[atcdevil]

Our demo has been released.

It is available at FoF download


The demo features the Intro, and up to the first boss, the game itself is similar to early Final Fantasy games.

Feeback is appreciated.

[XMark]

A required .DLL file, MSVCR70.DLL, was not found.

Where can I get this?

UPDATE:

I found a copy of MSVCR70.DLL on the web, but I still get an error starting the program:

The MSVCP70.DLL file is linked to missing export MSVCR70.DLL:__job_func.
_________________
Mark Hall
Abstract Productions
I PLAYS THE MUSIC THAT MAKES THE PEOPLES FALL DOWN!

[Modanung]

It works fine with me, I just met the wise woman...
Looks like a nice game, although 2 of my party members already died. How do I revive them?

[Bjorn]

It might work fine for you, Modanung 'My little brother' Frode, because our game, Cave Adventure, also required that DLL and we distributed it with it. Or Microsoft has put it in some Windows Update stuff. Either way, it is not included with WinXP so I think it should be distributed with the game.

BTW. The website probably doesn't have the PNG mimetype properly configured. Mozilla is displaying it as plain text as the server tells it the format is text/html. Might be Microsoft IIS, which doesn't seem to know about PNG by default.

Would be nice to see a Linux version, until then, maybe I can try it in the WinXP labs at my university.

[Rainer Deyke]

Just tried it; some quick comments:

• The game is painfully slow on my computer. Not sure if this is a timing bug or the game is supposed to run that slowly, but it really ruins the fun of the game, and makes me inclined to judge the rest of the game much more harshly than I would otherwise.
  
• The mouse cursor is annoying. In most games that can be played with just the keyboard but have a mouse cursor, I tend to move the mouse cursor into the bottom-right corner of the screen so I don't have to look at it. Oops, can't do that, moving the mouse cursor to the edge of the screen causes my character to move. As I said, annoying.
  
• Being unable to save when there are enemies on the screen is annoying. This might not be an issue if the game ran faster.
  
• The snake combat in the forest seems tedious and pointless. What's the point of fighting against opponents who don't have a change against you? This might not be an issue if the combat went faster.
  
• There is obviously some substance to the game and what I have seen of the story intrigues me. I can imagine really enjoying this game, if only it ran faster...

[js71]

Odd, the character zips along a bit too fast on my machine. ;)

[janus]

I played this a couple days ago when I saw it on the front page...

Well, it's a nice game. Pretty decent graphics - I like the tiles, and the character sprites and portraits are okay. Nothing to write home about, but good work for an indie production.

In-game interface art and the overall visual look, however, was underwhelming. I'm sorry to say I'm not at all a fan of simplistic bevelled gray boxes and buttons, and I'm especially not at all a fan of the sometimes-barely-readable aliased, noisy text you used for most of the game. Either changing to a more readable font, or turning on antialiasing for the text, would help a lot there. Also, I strongly suggest reworking ALL of the interface graphics, as the current ones don't cut it. Some of them are almost completely unreadable.

The controls are passable. Moving the character with the keyboard works okay. I strongly disliked the menus in battle, however. The mouse behaved unpredictably in battle, and it was hard to understand how to manipulate the menus, and there were not enough visual cues there to make it easy to work with. Add an actual cursor indicating the selected item(s) in battle, and make the mouse cursor visible instead of just having mouse movements translate into menu movements.

The sound and music were okay. Honestly, I didn't listen to much of the music, because I was listening to the radio. I listened to a bit of the game music, and then turned down the music volume in the game settings. For some reason, however, a lot of the in-game music still played at full volume anyway (music triggered by particular events in-game, and music in battles, still seemed to play.) The music and SFX I heard fit the theme quite well, and didn't really bother me (and a lot of indie game music really really bothers me and makes me want to plug my ears - i have a very good sense of hearing, so music that is not on key or harmonic usually bugs me a lot.) One exception, however, is the sound effects used on the main menu and other menus. Those are, to put it bluntly, horrible, and they make me cringe.

The plot in the parts of it that I played was pretty good. Somewhat original, pretty decently executed, and not too fast or slow paced. It stumbled a bit here and there (the part in the beginning with just randomly wandering around in the forest was, IMO, a terrible design decision, and I nearly quit right there because it appeared that nothing was happening) but it managed to be pretty consistently good overall.

The game flow was pretty decent, but not really good enough for me to consider playing it for more than an hour or two. All too often the solution to a puzzle or problem in the game was 'wander around and talk to everything that moves, and if necessary every single tile on the map.' I'm sorry, that's not good game design, and it makes me want to go play UT2k3 instead.

The map design was acceptable, but there are a few issues I'd like to point out:
1. The exits on your various maps were not marked or pointed out at all in most cases. It's simply up to the player to figure out where they are. Either darkening/lightening the places where exits are, or making it more obvious with changes to the map design, would be great. I spent a few seconds wandering around various maps once or twice trying to find exits.
2. There were a lot of useless items to interact with on your maps. Now, usually this isn't a big deal. But practically every flower in the forest, for example, could be interacted with, and they all did the exact same thing. In comparison, a few other items in the forest actually did something unique, but you couldn't tell the different without activating them. This irritated me.
3. The flashy, psychedelic carrots in that bizarre little garden in the forest nearly gave me an epileptic seizure, and they also looked downright bizarre, almost to the point of looking like something a four year old would draw in MS Paint. I hope you get around to cleaning up the carrot tile and maybe slowing down or smoothing the animation a bit.

