Tim-Tim 2 Dev Thread

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Bob the Hamster
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Re: Tim-Tim 2 Dev Thread

Post by Bob the Hamster »

Okay! I got a chance to play today, and I am delighted. The knife is fun to use, and changes the ammo management for the better I think.

I've gotten as far as Steve, but haven't beat him yet.

There seems to be some kind of bug with changing equipment. I could go into the menu, move the cursor over the knife or the rocks or the lightening scroll, but I had a real hard time equipping things.

Pressing A or X on the knife or rocks would *sometimes* change equipment, but I could not figure out why it would work and why it wouldn't. I would say I had 1/10 success rate at actually changing equipment. Also that is just for the A and X keys on the keyboard. The equivalent keys on my gamepad would never work to change equipment, although they worked fine during gameplay. (Yay! I have a gamepad now finally after how many years?)

As for the scroll, nothing I would press ever equipped it, and I have no idea why. I was wondering if I had to talk to somebody to teach me how to use it or something?

EDIT: I tried again today, and I had no trouble equipping rocks or knife, even when using the gamepad. I have no idea what was wrong yesterday.

I still can't get the lightening scroll equipped
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Re: Tim-Tim 2 Dev Thread

Post by SwordPlay »

god, i love the gfx and music. digging it so far. is it intentional to be able to see the map with F1?
kinda a minor thing, but is there any way to drop down from a ladder etc.,? maybe by pressing down+jump?
minor complaint is the save file doesnt show time played, location, or anything like that
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Re: Tim-Tim 2 Dev Thread

Post by Spoonweaver »

Just released a big bug fix version that addressed a lot of things that have been found so far.
thanks RMZ for playing through it on stream, a lot of the bugs were found through that.

SwordPlay wrote: Sun Mar 27, 2022 3:37 pm god, i love the gfx and music. digging it so far. is it intentional to be able to see the map with F1?
kinda a minor thing, but is there any way to drop down from a ladder etc.,? maybe by pressing down+jump?
minor complaint is the save file doesnt show time played, location, or anything like that
Direct compliments for the music to PJbebi. He did a great job.
I had originally planned to write it myself but after attempt number 3 I figured I'd need a lot more practice to get good at writing music and I moved on to other things.

debug keys are still on in this version so yea f1 will show a map
I actually just updated all ladders to be stand-able, you can jump down them but only when you are passed the first little part
to address this a bit, there was some issues I had with the platforms that you could jump on from under them and jump down off of. After working on them for a good long time and still finding a lot of weird bugs, rather than work on them more I took them out, which also took out the ability to press down and jump down a ladder.

The save files did originally show time played. This was a very recent change and also had to do with a bug that I kept running into. For some reason the save file times were changing on their own. I worked on this for a good long while and opted to just not have it. As far as locations, I had the thought but in the end the maps had mostly silly names or numbers, and would likely only serve to confuse the player. The areas being a bit vague and without names is intentional.
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Re: Tim-Tim 2 Dev Thread

Post by SwordPlay »

players just generally would want to know which save file is latest. some games display how many times you've saved overall, for example.
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Re: Tim-Tim 2 Dev Thread

Post by Bob the Hamster »

I downloaded the bugfix version, but I still can't equip the lightening scroll
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Re: Tim-Tim 2 Dev Thread

Post by Spoonweaver »

So, the issue with the lightning scroll...
If you opened the lightning scroll chest an even amount of times it stops working. So if it's not working, open the chest again and it should.
If your save file is far enough along that you don't want to start over and the chest can't be opened again, let me know and I'll make a fix that will allow for multiple lightning scrolls, but as that isn't normal I haven't implemented that yet.
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Re: Tim-Tim 2 Dev Thread

Post by Bob the Hamster »

Ah, no worries! I can just play from the start again. Glad to see it actually did get a fix in the latest update :D
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Re: Tim-Tim 2 Dev Thread

Post by Hedera »

Bug reports: Pressing F12 when there's a textbox up doesn't take a screenshot, instead it goes to the next textbox still. Also when using the knife while jumping, it cancels out any horizontal momentum and you drop like a rock; is this intentional?
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Re: Tim-Tim 2 Dev Thread

Post by Spoonweaver »

Hedera Helix wrote: Mon Mar 28, 2022 7:57 am Bug reports: Pressing F12 when there's a textbox up doesn't take a screenshot, instead it goes to the next textbox still. Also when using the knife while jumping, it cancels out any horizontal momentum and you drop like a rock; is this intentional?
I've noticed that too, it's not really a game bug so much as an engine bug from what I can tell, as there's nothing you can do, as far as I'm aware, disable that in the editor. If there is a way, let me know. But holding ctrl and then pressing f12 still seems to allow for gif recording.
I figure it's not a big deal, as it wasn't going to be an advertised feature of the game anyways.
But yea, I guess engine bug report?

yes, the knife stops you mid jump. It is intentional.
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Re: Tim-Tim 2 Dev Thread

Post by SwordPlay »

its truly the elden ring of OHR platformers
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Re: Tim-Tim 2 Dev Thread

Post by Bob the Hamster »

I see a small bug in the latest version -- When you load a save slot, it immediately re-activates the save point. Not too serious, just a little annoying.

