Topic: MAGS May “Rats” (RESULTS)

[Kinkilla]

*Kinkilla wakes up from sleep*
Hey, what? It's already june?
Well, I guess that I'm too late. (Damn you illness!)
But I try to play all of the 8 (!) games and write down my thoughts:

Check back later.

[fernewelten]

I did encounter some glitches in the maze room: […]

Hi Mandle,

Thanks for the detailed report and for uncovering the bugs.

Concerning the maze room: The music can freeze up right at the beginning because the computer has to become VERY BUSY at that point. Whilst Linkattus pole-jumps up the shaft, the computer jumps into action: It generates a beast called “randomized spanning tree” through something named “Dijkstra's algorithm”, then it connects the subrooms according to the aforementioned tree, makes sure that all the subrooms are indeed interconnected, and lastly searches for the two rooms that have the most distance one from the other. The one room is connected to the exit, the other to the sewer room and a random third one to the guard's key room. Lastly, the computer decides just what specific door should lead to just what specific room.

Unfortunately, AGS is scantly equipped for this sort of algorithmic heavy-lifting, which makes it harder. No recursive functions, no multidimensional arrays ...

Anyway, when the "Oh oh" jingle comes and Linkattus notices his plight, the computer is ready and Linkattus can start exploring.

It's all very technical, but I've done my hardest to disguise that aspect and stress instead how _individual_ the different areas of the maze are.

I'll probably counteract this specific bug by already fading out the music in the sewer room. Thus, nothing will play during the calculations, thus, nothing can hang or loop.

Of course, I'll also look into the other bugs. Thanks for pointing them out!

[Mandle]

I did encounter some glitches in the maze room: […]

Hi Mandle,

Thanks for the detailed report and for uncovering the bugs.

Concerning the maze room: The music can freeze up right at the beginning because the computer has to become VERY BUSY at that point.

No, I don't think that was the main cause. I walked away from the computer and made something to eat and came back like 5 minutes later and the game was still locked up.

As soon as I changed the graphics option to the software thingy I got into the maze room in bare seconds.

Must be the outdated graphics card on my crappy computer. I've had similar troubles with other games which is why I knew to try changing graphics options.

[Slasher]

* Updated everyday

Commando Raid by fernewelten

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I played much of the first version and it was going quite nicely. There were a few areas of concern, like baselines, inventory spacing and clickable boss. The graphics were nice and so were the dialogs. However, I downloaded later version and the door you came in from would not close and therefore you could not access the tap or the bag. Also some variables did not set properly giving wrong answers to what should have been true. This is reference to the bag and mop head. This was a game breaker for me. Still baseline error between player an cupboard door. With corrections this would be quite a good game. Hopefully the author will correct these. New build better.

OK.. Have managed to enter the maze. This area at the moment has a few flaws which stunts an otherwise great area. Will persevere.

Rat Playing Game by Mandle

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This has the makings of a fun game, given enough time to play about with and learn the variables. The graphics were coarse but kind of fitted the game and i found them acceptable (Mandle style ). Combat again needs time to figure out. The variable buttons could have been tarted up and a change of fonts would not go amiss. Overall a nice little game that i would play over and over a few times to get to know it better.

I can understand releasing this as a kind of demo, a taster. I can also see Mandle had put in a lot of effort into it, but of course time is a funny thing.: it runs out to quickly.

A good effort from an old veteran who likes to push the barrier in style and taste

Overall I quite enjoyed it.

I now see an updated version so i will play it and amend my review accordainly...

Will play new build tomorrow.

Played latest version. It was better. I kind of feel it growing on me... game breaker if you stop on first left bend. Apart from that I would personally would like the fonts to stand out more during combat, I can't see very well as it is. Having got used to the variables I can see me playing this repeatedly. It is a fun game and a few tweaks would make it even more playable and more fun. Great effort and a good game.

