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Strato Scruffy is one of the most important pieces of lost media in modern gaming and it's good to finally have it fully restored and playable. Hard recommend to any fans of SHMUPS like...

Well I haven't really played any Shmups besides Strato Scruffy but I guess that just proves it's better than the others. 

No, but I assume you're referring to this game?

Like action-platformers? Like character-heavy stories? Like those 2000's animal mascot vibes? More socially relevant than me? Well today's your lucky day! To promote my new game, Frebbventure, I'm giving out free Steam keys, and I'm not being picky! Here're the qualifications:

- Must have an English-speaking audience. Frebbventure has no translations so far, unfortunately, so in order to get the full experience you need to be able to read English.

- Must have already done streams or LPs on at least 3 other indie platformers.

- Those videos must have (mostly) reached at least 400 views each; at least, videos on the last couple games you've tackled. I don't care a ton about subscriber counts, I care about how engaged and active your audience is, and if they'd actually be interested in a game of this nature.

- Don't be an overly politicized, clickbaity, or otherwise contentious channel.

And that's "all!" (not that reaching an average of 400 views per video is an ENTIRELY nothing feat, I'm struggling to rake in the views myself, heh.) I only have 4 leftover keys at the moment, but I'll be requesting more from Steamworks later today. If you're interested, reply here with a link to your channel and I can set you up on Discord with free code.

https://almyriganhero.itch.io/the-great-frebbventure-public-demo

I've recently dropped the final free public demo for my humorous action-platformer The Great Frebbventure, and am looking to polish things up as much as possible as I crawl ever closer to completion! Give it a play, tell me what you like and dislike about it... and see if you can help me figure out why everyone I've watched play it is so reluctant to use the run button! (Seriously. I don't get it.)

The Great Frebbventure (0.4 SAGE '21!) by AlmyriganHero (itch.io)

The catbird sequence isn't nerfed and rebalanced, yet; but what it should be is fixed, unless...that was another fix I made post latest demo. The reason so many enemies were piling up was due to a scrolling bug; at certain combat sections, the screen was supposed to lock, but due to changes to the camera system that broke, meaning the screen kept moving onto new groups of enemies that shouldn't have been loaded until the current group was finished. It might still be a bit overtuned, but it should at least be manageable now.

On the topic of unpublished changes, I've essentially moved onto a stage where only private testers will have access to new demo builds. So Drinn, and any other new content shown off from this point onwards, won't be playable for quite a while. Too much demo, containing too much near-complete content, can really kill the full release for a simple game like this.

General update post:

Through some slightly less specific searching, I found out about the "sleep margin" global game setting. People seem to agree that the default value of 1/ms should always be changed to 10/ms anyway, and doing that...completely fixed everything, no changes to any computer settings required. That begs the question of why I only just now needed to change it, and why only I had any such issue in the first place, but if nothing else, I can at least playtest my game again.

Since I'm still pretty ignorant on the matter though, another question; have I fixed this issue, or is it now going to play at hyper-speed on literally anyone else's machine? To my paltry understanding, it has more to do with frame calculations than actual game speed, but you can never be too safe.

I know it wasn't a Studio update, because as stated, I redownloaded an executable demo compiled several days back, and it's suffering from the same problem. That basically rules out any issue with the file itself, as far as I can tell; something else on my computer updated, and now a file that previously worked fine, and was not even present on the hard drive the time of the restart, is misbehaving. I'm also reluctant to believe it's anything as "simple" as a damaged fan or bugged graphics driver, since far more demanding games and other programs are functioning at their usual capacity. Aside from this one particular issue with the one game that I'm developing, I'd never have even assumed anything changed.

And that's what honestly makes it so perplexing. All evidence points to the issue originating on my computer, and yet there's nothing discernably wrong with my computer, save for its interaction with this one very specific game. I don't even know where to start looking for the hangup, and I'm not quite desperate (nor knowledgeable) enough to start messing with the machine in ways as drastic as switching out to older operating systems. Or for that matter to blow money on expert analysis and repair, when for all I know whatever issue I'm experiencing will be patched within a week by whoever caused it.

I appreciate your thoughts, and I'll keep them in mind if the issue takes too long to resolve, but I guess what I really need is just someone who's already experienced and resolved...whatever this is.


Edit: I will try defraggler, though. Who knows; if it works, it works, if it doesn't...hopefully it won't destroy my PC.

Edit 2: After messing around a bit, I'm beginning to suspect that it was an Intel driver update that caused this. Unfortunately, the option to rollback is completely greyed out, so I guess I'm going to need to uninstall it and figure out which version I had yesterday.

So this isn't technically a bug with my game at all (more on that below) but it is, none the less, a technical issue which is negatively effecting development, and to which a simple browser search presented no solution (or even any particularly relevant results.)

My problem is basically...exactly what the title says. I woke up today, and found that my computer had restarted in the middle of the night. Nothing terribly unusual about that, but after booting up Game Maker Studio 1.4, making a few minor tweaks to a level I'd been working on last night, and compiling the game for a test, something..."funny" happened. I almost immediately noticed that the timing and speed of everything was off. The game seemed to be running at around 70% of its normal speed. Regardless of any circumstances, as well; every room, every screen, however packed or empty, was effected by this same unusual torpor. I even created a new room with nothing but the player character and an invisible floor; just as slow as any other part of the game. To completely rule out the possibility that it could be any changes I made, intentionally or otherwise, I downloaded an executable demo build that had worked fine on the day I uploaded it. Sure enough, slow as molasses.

