Todo the Tea-Mouse - Prototype 1

[davidn]

For a few weeks now, I've been saying that I'll put something playable of Todo up, but I just never got it into a position where it felt remotely presentable, even with the caveat that this was not complete work. However, tonight I think I've got it to a pretty good place to call a first prototype - most of the interface works and you can complete a task, so you can see the rough mechanics of the game. Have a go at this!


http://www.clickteam.info/davidn/games/todo/zip/todoprototype1.zip
Your mission, should you choose to accept it, is to acquire a "PipeBit" (which you can't use yet) and collect all 71 available Quest Points. Use the arrow keys with X to jump, and Up to interact with things - Q brings up the menu. You'll find that the game has some holes of varying degrees of hilarity and you have a couple of abilities which you won't really have from the start of the game, but feel free to poke around and do the unexpected - you may be surprised at what I've thought of (or more likely what I haven't).

It may seem slightly disappointing that I've been working on this for a few weeks to achieve roughly three minutes of gameplay, but so much of that time has gone into the backend - taking the base Crystal Towers 2 engine (which you'll see evidence of) and doing it... right. I've grown to love the Hatogate scripting engine as it grows more and more into what the game needs it to do - the game is pretty easy to expand now, and the game so far serves as a decent showcase of what it can do in terms of interacting with objects and characters. The scripts and rooms are all plain text in the "rooms" folder, so you can open them up and fiddle around with them if you like. Best of luck with that.

I haven't been as pleased with my game creation in a long time!

Comments

[lupineangel.livejournal.com]

This is really charming! I can see the Dizzy influences already (along with a touch of Okami when you get to cross things off your list with a big horizontal swipe), but it's really... sweet, right from the more peaceful music down to the Green Hill Zone feel to the place you're in. I can see some of the leftovers from CT2 (Todo drops gems when he gets hit by the snails, for example), but that's cool; is there going to be an equivalent for dropping QP or items or something when hit, or is he going to get a health bar like Bernard? Or, alternatively, to keep the more peaceful feel of it, is he going to be invulnerable, but enemies just knock you off platforms or cause similarly annoying effects and make your quest harder?

I found a bug, as well; the way the grab-the-wall grass is positioned next to Mister Ringtail's key, it's possible to jump up and on top of the wall at the edge of the level, then walk left and fall off it and all the way down to the bottom and die from falling off the screen; that's not so much the bug as it is me being a dick and screwing around with the system, but when the scene resets, it doesn't reset your accumulated QP total, meaning that on my first run I scored 91 out of 71 quest points. :P

I'm intrigued by the possibilities of the 'Aladdin's Cave' of teapots halfway down the hill; I keep thinking that if I can get in there, there'll be a Tea Genie or something in one of them. (It's not quite a lamp, but in this housing market, what're you gonna do? :P)

Awesome stuff - loving it so far!

D.F.

[davidn]

I knew someone was going to do that ;) I'm impressed that the game coped with it, though, because I hadn't written in anything specifically to cope with falling off the bottom of the screen (I'm going to avoid those entirely this time around, they're annoying!)

The question of enemies is something that I haven't worked out yet! Up until last night I was planning the game to have a very traditional, CT2-like relationship with enemies - they take your health off if touched, you jump on them, they explode - but having written in just the bouncing on the snails... I'm beginning to wonder if I even need a health bar or a way of dispatching enemies. If I go that route, I'm going to have to be very creative to keep up the feel of excitement and danger of, say, exploring the lower reaches of the caves... obstacles could still be Prince of Persia-like platform action, but I'm not sure how to have the same sense of enemies impeding progress. I'd also like there to be a few climactic boss fights in the game, so... I've no idea, yet.

[lupineangel.livejournal.com]

I assumed the 'death by falling off the bottom of the screen' coding was part of the script left over from CT2; if not, then yes, that's very impressive indeed! :P

What about something like, if enemies deal too many hits/too much damage to Todo in a short space of time, his teapot breaks, and he has to return to the cave to get another one before he can do anything else? Although the backtracking could get tedious... maybe he scurries back to the start of the room he's in? I don't know; you're right, that is a hard one.

D.F.

