Fullscreen/Windowed??? 12) Thanks! 14) The game is run in 1024*768. As you are playing the windowed version, the upper windowborder is taking place and pushes about 15-20 pixels of the window outside at the bottom. Fullscreen would do the trick (or carefully move the window up above the screen). I had to decide between 800*600 or 1024*768 and went with this one. 15) Yes, as you mention it, the treasurescene is not intuitive. Ill change that somehow. Thanks 16) Cant take credit for that one. A friend of mine made 2 pictures including that one. 18) All these edges are due to masking instead of Alphatransparency. Actually I didnt get the alpha to work til about 80% into the project. Then I realized that it just didnt work because I used textured not equally sized (512*512 etc) alphahannel just disappeared but the image still was intact. Lazy as I am, I just moved further and have used the masked pictures ever since. Time to fix it maybe? 19) I will get help with the dialogue which is a good thing. I'm from Sweden and even though I can manage to make myself understood, it's far from perfect :) Thanks for finding some of the mistakes though. 23) Is this even possible in Blitz3D? I will look it up in the forums.. would be a great thing. 26) I wanted people to be aware of the spindles so they wasnt just wasted polygons. Maybe too much then. 28) Hasn't happened here. I will see if I can reproduce it because it's a simple countercheck. If tower is HEIGHTLIMIT-2 then warn. Warning stays until tower drops to HEIGHTLIMIT-4 I think, just so the message doesnt reappear all the time. 29) I should have some better message there but as you said the buttons are small and I just write text ON the buttons so there is not much space to write anything. Thats why everything is: OK, GO, NO, YES, MAIN etc I will fix the mouseover sound. Thanks 30) Other colour on the small dots? Well.. the player will see after just one level. 31) Thats a thing I have discussed with my publisher back and forth. They made me remove the timemeter as it was too much info on screen. Maybe I shouldnt talk about time at all but somehow I want the player to know that they can impact how often the wheels are dropping down. 32) Thanks 33) The Combonumber would actually be a part of a gamemode but it never happened. Is it anything the player would like to see even? Should I just remove it as it doesn't really matter how many gems/cubes you are removing in one rotation. 34) Random spinning works on the first few levels, yes :) 35) No, I havent been able to. But I had a PuzzleMode which we scrapped a few weeks ago where you had only a few spindles and in some amounts of rotations you had to remove all. No time passing and no new wheels dropping down. Unfortunately it wont be in this version. Once again, I'm grateful for your throughly test and detailed honesty. I have some work to do. |
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| Cool glad it helped. It was just a "report" I didn't want to offend, I never do. There's always loads of little polish items to do at the end and they do zap your energy but you gotta finish them... couple of replies but I'm tired and need to go soon: 2) loading bar for a start to give user feedback. If you load it all in at once, could you overload the VRAM on low RAM cards? Maybe loading in some screens only when they are used (title, map, game) could be done, I actually do it that way but I'm not saying it's the best. 5) haha, it's never going to be typed realistically. 9) Yeah when it was loading I saw the not responding thing and then it stayed even though the game was playing OK. 11) Any decent game will swap screen modes on the fly, only crap old ones don't do that. 14) I see. When I made Xmas and Easter Bonus I actually planned for the fact that if you were running in 800x600 desktop the game window would be too big (with top title bar) so I actually shrunk it a bit and scaled the position of graphics on certain screens BUT it was a massive pain and I haven't bothered for my modern games. Really your game should start in full-screen mode (that's the portal standard) anyway, so it'll be less of an issue, but making it 1024x768 will mean truncated screens, so why not move the buttons up or something and make sure that there is NEVER anything in the lower 24 pixels that is important? 18) yeah fix, it looks bad. 19) I noticed quite a lot but it's not worth writing them all down as you'll get someone to fix it. It's worth doing as to an English speaker it will subconciously affect their opionion of quality. 23) It was possible in BlitzPlus and is in BMax so I'm sure you can do it. Just detect when the window looses focus and when focus comes back. 28) It was probably correct, I thought it wasn't a warning but a game over message that fired off but game over didn't occur as I removed a spindle at the same time. It's probably fine. 30) dunno, it's probably fine, I just wondered if the small dots could look more like a PATH than a mini-level. 31) removing user feedback, weird. OK gues syou gotta do what they say but I feel being in the dark about the time is a BAD thing. See what other players think. 33) comobo numbers are normal in these sort of games but it looked plain is all I'm saying. like a plain thin normal font instead of exciting... Good luck, go for it. BUT also don't be disheartened if it's not a mega-smash hit, I don't mean that nastily, I just mean feel good about it but be prepared to write more games and keep on improving and not give in if sales don't live up to your expectations, that's all...Like any business you have to BUILD being an Indie developer and it can take years. |
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| ... and I thought I was almost done ... :D Cant reproduce the Egypt-tutorialcrash.. anyone else got it? |
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| Andreas, I'll tell you what, with Grey helping you out like that you should do really really well - Jake is such a professional developer. That's one of the aspects of being a Blitz developer, there are so many people here willing to help - it's a great community when it works together. Your game looks superb by the way - good luck with it. IPete2. |
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| 1) Fixed 3) Fixed 5) A little better now 6) Fixed 7) Fixed all 8) Fixed 14)Fixed 18)Fixed 23)Fixed Now into the fullscreen thingy (hate it) |