I think a great feature would be to use the save slot used command to detect whether or not any saves exist, and if so, change the default menu selection from "Start" -> "Load". I have accidentally started several times when I meant to load

Also, just cosmetic, but this ice block is missing its wallmap
Screenshot_2022-03-29_19-41-53.png
Screenshot_2022-03-29_19-41-53.png (24.04 KiB) Viewed 1605 times
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Re: Tim-Tim 2 Dev Thread

Post by Hedera »

Spoonweaver wrote: Mon Mar 28, 2022 7:11 pm I've noticed that too, it's not really a game bug so much as an engine bug from what I can tell, as there's nothing you can do, as far as I'm aware, disable that in the editor. If there is a way, let me know. But holding ctrl and then pressing f12 still seems to allow for gif recording.
I figure it's not a big deal, as it wasn't going to be an advertised feature of the game anyways.
But yea, I guess engine bug report?
I suspect that it's because pressing any key advances text boxes, but, you're right it's got an easy workaround
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Re: Tim-Tim 2 Dev Thread

Post by polkakitty »

Hedera Helix wrote: Mon Mar 28, 2022 7:57 amBug reports: Pressing F12 when there's a textbox up doesn't take a screenshot, instead it goes to the next textbox still.
I found that pushing F8 to bring up the main debug menu, and then selecting "screenshot" does still work.

....Actually, it occurs to me that it might be useful to be able to enable and disable individual debug keys for different games, instead of having them all on or all off. I'm going to make a feature request about that.
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Re: Tim-Tim 2 Dev Thread

Post by Spoonweaver »

Bob the Hamster wrote: Tue Mar 29, 2022 11:42 pm I see a small bug in the latest version -- When you load a save slot, it immediately re-activates the save point. Not too serious, just a little annoying.

I think a great feature would be to use the save slot used command to detect whether or not any saves exist, and if so, change the default menu selection from "Start" -> "Load". I have accidentally started several times when I meant to load

Also, just cosmetic, but this ice block is missing its wallmap
Screenshot_2022-03-29_19-41-53.png
Thank you, I don't know how that ice block got away from me.
Your idea about the start load menu is a good one too

The new bug with the save menu popping up is an interesting one, I guess I altered the layout of the load game script too much when I reorganized the scripts to fix another bug. I haven't fixed that one yet, but I should have it fixed soon.
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Re: Tim-Tim 2 Dev Thread

Post by polkakitty »

So I played Tim-Tim 2, and it was very enjoyable! I actually finished the game about a week ago, but I haven't had time to write down all my thoughts about it until now.

I think the best thing about the game is the variety of scrolls you can collect. The powers they give you are all distinct, useful, and fun to play around with, and unlike a lot of games with similar equipment setups, you have enough opportunities to refill MP that you can use your scrolls frequently without worrying about running out, or having to hoard all your MP for boss battles. (Notably, magic refills seem to both drop more frequently and restore more MP than life refills restore HP, and if you can catch several enemies in the area of effect of an offensive scroll, you can often make a profit in MP from the magic refills they drop.) Of course, you should always carry some MP-restoring potions, which are a great help in tough situations.

For most of the scrolls, there's a particular kind of obstacle that you need to use that scroll to get past, but I also found every one of them to be genuinely useful in some situations when I was just fighting and traversing the map, and I wasn't required to use any particular scroll. For instance, the invisibility scroll isn't just good for getting past the eyeball blocks, it also acts as a counter to enemies that use homing attacks. And the lightning, flame, and tornado scrolls aren't just straight upgrades to one another; even in the final dungeon, I found it worthwhile to use all three of them, depending on which enemies I was facing.

The graphics are a good example of how graphics don't need to be incredibly detailed to be good. The environments are colorful and varied, and the NPCs and bosses are simply drawn, but very expressive. I think the graphics would be well worth studying for anyone who feels they can't draw graphics that are realistic enough, or detailed enough, to use in a game, because they show how, ultimately, thoughtful design will outweigh realism (I like to call this the Order of the Stick Effect.) I especially liked the part where you first meet the elder gnome, and his beard makes up the entire landscape. (I was a little disappointed that you don't really see surreal ideas like that for the rest of the game; the environments you explore from then on are all pretty typical video game settings. Actually, one thing I think could be great is if the Elder's beard made up some of the walls in rooms off the main path in the second half of the final dungeon: most people probably wouldn't notice any significance in that particular wall design, among all the background elements from other areas of the game, but to savvy players, it could act as a way of foreshadowing who it really was that was behind all the tribulations Tim-Tim has gone through.)

