Old style action adventure rpg

[Atari-Jess]

http://www.newgrounds.com/portal/view/314613

 

Tell me what you think. (and vote 5 for me )

[Atari-Jess]

no one has comments??

[super_dos_man]

it won't load

[Atari-Jess]

Are you using the latest version of flash player? it's only 174kb...

[deathtrappomegranate]

It didn't work for me on Firefox, but worked fine on IE.

 

I only checked it out for a couple of minutes, but I will give it more time at the weekend, because it has a pretty inviting feel. Nice 8-bit font, and real old-school feel. Can you code it for the 8-bit Atari computers?

 

One downside, though. The "newsgrounds" website design is horrible. I would have left there immediately if I hadn't been curious about the game.

[Atari-Jess]

How strange, I use firefox exclusively, and I am encountering no problems

 

the 8-bit font the Atari 8bit font

 

as far as coding it for 8bits, that would be a toughie...

[tyranthraxus]

Works in Safari on my Mac.

 

Killed by a blood thirsty bat!

 

Nice work! The graphics really were a trip back to 1980s games on a CGA IBM XT! Certainly gets votes for style,

and was very faithful to the genre. But I think it would be worth changing some of the key commands like make

it so that all the commands can be done through the numeric keypad or at least use the arrows keys for directions.

 

I'd also ask for an automap. Although maping was part of the fun of those games I think most people are too used to

automaps these days. Even Might and Magic II in 1988 had an automap!

 

Still very strong faithful work to the genre.

[Lord Thag]

I gave you a five

 

 

Nice job. I love interactive fiction, and the retro look is a nice touch. Reminds me of playin' LOTR, Ultima, Zork on the old Apple II. Maybe I'll drag out the IIgs this weekend, actually...

 

I'll give the game a good rn through when I have the time. I'll wait till I'm at work

[Classic Pac]

I discovered recently if your using Firefox you have to install it first then install Flash

[+-^CrossBow^-]

And on my PC clone here...I can get it to come up just fine in IE..but then it doesn't seem to "see" any of my keyboard keys. I finally was able to advance through the initial screens, but I had to use the enter key on my keypad? This is a standard PS2 keyboard we are talking about here...so I don't know what that is about. I couldn't get any of the other keys on my keyboard to register in the game..so I was stuck looking at the mountain trail.

[vdub_bobby]

Same for me - only would read ENTER from number pad, wouldn't read any letters or anything else.

[Atari-Jess]

did you click on the grey bar?

 

I'm having problems making it auto focus to that, but if you click on the grey bar, it SHOULD let you begin typing into it.

 

my apologies, I'm working on it!

 

I'm gonna keep working on the other levels, its a lot of work making the map, more so than the engine!

 

(at least with the engine I can make a bunch of these games)

[tyranthraxus]

You should rip off the layout/plot of Warlock of Firetop mountain. I always loved that book and your games opening

of finding a mountain with the cave made me immediatly think back to that old Fighting Fantasy book. How about a

cheezy intro where you start in a village and the tavern keeper warns you not to go to the haunted mountain!

Now just how many games start that way?

[Atari-Jess]

You should rip off the layout/plot of Warlock of Firetop mountain. I always loved that book and your games opening

of finding a mountain with the cave made me immediatly think back to that old Fighting Fantasy book.

 

That book was one of a handful of inspirations I had in making this game! (you'll see it even more when I release more of the map)

 

Ultima, Dungeons & Dragons, Wizards & Warriors, Zork, Rogue, Fighting Fantasy, Legend of Zelda, and all those BASIC games I used to make (the title comes from an 8 year old Atari-Jess)

 

The next release will feature:

 

* arrow-key directions (left = west, north = up, etc)

* 4 Quests (instead of just the one thats there already)

* Stores, buy and sell crystals/potions

* Save/Load features

* And lets not forget a definite end to the maze!

 

Possible features:

 

* music (although it MUST stay true to the era, PC Speaker single channel, monp quality sound )

* auto-map, I *really* don't want to put one in, although it would be very easy to do so...

Edited May 27, 2006 by Atari-Jess

[ZylonBane]

It appears that you have successfully recreated the look and feel of CGA era graphic adventure games.

 

Which, by the way, were extremely ugly. The point of retro gaming is to bring back the good things, not the bad things. CGA graphics were a very, very, very bad thing.

[Atari-Jess]

CGA graphics were a very, very, very bad thing.

 

lmao, yes, they were ugly. I'm doing my best to make art out of CGA, if you saw some of the backdrops that haven't been revealed yet, you'd be amazed. I get warm fuzzy feelings with CGA graphics (all my computer games were CGA)

 

I think the Spectrum was a pretty ugly computer but I bet if I were to make a game in that style, I could do a pretty good job and making it acceptable. (although just barely!)

Edited May 27, 2006 by Atari-Jess

[ZylonBane]

lmao, yes, they were ugly. I'm doing my best to make art out of CGA

If by "art" you mean "good art", it can't be done. The CGA palettes are just plain ugly, no matter what you do with them.

