itch.io

No worries about the crash!

I’m on a mac. For a little more information:

Waiting on your next project :)

Fun little game!

The characters were all very strange (good thing), and I like the fantasy elements to it. The world is really trippy - don’t play this on drugs! haha (or maybe it’s better on drugs??)

The gameplay didn’t really do it for me, but I don’t really think that was the point.

That said, I had a crash near the end of the game when

Luckily, there seems to be an autosave feature! So I didn’t have to redo much.

Great job! Super solid project.

Nice one! I finished the game but while it was sort of interested with the story, I was disappointed with the ending.

Is there a secret ending I’m missing?

Hey Oco, I used a lot of your forest assets and characters as intended for a small project called Red Fantasy. The assets are basically all from you and it does a lot of your “intended” functionality. I even had the shield block attacks but decided to take it out due to gameplay reasons. The boss character with the hammer and sword is also used in its entirety, the fight is pretty fun!

Check it out if you want to see your art: https://lucrecious.itch.io/red-fantasy

I also tagged you in a Twitter reply.

Hi Oco, nice assets! I'm using all your medieval fantasy ones to make a small game :)

I've been using your sprite sheets but some of the frames are spaced/aligned very weirdly. For example, the jump animation for the character seems to move in the X direction and in the Y. I think this is trying to capture the jump height, but most of the times it easier to program it so the sprite stays in place (like your run animation).

Lastly, it would be a lot easier if instead of uploading strips of frames of the animation, you could upload the frames as individual numbered images in separate folders. This would make them a lot easier to use.

Thanks

Hey Solar,

So I noticed you're using Ctrl for many of the modifiers for the shortcut keys in MasterPlan. The problem is that Ctrl on a Mac has different utility than it does on Windows or Linux. Ctrl + Up for example, does not work for me to move tasks because on Mac that's bindded to seeing all open apps. Macs use Command as the main shortcut modifiers. On many apps it's used for Saving (Command + S), it's used for Opening (Command + O) and it's used to select multiple files (Command + Click).  So I think it kind of makes sense to use Command instead of Control, for the shortcuts.

For Apps, it's very typical to have an "if" statement somewhere that uses Commands instead on Control when on a Mac.

Even better would be to allow for keyboard short-cut remapping but that's up to you. I'm cool with the keyboard shortcut setup, I'd just like to use Command instead of Control lol

PS: I started to use MasterPlan recently since it seemed more feature complete after the Maps update, and I'm really enjoying it so far! There's a few QoL things that are missing for me though, like better trackpad support (I know, ew, but zooming is hard in MasterPlan with one, and sometimes the 1-5 numbers don't cut it), and being able to word wrap notes...

I was trying it out on my 4K monitor and the UI is a little small.

Would you consider adding an option to adjust UI size or add 4K sensitivity? 

Thanks

MasterPlan is running fine on my Windows machine!

Along with the text highlighting and text wrapping in task descriptions - which I think is pretty important considering  people will be copy and pasting things from previous planners to this one - an export option would be pretty cool as well. Maybe you can "export" the current screen at a set dpi (higher resolution depending on how far the user zooms out, they can choose how detailed they get or something like that) to pdf.

A note on text wrapping, it'd still be good to be able to have a customization text-description-box size that you can drag to make bigger or small but that wraps the content in the set size. That might feel better than to adjusting the size automatically depending on the context.

Hi Solar, would love to try MasterPlan. I downloaded the current mac version:

LSOpenURLsWithRole() failed with error -10810 for the file /Users/lucrecious/Desktop/Luca/MasterPlan.app.

While trying to open it through terminal because it wasn't starting if I just clicked on it.

Let me know if you need more information!

I finished Gearend! Not 100% though. In any case, this post contains spoilers.

I really liked the game!

