.ISO - Part One by Kortuga98
Here it is. ISO - Part one. I may make a Part Two. Who knows. I'm just a bit fed up with coding at the moment.
ISO is a linear story-based platformer in a future where technological implants in humans have caused them to rapidly evolve into nearly completely mechanical monstrosities bent on destroying every non-implanted human in existence.
As a last-ditch effort, the human Resistance put all their efforts and resources into creating one final weapon- You- A super-soldier of biotechnological make that would be capable of destroying the entire machine army in a fell swoop of a fist.
Before you could be activated, though, the Resistance was seemingly destroyed.
For thirty years you have waited, dormant, in the ruins of the old Resistance outpost... Until you were activated with a mysterious radiowave transmission from deep space.
Now, it is up to you to discover the fate of the Resistance, the meaning behind your activation, and the shattering secrets hidden in the fabrics woven by time!
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INSTRUCTIONS:
Up, Down, Left, Right to move.
X to shoot.
Z to jump.
C to see which keys you currently possess.
Hold Shift to dash.
Hold X until you are glowing to unleash a charged shot.
Shift+Z+Direction to open a door for which you have the key.
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This game took about 30 hours of total nonstop work to complete. I put a damn lot of effort into it, so please take the time to download and score it. Additionally, please be gentle with the criticism, this is only my second game and I'm 14. Thank you, and enjoy.
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Also, check out N247's awesome game, http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-24/?action=preview&uid=7563
EDIT:
Apparently the movement isn't too great. I thought it was good, but hey. If it's the speed of the movement that's bothersome, just hold shift to dash everywhere.
~Kortuga
ISO is a linear story-based platformer in a future where technological implants in humans have caused them to rapidly evolve into nearly completely mechanical monstrosities bent on destroying every non-implanted human in existence.
As a last-ditch effort, the human Resistance put all their efforts and resources into creating one final weapon- You- A super-soldier of biotechnological make that would be capable of destroying the entire machine army in a fell swoop of a fist.
Before you could be activated, though, the Resistance was seemingly destroyed.
For thirty years you have waited, dormant, in the ruins of the old Resistance outpost... Until you were activated with a mysterious radiowave transmission from deep space.
Now, it is up to you to discover the fate of the Resistance, the meaning behind your activation, and the shattering secrets hidden in the fabrics woven by time!
--------
INSTRUCTIONS:
Up, Down, Left, Right to move.
X to shoot.
Z to jump.
C to see which keys you currently possess.
Hold Shift to dash.
Hold X until you are glowing to unleash a charged shot.
Shift+Z+Direction to open a door for which you have the key.
--------
This game took about 30 hours of total nonstop work to complete. I put a damn lot of effort into it, so please take the time to download and score it. Additionally, please be gentle with the criticism, this is only my second game and I'm 14. Thank you, and enjoy.
--------
Also, check out N247's awesome game, http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-24/?action=preview&uid=7563
EDIT:
Apparently the movement isn't too great. I thought it was good, but hey. If it's the speed of the movement that's bothersome, just hold shift to dash everywhere.
~Kortuga
| Windows (With ALL files) | http://dl.dropbox.com/u/72107121/ISO%20-%20Part%20One.zip |
| Windows (.EXE only) | http://dl.dropbox.com/u/72107121/ISO%20-%20Part%20One.exe |
| Source | http://dl.dropbox.com/u/72107121/ISO%20-%20Part%20One%20(Source).zip |
| Original URL | https://ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-24/?action=preview&uid=12952 |
Ratings
| Coolness | 53% | 3 |
| Overall | 3.00 | 357 |
| Audio | 3.21 | 124 |
| Fun | 2.52 | 511 |
| Graphics | 4.12 | 52 |
| Humor | 2.07 | 368 |
| Innovation | 2.40 | 563 |
| Mood | 3.33 | 94 |
| Theme | 2.40 | 565 |
Graphics is good, even great.
Movements are awful.
Hero moves like a turtle.
Jumps on walls in super meat boy style were made very inconvenient.
I stuck on the red door,it didn't open, even though I had red key.
I think I elaborate on the movement issues. First off your character moves really slow when not running; painfully slow. The jump is also way too floaty, the player should move up faster and fall faster given the tone of the game.
