Please test our platform jump and run game...

Cool game man, its really fun and the levels are quite large. Any chance at releasing a level editor?

Incredibly well done. Reminds me of Sonic the Hedgehog.

I did have a problem controlling the jumps. Maybe you could make the jumps just a little slower?

Also, I had a problem stopping on the stone above the waterfall. Not sure if it's just my lack of coordination or if the animation of the character should better represent his foot speed to give me better cues for slowing down.

Very nicely done.

System:
CPU: XP 1800
Video: GeForce 3 Ti500
Memory: 512MB RAM
OS: Windows XP Pro

[edited by - Waverider on December 1, 2002 10:58:34 PM]

Very nice.

System:
CPU: Intel Celeron 500Mhz
Video: Intel 810
Memory: 64MB RAM
OS: Windows 98

Yeah, that''s not very pretty, but it ran well without any problems.

Very impressive. It ran fine on my old system - smooth frame rates.

CPU: Pentium 200 MHz
RAM: 32 MB
VIDEO: Voodoo3
OS: Win95

wow, kudos to you and the team (looks like one other person from the credits)

Everything worked perfectly. Very professional.

Hi guys,

Thanks for your help with testing our game!

Here are some replies:

To elis-cool:

Hm, editor is done in Croatian language...
Also, even if it were in English, there are many restrictions what you may and what you may not do in it so it wouldn''t be of much use without good knowledge of the engine. (or a big tutorial which I really don''t have the time to write)
Sorry, maybe in the future, although I doubt it.

To Waverider:

I tried to force slower jumps but neither me nor my wife liked it that way. :-(
Anyway, after a little adaptation to the game you will find it to be quite easy.
Stones above the waterfall have smaller friction! So it''s not you... :-)
In the space ship levels there are whole frozen rooms with slippery surface...

To smart_idiot:

The game is made on 433 celeron with TNT. ;-)

To LoneCoyote:

Yes, I know! As long as you have enough video memory it will work nicely with slower computers too...
And even if you have small amount video ram you can still turn off paralax background planes.


Well, thank you all again!

Bojan

AMAZING!!!!!!!

0. IT IS VERY FUN.
1. SUPER LOVELY GOOD LOOKING ART.
2. RUNS SUPER SMOOTLY.
3. THE CONTROLS ARE GREAT.
4. THE LEVELS ARE BEAUTIFULL AND HUGE. LOTS OF WAYS TO FOLLOW.
5. IT HAS ALL THE GOOD THINGS I LOVED FROM THE OLD GAMES (IT REMINDS ME JACK RABBIT )
6. THE MENUS, THE OPTIONS, PASSWORD THING, TUNNELS. IT LOOKS SO PRO... FLAWLESS.

Ok, enough caps emotion...

My system:
Celleron 466
Riva TNT2 64MB
196MB RAM
WinMe (Spanish) - DirectX 8.1

I''m going to apply for translating to spanish, I would like to have the full version

Beautiful game, congratulations.

PS: And dude... you made it with your wife... what else can you ask from life?

Ok, I don''t know if you already knew this but I''ll post it just in case:

I did the folowing:

1. While playing I pressed the ESC key to pause the game.
2. Then I pressed ALT-TAB.
3. The game window got minimized correctly.
4. I did ALT-TAB again to return to the game.
5. Pressed ESC key to continue playing.

Then the music started to repeat the same part (just a second of the music) over and over, and never ended. I continued playing normally, but the music never recovered.

This is the only "bug" I found. I''m having a great time playing your game

you must be very proud of this accomplishment. like the others have stated, it looks very professional! it just goes to show once again that you dont need 3d to create something addictive and fun! congrats =)

ran flawlessly on my:
p4 1.7
512ram
gf3

ps. delightful music score to boot

Very nice game. I have a few suggestions though.

1) First and foremost, make obstacles more noticeable. Spikes and man-eating plants blend into the background since they're totally still and use the same colors. They need to be animated. Make a flashing effect on the spikes or something, and make the plants move. Do this for all such things.

You know the spikes right after the exit portal in Forest Level 1? I died twice on them without having any idea why I was dying because I simply did not see them. Only later, after walking to the portal and standing still, did I notice the spikes.

2) When you're at the main menu and click "Exit", it asks you for confirmation. It shouldn't. It only makes sense to if you're in the middle of a game, but if you're not, it should quit straight to the desktop.

