ALSO i am trying desperately to download your game pepsi, but my computer keeps almost finishing the download and then jumping the gun and saying its done when i can clearly see from the file size that it's like 15mb short, so it doesn't run and acts as if it's corrupted. does anyone know why this keeps happening? i tried downloading my game too and it happened.
I used to have that problem with Internet Explorer's downloader all the time when I was on dial up. It was the reason I got GetRight (which doesn't work on this site). In short, IE was never that good of a downloader. I think it gets bored of downloading after a few minutes.
What are your download speeds? I think the more bandwidth you free up, the faster it goes (gosh, I sound like the tekkie that failed computer class).
I downloaded
Genesis at about an average 250KB / second. And I just downloaded mine to see if I'd run into the problem you had, and it downloaded fine. So I don't think there's anything wrong with the site. But I have had my share of incomplete downloads because IE gives up on them. I'm not sure if other browsers have that problem or not.
i appreciate the feedback! let me know when you finish the demo what you thought.
I'm getting ready to play some more. I'll give feedback on that once I'm done. I figure it's easier for me to give daily feedback than to try to remember everything that happened over the course of however many days it takes me to finish it.
the battle backgrounds were actually done with my tablet. i just hand painted them in Gimp by first doing a rough blocking out of colors (brown for the forest floor, different shade of brown for the trees, different splotches of green shades on the ground), and then went back in with the paint brush tool on the smallest size setting and drew in each blade of grass and layered the lines using different shades of grass colors and tried to keep the darker colors at the bottom parts of the grass and the yellow highlights at the top of the blades of grass. they took me about 2 days each to complete.
I think I've seen one of these tablets at Best Buy. They run for about $80, right? The one I saw tempted me, I'll have to say. And the method you describe sounds much nicer than the one I've adopted (which is to fill an area with clone brushing). I may have to look into that design process for the future.
and i agree with you about there needing to be more life in the graphics, i am thinking of maybe making some grass patches that blow in the wind, and i think the interiors need more movement too so i'll probably make an animated lantern and something else, not sure what yet though. i'd also like to add some items hidden inside dressers and the like to promote exploration and allow the player to interact more with their surroundings.
I'm convinced that TMC will implement those extra layers some day. It's just a matter of waiting him out. But once it happens, all this stuff can become reality. And that animated lantern will be a welcome addition. All we would need then is a longer "Define Animation" outline for longer hard-coded loops. Right now, I had to script all of mine.
i'd love to see more sound effects as well, i'm going to spend some time finding perfect ones that we can have in the game for the next release. i'd like to add a monster roar sound effect to the monster in the forest, inn music for when the characters fall asleep next to the campfire, etc etc. just little touch ups here and there to really bring it to life.
It's unfortunate that it became a pay site, but
www.soundsnap.com is an excellent source for sound effects and where I downloaded about 95% of the ones that I didn't record myself. They do have a free membership, but it only allows you 5 downloads a month, which fortunately I've been able to stick with. If you don't mind implementing 5 sounds at a time, then that would be a great resource for you. Otherwise they charge certain packaging fees, which are reasonable if you can afford $20-$70 per membership period. In any case, you should definitely take a look. You can listen to anything for free. And most of it is high quality.
Okay, time to go play some more.