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20
Gender
Male
Location
High Wycombe, Buckinghamshire, England
Website
http://fano.victorygames.info
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polgamez@interia.pl
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The Messenger
(9 votes)
The Messenger is a story about one young woman and her aim - delivering important message.
But how long it will take? What difficulties she will find on her way? What is in the message? No one shall know.
Game inspirited by Canabalt, Mirror's Edge, and Warhammer - it was created by Gien (GFX), Wyvern (Game Theme), Draq (Fano mascot), Fanotherpg (Coding).
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Beautiful parallax, but the thing that gets me is when you get caught in situations that simply are impossible to get past. Sometimes the falling ground will be at the point you cant get to the higher platform at all, which is somewhat frustrating.
It all depends where you land and what is your speed. If you will be to long for a falling platform, you will surely die - this is why I make a jump like it is.
If you just press it, you will jump with high gravity, but the longer you ran (ran on the platform and not jump over or from it or roll!) the higher you can jump after holding your jump button for a while. What's more if you will be quick enough even with short jumping it will be higher - which makes game sometimes easier.
Unfortunately lack of time (uni, work) caused that I couldn't use power of the game as I wanted (check yellow comments in game frame).
Also if someone would be asking I used counter for speed and not variable because I could restrict it max and min value with no events.
Very canabalt-ish, except this is much more cruel. I've got the same problem as Eliyahu, except I feel it's worse. Quite often the first high jump I need to make doesn't even go as high as the next platform is, regardless of how many times I've jumped prior, or how long I press the button. The buildings can kinda fall down from under the feet quite suddenly, to a point where you're in the air and land between the falling building under without having any control over the results anymore. Certainly this happened in Canabalt too, but I think I had to at least run like crazy. x3 Luck steps in a way bit too much.
Still, overall a good looking game. You should polish it a bit and make a proper balanced non-contest edition.
I'd like to give it a spin.
Yea I know about that issue HitmanN and it's why I set first 3 platforms as straight ones so you can get some speed. Unfortunately I didn't have time to polish game as I would like to... And yeah I found a bug - that platform with guys (the highest one) is too high for several pixels (I screw with hot spot) - so it's seems to fly about 8-10 pixels above the bottom of the level :/
But still about several attempts you get the feel of the jump. But yea it's hard and Canabaltish to which we don't hide - guess in what we are playing during breaks on lectures
I'll rate yours because you rated mine
Gameplay - 8/20
The controls are basic and the way the gravity works is pretty cool. However, platforms pop up right in front of our feet and mess you up and sometimes the jump is way too high.
General Professionalism - 8/10
The intro and main screen looks good. The game is a bit glitchy.
Graphics - 5/5
Very good and detailed.
Sounds - 4/5
The music is good but it doesn't keep going throughout all the frames.
Bonus 10/10
Overal - 35/50
Cheers Root I appreciate your effort
Just two questions.
1st one - What is so glitchy in the game?
2nd one - How I could improve gameplay in your opinion?
By glitchy its like stuff comes from under your feet without warning and stuff is way too high. You are killed with no way to stop it: something that shouldn't happen in a game.
Those two things could've been fixed. Maybe the different platforms could be different colors. To solve the super high platform maybe at the start of the game it could give you three super jumps that you can use throughout the run.
There are also a few other options for the game. Maybe multiple levels or moving enemies.
Still, it's a good game, especially graphics and sound.
What you mean by stuff which is coming under your feet? Barrels? Or falling wall?
And yes I know that it's hard, but it's not so hard
Sometimes you jump off of a high tower onto what looks like it is a flat plane. But as soon as you land on it the platform drops down and there is a platform right in front of you that didn't drop down; thus the platform that didn't move is right in front of your feet. Sorry I wasn't specific.
What Root said there. The buildings fall too suddenly sometimes to be enjoyable. There should always be enough time for an average person to react in such an early stage of the game. I usually do relatively well in Canabalt, but here I'm lucky to make 3-5 jumps before suddenly having a building collapse under me in a split second.
Hardcore stuff. xP
It was easier but Gien decided that it's too easy, so I changed it a bit, unfortunatelly because lack of time I couldn't polish it a bit more.
Mirror's Edge is all I can think of while playing this game. Great job!
Can't get higher than 450 or so, quite fun though.
As far as graphics go, the silhouette icon of the player looks out of place, as in, resized too large and pixelated. The smoke at the bottom of the towers could've been done so it faded off at the edge and looked seamless.