[davidn]

That's right about falling off the bottom of the screen, but... CT2 had a lot of mechanics in place to handle that, setting your health, directing the game to the intro frame to restart the level, and so on... somehow, in ripping out the bits I wasn't using, what was left handled that eventuality perfectly. (Apart from the save reset thing.)

I love the image of the teapot as health, at least :)

[crassadon.livejournal.com]

Oh~ To-do is a bad pun!!! DX


I think the character is a bit too agile when performing aerial acrobatics. His land based movements seems fitting for a monk, though. Monks are only allowed to move quickly if they are from Asia.

I seemed to have encounted a glitch where, after opening the inventory to no purpose, and then closing it; attempting to open it again locks the controls for several seconds, and does not open the menu or anything.

Is David N from England? Yes, yes he is.

[davidn]

But I'm from Scotland...

[crassadon.livejournal.com]

Notthisagain!!DX

[crassadon.livejournal.com]

Also: will the main character ever has a sword? =3

[tamakun.livejournal.com]

The Cavern of Teapots reminds me of an Eternal Darkness sanity effect...

I'll note for my playthrough (which, right after posting it on my Tumblr, I then played it!), that I noticed a bit of screen tearing when the screen scrolled in any direction. I don't remember that happening in Crystal Towers 2, so I figured I'd bring it to your attention.

I also noticed that heading to the screen to the right to Todo's house and heading left from Ringtail's house just repeated the same screen. I'm sure that will be expanded upon later :)

Wonderful game, I'm surprised how much you've made already! So you've put two engines together, as it were?

[davidn]

Ah, I'm using a different DirectX display mode (largely to speed things up compared to CT2) - I may have to include some options to configure it if it causes screen tearing for some people.

And yes, the game is based on the platform environment for Crystal Towers 2 with an editor and room loader on top of it (instead of every level's layout being made directly in MMF2 and packed into the EXE), and whenever you interact with an object, it sends a message to the script interpreter that I took from Hatogate, which I'm extending to do the things that I need it to do for a platform adventure. The cave of teapots was a placeholder, but comments on Tumblr have left me wanting to explore the possibilities!

[ravenworks.livejournal.com]

OK, to start I'll reiterate the stuff I mentioned on IM:
- jumping is lovely, especially with that animation<3
- jumping/landing sounds are a bit aggressive for my taste
- text voices and text 'slowing' system are charming
- the font itself is rasterized entirely too blurry
- todo's depth-sorting with regard to the walls

and on to new things:
- The music is lovely! :D
- The camera movement's is much too swift and abrupt for me (I felt the same way about CT2). The camera needs some inertia/momentum (i.e. acceleration) to smooth out its movements, so it's less distracting. (If only vertically; todo's horizontal speed is slight enough that it's not really noticeable, but with such a rapid jump I feel like the camera is always being jerked around.)
- It's a bit odd to have the 'investigate' button make the camera jerk if there's nothing to investigate, come to think of it (although a slower camera acceleration might mitigate that anyway.)
- Hill Y position should be based around the center of the character's sprite, not their edge -- Todo's robe looks a bit odd flying out into space ;) Same for the snails...
- Needing to select the correct quest item from a menu seems needlessly archaic, compared to the character just recognizing that it's in your inventory the next time you speak to them.... (but, I could be convinced that you should keep it in, if you plan to have humorous responses to each wrong item attempt ;P)
- Similarly, it felt a bit weird to have to manually pick up the key, but I could see it being more natural if it were hanging on something, rather than floating in air like pickups do.
- Maybe collectable things could have a flicker/glow? I almost didn't notice the pipe... (Or is identifying them in context meant to be part of the game, as in adventure games?)

Augh! Comment length!