 

Ditch it, upgrade to EGA, and save everyone the suffering.

[supercat]

If by "art" you mean "good art", it can't be done. The CGA palettes are just plain ugly, no matter what you do with them.

 

The text mode or lores (160x100) palettes weren't too bad. The medium res palettes weren't good, but the red/green/yellow one was okay for some things. Actually, one of my CGA games uses the red/green/yellow palette for most of the screen, but shows a rainbow-color effect on the top three lines of text. That part of the game display doesn't work on modern machines, though--it just uses the red/green/yellow palette for everything.

 

I wonder why IBM didn't allow better color selection? Two 74LS373's, 74LS157, and an invertor would have probably been sufficient. Might even have been cheaper than the hardware they ended up using.

[Atari-Jess]

Ditch it, upgrade to EGA, and save everyone the suffering.

 

We're going to have to agree to disagree, EGA means nothing to me and its too "complex" to make it anything other than 16 colour gifs, that defeats the purpose of the minimalist feel.

[Atari-Jess]

The text mode or lores (160x100) palettes weren't too bad.

 

(edit:oops I was thinking about a composite mode) I've had hard enough trouble with 320x200 (using only 100px of that height for the images)

Edited May 28, 2006 by Atari-Jess

[supercat]

(edit:oops I was thinking about a composite mode) I've had hard enough trouble with 320x200 (using only 100px of that height for the images)

 

Actually, composite mode would have been nice for this style of game (it's what King's Quest I-III used). Composite mode looks like black and white on an RGB monitor, though. Basically, what happens is that in each group of four (640x200 mode) pixels, the leftmost pixel is brownish, the next one reddish, the next one bluish, and the next one greenish. Displaying different patterns of pixels thus allows the production of sixteen reasonably-solid colors at 160x200 resolution while showing 40-column text.

[supercat]

Tell me what you think. (and vote 5 for me )

 

The healing potions don't have enough effect, especially since your character does not get any automatic healing with time. The only way I've found to play the game is to go up to the surface after dealing with each monster and wander around to restock crystals and potions. Not a lot of fun.

 

The game has some definite potential, and might be nice on the 2600 if you rendered the artwork Chronocolor-style. It's too hard, though, and it's rather unfair having that acid room which effectively kills you on entry but still says you can go south. Also, a few rooms are "undefined".

[Atari-Jess]

The healing potions don't have enough effect, especially since your character does not get any automatic healing with time.

 

I'll work on the potions system...

 

The only way I've found to play the game is to go up to the surface after dealing with each monster and wander around to restock crystals and potions. Not a lot of fun.

 

You don't have to fight monsters when you see them, you can actually... walk away from them... That is the trade off for not being able to run after you start fighting.

 

It's too hard, though, and it's rather unfair having that acid room which effectively kills you on entry but still says you can go south. Also, a few rooms are "undefined".

 

I appreciate your thoughts on the difficulty of the game, any thing in particular that is too hard? level progression, monsters, just the initial level or two?

 

The undefined rooms were supposed to be blocked off, oops, they'll have descriptions and images in the full version of course.

As far as the acid room it WARNS you, it almost BEGS you not to go

[supercat]

You don't have to fight monsters when you see them, you can actually... walk away from them... That is the trade off for not being able to run after you start fighting.

 

I recognize that, but it's more convenient to look for gems/potions on the monster-free surface, and the time required to get there is slight compared to the time spent wandering around searching. Also, I can't get the healing spell to work except during combat, and using it then is often counterproductive.

 

I appreciate your thoughts on the difficulty of the game, any thing in particular that is too hard? level progression, monsters, just the initial level or two?

There are levels?

 

The undefined rooms were supposed to be blocked off, oops, they'll have descriptions and images in the full version of course.

As far as the acid room it WARNS you, it almost BEGS you not to go

 

Yeah, yeah. But half the time such warnings are in precisely the place you should go. What seems sloppy with the acid room is that your character doesn't seem to really be dead, but can't go anywhere despite the apparent exit south.

[Atari-Jess]

I said a bunch of stuff that Atari-Jess is replying to below, which refers to what I said above...

 

The heal-spell subsystem was originally designed to work most of the time but to heal dependant on your spell level, I'm changing this heal you entirely, but the frequency of success will be the same as other spells if not worse.

 

the death rooms are strictly generic trap rooms, would it really be any different if it said your HP was zero? The room description says you are dead, and that will supercede anything else, which is enforced due to the fact you can't actually do anything but "quit" to restart the game. However, your argument simply seems to be that it seems sloppy, so zero-hitpoints-to-be-displayed it is.

 

I don't mean dungeon levels, I mean experience levels, The game is somewhat of an s curve in difficulty...

 

It shouldn't matter what people use warnings for, a warning is a warning!

 

I've now completed 50% of the total dungeon, but I won't release until its completion.

 

Further suggestions from anyone are still more than welcome

Edited May 30, 2006 by Atari-Jess