3) When the demo is playing, the demo text blinks, which is distracting. You should turn off the blinking. Also, one idea is to just not draw any of the GUI when the demo is playing, and put the demo text near the bottom or top of the screen.

4) Very very minor, but in the Credits screen, it says to press Escape to go to the main menu, but actually it's any key. As it should be

5) Power-ups would be very nice. Maybe ones that, for a fairly short period of time, give you the ability to shoot. You can have lighting or fireball or whatever, or you can get more creative, but it would be nice to have some way of possibly killing things like squirrels, porcupines, etc.

Anyway the game is excellent otherwise. Its high quality makes its few minor flaws stand out.

~CGameProgrammer( );

EDIT: Or, the power-ups can be permanent until you die, as in Super Mario Bros. This makes a bit more sense since enemies are spread apart so time-limited power-ups would be wasted.

[edited by - CGameProgrammer on December 3, 2002 4:57:46 AM]

To Waverider:

I must say "thanks" for pushing me into the right direction. ;-)
I have tried to make jumps slower once again and I think that
they are allright now... In the past I''ve tried to slow the jumps
completely, but now I tried to slow only the fall, and we are very
satisfied with the results.


To xaxa:

I wasn''t aware of that bug. Thanks... ;-)


To CGameProgrammer:

1) Yes we are aware of this problem... :-( However, game is designed to
work in 256 colors so more different colors are not an option. :-(
Nice animations take time to make. Flashes - well perhaps...

2) Sorry, but I don''t agree on this one...

3) I was thinking of putting it right bellow the top of the screen
when I remove fps in the final version. Although I for example don''t
mind it the way it is now.

4) Yes I know - this is only a test version and this screen won''t
look like this in a final one. ;-)

5) In the beginning we planned to give Bud some kind of weapon...
We also planned that you will be able to choose between Bud and
Rachel (you can see her in passwords) at the start of the game, but unfortunately, all this requires additional animations so we had to reject it... :-(
There are only two of us and we''ve been making this game for too long
already! :-(

Anyway, thank you for your comments. I really appreciate them... ;-)


Bojan
http://www.space-ewe.com

The game runs really well on my system..I''m running it on a
433mhz celeron
8mb intel video
64mb ram
n the game is veryy cool! few years ago, people just stopped making side scrollers like how they used to...its about time a game like this comes out again..artwork is very good..gameplay is good

Seemed to run a little jerky on the foreground when scrolling.
Athalon 650 Mhz. Creative Labs 32MB GeForce(1), 128MB RAM on Win2K. Looks great though

Maybe its my graphics card.

Just Curious can the PC do Totally smooth scrolling like the old nintendo, but at a resolution of 640x480 or higher?

The reason why I ask is 2D is far less forgiving then 3d when frame rates drop or things dont scroll smooothly (users expect it in 3d to some extent), and it seems that all drivers and hardware are aimed more for 3D then 2D now. So even as advanced as the PC hardware is today, were still doing 2D the hardway on PC's. If you look at the Amiga, Genesus, NES, and SuperNES they had multiple screen buffers with scroll registers, you didn't waste the CPU blitting every tile to the screen or doing the whole thing with a game loop, you just set up the fetch registers.

BTW I wish 2D games would make a come back, some of my favorites of all time were 2D games. One of the worst games but one of the best looking 2D games ever was Shadow Of The Beast on the old AMIGA, it had 13 layers of Parallax Scrolling.
[edited by - bazaillion on December 8, 2002 5:23:28 PM]

[edited by - bazaillion on December 8, 2002 5:27:35 PM]

Swell!

Athlon XP 1800
GF 2
256 Megs RAM

Win 2k Pro



_______________________________
It''s not reality that''s important, but how you perceive things.

A man''s reach should exceed his grasp.

Hi Bazaillion,

You are ABSOLUTELY right that 2D is FAR less forgiving then 3D when
frame rates drop. It''s because of the high contrast graphics and fast
scrolls. In 3D, games are often dark, or misty, and also you also see
far into the distance which is moving quite slowly unless you are
rotating... For example, when 2D game is rendered every other frame
(ie. 30 when in 60 mode, or 37.5 when in 75 mode) it tends to look
rather jerky, and even more - picture is doubled! (If someone doesn''t
believe this I recommend them to try to set the max fps inside the
game - it''s in fact frame skip control. BTW it''s intended for the
slower computers which are constantly jumping from full frame rate
to every other frame. The option will force those computers to stay
in lower fps because constant switching (from 60 to 30 for example)
can be ugly as hell...)

