Then again, not

Akatosh · Sun 07/09/2008 13:04:08

Then again, not. The version for the competition will stay up, but the game is BACK IN DEVELOPEMENT, so... uh... lock please?

DoorKnobHandle · Sun 07/09/2008 13:41:28

Well, as I said in the in-production thread, the player sprite is ripped and recolored from Ninja Gaiden 1 and - turns out on closer inspection - even most parts of the foreground tiles are.

Please mention this in the future, especially since you know it because people have been pointing it out in the in-production thread which you visited recently to update.

Also, I don't think it's a good idea to steal art without giving a reference and then entering the product in a contest (especially since it clearly states that you can NOT use copyrighted material).

I know you're not doing the art for this so I'm not blaming you for this entirely, but you must have read what people said in your first thread?

kaputtnik · Sun 07/09/2008 13:47:21

Uaargh! That bastard bouncy wall is communism's best friend! I keep on bouncing on and off and never really reach the ladder, and if I do, I miss the next plateau and then time runs out and the game quits without any further ado.

I really like the style of the game and it plays pretty well - there are some glitches, but they didn't quite annoy me. I fell through the wall behind the first ladder, for example, and died a horrible death in underground concrete, or I slipped behind the bouncy wall and bounced back out. Oh, and the bouncing is really very hard to control.

Nonetheless: Really good handling for an AGS made platformer.

Akatosh · Sun 07/09/2008 14:13:07

Quote from: dkh on Sun 07/09/2008 13:41:28
Well, as I said in the in-production thread, the player sprite is ripped and recolored from Ninja Gaiden 1 and - turns out on closer inspection - even most parts of the foreground tiles are.

Please mention this in the future, especially since you know it because people have been pointing it out in the in-production thread which you visited recently to update.

Also, I don't think it's a good idea to steal art without giving a reference and then entering the product in a contest (especially since it clearly states that you can NOT use copyrighted material).

I know you're not doing the art for this so I'm not blaming you for this entirely, but you must have read what people said in your first thread?

Urgh. I meant to reply to this in the GiP thread, but I forgot. I'm sorry.

Of course I noticed what you said there, and I talked with BaronCid about the issue. Turned out, yes, the sprite is a paintover of Ninja Gaiden, but it's been altered a fair deal and since we've been utterly unable to find an artist talented enough to make a proper animation from scratch, it seemed like the most sensible thing to do. I'll update the database entry to give proper credit as soon as possible, though. About the foreground tiles - care to elaborate on where you think they come from?

Again... I'm sorry. Didn't want to pull a Majestic.

About the bouncy walls: I'll see if I can fix the walljumps. These have been bastards to implement, and will probably turn out to be even biggers bastards to fix.

DoorKnobHandle · Sun 07/09/2008 14:50:03

No problem, I know you're a decent guy and didn't mean to rip anybody off on purpose or anything.

About the player-sprite: I have to play your game to judge all frames of the animation but the frame in the screenshot you posted is definitely a one-to-one copy of a frame of Ninja Gaiden 1. Really just changed a bunch of colors around. That's not altering at all in my book. Maybe other frames are edited slightly, but I think the general consensus on these slight edits and recolors is it's still a rip.

The tiles are recolored from the same game, Ninja Gaiden 1 for the NES. I don't have the time to post side-by-side comparison pictures right now but it's easy to see for yourself, take a look at Act 1 - Stage 1 - colors have changed but in general it's VERY heavily referenced and some parts are just copied.

Anyways, I won't mess your topic up with any more of this, especially since you're not the one doing the art anyways. I'll come back once I've had some time to play it!

Iv4n · Sun 07/09/2008 15:44:02

Does it support the 360 controller?

Akatosh · Sun 07/09/2008 17:45:31

Well, I don't know how configuration of that controller works, but if you can get Windows to treat movement of the controller as pressing the arrow keys and bind D and F to your two favourite controller buttons, I can't see why not.

Dualnames · Sun 07/09/2008 21:01:58

Comments: Cool stuff, loving idea and this is not what we see every day. Too bad that it is released now. This would surely score over Splinter Celll ehh.. Art of Theft on the awards..

TheJBurger · Sun 07/09/2008 23:01:45

Very cool. The handling is pretty good and the concept is well done. Love the momentum bar and the slide feature. Some complaints, however:
- It's pretty glitchy: I would walk into walls, through walls, and fall through the floor to my demise, over and over. The worst was when the game respawned me, and I instantly fell through the floor over and over without a chance of moving. This kept happening until I loaded a save-game. Another annoyances include the montemum bar pushing you off the second level instantly.
- I don't get the bounce off the wall thing. I tried to do it about ten times and I still don't get it, and I don't know whether or not I need momentum to do it.
- To make matters worse, I couldn't get through the first level at all, because the timer is too punishing. I'd suggest either extending the timer a lot (to soften the difficulty curve), or using a timer such as the one in Sonic that counts upwards instead of downwards. I know I was trying to get all the mail, but being one of those gamers who has to get everything, what was I to do?
- 'F' is an odd choice to grab the wall, since my fingers rest on WASD. It would make more sense for this to be the CTRL key, or some variation, so I don't have to move my fingers (I think).
edit: sorry, for some reason I thought 'A' was used for something, but I guess it was just my natural tendency to have my pinky rest on 'A' and my index finger to rest on 'D.'