The Rat Pack by CaptainD

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A game about playing with variables to obtain a successful outcome of a family of rats. This game has a single screen and is quite self explanatory. Getting a good balance and moving on was good fun. However, the mouse disappearing was game breaking and quite annoying and MUST be sorted as I would have liked to have gotten further than I had.. Effort went into coding the variables.
All in all a fun game that I could play more of given a fix of the mouse vanishing. I found it quite enjoyable and could spend quite some time playing around with it. Good effort for a nice game.

Echo in the Clouds by Hobo, Selmiak, Myshkin and Pinback

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So far...Game looks interesting.. Nice graphics and animations. Story line good... Atmosphere good.. Only downside I can see at the moment is the save/load system which did not appeal to me in its use...  I have now finished the game and the combination of authors have produced a really good demo game...

Rainbow Skunk Prism and the Vermin-Truder by DBoyWheeler

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A nice colorful game. Basic and simple. Not ground breaking but effective. Shame about the walk animations which I'm sure will improve in future games by this author.  Some fun and very basic.

The Burgomaster by morganw, Blondbraid and handsfree

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Enjoyable game. Great graphics from Blondbraid as expected. Story taken from a truth.. Nicely produced. Puzzles not to hard.  Fun game.

Lab Rat Maze! by Cassiebsg and Gurok

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Nice animation start to the game. Like the way the game paths opens up as you progress, nice scripting by Gurok. More to come...

[fernewelten]

As soon as I changed the graphics option to the software thingy I got into the maze room in bare seconds.

The maze room is comparatively huge. It might be that the graphics driver or card could not handle the dimensions.

[Mandle]

Oh, it still says v.0.01...

Yeah, I didn't change the version numbers because it was just simpler to upload and overwrite the existing file on Mediafire so it wouldn't break previous download links.

Regardless though, the current version is the final one and the one that actually works without any game-breaking bugs.

[fernewelten]

Commando Raid by fernewelten
However, I downloaded later version and 

Spoiler: ShowHide

the door you came in from would not close

I'm so sorry. It seems that I've inadvertently created a mind blocker for everyone that happened to play the old version first. I agree that this is stumping then. But the thing is,...

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Linkattus has better manners now. He won't bang the door shut, but he'll close it nicely when using the door HANDLE. (And he must be anywhere to the right of the water, or else the first click will make him cross the bridge and the second click on the handle will close the door.)  To explain what I mean, see this YouTube video.

The rationale for the change was this:

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In my playtests, I found myself on several occasions to want to move Linkattus over to the other side of the bridge and to click "anywhere" on the right hand side for this. Bam: My click happened to land on the door purely by chance, and the riddle was spoilt inadvertently.

So I had to do something to guard the riddle a little more. So now Linkattus muses on the insides and outsides of door blades unless the user clicks on the door HANDLE.

The better solution is planned for for the non-MAGS version: Making the room a tad wider so that the right wall is just out of view when Linkattus is on the left side and comes in view when Linkattus goes over the bridge. So there's much less chance of clicking on the door inadvertently. I can then release the constraints again.

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clickable boss

The revised version (i.e., the version as of the end of the weekend extension) already sees to it that

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the boss is really hidden when invisible. If you mouse over him, the status bar won't point him out any more.

[Mandle]

I have finished my impressions of each game in my post on the previous page (well, except for an update on Cassie's game after I finish the final section)...

Not much other feedback going on in this thread or elsewhere for the EIGHT games that MAGS garnered last month!

Come on, AGSers!!!

[VampireWombat]

Others are doing a better job at giving feedback on the games than I could, so I've let laziness take over...
I'm still playing through them. This week I've tried to play at least 10 minutes a day of one of them. Except yesterday when I ended up playing Kerbal Space Program instead of doing anything remotely productive...
But I could start giving feedback later today if I need to.