Gameplay is great, addictive, and, as far as I've played, original. A suggestion would be to have the player drop straight down when letting go of X, to be able to land and jump in time, or click X again and the cape fills up with air, lifting the player up and to glide down. Pretty much a double jump.
The Water buckets (?) could have been more visible as well, but overall it worked.
Paralaxing is great, the effects were all nice.
Music and Sounds suited the game. I didn't get far enough to see whether or not the music sped up based on the progress, but if not that would be a cool feature
Great Job, and I wish you luck in the competition.
Cheers Jacob, we planned to add some more things into the game but 20 events limited me drastically I even had to mix some things, but I'm happy that you like this a bit hardcore game.
And yea I plan to improve it soon, after competition if it would go well - in meaning that people would like it.
I loved this one. I also met with those frustrating parts where it seems to be impossible to pass sometimes, but hey, no game is perfect; I enjoyed playing it and couldn't stop it for a while:)
And those some parts are possible to pass if you've got good timing and speed
I've played about a third of the games now, and this is my favorite. Some ideas:
You could use a separate engine, now that you aren't limited.
Maybe if you pressed a certain button and you weren't high enough to make the jump you could grab the ledge and lift yourself up.
Instead of being linear, the game could have a Y dimension, and have steadily taller towers and castles to add to the challenge (Cue the song "Castles in the sky")
Again, great job!
Not to be a pain in the butt, but a few things I notice right off of the bat -
- The 'g' in 'Fanotherpg' is cut off
- 'presents' should be 'present' (plural)
- The silhouette is a little too big
- "You ran for x metres, and it's the longest ran ever!" could change the second 'ran' to 'run' (makes more sense to me, but yours makes sense after looking at it for a while)
- "It's better from the previous attempt..." could change 'from' to 'than' (same thing as above)
- "It was your x attempt..." doesn't really work, because for example it would be for example '1st' '2nd' '8th' to be grammatically correct (Try "You've attempted x times..." or "That was attempt number x...")
- It might be nice to do what Jacob suggested and have you hang from walls that you were close to making, even if it doesn't bring you back up but makes you fall. It seems to make more sense than hitting the wall with your foot and immediately floating away
Really addicting game, beautiful parallax, wonderfully challenging!
I really hope you continue working on this game
(sorry I'm a stickler for grammar)
Also, for your counter, it looks like it was done in photoshop then copied over. Do not do this, instead, delete the background and save it as a png, then import it. The alpha channels will come with it.
It was done like that Jacob but it ended like you see - unfortunately. And I didn't have time to look into it - sorry for that.
RickyRombo thanks for your suggestions I will try to bring them to live ASAP. But I've got some problems with my game - http://www.clickteam.com/epicenter/ubbthreads.php?ubb=showflat&Number=177229#Post177229 ...
Which causes that if I would go back to this project I would have to change whole platform engine. Any ideas?
I can't log in to CT Forums right now, but I'll post from here:
What exactly do you mean, does the hero get pushed with the platform? What exactly is the problem? I get that it has to do with the player and the active (moving) platforms, but is the problem the player moving to the left?
Great game! A bit hard (like Canabalt was) but really exciting. I liked the graphics and music very much, too.
Yea RickyRombo. I mean that hero moves with the platform when she shouldn't nah... earlier on it was working fine on my laptop now it's not working at all, so I'm confused.
@Fano
I don't understand what you mean. It worked perfectly fine in my entry, TowerCraft. Make sure there is no background to the image so there is alpha transparency before you save as png.
the gameplay is waaay too broken for this to be good at the moment.
Cecil, could you give some more details about your 'broken concept', because I would like to improve this after competition as much as I can.
sure.
1. there really is no sense of speed. you said it was partly inspired by canabalt. which does this realllllllly well. try and simulate that more.
2. the character sometimes rolls for no reason putting me in a situation where i die. rolling after i jump, or fall very small distances, randomly.
3. buildings are sometimes situated where its impossible to get to the next building.
4. it wasnt very clear if the enemy looking sprites on some buildings could hurt me or not at the beginning.
5. a non gameplay aspect that i found kind of broken was the sound design. well... there really isnt any. the music doesnt really go with the game imo and is brutally repetative, and there are no sound effects.
1 it's not so visible because of repetition of GFX and some issues with engine but it's good point thought.
2 it's not randomly - you are colliding with barrels which unfortunately are a bit to dark so on some screen displays it's hard to notice them.
3 in canabalt such situations also happened but not so often, but yea I will correct that one!
4 there are no 'enemies' in this version and they are all turned back to you, so I don't know why you counted them as enemies.
