itch.io

Sorry for the unpleasant experience. Unfortunately, due to unforeseen issues I didn't have as much time to commit to the jam as I had originally planned so I couldn't apply the level of polish I really wanted the game to have.

As for the story, it's just a bunch of animal people stuck at a school, with the main character being the smartest of the bunch but being treated badly by others, student and teacher alike.

I posted a walkthrough with director's commentary on YouTube if you're interested:

https://youtu.be/YVTmJHir8Ig?si=SfVGNTpyXZaN8uIS

I mean General MIDI (with a soundfont) as opposed to something like MP3 or OGG Vorbis or something like tracker music.

I was thinking more along the line of full MIDI music tracks.

Hi. I'd be interested. I'm gonna compete with my own engine. Can you produce MIDI?

Either by staying alive long enough or by dying and remaining in the game. One of the timers was broken.

There was a bug in our level 2 code but I didn't wanna scrap it entirely because my friend's e-guitar riffs are really fire, so I turned it into "Here be dragons" easter egg sort of deal.

The bug is now fixed and in the final version this level will be a lush forest that catches fire, forcing the player to make use of Tin Man's axes to quickly cut through trees blocking the way.

I can relate to that last part. This was my first game jam and I learned a lot but the code my team mate and I cobbled together is ... really just cobbled together.

Incredibly smooth animations and puzzles that are both fair and challenging.
Nicely integrated with the theme (illusion). Could need some audio (unless there is and it's an issue on my end).

Question: What engine version did you use (3.x or 4.x?) and do you plan on working on this game post game jam?

As for the performance: I'm still surprised how bad it is compared to the console version I built.
I'll spend a lot of time optimizing and polishing the desktop and browser builds post this game jam.

Sadly, I have some issues with my workstation (Linus Torvalds really doesn't seem to want me to have 96GB of RAM) so it was hard profiling things at all.

Since the performance dips were accompanied by ominous screen flickering on my workstation and my workstation has video RAM issues that manifest themselves in this sort of screen flicker (again. Thanks, Linus Torvalds...), I assume a great deal of the performance issues are down to un-optimized textures.

While the browser version runs in 1366x768, the game's native resolution is 1920x1080 and some of the assets are even higher resolution that that.

Lol. I thought the same when I integrated it with the rest of the code.
Our composer is very professional so I don't think she made it sound like p0rn on purpose.

Thank's for the kind and thoughtful review.

It's a Vampire Survivor-like. In a game like that player interaction is kept to the basics.
It can be really fun once there's more content and a few weapon upgrades.

Originally, we had more plans for the Tin Man since my co-creator thought he was under-used.
The second level would've seen him chop down trees to get to the other part of the level.

Unfortunately, we had some last minute technical issues so I scrapped the level.
The basic scene initialization code is still in there. If you last long enough in the first level, you get to listen to one of my friends' e-guitar solos. Quite a treat for everybody who is into that kind of music. Personally, that song has been stuck in my head for 2 years.

Thanks for the review.

Yea. We thought the same during development. Sadly, I ran out of time doing all the graphics. There's some sound effects when you hit enemies but there's lots of potential for better audiovisual cues.

We had to cut a lot of corners in the end. One level and most of the intro had to be sacrificed to deliver on time.
There's about 60 sound effects that have been recorded but not implemented yet and we had a last-minute merge conflict that appears to have accidentally disabled some button sounds.

Any chance of a release on other retro platforms? Would love to have this on Amiga or Sega Genesis. Would gladly help porting it there, too (I'm a software engineer/game designer myself).

A couple days ago I saw an archived Reddit post from what looked like ScummVM devs talking about the situation.

I'd love to know more myself. And yes, it would open tremendous possibilities.

Multiple console ports have been made with ScummVM, AFAIK. The Humongous game ports come to mind.

Anyhow. To this day ScummVM team members claim that they offered NightDive a way to relicense, for a fee they thought reasonable.

Apparently, even for those. The ScummVM team offered a proprietary license to Nightdive when they remastered Blade Runner. Nightdive refused, unfortunately.