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| Excellent sounds like good progress. Now you've fixed these things, you'll get them right in your next game. Thanks IPete2! :-) |
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| Thanks once again Grey. I'm working on my next game parallel now so it is very helpful. Just a question about Icons.. what formats should I include nowadays? 16*16 ? 32*32 ? 64*64 ? 256 colours? will the icons automatically be placed in windowsborder and down at Startmenu if I include them to the exe? |
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| I found that icons were NOT placed on the title bar (where the app title/caption is shown) in BlitzPlus or BMax, I had to code that with API calls. For the Start Menu (do you mean that and not the Task Bar) if the exe has an icon then then the entry in Start Menu/Program Files will have an icon. I'm pretty sure that the task bar icon comes from the exe, but I can't remember, it may need the same special code as the title bar. I think that the Task Swap icon (Alt+Tab) comes from the same code as the title bar too, but it could come from the .exe. Sorry to be vague, but basically add it to the EXE and then see where it DOESN'T appear, and you need an API call to set it on the Title Bar and those other things will sort out. As for sizes, I don't have multiple sizes right now but I WILL need to code that for my current game so it is good on Vista (portals want it too), so if you find out anything about it, let me know! thx. Part of the problem is getting a free util that allows you to combine them all in one, then telling the API which one to use for the title bar I think. |
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| Just a question about Icons.. what formats should I include nowadays? 16*16 ? 32*32 ? 64*64 ? 256 colours? Here's the full list of Microsoft icon requirements for applications: http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa511280.aspx (very useful actually -- it even lists the typical angles used for 3D-like images, drop shadow settings, and step-by-step instructions for photoshop. as far as size is concerned -- from that URL above: Application icons and Control panels: Full set 16, 32, 48, 256 (Code will scale between 32 and 256) Format =ICO (required)(For Classic Mode the full set is 16, 24, 32, 48 and 64) <-snip-> Additional Sizes: additional sizes are useful to have on hand as resources to make other files (ex: used for annotations, toolbar strips, overlays, HIDPI and special cases) 128, 96, 64, 40, 24, 22, 14, 10, 8. Format =ICO, PNG, BMP or other depending on code in that area |
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| That's an amazing link you submitted XLSIOR, many thanks! Browsing through some API calls.. not easy to find the right ones. If anyone knows them (call for setting the tiny icon in the topright windowcorner and for the taskbar) please post them. Just finished the Fullscreen/Windowedscreen part. God I've totally learned my lesson not to do that in the end of the gamedesign. It was a NIGHTMARE to get it done properly. Even so it's not even available as an option anymore in the game but only from MainMenu. To have it ingame it would have meant a total reconstruction of the whole game and logicengine as it doesn't really keep 100% track on the gems 3D-positions. I know it's not the best solution but it was the only solution for the time being. Anyone else tested it and want to contribute with their comments?? (I know you have ;) hundreds of downloads has been made so far) |
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here's what I have in my framework for Bmax, it may be of some use:' ----------------------------------------------------------------------------- ' ccSetIcon: Uses Windows API call to set the window icon ' ----------------------------------------------------------------------------- Function ccSetIcon(iconname$, TheWindow%) ?Win32 Local icon=ExtractIconA(TheWindow,iconname,0) Local WM_SETICON = $80 Local ICON_SMALL = 0 Local ICON_BIG = 1 ' sendmessage(TheWindow, WM_SETICON, ICON_SMALL, icon) 'don't need this sendmessage(TheWindow, WM_SETICON, ICON_BIG, icon) ' SetClassLongA(TheWindow,-14,icon) 'Obsolete as it doesn't work with Windows XP Theme! ? End Function Obviously those API called are externed at the top. |
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| I haven't found a way to include multiple sizes icon with Visual Studio 2005, Blitz etc. so I simply create a multiple sizes icon with Axialis IconWorkshop and use this program to add the icon to my game .exe: http://www.codeproject.com/gdi/using_vista_icons.asp I haven't checked around this icon problem for a few months so there might be a solution for it now but when Vista first was released this seemed like the only way to do it then :) By the way, the game works fine here and plays great! Good luck with it! |
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| Did you get my reply to your email? Only you didn't reply so I thought maybe mine got treated as spam by your ISP. Perhaps you've just been busy on your name game :-) |
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| Got a MAV when I first ran the executable (after the Molebox warning) Then got into the game, started the tutorial. I hate tutorials, so I hit space about 30 seconds in, and got a MAV. I have a GeForce Ti4200. 2.4 GHz, 1GB RAM. (Congrats, btw, this is very good for a first game!) |
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| :/ Agent4125: Sounds weird... haven't heard anything like it from the rest of the testers. I will go through my game now again as I've recieved a new list of 45 issues I need to take care of (beats your list Grey) so i'll just add it then :D |
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| It's not the size of the list but the Quality that counts ;-) |
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| I thought it was how I used it that counts |
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| ;) true true. |
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| Great Puzzle Game AJirenius !!! But I donīt play the demo, re release, please. Thxs. |
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| Thanks M2PLAY. As the official demo is to be out very soon I will wait til then. We all know that this version had a few things to be tweaked anyway. |
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| OOOK!! Andreas Thxs. I wait it. |
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