So much about "smooth" 30 fps. It must be a joke...
If 2D game can''t reach monitor refresh rate it will be ugly no
matter how high high fps it achieves! This is especially true if
fps is varying!!!

Again, for the non-believers, try to force for example 120Hz monitor
refresh in 640x480x8bpp and then set the max fps inside the game to
60. You will see that the game looks worse then when it is running
60 fps in 60Hz mode.
(if your driver don''t have the option then: run dxdiag..more
help..override, although, some drivers still won''t allow it)

However, in your particular case, I wouldn''t say that it is graphics
card, nor that it is driver. I have fought with PC to get PERFECTLY
smooth frame rates for quite a long time. I think that I succeeded,
but if you have background tasks, the game can still occassionally
look jerky... For example, I have Zone Alarm installed on my computer,
and when it''s on, game skip some frames every couple of seconds.
When I shut down Zone Alarm it stays perfectly smooth all the time.
(I have 433 celeron with TNT...)

Today, PC is definitely fast enough to show many parallax layers -
I haven''t done actual calculations, but I think that my 433 with
TNT should be able to do 10 layers (8bpp) easily.

However, there are two problems:
1. damn VGA hasn''t got the hardware vertical blank interrupt!!!
(therefore imho, even DX can''t ensure that buffer flip will be made on time)
2. multitasking

As I said, I tried my best to achieve the smooth scrolling as we
remeber it from consoles and Amiga. People will judge if I have
succeeded... O:-)

(I was Amiga demo coder back in 90''s so you can believe me that I
was particulary eager to get smooth scrolling in Bud Redhead...)

BTW, I forgot to say that when Bud is running in a demo mode it can
be jerky because it is then internally fixed to 120Hz. (It''s because
demos were saved in 120Hz.) This is true for windowed mode too.
Windowed mode is made completely without DX. It is used for debugging,
and as a last resort if game encounter some problems with DX.

However, when playing, game is internally fixed to whatever your
monitor refresh rate is - therefore it should be smooth. ;-)

Bojan
http://www.space-ewe.com

P.S.: I would really appreciate if anyone could explain me the
"doubling picture" phenomenon. I''ve been unable to understand it
ever since my Amiga age... I don''t understand, is it a hardware thing
(some phosphor behaviour) or our perception? As I said, it occurrs
even with 120Hz when you render every second frame. I mean, 60
fps on 60Hz refresh is nice, 60 fps on 120Hz is doubled. Similarly,
when you render every 3rd frame then it gets even worse, you can
see triple picture.
It beats me. :-(

I have shut all the services I can shut down on my system. I actually wonder if the jerk in the screen I am seeing is a Granularity problem with my first generation GeForce card.

It actually scrolls smoothly a couple of tiles then glitches a bit. Then smoothly again for a few tiles then it glitches.

BTW does any of the Modern PC video cards have a VBLANK register?

-M. Bazaillion

Hi Bazaillion,

Try to pause the music while playing the game.
(F5 is a shortcut)

Please tell me if this helps...

Bojan Urosevic
http://www.space-ewe.com

Great game. Very pro. It runs like a dream on this comp -

750Mhz AMD Athlon
128MB Ram
16mb nVidia Riva TNT2PRO

Great job on the game, man. I couldn''t find any problems besides the legit ones already mentioned.

Its got to be my geforce card thats causing the problem it jumps between 24 and 60fps on my system constantly (even without sound).

I ran your demo on a 1.2Ghz P3 Laptop with a S3 Virge at my job and it ran flawlessly.

Looks Awesome, you have definitely renewed my interest in wanting to do a 2D game again.

I have had problems with my system configuration from day one (first generation Athlon MB(FIC) with 650Mhz SlotA and First gen creative labs Geforce 1. I am ready to build a P4 with latest radeon card, I am tired of the problems I am having with it.

Just curious have you ever done any scrollers in OpenGL? I have heard its not as fast as Direct X for this type of thing.

Thanks,
-M. Bazaillion

[edited by - bazaillion on December 9, 2002 10:00:34 PM]