[Cassiebsg]

I plan on giving feedback, once I'm done with all. I'm only needing to play one more, and then maybe 2 others that I have tried but died before I even figured out how it worked... guess which 2 are those? )

Thanks for the feedback Mandle! I'm amazed at it, yes (speacially about the light puzzle, as I thought I had overdone it with 9! ).
Using a second view for the pushing was my "backup" option if I didn't managed to make pushing work. But I think I got a good idea for how to do it, without making a new view... I'm playing with it, hope I'll get to the solution.

As for the reveal of places that were blocked my "solid" walls... was it in corner tiles? (ones that are not blocked my a wall in the diagonal?) If so I noticed that, but was my fault for not making a solid wall all around as I intended (and was too lazy to fix it)... You can pretend that the rat can see through the small gap that the tangent of two wall blocks make...

[Shadow1000]

I want to emend some of my comments based on some game revisions and reading what others have pointed out:

1) I really feel remiss in not having commented on the OUTSTANDING opening scene of Cassie's rat maze. As much as the game itself was creative and a fun challenge, watching the intro scene was a complete pleasure.

2) I replayed Rat Playing game, this time to completion. This game has all the addictive qualities of an RPG: I really enjoyed the thrill and challenge of developing strategies of how to level up the character, running out to the big, bad world and seeing what works and what doesn't, then repeating and slowly progressing that way. Mandle put in so many areas that you can level up that there are so many ways to beat the game and this type of complexity makes the game very enjoyable. What I really like is when a game is released for MAGS, created in a short time but the basic idea is so good that you feel that it can be expanded and expanded...and this is one of them.

[Cassiebsg]

Good news, I solved the pushing problem... finally! I just need to fine tune it, as right now the object is a little too far away from the rat, but it's just a matter of adjusting the coords. I'll post a link here to the new version to anyone who wants to test the new pushing code later on today.

And thanks Shadow, if nothing else at least the intro works. Only thing missing is Mandle, but like I said, that was just the cherry on top of it. As I enjoyed making a game with almost zero words in it for a change.

[Mandle]

As for the reveal of places that were blocked my "solid" walls... was it in corner tiles? (ones that are not blocked my a wall in the diagonal?)

No, it is the...

Spoiler: ShowHide

...push-switch about halfway up the wall to the right of the AGS letters, on the still-hidden right side of that wall...

I will send a screenshot tomorrow from my work computer if this is too vague but here is a small sketch:

  |
A|
G|X <--- Somewhere about here
S|
  |

[Cassiebsg]

Thanks, after a little fiddling I managed to get that object to show up. Need to beat Gurok for that one... Cause I barely understand how this wizardry works... I thought I would have spend the entire month coding it, and then he went and did it in a night. Has for the rat running crazy through black unexplored areas, I blame the pathfinder. We tried very hard to make it that you could not click on black areas and that the cursor would not process any clicks on non exposed tiles, but guess the pathfinder is better to by pass our "do not process this click" (cause I can't reproduce it). Just for reference, did you change the rendering engine? It's on Direct 3D 9 by default. Might be that other modes react differently.

EDIT: So, we've fixed those "trigger pads" showing up. Was my fault. Tks to Gurok to figure it out though.
As for the Push it's working pretty fine now... I just need to stop it from going into the walls. And it'll be renamed to "Grab" in the help.

Oh, and no, I did not model the cage or the rat, those are credited in the credits (since we could use pre-existing graphics, I saw no reason to use time to make something someone already had done). And yes, I did the animation and added materials and lighting (lighting of the dark had a bit of help by Snarky's critic on the BG blitz. ).

EDIT 2: For those wishing to try the game with push/grab function improved, this is the version to get: http://www.mediafire.com/file/n1nxl9est0259yy/LabRatMaze_v1.02_Win.zip/file . Please note that you should not use this version to judge/vote for the competition. Hope it makes the game less annoying to be played. (of course, now that I made it so easy to move stuff around, players are likely to encounter other "bugs": like not all objects can be used in all pads... ).

[Mandle]

Cassie, what I meant was that when you click on a visible area sometimes the rat will take a "shortcut" through a non-visible area (which now becomes visible as he passes through it). The player doesn't yet know that area is a possible path to get where they want to go, but the rat (the pathfinder) does know. That's why I called the rat "psychic".

