Gray Begginings!

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Master K
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Gray Begginings!

Post by Master K »

The demo of my game, [game]Grayscale[/game], is now up!

This thread is for you to post your comments, thoughts, and bugs to crunch.
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Baconlabs
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Post by Baconlabs »

Hey there guy
Gave Greyscale a whirl while waiting for night to pass in Minecraft, and I'll probably be playing it intermittently like this until I've finished it.
So far I'm up to where Brody decides "Hey, why not explore the world!" and the brief adventure beforehand. Here's a few thoughts:
-The intro is pretty neat, I really like the way it scrolls from a game-scene to the title screen. Keep this in your game.
-The trees look okay, but the fact that they all line up perfectly bothers me a little. If nothing else, make a few alternate tree tiles where you just move your basic tree shape half a tile off-center or something, that way we don't have to see patterned blotches of bare land in the forest.
-A plot-advancing NPC has been assigned 2 names. This is a problem. The hero calls her Ms. Janice or something, while everyone else calls her Marie. I get that she is supposed to be a person with a surname, but with the tiny amount of story your world has, it just ended up being really confusing. At first I thought "Marie" was the name of the girl that went missing.
You can fix this really easily by just assigning her one name and having everyone address her as such. To make things even more clear, assign that same name to the top of her text boxes. It's very unusual in an RPG to have unimportant characters with more than one name.

EDIT: So it turns out, that point I reached up there? That was the end of the game. But I sure didn't know, I thought I had more stuff to look forward to. Instead I wandered to the end of the forest and got the "end of demo" message. Why is it here? Why not put it at the end of the last cutscene? It would save me and everyone else a hike through the woods, which is not enjoyable because all battles so far have been spacebar-holders. You might as well block off the fork that leads to the end of demo message until you complete more of your game.

OTHER GRIPES:
-When Brody saves the unconscious defenseless girl, he just leaves her there and runs all the way back to town to get help. Seriously, if I were presented with the situation, I'd man up and haul her back myself. So either this kid is a wimp, or he's an actual little kid who would've been too weak to help (but not weak enough to go on an adventure, which is baffling).
In fact, why don't you go ahead and give the player a choice over what to do, choices are always nice in videogames.

-Breaking the fourth wall at the beginning of the game. Seriously, the second NPC I am able to talk to breaks the fourth wall. This is a common characteristic among newbie games, so I wasn't that surprised, but I didn't find it funny either. (Also I didn't get the Pokemon joke, although Brody's house is almost a direct copy of Red's)

-Otherwise bland NPC dialogue. I realize this is unimportant and probably low on your priority list, but it's noticeably bland when several conversations consist of characters parroting "Hello!" "Hello!" to each other.
Image
-Boss battle is boring. The boss has minions, but they barely scratch me. The boss himself is pretty weak too, but he still has lots of HP which draws the battle out further than it needs to go.
The girl being alive but weak and caught between Brody and the boss was interesting, but she didn't actually do anything except attack Brody and miss every single time. Is this supposed to do damage, or heal Brody, or is it just there to give her something to do? Given the circumstances, a heal, cheer, or stat buff of some kind would be most appreciated and would make the fight a little less boring. Maybe even give her some dialogue with the attack captions.

So, if I were reviewing this, I'd say something like "this falls in line with all the rest of the newbie games", but this is not an offensive thing. This is just the first step on learning how to make games with the OHRRPGCE. The graphics are basic and the sounds are certainly from the enclosed bundle, but that's okay. What you really need to focus on is adding more to your game, making it bigger and creating your own world with its own story to share. I'd like to see how far this can go and how much it'll improve.
Also, it's greyscale. There's got to be some interesting gimmicks to work with there, right?

EDIT 2: I didn't run into any bugs, so congratulations on keeping your scripts clean and tidy!
Last edited by Baconlabs on Wed Jun 22, 2011 8:07 am, edited 2 times in total.
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Master K
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Post by Master K »

Thanks for playing, Bacon.

Give the girl a buff or such, thats a good idea...you see, I originally meant for her to have sorta of a help me! attack, with the caption "Help me!" but, for some reason, the caption would never show. I assumed caption text was the same color as the ground and became invisible and therfore, something I couldn't have. So, I promptly removed the attack and left her with none....