ScummVM can be used commercially

I created an unofficial Mac port of the demo. The .dmg is a bit broken unfortunately (no background image, unlike in the screenshot on my site) but I'm fixing that soon.

The demo currently only works on Intel Macs with MacOS 10.13 and up (it might work through Rosetta 2 on Apple Silicon. I don't have a device to test it though).

I'm releasing a universal binary for MacOSX 10.9 (Intel) and up and MacOS 11 (Apple Silicon) and up respectively soon.

https://markusbkk.github.io/Gobliiins5-MacDemo/

I contacted you on Kickstarter. If you need some additional expertise, I'm here. I already got a working MacOS build (still finetuning it though. Had some issues with the background image in the .dmg file and it currently only runs on MacOS 10.13 and up, and only on Intel Macs. I can  get it to work on Apple Silicon and even the old PPC models though)

Walk behinds are one of the weaknesses of AGS. It's incredibly difficult to use the paint tool, so I'm not surprised.

I spent more time bundling this than I spent hacking on ScummVM, but hopefully this should work and not run into any installation issues.

https://markusbkk.github.io/Gobliiins5-MacDemo/

Oui, ça peut absolument fonctionner sous GNU/Linux.
Cela pourrait aussi fonctionner sur Amiga ;=)

Hi Lebostein (is that the same Lebostein from Adventure Treff? If so, I inboxed you again. ;=) )

Yea. The game runs pretty well on Mac. Just a minor script bug due to different engine versions.

I'm almost done building an app bundle for the demo version.

I hope Pierre gets back to my Kickstarter message. This game has so much potential and would make a great game on consoles, too.

Talking about bugs, I ran into plenty on ScummVM's end when trying to bundle the game.

I don't think the documentation is up to snuff in that regard. It says that, on Mac, to drop the game files into "MyGame.app/Contents/Resources/game". That didn't work for me. I ended up having to create a scummvm-autorun file in the Resources folder and hardcode the path to "/Applications/MyGame.app".

Furthermore, the preferences are always saved as "~/Library/Preferences/ScummVM Preferences", no matter what change the bundle identifier in the Info.plist to.

That being said, I'm almost done with a first version of the MacOS demo app bundle. Gonna upload it tomorrow, once I have an icon for it and tested it on another Mac.

Would be great if Pierre saw that and picked up my work so we could have an official Mac build.

Here's a short playthrough of the demo in ScummVM, btw. After I commented out two lines to sidestep the Character.Animate repeat issue.

It would be better to either fix the scripting bug (RepeatStyle should be either 0 or 1, no other value) or add an exemption based on game_id.

Just ignoring it altogether, for every game, can lead to bugs, memory leaks or segmentation faults.

There are these tools to read/write TRA files like the one that ships with Gobliiins 5, although that's very unofficial.

https://github.com/Taktloss/AGS_TranslationEditor
https://github.com/Jibun/ags-translation-editor

Surprisingly, an Amiga version should be possible. Although it would require a fairly beefy Amiga with an accelerator and additional RAM.

I'm almost through with the demo on MacOS High Sierra, using ScummVM (haven't tried the official AGS runtime and I think ScummVM would be a better way to port the game to even older platforms as well as consoles)

There's one little bug in the script that required me to recompile ScummVM with a Character.Animate check in the AGS engine disabled. Otherwise it seems to work fine.

Would love to help porting this game, as well.

https://github.com/scummvm/scummvm/blob/842a52fd42c23d0290af768bf2593634008467ba/engines/ags/engine/ac/character.cpp#L168

The relevant line in ScummVM.
I'll take a look at it for you.

Will report back once I've found a workaround (although this looks like a coding mistake on Pierre's part, maybe. Been a while since I messed with the AGS engine. RN, I work on reviving ScummC, so that maybe one day people can develop another game with a SCUMM compatible engine).

EDIT: I simply commented out the if-statement, recompiled ScummVM and restarted the game. No error message thus far.
My suspicion is that the AGS engine inside ScummVM is somewhat more strict than the default Windows AGS interpreter and that Pierre set an animation value that is out of bounds for the AGS engine inside ScummVM.