Treasure Tower - Flash edition

[davidn]

Climb the Treasure Tower before the clock strikes midnight!

Spurred on by an offhand comment on Fusion Roundtable, I spent this week hammering at one of my old games to convert it to a Flash project.

Treasure Tower - Flash edition

Not a whole lot of the game had to be changed to allow it to be converted - most notably all the music and sound actions had to be replaced and I had to modify the way it saved so that it was allowable in Flash - I'll post a fuller article on what I had to do to convert it later on. Otherwise, most of the work just went into polishing up the presentation a bit. It's also now connected up to MochiMedia and its high score boards, so you can still compete with other players for the best times and other records - I've even gone as far as trying out sharing it on Facebook.

I must say that I quickly found myself on the receiving end of karmic retribution for scoring the game entirely with Scott Joplin ragtimes, because all I can hear in my head now is endless manic piano music - for the benefit of everyone else, as special consideration in this version, I've put in the option to make it stop.

Comments

[tamakun.livejournal.com]

This is pretty fun to play! I like how the clock's gears are constantly spinning - gears are a favourite element of mine, and coupled with the clock, gives a rather big sense of urgency.

If I can suggest, I noticed that the text in the instructional pages refers to "Button 1" as opposed to "Shift", and only displays the first line of text on each page. It could be just my computer - running Firefox on Kubuntu, Flash version 10,0,22,87.

[tamakun.livejournal.com]

Did I just see my character consume a plant in a flowerpot as food? *laugh*

[davidn]

I love having stories to tell about game elements like this - the clock was actually something that was created as an emergency replacement for something that didn't work! When first making the Windows version in 2006, it was going to be a Knightmare-themed game, so I was planning to use the life force sequence from the programme (which looks like this) for the timer. But I quickly found out that loading and jumping to a specific point in a video for every room just took far too long, so the clock with its spinning gears was thought up to take its place - and it became very iconic of the game for something that was never planned to be in it from the start :)

I think that the differing fonts between opreating systems will be the problem that you're seeing (although I should have caught that "Button 1" mistake...!) - I tried to catch everywhere where that happened, but it looks like I missed that. Never mind, Linux people will be the most likely to get the idea without instructions anyway ;)

[ravenworks.livejournal.com]

the Fusion To Flash thingie doesn't let you embed fonts?

[davidn]

It does, but my issue was that I was doing the conversion on a different computer from where I'd done the Windows version of the game, so the font files that I used originally weren't there either.

[ravenworks.livejournal.com]

Well, then replace them with the fonts that you're using for now, and embed those. ;) Flash doesn't play nice with non-embedded fonts, in a number of ways...

[tamakun.livejournal.com]

Ah-ha! So that scary skull-like icon you have is from Knightmare?

[kjorteo]

 

[tamakun.livejournal.com]

 

[davidn]

Yes, it is! It was one of the most game-like TV programmes ever, and that was in the last few frames of the "health bar" (it was replaced by decreasingly morbid things later on in the programme's lifetime, because they went soft).

[ravenworks.livejournal.com]

That was great! I can't stand games where you're up against a timer, generally, but the ragtime thing makes it feel playfully frantic instead of deadly urgent.. and the fact that you can reset your mistakes every three levels keeps the pressure from building up too high!

I take it (from the fact that I saw a level twice) that the spinning numbers arbitrarily decide the contents of the floor that you're about to see? What a subtle way to make people feel as though they're at the mercy of the machine ;)

[davidn]

Excellent :) I've got the idea that you don't like being... pressured or made to feel stressed, even in game form, so if this game didn't set off those fears too badly then I can think it successful. In later towers, the food gets gradually scarcer and the potential time-draining enemies get more difficult to avoid...

If you want a glance into how it works - each number consistently corresponds to a specific room. What the game does when you select a tower is to dump a load of room numbers into a list - the possible rooms vary between each tower, with the later towers starting out with all possibilities, but most towers use just subsets of the full selection so that very hard rooms don't appear in the Novice mode, for example. Then, each time the room selector comes up, a random number is removed from that list and displayed before you're sent off to play through the level that has that number.

And I never really made that connection in my head, but... that's perhaps a good way to summarize it :)

[ravenworks.livejournal.com]

So, wait, if it's removed from the list, how did I play it twice?
And, I guess the number that comes up is then modulo the number of available levels?

Oh, and -- I guess every level has a food point in it, and it's just empty if it's not a "food" level?

[davidn]

Absolutely right! (To the last question - I'll answer them backwards). Another thing that happens on the reels screen is that it decrements the food counter - and if the food counter is 0 when a level is entered, you get a bit of food generated at the level's designated food point. If the food counter is 0 on entering the reels screen, then it sets it back up to a random number within the tower style's nastiness bounds (I think the Novice tower only ever goes three or four rooms between food).

The room numbers actually have no strict assignment or order, though some of the numbers were chosen according to the room (001 is the first level that I made for the game, any repetition of three numbers is a bonus treasure room) - I remember keeping an Excel spreadsheet of the numbers that I'd used so far, and how those numbers mapped to the actual "physical" order of levels. There are two hundred rooms, a little short of the thousand possibilities that I had in the reels!

As for how you got a room twice in the same run... I'm not sure, can you remember which one it was? I haven't encountered that during my testing and it's not meant to happen, but some of them share similar visual designs. As you can imagine, I'm familiar enough with each and every room to tell the difference.

[ravenworks.livejournal.com]

Soooooomething like this.



I think the enemies were the weird ghosty thing in your thumbnail.


Ahhhhh, so... I fell for your spinning tumblers in assuming that the number was picked before the level! ;) I understand now.

[davidn]

That's right, it's far easier to get the reels to display a pre-determined number rather than to make sure that they stop on one that's legitimate :) What the program sees isn't what the player sees...

I had a look through the levels and realized that there were two very similar "ghost" levels in particular, with roughly the same layout but one with horizontal ghosts and one with vertical ones... I'm going to hope that this is what you saw! Though people have been mentioning problems with the Random mode later on, so there might be something off about the selection...

[ravenworks.livejournal.com]

Yeah, at the rate I was running through them, and having only seen each one once, I can promise you I wouldn't have noticed a change in the ghosts' behaviours ;) That's probably what it was..

[davidn]

Like I mentioned a short while ago, the difference between what you know as a developer and what the player sees is amazing... it's hard to adjust for difficulty that comes from not knowing the game inside-out! Not everyone instantly knows what's in room 001, or 242, or 119, and they might not learn it subconsciously even by the ninth or tenth time that number came up, but for a lot of the rooms, I know what's going to come up even when I just see the numbers roll into place.