The controls for jumping and running are smooth and intuitive to play with (amazingly so, really, considering that the game seems to run at the default 18 frames per second instead of 60.) However, one thing that annoyed me a little bit was the specific keys the controls used. I'm not sure how most people usually set up keyboard controls (my guess would be that they don't, because I'm probably the only dinosaur left who's still using a keyboard instead of a gamepad for games like this,) but my usual preference is to have the most commonly used buttons mapped to a horizontally oriented set of keys on the left side of the keyboard. Normally I use the A, S, D, and F keys if at all possible (I played all the way through Hollow Knight with dash, jump, soul magic, and attack bound to those keys, respectively, and although that game certainly has its share of head-bangingly difficult battles, I never had any problems with not being able to remember which action was bound to which key, or pressing a different key than I meant to,) but I can deal with the convention that seems to be standard in Japanese doujin games (and to have been picked up by most people on itch.io) where Z and X are used for everything.

But adding the A key, which is on a different row from Z and X, threw me off, and I found it hard to get used to. So although I realize it would require a highly impractical amount of effort to add a feature like this at this late stage of development, I do wish there was a way to rebind the main keys. I think it would be fine if you could just assign jumping and the two item slots to any letter keys.

I like the way there are several distinct regions of the world map: from left to right, you could roughly divide it up into the dwarf caves, the forest, the mushroom fields (with the human village in the middle,) the goblin cave, and the ruined desert town, with gradual changes from each of these zones to the next (you see trees outside of the forest area, but they're not as dense or as tall.) That makes the world feel like a place with internal logic to it, instead of just a series of arbitrary levels. What I don't like is the way that almost all the areas of the world map are arranged in a horizontal line, because it can take an excessively long time to get from one place to another, and you'll probably want to backtrack to the gnome village several times because it's the only place you can get the high-end potions for most of the game. (However, there is a good amount of variation in enemies as you travel through each area, which keeps the gameplay from getting monotonous, even if you're backtracking through areas you've already been to.)

I think it might be better if the villages and dungeons were divided up between multiple horizontal planes, with several ways to go up and down between them (and more shortcuts could open up as you gain new abilities.) That would allow players to revisit places they've already been without spending so much time just running back and forth, and it would open up more opportunities for players to find secret entrances they couldn't get to before, when they first visited an area with fewer abilities in their repertoire.

(I guess most people would just have a knee-jerk reaction that there should be a fast travel system that lets you instantly warp between any villages or dungeons you've been to, but I think a feature like that is detrimental to the sense of setting in a game like this, because it means that, once you've been to each fast travel point once, all the areas in between them effectively cease to exist, and you no longer have a world with any coherent geography to it. I think this kind of game usually feels better when, as you progress through the game and gain new abilities, you can take faster paths between areas, and find new secrets in them, but you still can't ignore them entirely.)

In the second half of the final dungeon, there are several branches that lead to chests with 50-coin awards, but by that stage of the game, there's probably nothing left that you'd want to spend money on, which makes it pointless to go down those branches instead of just going straight to the boss. Admittedly, I think that in any game where you collect new abilities over time, it's kind of an inherent problem that by the end of the game, when the player is supposed to have everything, there isn't much left you can give them as a reward for exploring any optional areas (how many RPGs have you seen with superbosses like Omega and Shinryu that give you rewards that literally do nothing?)

However, if you could get MP-refilling potions, or maybe even one of the purple potions that fully refills both your HP and MP, from the chests in those branches, I think that would make them much more worthwhile to go to, especially in light of the fact that the final boss almost requires you to use potions to refill your MP. I don't think it's an excessively difficult battle in general (his attacks can be tricky to dodge and deal a lot of damage, but that's appropriate for the final boss,) the issue is just that most of the bosses summon regular enemies that you can kill with the knife to get MP refills, but that tactic is a lot less viable in the final boss battle, both because he summons regular enemies much less frequently, and because he has much more HP you need to get through, which means you need to spend a lot of MP on your own spells.

Overall, I give Tim-Tim 2 PROFIT! out of 10. It's a fun little adventure that does a great job of creating a light-hearted, storybook feel, both with its graphics and with pjbebi's soundtrack, which conveys an appropriate feel for each area, while always retaining the sense of a journey into the unknown. It's reminiscent of a lot of old DOS shareware platformers like Jill of the Jungle and Crystal Caves, but with more polish and thought put into its design (for instance, Tim-Tim's hitbox is actually slightly smaller than one tile of the background, which creates some wiggle room and makes it easier to jump into a small passage; most platformers in the early 90s didn't think of that, and it made certain jumps very annoying to make.) It's a good example of how the OHRRPGCE has grown to be flexible enough to handle other genres besides RPGs effectively, but I think it's well worth playing as a game by itself, without considering any technical details of how it was made.
"It was right through those trees; I'm not insane
That's where the fin tried to drag me in
Don't look at me, look at where I'm pointing
Close your eyes, see what I see, Canajoharie..."
-- They Might Be Giants
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