Slime Salad

Almost exactly 1 whole year.
Yikes.
Anyways, I'm going to keep some progress on here for now
maybe it'll help motivate me?

Road to Beta
Mapping
Underworld1 - 90%
Underworld2 - 10%

Programming
Final Battle - 10%
fix bosses - 90%
fill all chests - 95%
cutscenes - 60%

Textboxes
Frog Dialog - 75%
Townfolk - 50%
cutscenes/letters - 30%

Bugs
Playtesting bug fixes - 25%

Guess I'll post a picture too since I normally would do that

I love the frog animation! :D

Wow, a frog-crawls under-your-cap animation? This is going the extra mile.

Hurrah, progress. I was getting worried.
These progress metrics seem to exclude all of the many things you've already completed!

So, did you say you would like to finish the game this year, not just release a beta? So... the beta might be soon? By beta, does that mean a beta of the full game, or a demo?

yea the list excludes anything that is done
As far as a full release this year, I want to see how the beta goes first. Maybe I'll find millions of terrible bugs?
..or people won't like it. or think it's too short without the 3 additional dungeons


The beta game will be the full game.
all 7 bosses included
and will be mainly for play testing

If it goes super well, the full release would be soon after.
Though, I plan to leave some work till after the beta, like the music and sound affect finalizations
And, I think I'd still want to touch up on the map decro a bit. I keep finding places where I forgot to put an edge or background tile...
and then there's bug hunting, and a million other touch ups I'd likely want to do like balancing

But yea, it would be great to release soonish.
Honestly, if I worked on it an hour or 2 a day I should be able to finish in a few weeks.
more realistically, I'm hoping to release the beta close to december

I'm going to draft my kid as a playtester when the beta comes out. She is still an enthusiastic fan of Tim-Tim 1

Worked on the "secret" mushroom village a lot.

Been making a lot of progress lately.
I'm thinking I'll be opening this up to Beta Testers in a month or two.
But... of course I also thought I'd be done with this game years ago....

Anyways, as I've been uploading pictures, I started to think they might be spoilers at this point...
This might be the last one for a while.

It's not done
a lot is still missing
you can't get to the mushroom village yet
and it ends with like a terrible door loop

but I think I want some testing input at this point....

Bob I sent you a link
I know I said other people could test, but I have forgotten who!

Anyone else, let me know if you want to give it a try and provide lots of feedback

Awesome! I will try it :D

Can't get to the mushroom village? What's even the point?

Jokes aside, it's looking good. Very impressed with the enemy AI in the gifs you've shown, particularly.

I've been working on mapping lately.
I haven't gotten a lot of feedback on that which I guess is a good thing.
All thoughts are welcome!

Also, again if you would like to test out the game, let me know.

I finally had time to play today. I have feedback!

The intro sequence is fantastic. That is a great way to start off the game with style. I also love that the rocks are useful too.

Tim-tim's floaty jump is fantastic. You have really nailed the jumping mechanics in this game. Jumping around is really satisfying, and narrow perilous jumps are actually pleasant instead of frustrating. The animation is also really satisfying.

I played far enough to beat Steven, talk to the Elder on the mountain, and get into the spider dungeon under the first lantern

The early enemies are a bit dull, which I think is okay, they start you off easy. When I first met the beetles that fly randomly I thought I would hate them, but avoiding them was actually a pretty cool challenge

I can see that just like the first Tim-tim game, ammunition management is extremely important-- it might even be the most important game mechanic I love that there are multiple types of ammo now.

I did feel badly magic-starved the whole time I was playing though. I think you could stand to be more generous with magic power ups. Scatter a few more collectable ones around the maps. Make the blue potions in your inventory restore more, I about choked the first time I drank one, expecting to get a full blue bar, and instead getting just a pittance. I understand why the magic-extending power ups don't full you up to max like the hear-extending power ups do, but maybe the should fill up to 50% or something.

As for level design, I generally liked it. I gave up on trying to explore 100%. I still made an effort to get to difficult-to-reach corners because i expected to be rewarded with treasure (and often was) but I quickly gave op on the completion feeling of trying to explore every inch.

Adding just a few more unique maptiles to various maps would probably go a long way towards making the maps feel more alive. For example, the curly beard blogs were fantastic. I also liked the gold nuggets in the Dwarf town. That kind of touch goes a long way.

Is a map ever unlocked? if not will you consider it? if so do you want me to share the code for how I did the world map in Vorpal Florist?

Oh, and one more thought about ammunition management. I like that it is such an important part of the game, but I also wish that at the very end of the game there might be a power-up that gives Tim-tim infinite recharging ammo so I can backtrack all over the place and go hog-wild killing all those enemies I had to prance around before :D

EDIT: Oh! I almost forgot. I did a quick android build, and side-loaded into onto my dusty old OUYA since my kids are way more comfortable with controllers than with the keyboard. They haven't played yet, but I'll give their feedback too when I hear it.

Awesome!

More mana; Yes I've had a few others say that too. The mana potions have been increased, the dropletts give 3 mana instead of 1, and I'l be sprinkling some more mana dropletts and maybe rocks and throwing stars around the beginning areas for the player.

Custom tiles are an idea I had. I did that for tim-tim 1, and I did it after I was done with all the maps, basically making a custom tile for each map. I'll likely do that again as I have noticed that a few of the areas are rather blank looking.

A map...
Well... I have choosen against it
I'm afraid the map won't look very nice..
The overworld is a huge line
and I think it will get rid of some of the mystery of the game
then again, it might help the story a bit if the elder shows you on a map where the dungeons are...
I'll see if anyone else brings it up
if I have a ton of people asking about it I might change my mind. but for now, no map

An infinite ammo mode, or new game + sort of thing.
yea, I can see that.
But I don't know if you'll really need it too much. You sohould have so much money by the end that you might not need a special mode to go romping around. Holding max purple potions is pretty OP in my play tests.

I look forward to any other feedback you have.

Thank you so much!

Also!
Thank you all, for helping me test, I have enough people at this point now and enough changes and fixes to do at this point. So I don't think I need any additional testers. If you are a tester already, please keep sending in the feedback as much as you're willing!
All the feedback has been great so far! Glad that most of the feedback was positive! Really helps my motivation to finish this!
You guys are all awesome!~