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Matthew Colón's DevBlog

A topic by Matt Colón created May 16, 2020 Views: 305 Replies: 8
Viewing posts 1 to 8
Submitted

Hello everyone!  For Speedgame: Hardmode, I'm working on a rogue-like called "Unveil" whose story will tie into the Kintsukuro (beauty from brokenness) theme.  Bobby Vickery is helping out with the music, which already is sounding great!

Submitted

Sounds interesting. Will this be 2D or 3D?

Submitted (1 edit)

2D.  Here's a glimpse of the start of the game so far:


Submitted

Nice retro look! Any hints on the story?

Submitted

The player is setting out to save his princess, though It's hard to share more of the story without giving anything away, so you'll just have to play to the end. :)

Host

Look forward to playing this, Matt! Roguelike is a genre I've been appreciating more and more.

Host

Since I've permitted sketche99 to upload his version after hitting some issues during the upload process, and he also implemented some bug fixes, I'm allowing for a few extra hours to edit your submission if you need to.

Heres the gameplay video first:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DNkhsYs4W7

As you can see from the video, there are two different game sessions.

The first one ended when I ran out of hearts as I forgot to pay attention to them when so many monsters attacked at once. Anyway, that was my own mistake but also made me think it had been good to have something like alarm sound or similar when hearts go down to three or something. But that wasnt a big deal.

What however was a major big deal, was the crashing. Session 2 luckily happened to be the furthest I got on this game.

I tried to play this 8 times in total, until I just decided to give up. Never reached as far as on session 2 before game crashed.I first thought it might have been affected because of my recording on background, but actualy, it might have been the opposite, for the last session I played the game without recording both to see if it works as well as compare the speed of the gameplay, but actually it crashed sooner than on other sessions.

Would like to take 2 stars away just for that since I am feeling pretty pissed off still trying to play that game, all the small things that wouldnt annoy otherwise, especially on hardmode game, really started taking their toll, but I dont think it is fair to take more than 1 star from crash problem, even from this serious one.

I recommend you make another crash free version of this game for those to play it who play it after the voting is over, for after watching the rest from the gameplay video you provided, I would have really liked to get tot the end myself, now that end lost a lot watching it just from video.

So, the little annoyances that became really big annoyiances after starting the game for the nth time.

First of all, why does the game start so slow. Alrady first time I was looking like it is taking ages before the fading ends and game starts. And text, why cant i skip them. One push complete the text, second push, remove it. Now I was force dto watch the text come to screen slowly, which didnt bother me the first time, but already did the second time.

Another terrible thing was the monster animation. Playability suffered terribly when there were several monsters on screen, and especially when playing for the nth time that was absolute torture. That was part that I felt bad even when playing the first time, but once again, it does go once, it only starts to bother you after you have to suffer it through more than once.

But that was about bad parts. I was in such a bad mood after failing to complete it the 8th time that I had to start from the bad things first.

Music is obviously very good. Not perfect, since I think in some parts it is bit overdoing it compared to what the game looks like, but very good indeed, especially the game complete part makes it very moody scene.

I actually bit missed what was the broken part on the end on the princess that why did they think she was that (avoiding giving spoilers to others, although I doubt anyone who would get spoiled reads this), I understand that the monsters were all about possibly that broken part, but I didnt quite understand why others were saying that broken thing?

Other than that, a great ending, one of the best ones I seen on any game. Good twist etc. and changed the game completely, that you thought game was this type A, when it actually was type B as you notice in the end.

Game itself was quite enjoyable too, especially for a hardmode game. Basically this had been a strong entry even to classic version of competition, but to hatrdmode even more so.

I also liked that there was some variety to monsters attacks, that sometimes came alone, sometimes in groups etc. That levels were different.

I also liked how each level were sort of fitting into a one screen (although they didnt in practice), so this was nice change too to RPGs where we have large dungeons to go around that now always just a small piece and bit of strategy there.

This concept could well be transformed into commercial one with more complexity and variety of monsters etc. and it would work quite nice, especially for something like Nintendo 3DS, Switch, Mobile, where you could easily have short game sessions of just finishing one floor when you are on a bus or something.

Graphics were good. No more, no less. They werent anything spectacular, but they did their job.

Having more attack types during the game was also good, although last two (from which I didnt get to experience triangle myself) made the player to over powered. With push attack, how can you die anymore as long as you play it right? So that was bit of a failure there actually.

Games length was quite okay. Basically might have been better if it had been bit shorter, since while I was playing, I was already waiting for it to end before the crash happened, but it wasnt that lengthy however that it would have really suffered from length, it was still on fine limit.

All in all, good game with excellent story with great twist in the end and good music. Graphics suit the game, and few sounds do their job. Couple of Polishing problems (forced to watch text, slow movement when lots of enemies) which are forgivable due to hardmode, except now that they are combined with a crash they really start annoying you bad.

Despite the crash, I felt this was the best game of the entries.

Submitted

Thank you for playing, and for your feedback and play-through video!  I apologize for the crashes; this time I hadn't been able to play through the game in a build outside of Unity until right near the end (and of course it didn't crash on my machine :D ), but I'll definitely make sure I get builds going earlier in future speedgames to check for crashes.

Also, I hope to make a crash-free version soon after the speedgame voting ends once changes are allowed again.  In addition, I'd love to start working on a better version of the game outside of the three-day time restriction that has vastly improved code and addresses a number of the things you had concerns about since I also had many of those same concerns but had to triage them for other things.  Hopefully I'll have some news about an improved version of the game soon!