I liked it. Basic, yet very polished. Didn't find any outstanding bugs when I played it. It was pretty fun to play anyway, and I look forward to more varied environments and gameplay. Only complaint is that the music for the demo level is terrible, but I'm sure you can fix that :P

Also, just because I like you, rate++

Thanks for the comments. Glad you found it fun.

The music is a bit awful, but I don't really do computer music so I'm limited to whatever royalty-free freeware WAV loops I can find on the internet.

They music is all specified by the level files though, so it can be changed from level to level without any kind of recompiling.

Maybe if the game gets developed enough to tempt some other talent on board, I'll start fishing around for a musician to help.

Excellent, very polished graphics and smooth gameplay ( with the note below taken into account [smile] ). Simple but fun.

I'm not somewhere where I can listen to the music, but it seems like I'm not missing much.

Only complaint is that I had my card set to force vsync off ( for stressing some parts of my own application ), I had to enable it to make the game play at a consistent logic rate.

But overall a brilliant sample.

Fraid so about the vsync. As per many pained journal entries a few months ago, I tried everything I possibly could to write this with variable frame rate but everything failed so I've ended up having to insist on 60hz and relying on vsync to keep the logic at a fixed rate.

I know this seems like a bit of a cop out but I really did spend a long time trying every other possiblity and I just couldn't get it either a) smooth or b) consistent (jumps the same height etc) at the same time.

I guess I could put in a limiter that would wait until 1/60th of a second had passed before updating in case the user has vsync off. I'll give that a try tomorrow.

Thanks for the input.

Virtual High Five!

Very nice game, I enjoyed it quite a bit, it feels very polished. I especially liked the world map, and the background of the level. If I hadn't already rated you up, I definitely would....

Awesome! This calls for a patented Lump 'o Feedback:

• Excellent polish. It looks and feels smooth overall. The doors, the checkpoints, the glass floors, the fishes, and I could go on. Everything just feels really fluid and professional.
  
• Clean and consistent artwork. It all flows, and it all looks good when placed together in a scene.
  
• From being in-level, it shouldn't have to take me 3 menus just to exit the game. [sad]
  
• The flowing water on the overworld makes it feel more like I'm on a floating island in the void than on an island in the water.
  
• I really like how the downwards-whack ability works and feels. I think the particle effect would even more awesome if the little particles that currently come out had a longer lifetime, and bounced off the floor around it a bit.
  
• No offense, and I know it's likely temporary, but most boring title screen ever, hehe. [smile]
  
• GUI was generally nice and unobtrusive. I like.
  
• Despite the other remarks around here, I didn't mind the music.
  
• I'd really like to see a more 'dramatic' effect when Udo bounces off a spring. Using a stretched coil bitmap and a little bit of velocity math, you could make a really awesome spring animation when Udo bounces off of one. [smile]
  
• BUSH MONSTERS OWN!!
  
• Overall, excellent work. Very nice, very polished. With even just that limited feature set you could already make a pretty groovy game. I can't wait to see what the finished game will look like.
  
• (For some reason, I really think that a time-attack mode with winnable medals and stuff would really be great, as an alternate mode. Just by the demo level I played I could tell that this would be a fun game to try and race through just for kicks [grin])
  

Awesome work, EC!

Very nice and very fun!

I agree that the island looks like it is in a void rather than on water, maybe that will change when the maps are larger.

And the bush monster is a layer behind the end of map door. Thats the only bug I found.

The spin attack is awesome!!!

Thanks all for the comments and the very constructive criticism.

HD - I agree about the water looking like a weird void thing on the world map, but I think envy3d has hit the nail on the head. When the maps are larger and there is less water, it looks a lot less strange. I just made a pretty small world map for this demo, but I may see if I can improve on the overall effect.

I take your point about the exiting the game thing, and will add an "Exit Program" option to the in-game menu, with an "Are you sure?" check.

The title screen is indeed temporary [smile].

Re the spring, I'd not actually implemented rotation when I did the spring, so I guess now there is no reason why the spring couldn't wobble from side to side as it goes back down. Another great HD(TM) idea.

Time attack mode and so on would be good, but I'd like to get the main game finished first. I also want secret levels, and the idea with the world map is that there will be doors and broken bridges and stuff that will be opened up by completing levels so you can choose from a few levels at a time before progressing. This can now be implemented via my Imp scripting so should be easy. It also means you can always revisit old levels, so maybe a Crash Bandicoot style multiple ways of completing the levels award system would be cool.

envy3d - Very well spotted about the bush monster going behind the door. Thankfully that is not a bug in the game, but my error when using the level editor, since I have to move the free items about in the listview before I export the level file to make sure they are in the right order. Bit of a pain, but there you go. Level editor is not top priority at the moment.

Glad the spin attack is being well recieved as I was a bit worried it was not too intuitive compared to just landing on top of enemies, but as a game mechanic it works far better.

Anyway, thanks again to all for the comments and I'll bung up another demo fairly soon.

I love the spin attack. I particularly like how you can just keep doing it again and again without having to jump, because after the spin attack, you actually bounce off the ground a little.

I think it would be great if the bush monster were able to hide behind other bushes after it jumps out at you.