The wall jumping is difficult to do, and that maybe due to having played Super Metroid and other similar games. With your control scheme the player needs to be pressing towards the wall to jump then immediately switch directions if they are going to bounce between two walls. It's a little more intuitive to push the direction they intend on going first then jumping. From an implementation standpoint, when you would start a slide, if the player pushes the opposite direction make them stick to the wall for a split second.
For the dash, I found it irritating that I couldn't change directions while dashing. I had to let go of the shift key and then change directions. This might be less of an issue if the normal movement was faster and I didn't want to dash everywhere.
Finally, this may just be my preference, but I think you should swap the controls on the Z and C keys. It feels more natural to my to use my index and middle finger more than ring and pinky for controls, and it would put jump in the right most button which always felt more natural to me on a keyboard.
Unfortunately I can't play since I don't have a Windows machine.
Fantastic soundtrack!
Anyway, this game is BEAUTIFUL. The limited colour pallette works very well, especially with your scenario. It doesn't really scream "evolution", but it's fun nonetheless.
It looks like it could do with some increasing of room_speed, maybe up to 60? sprinting could also do with some sort of drawback, but notuntil you've improved the clunky physics.
As most people have said, the movement is flawed. You might do well to have a look through my source, if you want some better platform physics?
You're evidently good with GM, the message boxes look great, the piellated art style looks awesome, the soundtrack is full of lovely chiptunes and the sound effects are better than your average sfxr/bfxr generated stuff.
The mood feels great for the future style you're going for, but unfortunately the boss' weakness being almost impossible to find and the flawed physics sort of decrease the playability. It's evidently very polished, but make it so you don't have to sprint to make it playable, make sprinting more easily stoppable, make gravity tighter and less floaty, etc, and you might have a much more playable game.
The movement is slow and it doesn't really fit the size of the character. Make him smaller and play the animations faster and it should be ok. Alternatively just increase the movement speed.
The next problem is quite common amongst LD games. Your game ignores the existence of various keyboard layouts. For example on my german keyboard the y and z keys are exchanged which makes it really hard to control. Best way to solve this problem is to have multiple key mappings (i.e. y AND z for jumping) or to allow custom key bindings.
Sorry to be a wet blanket, but all of your content has to have been made within the 48 hours, and by only yourself to be valid for the Compo - I understand you've probably overlooked the rule by accident, I'm just saying to give you a heads up. Still, keep up the good work!
Fonts, drum loops, drum samples, and sampled instruments are allowed IF you have the legal right to use them.
The music from the game is available in the public domain, as noted on the page where the music is available.
The game itself was impressive in scope for an LD48 game, both in content and also graphically. The controls felt floaty and like others I had issues with the movement speed. Also dashing didn't help much, as you can't turn when dashing which makes moving around with it annoying. Still, with a little more work and polish this could become very good!
Anyway, keep up with the art (graphics and music). I've never been that great at spriting, nor do I have any musical talent, and I knew very few people as good as you at it when I was 14.
As a matter of fact, your game is pretty solid for Game Maker in general; quite impressive for 48 hours. Even considering the parts of code from various contributors' repositories (eg, the text box script).
See the prior remarks on wall jump mechanics.
Other remarks: SWEET MOTHER OF GOD, THE SOURCE FILE IS A SINGLE, 170MB OBJECT. I told IsmAvatar not to preload sound data into the IDE, but nooooo, 17 months later it's still doing it. As said, don't use WAV for music. MP3 seems like your best bet, since you use GM (ours supports OGG and XM/S3M/IT), but WAV is not your friend. Also, avoid execute_string(), it's a bad habit (and it makes it so I can't compile the thing natively, which is annoying).
Not a bad shot.
Well, I can't for the life of me pass the buzzsaw level, because the guy is just too darn slow for me to reach this one platform. Even with dash. A word of advice: if you, as a developer, find you're always holding dash while playing and telling everyone "just use dash!", then you're probably better off making the normal speed the same as dash and cutting dash entirely. And the buzzsaws are really annoying, with their huge hitbox constantly knocking me back off that one platform. And the physics could use some work.
All in all, it's okay. Not very entertaining, but a good try.
P.S. I'll do your guilty conscience a favor and rate audio as a one, just to balance it out against the people who thought you made the audio yourself. Assuming you are guilty. Otherwise, TROOOLOLOLOLOLOLOLOLOLOLOLOLOL!