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

[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?