[Mandle]

However, the mouse disappearing was game breaking and quite annoying and MUST be sorted as I would have liked to have gotten further than I had.

Well, of course the game is over when your last mouse disappears...

Ohhhhhhhhhhh...

[Cassiebsg]

Rainbow Skunk Prism and the Vermin-Truder

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Nice little game. Again, like others keep mentioning, you should work on your walk-cycle instead of keep excusing yourself for not being an animator.
The front view is good enough, but you should work on the side view. There are plenty of tutorials about how to, and then there's the critics lounge to help improve your skills. Please do something about this, as it kind of ruins a perfectly nice experience. Also the walk speed should have been a little faster.
Not many puzzles, so I was kind of surprised when it ended.

The Rat Pack Do Cheesy Castle

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Slasher trade mark! Nice game with good story and some pretty decent puzzles. I enjoyed being able to change the rat to play with. Would have been nice with some better descriptions of what some stuff they had was. As it was my solution was "Try everything until something works"... Though I solved the radio at first try.
But wish you stopped using the Sierra interface and moved to a 2 click interface instead, as I just don't see the Sierra having any benefit in your games, it's often in the way. Deselecting an object to select another was also a pain. Eventually I noticed I could click the "interact" button on the right to get the hand and select a new one.

The Rat Pack

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First time round, took me less than a minute to die... and wonder "what the hell happened?"... Second time I was in a roll and was progressing nicely, until I got a bit carried away... Maybe killing the entire colony before the food reaches zero is a bit unintuitive.
Not really my kind of game, but still nicely made and worth playing. That is if one likes the gender.

Commando Raid

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I loved the simplicity of this game, yet the puzzles felt hard to solve (I admit I looked up the solution more times than I wished...). I loved the idea of "disassemble". I was annoyed by not being able to deselect an object inside the inventory. Would have been nice to allow it inside.
I almost felt like "I want to give up!" once I finally reached the exit and realized I needed to go back to find the key! Not so much because of finding the way, but because the rat moves sooooo slow in this BG. Suggestions to improving: Speed up the walk speed! Make the transition sequence faster and maybe code a double-click to make him run/skip the walk to the next exit.
Also the last puzzle felt forced and illogical. And I'm almost sure I had tried it before... but maybe before I had offered it to Kitty. Why not just mash the paper and throw it? Or the cap of the bottle? No cat would mistake that huge UFO for a ball/play thing...
Nice end!

PS. You should also ensure that inventory items have a clear use spot, and they're not blocking the spot you want to use them on. Also, I'm sure it sounded like a good idea to have two cursors, one for game play and one for dialogues, but two cursors that that a completely different pointer was just annoying as I kept choosing the wrong option by accident.
Oh, and in case someone hasn't mentioned yet, but I'm sure they have, you can pickup the mop head multiple times.

Rat Playing Game

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Well, I tried twice and twice I died with the 1st encounter with another creature... so I didn't progress that long. I also did not see any changes in the stats during the fight. As it kept telling me I had 3 lives and then I died. So now I need to download the fixed version and hope that it plays better.

EDIT: Played it a couple more times, this time the fixed version. I haven't done much either, besides win one fight then try and return to my lair and lick my wounds (as advised) just to meet a new creature on my way back that killed me.
Definitely not my type of game, I may still give it a few play times just to see if I can get it going, but not one I'll play to the end. I'm just an adventurer/puzzler...

The Burgomaster

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Oh boy... well, it started bad due to the huge res, it's filling my entire screen and performing very very slow. I would rather something half size... but AGS can't do that! Graphics are top notch as Blondbraid has already gotten us use to. Story seems very interesting... so I'm looking forward to play more... only someone decided that "Save game" was expendable... which means I'm reluctant to play a game I have no idea how long it'll take and plays slugish... so in other to start it, I need to wait for a slot where I might have a chance to finish it in one go. Not sure that'll happen before the voting deadline though.