[ravenworks.livejournal.com]

- Your upward vertical speed shouldn't come to a stop so immediately when you're on a kick-off wall... I DO get the feeling that it waits until your upward trajectory has stopped before triggering the slide, but that still has you moving downward FASTER than you would have been at that point if you were jumping in empty space, when really it should be the opposite, no? It makes me feel like the walls are dragging me downward, rather than that I'm SLOWING my descent... (so, your speed sliding down a jumpy wall should slowly accumulate from zero like it does in freefall jumps, not instantly snap to full dragging speed -- it makes me feel like I'm travelling downwards too quickly, even though dragging speed is slower than your freefall eventually becomes.)
- The hitzone for the dragging walls is a bit over-generous: try hanging from the first tail-pole (on the left), then slide all the way to the wall, then hold down and tap jump. It pushes you away from the wall like you just kicked off. You can do the same thing at the top where the key was: just stand against the wall, then tap jump; it'll throw you aside like you kicked off.
- This makes me notice something else about the kick-walls: you go WAY further if you aren't holding against the wall when you jump off of them (even if you let go of the key a moment after jumping) -- this is only a problem because most games with that sort of move have trained me to expect that you need to keep holding against the wall or else you'll let go of the slide and drop like a stone.... so I was always leaping away from the wall with force that the game thinks I intended to put towards coming back to the wall, even though I switched to pushing away as quick as I could once I was in the air. (Actually, is that how it's meant to work? You go REALLY far when you kick off the wall without holding a direction..!)
- This is a pet peeve, but I love jumping across the screen boundary in games -- a la Mega Man -- and it always feels weird and artificial to clunk against a wall until I land on the ground at which point I'm suddenly able to walk offscreen ;)
- Another pet peeve: separate speeds for horizontal and vertical parallax (or in this case, parallax and no parallax) always feels artificial to me. (Super Metroid gets away with it in Crateria, but only because those whooshing clouds are so dizzying already, I think...)
- Maybe there should be a sound when you hit your head on a ceiling? Just to establish that you stopped because the thing you touched is foreground rather than background, and not just because it was the highest you can jump. (I guess it doesn't matter that much..)
- The cave walls stick out a bit too far from their collision boxes, I think



While I'm at it, a few bug reports just in case:
- if you start or stop moving downhill on a slope, you'll "land" continuously for a few frames.
- you can send Todo into an adorable moonwalk by tapping the opposite direction while holding either direction ;)
- Todo can investigate things in midair, inducing a magical temporary hovering ability :)
- If you graze a jump-up-through platform JUST right, Todo will land on it but stay in his 'jumping upwards' animation and be unable to jump again until he slides off the platform. (Try it on the thin platforms above the teapot breeding grounds.)

I think that's everything? X3 I have to go to bed regardless... Sorry there's so much. Let me wind down by saying I absolutely can't wait for you to have a chance to flesh it all out with your sense of humor and whimsy :) I already love it, but I can just picture what it'll be like once you've breathed more life into it :)

[davidn]

Kick-off walls!

They've pretty much been imported from Crystal Towers 2 as-is just now, so the distance they hurl you is definitely off (the gravity values have been adjusted from CT2 but those haven't). Deciding what to do about the distance travelled if holding/not holding away is a tricky issue, because some players will habitually hold towards the wall and others won't...

I noticed the awkwardness of jumping at them from below as well, and just thinking about it, the idea of the feel of grappling on and hanging still for a moment before gradually accelerating down is great - I'll see how that works out.

The boundary at the edge of the stage was intentional, to prevent players accidentally moving between areas if you reached the edge while jumping... I hadn't considered that people might want to do it intentionally. It raises a few issues with how to handle it which may not be as simple as it first appears, but I will bear it in mind.

[ravenworks.livejournal.com]

For about the people holding/not-holding towards the wall.... just have the kick-off wall's force ignore keyboard directions, and let the player's mid-air momentum come from what keys they hold once they're in the air? (Or, maybe a more obvious 'latch' moment would just make it clear that you don't have to keep holding the key... if people have a moment to hang there, they might be more likely to test things, rather than going "aah I'm falling" and going by instincts like I did at first...)

How would you reach the edge of the screen accidentally by jumping? It seems like putting in invisible walls to work around a level design shortcoming is a strange way to approach it, if I'm understanding right?

[ravenworks.livejournal.com]

Ah! I knew I was forgetting something.... it's very distracting when an appearing word of dialogue gets to halfway through and THEN wraps onto the next line. (Y'know what I mean?)

[davidn]

I know exactly what you mean (working on responses to the others)! I meant to fix that but then changed to using a variable-width font and was no longer sure how to do it (I suppose I could 'preview' the next word invisibly and if it wraps over, insert a line break manually - that sounds quite promising...)