• The characters were super fun. My favourite is ArmBoy and the fire guy (I forget his name), very entertaining. I had many laughs.
• I noticed a lot of really smart game design decisions in all the zones.
• My favourite zone was the one with Vial - I liked how a lot of the equipment had to be used to complete the zone.
• I don't know if you did this on purpose, but the design of the weapons allowed for a lot of different fighting styles - it was really cool. 
• In terms of length, the game was pretty much exactly as long as I thought it would be. That being said, given the variety of equipment, I know you could have made Gearend a lot longer.
• The ending felt like you were setting up for a sequel, will there be a Gearend 2?
• The music was tight-tight-tight man, great music.
• Aside from the few bugs, the game felt super professional :)

A few suggestions:

1. There are too many buttons for equipping things (Ctrl, Arrow keys, X, C). I think it'd be better if equipping were done more traditionally - something like Zelda Breath of the Wild equipping.
2. Please make the final cutscene before the Unnamed (and all bosses for that matter) skippable after you see it for the first time. I'm horrible at side-scrollers so I saw that cutscene at least 10 times lol
3. This is a personal opinion, but instant deaths to me always come off as a way of artificially increasing game time. The spinners I could live with, but the spikes were super frustrating. I think instead of doing 999 damage, they should do like five damage per half-second or something like that (so they're deadly, but you can afford 1 - 2 mistakes). In Metroidvanias, the instant death blocks don't work well imo.
4. Keep the ESC quit at the end of the game during the credits and go to title screen after credits (it's a small thing, but I think it's more professional than telling the user to just close the game).
5. The sound when an enemy or the player is close to dying is a little annoying. I don't know if anyone else has the same opinion though. In general though, I find repeating sounds when at low health annoying (like in all Zelda games, it's the worst thing ever). A game that does it super well though is Axiom Verge, the death beep fuses with the music.
6. EDIT: When there's a switch, it might be good to show what the switch does. For example, in the Vial zone (can't remember the name), there's a switch above the ground door. When you go up the stairs and hit the switch, you don't know what it does because the way that opens up is off camera. Similarly, there's a secret energy increase thing you can get by using the skating legs, but when you turn on the switch you don't know what opens. Finally, there are some switches in the desert zone where you turn them on, and I never know what they did because I hit the switch before finding the thing it's suppose to open. Maybe somehow move the camera to show that a door or something has been opened (like in Zelda?)

Some bugs:

1. I have a feeling there are memory leaks because GC happens more often the more times I die. Try profiling and dying multiple times.
2. If I die on the Unnamed and he's doing an attack with a looping sound, the sound loops forever upon revival.
3. I think the trigger for the Unnamed to finish the drill attack is touching the floor, right? Well sometimes the Unnamed hits the wall before hitting the floor and gets stuck there, and he's super easy to kill if this happens (and it's not that difficult to exploit). So maybe add the walls to trigger the Unnamed finishing the drill attack (or put him on a timer as back up, he can't be drilling more than 5 seconds, right?).

Okay that's pretty much it right now. I should have written the bugs as I played along (I'll comment here about more bugs if I play through the game again, or try to 100% it), but I was mostly just playing the game for fun! All in all, I had a really good time playing Gearend :) All my grievances are rather minor and some are due to my lack of Metroidvania skills haha

Edit: Just wanted to say that I don't expect you to follow through with any suggestions at all, they're mostly there as part of a small "review" and my opinion on certain aspects of the game.

Thanks for a great game, Solar!

^ Same for me! I think it's a memory leak - garbage collection on shorter intervals. I'm guessing some resources aren't being disposed of properly after death.

Hey Solar!

Fun game so far, it really forces you to explore. Nice.

Anyways, I made it to the Purifier (I think). I don't actually know because every time I try to enter the room (right after the guy who's like, "you're close to the Purifier"), the game crashes.

Here's a link to the error file, hopefully this helps!

http://pasteall.org/498184

Keep up the good work :) In the mean time, I can try to fix it myself...

PS: I've tried to get to the Purifier on both my Mac and on a Linux (Ubuntu) virtual machine, and I crash in both.

Edit: Just wanted to let you know that I've fixed this myself for the meantime :) (I edited your water.frag shader, and fixed the errors). 

So I incorporated a similar fix to rainybyte's - I can enter the game on Mac OSX. However, it's pretty laggy, harsh on GPU and music doesn't play (despite the title music playing, only sound effects work). I can't see the framerate, but I'd put it under 20fps. For reference, I can play games like Hearthstone, Shovel Knight, Braid and Undertale on this Mac at full fps.

Since the err.log doesn't really show me much, aside from there being a type error (trying to multiply an int by a float), I can't really help much until I look at this through a profiler (which I might try later).