EDIT: So, managed to get some time today and played it. Wasn't as sluggish this time around, maybe my computer was as tired as me the other day...
Anyway, nice little story. I felt though that the doctor reached to the conclusion a bit too fast and easy. Puzzles weren't many of, so no struggling with what to do. Enjoyable little game with great art! Good job.

Echo in the Clouds

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Lovely lovely game, both visually, mechanically and story wise! And I'm bias for sci-fi stories. Didn't felt there was much to do, and just when it was getting interesting it ended. And since I hadn't saved, I have no idea if choosing any of the other options would have resulted in a different out come (as in a bit more game play). I'm guessing it wouldn't. A msg showing up "This is were the demo ends..." would have been nice though.

EDIT: And my vote went to

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Commando Raid! Just a nice little game, got a few faults, but nothing that the author can't fix with time if he so desires... Or move on to the next game.

[VampireWombat]

Rainbow Skunk Prism and the Vermin-Truder

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I don't have much to add. I saw the rat man before the hidden spoiler was added, so I already knew how to beat it.
Could have used something to make it more interesting and not quite so straightforward.
I only played the version without music, so I don't know how much the music improved it.

The Burgomaster

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The visuals were nice and the story was pretty good. The puzzles were pretty straightforward. The ending seemed a little abrupt.
Overall was good. I'd like to see it expanded upon to some degree.

Commando Raid

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I admit that I had to look up things 3 or 4 times. I had a general idea of things, but the having to look first threw me off. And I simply didn't think of using the first bar to pry the others.
Currently at the maze. Unable to make myself go back to playing it due to my dislike of mazes.

Echo in the Clouds

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Very beautiful game. I enjoyed the setting. At times it made me think of Alien/Aliens.
Once I saw that the rat was missing, I instantly thought of the movie Splice for some reason. So I wasn't surprised at all to see a humanoid rat. My only complaint is that there's no ending other than thanking me for playing. Looking forward to seeing a longer version.
This one got my vote. The science fiction elements, setting, and visuals easily won me over.

Lab Rat Maze

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Haven't played enough yet to give much feedback.
Having trouble making myself go back to playing it. The fact I generally dislike mazes in games could be why...

Rat Playing Game

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Played 4 times and didn't get too far. Kind of fun, but difficult for me. Probably I just need a different strategy.

The Rat Pack Do Cheesy Castle

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I haven't found a difference in playing the different rats yet other than different items.
I thought that I was given a hint at one point with getting past the spider when Pilchards were mentioned. But trying to put one on the web or giving one to the spider doesn't seem to work. Then again, I had never heard of Pilchards before.
Currently at Checkpoint Charlie.

The Rat Pack

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Pretty fun. I made it to turn 101 before my rats all died. The graphics are crude, but get the job done. Otherwise I can't think of a single thing that should be changed.

[Slasher]

Cassiebsg....Thanks for your comments...

Time restrictions usually mean you miss stuff out... I agree, I should have made more interactions for the Inventory descriptions etc.
2 click operations... possibly...but it is what it is...

cheers

Slasher

[morganw]

The Burgomaster (Barely started, so no full review yet)

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Oh boy... well, it started bad due to the huge res, it's filling my entire screen and performing very very slow. I would rather something half size... but AGS can't do that! Graphics are top notch as Blondbraid has already gotten us use to. Story seems very interesting... so I'm looking forward to play more... only someone decided that "Save game" was expendable... which means I'm reluctant to play a game I have no idea how long it'll take and plays slugish... so in other to start it, I need to wait for a slot where I might have a chance to finish it in one go. Not sure that'll happen before the voting deadline though.

I think the time to finish it for a first time player is probably about 15 minutes.
You might find the downscaling performance is significantly worse with the OpenGL renderer, if you've switched the settings.
This is a premium narrative experience, so a high resolution monitor is recommended.