~~I'm only on level 2, so I'll post the rest of my comments later. It's always a challenge to make new things in AGS, so thumbs up for that!~~

I finished the game with a score of 563.

I really like it and it has a lot of potential. If you can fix all the glitches, and add more levels, this would be a pretty fun game. One bug that I can single out in particular: sometimes when you die the momentum carries over when you respawn. This is readily apparent on level 2, because it would cause me to fall in the first pit continuously.
It also wouldn't hurt to auto-save during the level. You could also not stick mail just above pits that aren't visible below the bottom of my screen, causing me to jump down into nothingness to my death and feel tricked... but then again, it's a platformer.

Nice job, I really liked it.

Dualnames · Mon 08/09/2008 00:21:17

Well i made a module that you can use to enable players to change their hotkeys..

Akatosh · Mon 08/09/2008 16:50:32

Alright... I'm aware the game is glitchy as fuck, and I'm sorry about that, but that was at least partially a design choice. It's a bootleg competition, after all

. And, in all honesty, it would take at least a couple more weeks to smite all the bugs in the game and extend it by a few levels. I'll fix some of the worst glitches as soon as I can, but some (e.g. the weird collision detection) that require having to re-write parts of the game essentially from scratch will have to wait a little.

Maybe think of this as... an open beta... or maybe a glorified demo. The release maybe was a little premature, but the Bootleg Demakes competition ended yesterday, so... not much of a choice there.

Also, 563 points? Wow. My record is somewhere in the 490s, I think.

Dualnames: I'll consider using that module in one of the future versions, as it looks pretty good. Thanks for the heads-up.

Ubel · Mon 08/09/2008 19:36:23

Warning, harsh text about to come.

So, the idea of this game is ok. Not really anything innovative but the concept, as it is, works. Or at least it should. In this case it doesn't.

The controls are really awkward... Half the time you keep bouncing off things completely randomly. Climbing the ladder is difficult because sometimes you end up grabbing it at a wrong x-position and you can't climb up. The bouncy red walls just don't work. I swear, I never got the wall jump to work properly. I guess there's some magical skill that you need to develop to get past it.

The collsion detection is REALLY buggy. Sometimes I end up inside walls or fall through the floor and die. Most of the times I just bounce all around the place, as already mentioned.

And what's up with the game shutting down after time runs out? Why can't I just simply start over? Why do I have to start up the game again? And most of the time I couldn't even see the "Time's up" text because I was holding down a button, which caused the text to just flash by. The first time I was like "What the hell just happened? Did the game crash? Where's the error message?".

The graphics are decent but why is there so much JPG compression visible? The music's not awesome but it's not bad either.

You can also cheat the momentum by running back and forth. That doesn't make much sense to me but that should be easily fixed.

Needless to say, I didn't enjoy this game at all but I do want you to know that I respect you for trying. It's not all that easy programming a physics engine, let alone using the AGS engine. I also hope you don't take too much offence by this, I didn't write it to make you feel like shit but to make you work on the problems your game is suffering from.

Peace and love,
Pablo

Akatosh · Mon 08/09/2008 21:33:43

No offense taken, you're right, it's a lot of a glitchfest, quite possibly to a larger extend than intended (it -is- a chinese bootleg demake, after all). Coming to think of it, this probably doesn't belong into the finished games subforum just yet. I'll try to reach BarinCid first, but yeah, it might be sensible to return this into an "under production" state and pull the current version off the Internet again once that blasted competition is over.

But I do insist on the game being playable and quite possible to beat... if you know what you're doing.

nihilyst · Tue 09/09/2008 12:56:13

Okay, after managing to get around the glitches I finished it with 547. I could have been more, but everytime I tried getting that one letter I constantly fall through the platforms. And that's probably the main issue with this game (as has been said): You fall through platforms, sometimes he doesn't jump, sometimes he bounces off the letters, sometimes he lands on invisible plattforms.

And the sound when fetching the mails is too loud really horrible. I had to mute my speakers.

But other than that, I guess it could be a cool platformer. Keep working!

Akatosh · Tue 09/09/2008 14:24:29

And continue we shall. I had a short talk with BaronCid, and yes, Corner's Shiny is back in production for deglitchification and the addition of more content. The download link will stay valid from now, but the database entry will be purged. Thanks for the kind comments on what the game could be, and... for not being too harsh.

So... uh... lock please?