Hey guys. I'm working on a game in Gamemaker. It's called Dungeon Dude and it's kind-of an 80s arcade style game. Only half of the final content is finished at this point, but I would like to hear (read) what people think of the game-play. Is it too hard? too easy? tedious? frustrating? fun? Does it run on your machine? download original tweaked version In this game there are three knights. you select a knight and finish his quest. When you finish all three of the knights quests you move on to the next round of quests. attack and avoid enemies. Pick up a shield and it will allow you to take a hit without dying. Each knight has three quests, but only the first quest is finished for each knight. You can still play each knights' second quest but they are not quite done and they might have empty spots. The third quests will give you error messages if you attempt to enter but the game should crash harmlessly. controls: at the title screen Press "Enter" to start. press "left" and "right" to select a knight and press enter to select that knight. press "esc" to exit at any time to exit. use the arrow keys to walk "A" to jump "S" to attack [Edited by - Kelly G on February 14, 2008 9:45:54 PM]

I gave it a try. It seems pretty difficult. The player moves too slowly most of the time and there are often so many skulls on the screen that you just can't dodge them.

With some tweaking, this game could be a lot more fun.

Thanks. My inspiration for this game is hunchback. I'm trying to make it difficult so that it's reminiscent of those old 80s arcade games where there are only a limited number of screens and it takes several tries to get past a single screen. On the the other hand, i don't want the play control to be so unresponsive as those old games.

I suppose the second screen of the blue guy's first quest is pretty bad for skulls. I might try removing one of the skull-chuckers. I'm finding the line between too hard and too easy seems pretty narrow.

I'll also try tweaking the walking speed. I thought the slow speed had a good old-timey feel to it, but perhaps the game is not compact enough to warrant such a slow speed. If I may ask further questions- do you mean that the player moves too slow to dodge the obstacles, or is it more that you would like to be able to progress faster through the level? Do you find the player is too slow walking, climbing ladders, or both?

Quote:I didnt understand why I could change character during a quest though - is there a point to that?

I forgot to mention- The space key, which switches the index of the sprite set, is only there for testing. If you hold down "1" it also increases the room speed. I'm planning on disabling both of those when the game is finished.

The reason that there are three characters is that I was originally going to give this game to my three brothers as a christmas gift. It was going to be linear and at the end of development I would hard-code the sprite set index so that each brother would have a unique variation of the game. Now this project is a little bigger than I had originally planned. I thought of still using the three characters as way to do a level select.

Yeah, I think it's interesting but too slow and unforgiving. Also the transitions could be sped up. (If you hit enter multiple times on the character select, you keep hearing the sound)

tweaked version

I tried these changes:

I made the player 25% faster.

the interval of the skull throwers' throws is randomly longer sometimes, decreasing the frequency overall. There was also a problem when the skull throwers switched from throwing to walking to throwing again- their timers would reset, potentially causing them to throw much more frequently then originally intended. This has been fixed.

I decreased the number of throwers in the blue knight's first quest.

I made it so that when you transition between screens, flying skulls and arrows don't follow you. This results in fewer of the unfair projectiles with little time to dodge.

it's kind of fun. I think there we're a couple of annoyances, but there is potential for a fun action game here. Here are some suggestions

-either speed up the transition between death and restarting. heres 2 ways i can think of to achieve it :
-Pressing enter skips the text
-Give the player 3 lives and make him restart with no intermission until he's game over

-Allow the player to 'jump onto' and 'jump from' a ladder.

-Try to make some little patches to increase fairness. For example, i once got hit by the knight, as he came running from the edge of the screen at the same time that i was running to go to the next screen. If it can't see it coming, it doesn't feel fair. On the same level, on the next screen, i was fighting an enemy on the bridge and a skull fell over my head. In my opinion, the best way to fix it would be not to divide the level into 'screen' and instead have the camera fixed around the player. Another way is to add patches to remove/delay spawning at unfair areas, or, when applicable, give visual cues to the player to show him that somethings going to happen there in advance.

-hitting in the air would be fun

-If you implement the 3 lives suggestion, restarting at the start of the screen you died on would be nice.

Thanks for the replies.

Quote:
For example, i once got hit by the knight, as he came running from the edge of the screen at the same time that i was running to go to the next screen. If it can't see it coming, it doesn't feel fair.

I agree. I'll have to fix this as well. The easiest way is to prevent that badguy from getting too close to edge of the screen. I think there are some places in the gold knight's first quest where the same thing can happen.

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although on the second Gold Knights quest i seemed to stick sometimes during a jump.

I think the collision boxes on the bridge-pieces might be too big. I'll try adjusting that.