The battlesystem was pretty decent. I didn't get far enough into the game to get into the more complicated parts of it, but it functioned well. The animations could use a little tweaking and maybe a few extra frames, and in particular the damage numbers that appeared when you struck an enemy were both very hard to read and very small. Try increasing the size of your damage numbers, and making them stay visible a little longer.

Anyway, good work so far. I look forward to seeing future versions that are a little easier to play! :)

[janus]

A more detailed explanation of what I didn't like about the game, at least visually. This is in a seperate post so it's easier to skip over or delete, depending on if you're an average RPGDX forum user, or an angry admin. :) I took a few screenshots of various menus in the game that demonstrate some of what I disliked about the game's visual design.


This is the menu you get after picking Continue at the main menu:
For some reason, there is a Save button. Why? I couldn't begin to guess.
The blue text used for the button captions and headings is nearly impossible to read next to the gray stone texture used on the background. This is partly due to the fact that the text is bevelled and heavily aliased, and partly due to the fact that light blue does not contrast well with light gray. That, and the blue, bevelled text simply doesn't look good.
The text listing the game names and time elapsed is TINY, and has lots of margin space around it.


This is the menu you get by right clicking. Overall, the design is okay. However, there are a number of issues with this basic screen:
There is lots of empty space here, and things are not aligned consistently. The three characters have lots of whitespace at the top, but less whitespace at the left, which makes it feel a bit unbalanced.
The two topmost character portraits have a red background, while the third has a gray one. Looks visually inconsistent and draws attention to the gray portrait.
The text on the character buttons is small and hard to read.
The text on the menu buttons is very hard to read because it is the same color as the actual buttons, and is heavily aliased. Inner Bevel looks pretty, but it isn't very good for readability.
The blue glyph below the buttons is very aliased, which is a heavy contrast to the smoothness of the background texture.


This is the 'item menu' (aka, a list of items in a big box):
The rounded edges on the 'window' are aliased and just look somewhat funny.
The 'window' is aligned strangely on the screen (not centered, not really positioned in any logical manner).
The names of the items are extremely small (hey, like the save/load screen!). Also, the item quantities are small too. And so is the description.
The item descriptions are displayed in a basically random location in the top-right corner of the 'window'.
There's empty space at the top and bottom of the 'window' which serves no purpose. Not bad, but not good either.
The 'Item' and '#' captions are hard to read and just look bad.
The item menu does not say whose items you are looking at, which is kind of confusing.


This is the equip menu. Can you tell? I can't.
There are no headings above the two small lists of items to equip. You basically have to infer what it is those lists equip. Not exactly easy to understand or use.
The text in the two equip lists is hard to read and small.


This is the sound menu, I guess.
The two bars for effects and music are very hard on the eyes and not at all smooth or antialiased, and they also look nothing like anything else you see in the game's menu or dialogs.
The text next to the two bars is hard to read and looks strange (and is also aliased heavily)
The hand pointer is displayed next to the currently selected bar, even though the mouse is being used to select it. Pointless, and confusing.
The bevel on the bars is inconsistent with the bevels in every other part of the game, which is a bit of a throw-off to the eyes.

Hope you don't take this personally. I just want to help, and I feel that the basic design and flow of your menus isn't bad, it just needs a lot of effort and polish if you want it to work well. A good menu system doesn't get in the way, and this one does, at least for me.

[Bjorn]

I feel know need for playing evil admin here, but then again, I'm just an average RPGDX admin. I think detailed reviews are good, especially when feedback is appreciated.

[XMark]

Is there a specific version of MSVCR70.DLL that I have to find to play the game or what? I still can't get it running!

In any further releases, I suggest packaging this file with it.
_________________
Mark Hall
Abstract Productions
I PLAYS THE MUSIC THAT MAKES THE PEOPLES FALL DOWN!

[janus]

[atcdevil]

Thank you so much for all of the feedback, especially those detailed reviews Janus :)

We'll be taking everything said into account. Most of the game still needs to be made, so there's plenty of room for improvement.

Please feel free to criticize all you want :-D It will only result in a better game.

About the dll I don't understand how this happens, I tested on so many PC's before the release without a problem bla bla bla excuses excuses. I'm really sorry about that, it'll be fixed by tomorrow morning.

About Linux... We're planning on releasing a version very soon. As it's made with SDL, it's been compiled and everything, only I want to make sure I can get it working at least on my computer before it works (I'm having trouble playing back MIDI files.) Mac OS X hopefully will not be too far off either.

About the carrots you're basically right, I have the skills of a 4 year old when it comes to art, and I drew them in MS Paint. They'll be fixed. (that's the one bit of programmer art in there) That's really unacceptable isn't it.

About the game running slow: We've had it run really fast on really slow computers, I think it may be something to do with certain video cards. I'd like to do the rendering in OpenGL (currently it's just SDL) Hopefully that'll be a speedup in general...

[janus]

You could just try adding framerate balancing so that even if the rendering is slow the game still runs at an acceptable speed level (it just looks jerkier).

[valderman]

Is it just me, or does Laius look like Yusuke from Green Green?
_________________
http://www.weeaboo.se

[atcdevil]

A fixed version with the new dll still isn't up like I had said... I'm not sure when my computer will be fixed so I'll just make another post when it's ready.