[davidn]

All right, thanks :) Let's see what we can do with this...

- I turned down the volume of the music because I'd accidentally made the coin-collecting sound effects too quiet and wanted to test them - possibly putting that back would make the jump/land sounds less noticeable in comparison.

- Is the font on the notepad/inventory OK, or is that as blurred as the conversation font?

- Trying to think of what I could do to avoid this, as MMF2's environment always puts objects that are part of the collision mask behind active objects (with movement/animation)... I could copy the background layer to the foreground as well, but that might slow things down. Or limit it so that only pieces that border empty space are copied to the foreground... hmm. I'll see if I can do something clever! (The effect itself I agree with)

- The camera was a definite sticking point in CT2 as well, even though I spent a lot of time trying to get it right and not disorient people... I thought I'd mitigated it by changing the horizontal movement (to just nail him to the centre of the screen), but I didn't realize that vertical was an issue as well! I'll see what I can do... what I'm trying to avoid is the feeling that (as with a camera that has some acceleration lag time) it's falling behind and you can't see what you're landing on.

- Do you think "investigate" should be an action button as well? I'm trying to think of how other games I've seen handled it... I know Cave Story used the down arrow, which threw me a bit, but I can't remember if that was shared with "look down".

- Yes, the key is meant to be an object - it's meant to be hanging on a branch that I forgot to put in (It's so easy to forget, as odd as it sounds, that people coming at it for the first time can't see that.) The answer to manual object selection is more complicated and I'll split it off into a separate post!

- You've reminded me that I meant to do what Simon the Sorcerer did and have an option to highlight the interactable objects on the screen so that you're not hunting around... that contributed immensely in Simon 2's status in being the only adventure game I've ever completed without a walkthrough!

[ravenworks.livejournal.com]

- The notepad text isn't great, but it isn't as bad as the dialogue text is.

- It's alright for the camera to travel very fast, it just needs to take a moment to get up to that speed, so keeping up with the player shouldn't be a problem.... and, the way most games avoid the feeling of being behind the character is to actually center AHEAD of whichever direction the character is facing -- as in, if the character is facing right, they'll be positioned about 1/3 of the way across the screen (so that even when the camera is playing catchup, they never get farther right than the 50% mark or so).

- I think investigate should be a button, it usually is... Cave Story was a weird exception (and it WAS definitely shared with Look Down). Then again, it could be a remappable option?

[davidn]

I sort of started my long post about automation of controls in games and selecting quest items from a menu, but then realized that I was mostly talking rubbish.

In the particular case you mentioned, though... if you're using an item on a character rather than an inanimate object, it does make sense for them to recognize something's in your inventory. However, I'd intended that bit to be a brief tutorial on how to go into your inventory and use items!

On the whole, I would like to keep having to select quest items in, and if responding to wrong item choices in a funny way is the writing price I have to pay for that then I will gladly do it :)

[ravenworks.livejournal.com]

There's automation at one extreme, but there's "can you figure out to use the pipe-fixer on the pipe that needs fixing?" on the other extreme -- they both feel condescending in their own way ;) But, I might be way off in my guess about how inventory items are going to be used in this game in a more general sense -- is there going to be some Adventure Game style "use pudding on komodo dragon" or is it mostly going to be of the fetch quest variety to macguffin people through platforming segments?

But yes, this conversation is mostly academic because I do want to see remarks about attempts to just dispose of your to-do list in various places. XD

[davidn]

:D That would be an original solution to the game! Throw NOTEPAD in LAKE, go home.

I'm really hoping to avoid straight fetch-quests (notwithstanding the ones that I've put in about two minutes into the game) and have the game feel more like an adventure game with platforming elements.

[ravenworks.livejournal.com]

Ah, okay, that makes more sense then :)

[budgiebin.livejournal.com]

I still vote for Teapot Rattmann. Just strange little inaccessible teapot caverns in every level that has something strange in it sometimes, until you eventually find the person responsible and you discover why they're there.

EDIT: maybe the teapot caverns themselves give you a clue to their creator :D

[davidn]

I love that :) I've had a list of things to put in this game for several years now and it just keeps on growing!