For further testing, I played a few games in my Steam library, as well as a Studio 2 project by one of my friends. Both were absolutely fine, and I can also confirm that my game is running fine for that same friend. It's not a particularly demanding game, either; pixel art, fairly low resolution, an old-school lighting engine based on surfaces and gradient sprites, and simple post-processing shaders to adjust bloom, saturation, and contrast. Even with both the lighting and shaders disabled, the game ran no faster.


I'm barely even looking for solutions at this point, I'd be happy for a few good theories, or even just affirmation that I'm not literally the only person this has ever happened to. My only real guess is that a Windows 10 update screwed me over, somehow, for some reason; but that's obviously not much to go on.

Hi there, and thanks for taking the time to leave such a detailed comment! Sorry it took me so long to get around to replying, too; it's not that I was offended and didn't want to talk, I just...really don't check in on this page very often, what with how little traffic it gets in general and how infrequent updates are.

The game does seem, all things considered, to be a bit harder in practice than I intended it to be; at least based on the opinion of the one other person who really discusses it with me in-depth. And looking back, I can definitely see how the Catbird stage might be a little much all at once.

I suppose it also kinds of lacks focus, initially having a more complex, navigation-centric control scheme but then kind of going bullet hell, with the exact same control setup. More basic obstacles, and fewer enemies with slower rates of fire wouldn't be a bad idea by any means.

I look forward to hearing more feedback from you in the future. Negative feedback can sting at times, but it'll sting a lot more if I get it all at once in the form of post-release Steam reviews.

Thanks! I gave your video a like and left a comment.

Okay, to get one thing out of the way first, I get it; people aren't fond of DRM, and I'm not necessarily here to discuss DRM, at least in terms of file encryption and inconvenient always-online setups. I'm more so just looking for advice on how to go about the whole situation.

1. Does the itch.io staff take any sort of active measures in taking down illegal offsite downloads? I'm not asking for them to constantly scour the internet to make sure nobody's uploaded a copy of my game without permission, but if I find an upload somewhere that violates copyright laws, is there anyone on here I can contact for help getting them taken down? Or do I just have to rely on the provider of the service it's hosted on?

2. What makes people want to support a game versus taking the path of least resistance? Two kind of conflicting arguments I've heard are that a game people aren't willing to pay for isn't worth buying, and that every game in existence has been and will be pirated. Unless no game ever created has ever been or ever will be worth buying, it's pretty obvious that there's a right way and a wrong way to go about publishing a quality product.

3. If I did decide to publish on Steam instead for the sake of DRM, would its relatively lightweight Game Maker DRM even realistically make up for the $100 greenlight entry fee and the 30% commission on each sale? It'd make pirating my game a bit harder than just downloading it and reuploading to Dropbox, but theoretically, once that one illegal file is out there, whatever effect it'd have on my sales will be basically unavoidable, right?

4. What should I do if (probably more like when) it does happen? How much effort is it actually worth expending to squash every illegal upload, and how would I even go about doing it? Should I seek additional support if I think piracy is hurting me significantly, or is it a better idea to not call attention to the existence and accessibility of pirated copies in the first place? Is it a problem that gets better, or worse, the more you fight back?

I ran it through my own antivirus and it found no threats. Game Maker Studio executables are known to trigger false positives with some AVs due to the technique they use to decompile data. I don't visit obscure sites or download files all that often, and I run AdwCleaner fairly often, so it's probably nothing.

EDIT: Either way though, if you still aren't comfortable (or your PC plain old won't let you run the file,) I've also added an NSIS installer version. It's a slightly larger file, but they tend to be a bit less problematic.

https://almyriganhero.itch.io/the-great-frebbventure-public-demo/devlog/85928/an... There, it's ready now. Hopefully you haven't already streamed the 0.1 version.

I don't know whether you've already streamed the game or not, but fi you haven't, please wait. A friend of mine caught a few major bugs that I'd like to patch, and while I'm at it I've decided to make a few additional changes to add polish and better game balance. It shouldn't take much more than a couple of days at most for me to have a 0.1.5 update out.

I released a demo for my game a couple days ago, and I want some feedback, mostly in terms of two specific things:

Difficulty - I'm a bad judge of difficulty in my own projects. For reference, I'm aiming for a fairly middle-of-the-road difficulty level. Somewhere between Super Mario World and classic Mega Man.

Controls/Game feel - I want my game's controls and feel to be smoother than butter and tighter than those yoga pants that actually make you look fatter instead of skinnier. I'd like reviewers to tell me that my game has some of the best platforming controls they've ever experienced. I want them to cry when they realize they have to move using their own legs in real life, and beg me to somehow tweak their gravity and inertia to make it more like how it is in my game.


Here is game. https://almyriganhero.itch.io/the-great-frebbventure-public-demo

Here's a demo for an action-platformer game I'm working on. It's not super weird or crazy, but it's got quite a bit of visual and musical variety and focuses on tight, fast-placed gameplay that would hopefully be fun to watch. There're also cutscenes full of classic cartoon humor and a protagonist who's basically Squidward fused with Waluigi, so it has that going for it too.
https://almyriganhero.itch.io/the-great-frebbventure-public-demo