5 unfortunately you're right about this one, also I would like to correct this part.
I assumed they were enemies too, at a glance you can't really tell which way they're facing...
On a side note, I was wondering what you meant when you said nothing happened after 0 on Anteater...
exactly. and it looked like they were waving swords around or something.
Yea bacause they are 'shouting' on enemies but thanks for claryfing that one out.
Gameplay – 16/20 - Sometimes frustrating - buildings heigh isn't coded properly.
General Professionalism – 7/10 - Some issues here and there.
Appropriate Graphics to the Game - 4/5 - Could be more clear/contrast and more of them.
Appropriate Music and Sounds – 3/5 - Lack of sounds.
5 POINT BONUS Event: 5/5 - All events are commented.
5 POINT BONUS Flash/Java: 5/5 - It compiles to both Java App and Applet.
Total 40/50 = 80% = 8*
//To be fair and scoring all by the same principles//
I'd agree with Root's total score, but not his individual ratings. I'd say...
Gameplay - 13/20 Sloppiness
General Professionalism - 5/10 Grammatical, graphical, visual errors (such as the enemies, the water buckets being hardly visible, the other textual errors stated before, and the toe-jam death)
Appropriate Graphics - 4/5 (likewise)
Appropriate Music and Sounds - 3/5 (likewise)
and of course you had the bonus.
So 35/50. But I give you stars for fun and general experience
heheh... I guess you're right, Fano. I meant to take 3 points of on gameplay for sloppiness.
To be honest it was my first platform styled game (where I was coding the game itself) ever so it was general experience... But hmm I've got quite nice 'Fan'(o)'base' so I just let known Polish people about my game and they tried to make it better
Just example: http://fabrykagier.com/gra/fadex-vs-fanotherpg--the-messenger-10159
Who could think about that? And whay would you say?
BTW RickyRombo in your scoring it's 8*
Not 7 like in Root's! But still I appreciate your different and honest scores, you even don't know what it means for me!
rating your own game - LOL!
heres an completly independent view...
if you want to see an example of this game that DOES play well, and isnt just plain horrible to play - then see dizzy doo's - turbulent tundra
a game identical to this, but is well made.
regarding your inane obsession with comments, this would be certainly one i would NOT read, because it is so poorly coded.
if you borrowed the engine from tundra, you'd have a nice game on your hands.
this has better gfx than tundra, but has awful mechanics. tundra wins hands down.
thats my opinion anyway. and im not going to pretend im a judge and rate it in any detailed way apart from imo, you got 2 stars for the gfx only.
sorry if my blunt opinion offends you, but the game still has to atleast play well - which it doesnt.
dan-ac I promised that I will play ALL games, and comment ALL of them, so that includes my entry.
Also I commented all entries on the same fair basis with some comments.
You had right to comment as you did but, take one point. I wanted code to be as simple and basic - you call it unprofessional - as it is possible, to make game easy to modify for everyone, and comments are just as long as they should be IMHO, but still thanks for comment.
And check fan-game, which is imho slightly better even than Tundra, which is a good game.
Danjo can you try and give "constructive" comments without being so offensive, please?
haha.. i'm not sure how to comment on this game constructively, all I can really say is there is something fundamentally wrong at its very core, the game mechanics just don't work. I can try my hardest 5 times in a row and get low scores, but then i can play while hardly trying at all and get a score 10 times higher, it seems completely up to chance if you get a good score or not.. it doesn't feel like skill is rewarded.
i think the main problem is there is no 'variable jump height'. that is, if you just tap x you still jump half a mile in the air, i think fixing that would fix most of this games problems.
Dave_C I know some issues of the game and so on really influence gameplay, especially that one, that game is so hard - where my GFX artist decided in last moment to make it much harder because it was too easy for him.
Unfortunately those and other decisions related on GFX, caused some problems with the core gameplay mechanics, and it's why I plan to redesign the engine, if it will be worth it (understand if people would like such type of game). Cause it was unfortunately compo entry and not full title.
But still thanks for quite detailed opinion, and people don't be ashamed scoring! I want to know if you would like to see corrected version of it or not.
I feel like an idiot saying this, but I can't even figure out how to play.
Just press X
That's it? Ok, then I guess I did know how to play. I just can't play well.
Yea in this one only X for jump, nothing more
For interested people I started a project page at TDC for a corrected second part so if you are interest in improving the game please post there - http://create-games.com/project.asp?view=main&id=1830
Oh and Yea I make a list of all of your suggestions placed here.