A particular annoyance of mine is on the world map, having to move tile by tile. The lack of free movement is annoying, but that's most likely something you've already made definite.

Everything felt polished.

Quote:Original post by Endar
A particular annoyance of mine is on the world map, having to move tile by tile. The lack of free movement is annoying, but that's most likely something you've already made definite.

Cheers for all the positives and sorry to only quote the negative bit [grin].

The worldmap is quite deliberately locked to the tiles since it is not really supposed to be part of the game, but just a mechanism for selecting levels.

By locking the movement to tiles, it means that Udo always stops on the middle of a star, and means there is no tricky lining up needed to move through narrow tunnels in the blocking stuff like the trees.

I was originally going to have it like Mario where you could only actually walk from point to point on paths, but I gave up on that because I couldn't draw paths properly and the route stuff was a bit complex.

So you have actually got more freedom of movement than I originally intended, if that's any consolation [smile].

Very, very nice.

* I have to agree about the world map water plane. It looks more like a sky layer than a water surface, because of the use of static tiles and opaqueness. Now, opaqueness isn't really a big deal, but moving on to an animation would really make a difference.
* I love the spin attack and I'll tell you why too: it adds a certain amount of difficulty to the game as opposed to simply butt-squashing enemies to death. A big plus is of course the ability to perform combos by flinging twice or three times in a row. Maybe you could award a player for progressively getting better at sweeping enemies? Killing the third enemy in a row would for example grant him a 3x multiplier. This allows for much more replayability.
* The animations in-game are simply superb and bring back some great memories (I already said that I think, but what the heck). The art style of all sprites combined works, and the color schemes match. Like others have pointed out: it's polished and plays and runs ever so smooth on my machine.
* I did manage to get a sheep to get stuck on a 1x1 tile of spikes. Not a big deal, just FYI :-).
* As I was playing I thought it would be cool to be able to use the spin attack to "stun" certain enemies when landing next to them. For example, you could (temporarily) stun a sheep by landing it on its back :-D. In fact, the spin attack opens up lots of gameplay possibilities. Think about it, pretty please.
* The idea of moving per-tile in the world map is a good one imho.
* Quoted for truth: I LOVE the bush monsters, they rock (the bushes)
* Something I as a modder would definitely try when I get my hands on the level editor for the first time is adding "zombie" monsters on the far planes of the level to make them more vivid. They just walk of course, but it makes for a nice distraction and it should be easy enough (if not already possible as they are separate level files?).
* You probably already know this, but when I died, I lost a live for just a second: re-entering the level upped my lives to three again.

A few things slipped my mind, probably because I was baffled and all. Cheers.

Hey Todo. Thanks for your (as ever) useful comments.

I'm getting tempted to just stop the water layer on the world map from scrolling. It doens't really add anything to the game and the general consensus seems to be that it looks weird.

I like the idea of the combo multiplier thing for multiple spin attacks. Seems like it would be nice to award the player something better than just points for that, or at least give the points some kind of value.

The sheep stuck on the spikes thing is kind of hard to solve really. Perhaps if they are knocked off their origin platform, they should stop turning back and forth but then they would walk into water and so on. Needs some thought, that.

Stunning enemies with the spin attack is a neat idea. I'm thinking about a new enemy that that could apply to. Mario turtles come to mind as a comparison, but I'd like to come up with something a bit more original.

Animated monsters on the far plane is a neat idea. That will sit on the back burner for consideration when the game is finished. The back layer is not actually stored as a level file - it is just a tile map - so would require some changes to the actual game code to implement but wouldn't be difficult.

The inifinite lives thing is deliberate for testing purposes at the moment. There's a --Lives; commented out somewhere.

I agree the spin attack should be used in more interesting ways and you've given me some great food for thought.

Very nice game, I found the spin attack was quite fun, especialy trying to hit multiple sheep in one jump, the overall fell was extremly smoth, I particalary liked the bush monster.

Perhaps the sheep could die if they're knocked on to the spikes, thats what i had expected to happen when i was trying to knock it of the platform, or you could place the platforms so its imposible for them to land on the spikes but i think thats a bit too limiting.

Sheep should definatley die when they land on the spikes. Good thought.

It doesn't solve the general problem of sheep getting stuck on 1x1 blocks. Smash the three glass blocks without killing the sheep on top to see what I mean.

A rating++ for you sir!

This is making great progress, and I was very impressed by the demo. The game runs smoothly, it looks great, and it is fun. I love seeing platformers being created, especially when they're of such a high quality.

I have to admit, though, I did want to play around with the FireStar[grin]

Great demo! :) Can't wait for more.

One little control bit was that since you can only use the spin move while jumping, just move the spin attack to the spacebar and only allow you to use it while jumping.

This way you don't have to do two separate keys for one attack essentially. It also would open up the doors to being able to crouch and jump.

Speaking of crouching, it really doesn't seem like he crouches down much at all and pretty much just loses his feet. Not sure what you plan on doing with crouch either (probably flying pigs flying overhead would be cool and you need to duck lol). I guess I'll wait for you to show more stuff!

Anyways, I like it and can't wait for the next demo!