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DevBlog #01

A topic by eMCee13 created Jun 15, 2018 Views: 353 Replies: 10
Viewing posts 1 to 6
Submitted

Hi everyone,

Late to getting this first dev blog out.  I'm working on a game with my brother, ElBruh.  It's been over 5 years since I've been a part of a competition like this and about the same since I've last worked on a game.  I'm really excited to be getting back into it.  We talked about it on Sunday and brainstormed the game idea on Monday.

For our game, we chose the passage: 

Therefore encourage one another and build each other up, just as in fact you are doing. 1 Thessalonians 5:11 NIV

The idea for our game that the main character, a knight, is climbing a tower, floor by floor, defeating enemies along the way.  Enemy combat consists of typing words that appear on the screen without errors.  When the knight is going to proceed to the next floor, the player is prompted with an encouraging phrase that need to be typed to help the knight proceed to the next floor.

It's been a blast working on it so far.  Thanks for putting on this competition!

Submitted

I have heard of these typing kind of games, but never actually tried one. It will be interesting to get to try one finally.

Host

Welcome back to the competition! The game idea sounds interesting. Looking forward to playing it.

Submitted

Am i right that this game doesnt have an end but continues forever? It crashed me on about floor 12, so either there was big boss coming or it just decided to crash.

Submitted (1 edit)

It is endless.  We didn't encounter any crashes in our testing, but yeah, must have been a crash.

If you can, send us the log or post its contents here.  I think it'll be at: C:\Users\<username>\AppData\LocalLow\DefaultCompany\TyperHero\output_log.txt

Submitted

It actually crashed twice even. First time on floor 12, second time at last fight on floor 1. Also the getting strength back doesnt work properly. Not sure but my guess is that it works only on first game you play after starting the game, but this is merely a guess, since i recall that it did work the first time i got on third floor, but ever after that it didnt work.

Where do i send that log file?

Submitted

Email to admin@codesalmon.com .  Please mention hardware specs if possible.

We actually don't have any mechanic for gaining strength/health back. :)  It's something we're looking to add in the future with more tweaking of the difficulty scaling. 

Thanks for the feedback!

Submitted

ah, then i must have just assumed the health was full and as i was trying first with easy, maybe i had it full still at that point.

Submitted

Here are my thoughts about your game.

First of all, if you had made this say 5 floors high game and then gave a big boss, then this had been an excellent entry, now as it is endless game, it changes things a lot.

First of all, I had never played these typing games before, and i was basically expecting it to be boring. But to my surprise, there were plenty of good ideas in this and it could have been real good game. And actually, as long as i thought this was going to end to floor 4 or 5 or something, I was feeling very excited playing this, despite having problem with keyboard following my keystrokes.

First thing that stroke to my eye was how good looking a game this was, also when the fights started, the fights looked good too, and enemies had dieing animations and all. It was very polished and just from looks point of view, I could have easily thought that this had been some commercial independent release sold for some small money, for example on Switch, except that this obviously wouldnt work on switch due to missing keyboard. But just from looks point of view.

Music was also very fitting to the game, making the game even better and despite it repeating, it didnt start annoying at any point, even i played up to 10+floors before it crashed.

Soundfx was okay. They maybe didnt make the game that much better like the music did, but it was anyway better they were there, than had they not been there.

Partially the sound failure is to do with the animations being bit too slow, which is once again due to the endless nature of game. Energy bar dropout when enemies hit also felt very unnatural that it happened as a last thing. I would have preferred the bar to drop at same time as the actual hit happened in animation, instead of such a delay.

It was also good there was some variation with monsters, that made the game even better.

Also having difficulty levels was big plus as well, especially since I had one specific problem having to do with having not powerful machine enough. I first played with max screen and max quality settings, but i had a big problem there as when i tried to play with hard, keyboard didnt seem to recognise all my strokes and I think sometimes it thought i was stroking wrong key when i think i actually hit right one. Hence i in last try played it on window with only medium wuality graphics. Then it worked fast, and i didnt have that missed keyboard strokes problem anymore.

I also think those difficulty levels are very good in sense that if someone actually wants to practice typing, he can choose to start with that easy mode.

I personally dislike endless games. I like there to be definite end to a game to get the conclusion. However, when game is endless, i prefer it to be a quick one. Like that Stacksheep game on mobile where you try push at right moment to drop a sheep on top of the previous sheep, and you usually get game over in less than a minute.

When i thought this game had end, i was very happily playing this repeatedly even i died, and the slow tempo of the game didnt matter either, since it only helped build the expectancy more, especially when i was low on health and was close to that health regaining place (or so i thought, as you pointed out you are not getting your strength back actually), the slow speed made it painfully exciting to wait if that last hit right before the ladders would kill me or not.

But after i realised this was endless game, all changed. This game became boringly slow, and lasts simply too long. A game like this with endless gaming should go so that fights are much quicker and every room the next guy gets tougher, instead of next floor only. Then, with faster pace overall, this would have been good even as endless game. However, right now despite all the good things in this game, it is not too fun anymore. But once again I like to emphasize, that it is this single decision to make this game endless that fails this game, otherwise this game is gold. As long as i thought  this was going to end to floor 4-5 with a final big boss battle, I thought this was very strong candidate to be the winner of this competition as in overall best game.

Hence dont take it too strongly that i dont think the game is too good right now, since just make that one change to this, and you could actually sell this game. Although, unfortunately I dont think it would necessarily be sellable to computer market, but would be sellable to console/mobile market, but unfortunately they dont have keyboards. But still, that one change and it is as good as sellable product, just on wrong platform. And that is not a bad thing to say from a game at all!

I very much liked how you had made the christian message part to this game. That worked out real well. Especially I liked the idea of being able to send encouraging messages to other players, although I am not sure that actually worked.

Basically this is just what WII U had with their miiworld that they just shut down this year, except in their case they were mentioning as possiblity to leave messages, while in your case you took the same idea and put it to more specific use by telling to send encouraging messages to other players. That was a really good idea.

All in all, i thought i was going to be playing somewhat boring game, but to my surprise, this was close to being the best. Great working music, exciting gameplay, good amount of variety, great idea getting those enc etc. only one bad decision which makes a big impact to take out from the funness of a game a lot. And encourage one other comes quite nicely out in this game, and i especially liked the leave encouraging message to other players.

Submitted

One thing I forgot to mention. What had been good had been to give maybe random tips between those floors or before starting the game or on title screen or something. Main point being that it took me a long time before i realised i was losing health from wrong keyboard strokes.

At beginning this even worked exactly wrong way around, for i noticed i had lost some strength, and i thought it was so that you lose some strength the longer you stay with enemy and on top of that from hits, hence i started to try type even faster and with too slow a machine, even more miss strokes came. I eventually went all the way to easy level to be able to survive, until i realised problem was miss strokes, after which i was able to play even with hard level as long as i put the graphics settings low enough, as i wasnt so much in hurry to type than i thought, but was more of in need of being more accurate with my keypresses.

Submitted

Authors: Eli Aguilera & Matias Codesal