Anyways, to get it to run, getting rid of the typing conflicts should help?

Edit: So I got around on using a profiler on it. The CPU usage seems to be in the right places (updating object logic and rendering). Instrumenting the game kills my fps, so I didn't play much, took me like 2 minutes to get through the first cutscene lol. For me, the profiler wasn't much help :/

You need to profile the game with a profiler and take a snapshot to see what's taking up the most CPU.

I use Visual VM. Here's a long-winded tutorial I made about it a while back: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UFRTSeG2e5c

Hey Solar, so I've played through much of the demo, and I've found a bunch of things I thought might be better to put into one post since most are pretty minor.

I couldn't play the game on my Mac machine, but I also have a Windows and Linux machine to try stuff on. I'm playing the game on Windows 7 on a gaming PC (so pretty good specs).

I'll split this post into three parts: the stuff I liked, bugs and suggestions

Stuff I liked

Eps controls great (although a little floaty for my taste). I like the music a lot, it goes really well with the art. The shaders are working great. The performance is good on my gaming PC, aside from the minor hiccups from when Java does a garbage collection (you might want to try gradual garbage collection if it doesn't slow down your game too much).

Bugs

1. When running from left to right or right to left with Eps, sometimes you can see the vertical tile seams. This happens in various areas in the demo (most prominently in the scrolling screen one screen to the right of the "fingerprint door" doors)
2. My game crashed after leaving it open (literally doing nothing) after like 20 minutes-ish? Have not been able to reproduce this one though
3. Not sure if this is a bug, but on the equipment screen there are a bunch of parts I have not gotten yet. More specifically the "shear legs", the "roundtable core", the "prescript 0-9-0 core" and the "deterrent arm", and I can equip all of them.
4. I pushed one of the runny/jumpy guys into another screen and it kind of just chilled there (they don't seem to come back into the same screen). That or he was just stuck on something lol
5. When I go fullscreen with an xbox controller, my xbox controller doesn't work anymore, I have to restart the game. Meaning, as of now, there is no way to play fullscreen with my joystick (since fullscreen doesn't stay active after a game restart)

1. When you talk to characters, it's not obvious to me who is talking (mostly referring to the cutscene with Twent and Jeremy). I know their mouths are moving and stuff, but it's too subtle for me while I'm reading the text. I really enjoyed the way you did it with the old Gearend (with the faces), but even just a "Jeremy:" or "Twent:" when one of them starts speaking would be helpful.
2. The fall right before Twent's room is not super obvious, but it's something I'd be watching out for as I play the game. I don't know if you intended that fall to be obvious or not.
3. When you speak to any character, Eps always moves to the right of them to speak to them, even if I'm way on the left. I think it'd be cool if it moved to the closest place (either to the right or left).
4. Transitioning between doors is too slow for my taste, it's almost like one second, I know it seems stupid but if you're going in/out of doors often, it's a little annoying.
5. Saving takes too long for me. I guess it doesn't matter if you don't intend for people to save a lot though.
6. Finally, if you're going for a more serious tone, all the characters are too light-hearted and fun. If you're going for a Cavestory type of feel, I'm not really getting it. However, this is only the demo, so I can't speak for the rest of the game. In case you're wondering, I really like the tone of the game as it is now.

That makes sense. Even though Java is cross-platform, I'm betting the shaders compile (or are interpreted) slightly differently on each system.

i.e. float by integer division might be only a warning with a Windows compiler but error worthy in a Mac compiler.

Platform: Max OSX - El Capitan version 10.11.6

Reproduce:

1. Open Gearend in fullscreen or windowed

Problem: Cursor is visible in both windowed and fullscreen

Platform: Mac OSX - El Capitan version 10.11.6

Reproduce:

1. Open Gearend for the first time
2. Go into options and enable fullscreen
3. Apply settings
4. Close the game and reopen

Problem: The game is not in fullscreen anymore (windowed mode), but the options menu says that fullscreen is enabled. Toggling fullscreen to off then to on, puts the game back into fullscreen.

Hey Solar! Just letting you know that I'm having the same problems as rainybyte. I'm also on Mac OSX (El Capitan version 10.11.6).