RPGDX > Forums > Projects / Screenshots > New release of the Blues Brothers RPG!

Moonlight

(I'm Bjørn posting on behalf of Moonlight Productions)

The past few days we've been hard at work to improve the release of our Blues Brothers RPG. This is how we should have released it but we wanted to release what we had at the end of the compo to take part in the voting process, as we already missed out with the Compo Nostos and didn't want that to happen again.

People that have already played the game will find it is still quite the same. For Dutch players the biggest difference might be the added Dutch translation, and for the rest of you it might be the music. We've also speeded it up a lot for some systems by disableing writing messages to the logfile, which turned out to be much slower in WinXP than in Linux. Last but not least, the list of bug fixes is enormous.

The file: http://moonlight.rpgdx.net/files/BBRpg-1.1.0.zip

When voting for the competition, please take into account release 1.0.0.

valderman · Posted: Sat Jan 10, 2004 11:50 pm Post subject:

I don't know about you Dutch people, but all Swedes I know (myself included) think that games and movies translated into Swedish is only slightly better AIDS. If I were Dutch, I'd still play in English.
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Bjorn · Posted: Sun Jan 11, 2004 12:01 am Post subject:

I think the same way about most Dutch games*, but when Georg made this translation we were surprised by how much fun it was to play in Dutch!

*) Expressed slightly different, I think most games become rather childish when translated to Dutch. When movies get translated... that's just unforgivable. Luckily they don't do that to most movies, but only to the cartoon ones, where its acceptable to me, for the kids.

Georg · Posted: Sun Jan 11, 2004 7:05 am Post subject:

We already had the music done the first of januari, but my brother Jasper lost his connection to the internet and wasn't able to upload the music. There still had to be done a little work on implementing the music though, and we didn't have the time for that anyway.
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janus · Mage Joined: 29 Jun 2002 Posts: 464 Location: Issaquah, WA

Is there a way to save yet? I couldn't believe that every time I died or wanted to change settings in the config file that I had to sit through that whole introduction over again. It was pretty easy to die, too.

Bjorn · Posted: Mon Jan 12, 2004 9:40 am Post subject:

Sorry, no way to safe. It is one of the shortcomings of the engine that are not easily solved. I think we should have pointed out that sleeping in the bed makes you heal, as you won't die so easily when you just run away when health runs out. The introduction is skippable from version 1.1.0.

BTW, thanks for your review. It gives a lot of things to consider for our next game, mostly the point about tediousity. It's nice to see we're at least above average from your point of view though, your average review score being 5.8 at the moment. :-)

Georg · Posted: Mon Jan 12, 2004 4:50 pm Post subject:

Bjorn, I think you should not also take into account the mark Janus gave to our RPG. It's even better! Because our 6 pulls the average up. It should be something between
((5.75 * N) - 6)/(N-1) and ((5.85 * N) - 6)/(N-1), where N = 6 is the number of reviews. ;)

Janus, thanks a lot for your extremely helpful review. You went through a lot of trouble to get as far as the guards without healing. :D I agree on most of your points, though I was hoping it would be just a little fun to play. I want to improve the game to make it a lot better. I think it has the potential for becoming a good game, and already has some good things in it. I think the fact that it lacks from the points you mentioned, is a severly drawback which can be resolved.

Anybody here willing to help us by suggesting how to improve the game?
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ThousandKnives · Posted: Tue Jan 13, 2004 1:39 am Post subject:

Georg · Posted: Tue Jan 13, 2004 7:35 am Post subject:

Ah, okay. Thanks a lot, I will discuss it with Bjorn. Save files may be easy to implement as long as your engine is not to complicated. In case of the BBRPG, for example, one can switch between the Blues Brothers, which makes the trick of save points pretty much impossible I think. An option for fast scrolling between the texts is pretty easy to implement, I guess. But if one wants to skip the text it's probably a better solution to make the text shorter and better. But you're right that option is needed anyway, I think.
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janus · Mage Joined: 29 Jun 2002 Posts: 464 Location: Issaquah, WA

My engine is very similar to yours in many aspects, but I ended up just coming up with a decent solution for saved games: Save everything.

It's actually done by a number of commercial games - Deus Ex uses 8 megs or so for a saved game, because it stores the entire world in that save file, so that changes to the world are persistent... theoretically you should just be able to save all the map and sprite data that you have in RAM at the time... that's what I do, at least. It takes some work to write all the serialization/deserialization code, but once you get it done it works quite well.

For dealing with having three blues brothers, you could just have autosave. Automatically save the first time an area is entered. That would give you a save basically at the end of every tough point in the game, without having save point problems.

Georg · Posted: Tue Jan 13, 2004 3:35 pm Post subject:

Okay, I've been improving some drawbacks of the RPG. Ofcourse you could save all the objects and their properties to a file. But we also have sequences running in the script at any time. I'm not sure how to save those. I don't see why autosaving when you enter the map the first time will make things any less difficult. Blues brothers can be in different area's, so this still comes down to being able to save all the previously explored areas.

Anyway, I changed the citymap, so now it has only `natural' boundaries. I don't know how to resolve the problem with the fact that you're able to walk behind walls and roofs. Personally, I thought it to give me a better feeling of being inside the world, especially in the citymap. What do you guys think about this? But in the sewers I agree it's very inconvenient, and we might simply cut off part of the wall to view the characters (or at least the player). I would like to improve the map, but I'm not sure what you mean by `just plain confusing and seemed to lack any focus or coherent flow'. Could you please elaborate on that?

I'm thinking about improving the music and soundeffects. The music could be improved by adding a beat and/or an instrument like a guitar or mouth organ (for the end demo maybe). I want to add some soundeffects. Where did you miss them?
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ThousandKnives · Posted: Tue Jan 13, 2004 6:05 pm Post subject:

Georg · Posted: Tue Jan 13, 2004 9:09 pm Post subject:

The engine is powerful and flexible. We can run sequences with or without taking away the control of the player. Every object could start a sequence. For example, one could script rats simply wandering around, but, when it meets another rat, it would attack it. If one of both rats dies, this would trigger the sequence do_death of the dying rat which would for example fade out the bitmap of the rat. Really, it's more complicated. Ofcourse we could restrict ourselves, but it needs a lot of thinking what restrictions to take. I was pointing out to Janus that it's not a (completely) trivial problem in our case. We'll figure out a nice solution, don't worry. :)
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janus · Mage Joined: 29 Jun 2002 Posts: 464 Location: Issaquah, WA

XMark · Posted: Wed Jan 14, 2004 8:19 am Post subject:

I think a good way to make the combat more interesting, rather than just slugging away at each other until one dies, is to have the enemy bounce back a bit when you hit them, like in zelda-style games.

Oh, BTW, is the voting period over yet? I wanna see who won!
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Abstract Productions
I PLAYS THE MUSIC THAT MAKES THE PEOPLES FALL DOWN!