Hans Stinkman 2015: A Cash Dollar Contest

Your title screen music is awesome, but the 3D effect on the title screen is like an astigmatism simulator. Awesome effects in game though, and I'm glad we both went totally different directions with the shooter thing!

Thanks a lot. Can't wait to see what you came up with. It will be fun to mess around with a good shooter game since they don't come up much around here. Someone should totally start a shooter contest one of these days.

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⊕ P E R S O N A L M U S I C: https://open.spotify.com/album/6fEo3fCm5C3XhtFRflfANr
⍠ C O L L A B M U S I C: https://dustpuppets.bandcamp.com/releases

That would be an awesome contest. I dunno that I'm gonna be a good shooter, I've been really really lazy and had a lot of bum luck with the weather and running errands and crap like that. Gonna do my best to finish and hopefully it will be.

Crusty the pirate is a shooting game as well. You shoot at that frightening kraken I posted a few posts back. My will, how do I say.... be awful. But it has pirate puns so it's worth it.

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My pronouns are they/them
Ps. I love my wife

Haha, well I look forward to that too. I like a good pun. Every time I think up a pun I write it in my phone. The list is getting ridiculously long. I just need to find the right purposes for them.

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⊕ P E R S O N A L M U S I C: https://open.spotify.com/album/6fEo3fCm5C3XhtFRflfANr
⍠ C O L L A B M U S I C: https://dustpuppets.bandcamp.com/releases

Our first hero stabs the stink! Good job Mr. Kjennedy. The animation here is incredible.

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Super Walrus Land: Mouth Words Edition

I have a terrible eye for this kind of thing and need some advice:

A) Are the health and score indicators too far away from the "action"? Would you have to deliberately look at them and would that be a bad thing?

B) Is the score gauge hard to read?

C) Can you tell that I haven't even started on actually programming the enemies and designing the levels? 48 Hour contest, ho!

I think they're of decent size. Comparing it to some early zelda games I'd say your health graphics are smaller but in those same zelda games the hearts can divide in to half their size. Therefore I think it's okay. Perhaps what may be easier than redoing those graphics would be to make an indicator when your character is weak like: beeping sound, blinking character palette, or make the health bar blink.

I think the money counter is readable for my personal preference. Also since money usually isn't as critical to most games as the heath bar, I think it does not require any sort of change as long as most people can read it with ease.

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⊕ P E R S O N A L M U S I C: https://open.spotify.com/album/6fEo3fCm5C3XhtFRflfANr
⍠ C O L L A B M U S I C: https://dustpuppets.bandcamp.com/releases

Assuming this is the size of the game upon playing, and it won't be scaled/zoomed in...

Health Bar -- It's too compact and kind of outta the way for individual "hearts" for my sake, but that's not really the issue. If you're gonna work that small, you need to make sure players can still read lost health without having to take their eyes away from the character. Personally, anything above 3-5 "hearts" feels kind of trivial, and would be better suited as an actual bar of health.

Score Bar -- I'll echo what sheam says about the score bar not being as important, but I still have a problem reading those numbers even though I'm not playing the game. I'll provide an example, but lighting up the background of the numbers will make it easier to read.

Edit: As an aside, the player character is small, and has enough breathing room that moving the bars inwards 10 pixels or so wouldn't hurt, plus, it'll look nicer.

@Jack: Regarding what you said about the lack of need for more than 3-5 hearts. I think this depends on the type of game. The more intense the game is (as far as taking damage) the finer the scale of health should be to alleviate quickly dying. I think a way to more clearly outline where the players health stands at a glance would be to make the final 3 hearts red, the middle hearts yellow, and the rest green. Thus if the player can sense some green is still left they know they are in good health, if they glance down to see yellow they know to be cautious, and red means... you get it. This way the player doesnt have to actually count to see that they have 7 hearts left, they just get a sense that they are in decent health.

As I said before, pairing this with a beeping sound/flashing or some other indicator helps to reinforce this. I like some games where the screen gets redder and redder the more damage you take until you die and it fades to black, but I think this is more of a horror genre thing and I can't really say what genre yours is just yet.

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⊕ P E R S O N A L M U S I C: https://open.spotify.com/album/6fEo3fCm5C3XhtFRflfANr
⍠ C O L L A B M U S I C: https://dustpuppets.bandcamp.com/releases

The player character already blinks upon taking damage, and you're immune during that time which could theoretically give you enough time to take a peek down to the health gauge. I guess I'll have to see how it feels in practice. There's also an "empty" frame for the health beneath it, so you can see like.. 3 dark spots, 7 lit ones so it's not just vanishing and leaving you nothing to deduce.

EXCELLENT example on the brighter score gauge, I'll probably go with something like that.

Yeah, pretty much all I have is a slice collection and an intro stage. I'm just setting up global variables now

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My pronouns are they/them
Ps. I love my wife

It won't be "complete" in time for this contest's deadline, but I am pretty close to having a reachable ending to my game (aside from the two "bad endings" that I already have in there, anyway.) The map/scripting stuff required to get to that ending might take a while and having to work tomorrow will make it even tougher to squeeze in, though. Can we pretend this year's a leap year and move the deadline up to March 1st--I mean, "February 29th"--instead of the 28th? XD

(About half-serious with that suggestion... I'm not completely screwed if I don't have more time, but it would definitely help.)

Oh, and I think I mentioned at some point that these two would never be "real" party members...



...turns out I changed my mind. You will be able to fight stuff as an afroed, sunglasses-wearing wannabe-gangsta octopus or a doofy, single-shoulderpad-wearing wannabe-cereal-mascot bird after all.

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FYS:AHS -- Swapping out some step-on NPCs for zones + each step script
Puckamon -- Not until the reserve party is expanded.[/size]

Noodle conversation is finished. I would've liked for it to be more robust, but it's pretty good for what it is. That means I've got tomorrow to work on the actual dating part of the dating sim, which is a woefully inadequate schedule for what should be a very central mechanic.

Oh well. I can't say I'm satisfied with how the game's shaping out, but it'll still be one of the top two contest games that gets released in time for the contest, by the looks of things.

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Mega Tact v1.1
Super Penguin Chef
Wizard Blocks

Death draws near!! I won't be around to check this thread until Sunday night so do what you want and just lie about when you release stuff 🐍

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Super Walrus Land: Mouth Words Edition