Also, the pokemon cliche coming up would've been getting running shoes, which I so deliberatly avoided, which I should also specifiy with the telling the mom that your going exploring. At the beggining of the older pokemon games, usually in the beginning, you get running shoes from your mom. In my game, they're actually going tied to the story. Theres the boots of lightness, which allow you to skim over water, and the winged shoes, which allow you to cross some chasms. They each make you run different speeds. And yes, I realized the house was very similar to reds. Thats sorta where I got the idea, but I had no PC or TV in the room. XD

The NPC's, I shall resolve that. Talked to once and twice tags, and so on, so you can get a couple of different replies. I'll also fix the confusing name. Her text box top will say Marie, but I still would like Brody to adress her by Ms.Janes.

Choices are what im meaning to get to. The first major boss of the story (Not the Ent), i'm going to try and figure out how to make the player...heheh, end their game with a choice. And now that you've brought it up, I shall put the choice in the grotto.

I'll see how I can spice up my battles. As a last minute, I added drops, which will be used later in certain merges. What do you think I can make with Slime, Leaves and Herbs...? Also, the leaves can be used as healing items. I hope...I never encountered any in my test runs, but I set them to be a healing item. I found the ent battle difficult, and thought others may to, so I set the leaf as a healing item, and it drops from some of the forest enemies.

Interesting gimmicks? I'll try and slip some puns, shout outs, and interesting things in there...you already can figure out one from the paragraph above, hopefully...and, abusable insert name text! Whenever I ran my demo, I inserted a funny name. I had son of a (bword) in, and found one funny thing near the end of the game.

Anyways, so thank you for imparting your time to my demo. I appreciate it. :angel:
Last edited by Master K on Wed Jun 22, 2011 3:27 pm, edited 2 times in total.
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charbile
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Post by charbile »

Master C here,

Pretty much what Bacon said (especially his first spoiler, which was where I quit--your random fights were hard.)

I had to play twice because I seemed to have found an engine bug, but I was unable to reproduce it. I talked to the guard blocking the exit out of the first town, talked to some other people to trigger plot to get past the guard, talked to him again and caused game.exe to crash. Weird weird.

Graphically, I have to suggest using more contrast. Like the first house's gate is too close to the ground's color.
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FnrrfYgmSchnish
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Post by FnrrfYgmSchnish »

At the beggining of the older pokemon games, usually in the beginning, you get running shoes from your mom
...you mean the newer Pokémon games, right? The running shoes weren't even introduced until Ruby and Sapphire.

Anyway, haven't had a chance to try your game yet; I'm on dial-up and my connection is extremely unreliable (especially with Slime Salad downloads) and tends to screw up for no good reason in the middle of downloading stuff. I might download it and try it out the next time I have access to a decent connection, since I still need to get around to the last couple of movie contest entires too and theres no way I'd be able to do that on my dial-up.
FYS:AHS -- Working on Yagziknian NPC walkabout sprites
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Shizuma
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Post by Shizuma »

You need to make the palette actually grey scale. There's off white purples in there.
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Master K
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Post by Master K »

I generally picked any color near or close to Gray and white. White purples? Ahem...theres white in them.
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Shizuma
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Post by Shizuma »

1. edit your palette, Set saturation to zero.

2. Import it back.

3. Mission accomplished.
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Master K
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Post by Master K »

Im clueless how to do that. I only have MS Paint.
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Shizuma
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Post by Shizuma »

OK, Send me your palette and I'll do it.
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Master K
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Post by Master K »

I use Neos Better Pallete, from the Import-Master Palletes.
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Shizuma
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Post by Shizuma »

Here.

Image

While I'm at it, here's a transparent version of your avatar:
Image
Last edited by Shizuma on Thu Jun 23, 2011 8:00 pm, edited 1 time in total.
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Master K
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Post by Master K »

Thank you Shizuma, i'll test out the palette...

It works great!
Last edited by Master K on Thu Jun 23, 2011 8:08 pm, edited 1 time in total.
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