Messages

61

Bigosaur / Re: Son of a Witch: Devlog and general discussion

« on: November 27, 2020, 08:31:32 PM »

A couple a days ago I started to work full time on the next Son of a Witch update. I'm currently preparing all the art pieces for the hell level:



The plan is to make it an optional area which you can reach if you collect all the ingredients for a ritual in the catacombs. Going through hell would alter the story a little bit and allow you to take an alternate route through the game, skipping the ice level. I'm still not clear on all the details. I have a lot of possible ideas, but need to test them first. In any case, it should be the most challenging area of the game.

The update should also come with new weapons, pets, scrolls, potions, items and I plan to add more heroes using Jubal's skins. Those will all unlock by completing some quests in Hell.

62

Bigosaur / Re: The Game is ON

« on: November 21, 2020, 07:27:19 PM »

Finally I went back, re-recorded the material and re-edited the video. Here's a version with the new Boris:

This one should be final.

63

Announcements! The Town Crier! / Re: Updates from the Forge 39: Autumn 2020

« on: November 21, 2020, 07:26:05 PM »

Hi,

I updated the YouTube video. Could you please change the video in this thread to: RO19YFK3kI0

The full link is: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RO19YFK3kI0

Thanks.

64

Computer Game Development - The Indie Alley / Re: [Dev Log] Tourney: The medieval tournament sim

« on: November 17, 2020, 09:46:34 AM »

Shouldn't this be that "you are competing in a tournament" instead?

It's "running" as in "organising".

Well, I think I was right then. But maybe I didn't explain it properly. If you are organizing a tournament, you aren't competing in it. The usual sim game has you only organizing, not competing. As I understand, Tourney allows you to both organize and compete, but the sentence on KS page doesn't really say that. It seem to imply that "running" is an extra, unusual feature.

Or did I misunderstand the game completely?

65

Computer Game Development - The Indie Alley / Re: [Dev Log] Tourney: The medieval tournament sim

« on: November 16, 2020, 07:14:38 PM »

Well I've been busy the last while putting together a kickstarter to crowdfund for some remaining elements on the game! Pretty nervous 

I have a preview link here I'm only sharing in a couple of places to hopefully get a little feedback. Please check it out if you have a a moment.

Hey, I'm not a native English speaker, so I could be mistaken on anything I write below. Anyway...

Where Tourney differs from more traditional sim games is that you are running a tournament, so you will be able to get involved and try to win!

Shouldn't this be that "you are competing in a tournament" instead? "You are running a tournament" sounds like you're the organizer to me. Maybe something like "Where Tourney differs from more traditional sim games is that you aren't just running a tournament, you are also able to get involved and try to win!"

Budget

There are two things here, and they are connected. Your target of £3,200 seems a bit low to me. When I look at the budget allocation, it looks like it's structured in such way to cover external costs and you would be working for free. I have talked to some people who back up KS projects on regular basis and they stay away from such projects, because they feel it's too risky. I have also seen many successful campaigns where developers added "cost of living" to the equation. You expect 8-9 months of development and you should eat and drink at least during that time.

If you have some independent source of funding, it should be stated (you don't have to disclose what it is, only that your life doesn't depend on this project succeeding). Escape From BioStation with 4 user reviews on Steam doesn't look like it's bringing food to the table every month, so there must be something else.

I'm just saying this from a funder perspective: if I'm going to fund a project, I want to make sure I know the developer will be there to push it all the way to the end.

I know you only collected £1,000-something for Escape from BioStation, but Tourney is much more promising game. It's got nicer graphics, more appealing genre and I believe there is an actual market for such game on Steam. I wouldn't be surprised if it sold 5000+ copies on Steam, provided that you do proper marketing.

Now, you don't need to increase the target sum, but at least add a couple of sentences that would ensure the backers that you know what you're doing financially, and that your own cost of living is covered.

Good luck with KS!

66

Bigosaur / Re: The Game is ON

« on: November 13, 2020, 09:29:25 PM »

Do you need any more playtesting?

I might need more soon. Not sure when, maybe tomorrow, maybe next week. I'm doing some changes for the Nintendo Switch port, so I want to make sure I don't break anything in the Steam version. So it all depends when I finish porting.

If you are interested, I can send you a Steam key once I have a new build ready. Just send me your e-mail at dev@bigosaur.com and I'll e-mail you the key once the build is up.

67

Bigosaur / Re: The Game is ON

« on: November 12, 2020, 08:06:05 PM »

For low hanging fruit

That could work. I can leave the hidden object in the game - to be used to get the secret puzzle piece.

I think drinks on the house works fine if you just change the idiom text and leave the puzzle as is - a wine bottle can contain multiple drinks worth of wine after all unless you're really going at it hard

Oh, ok. That's easy to fix then

I think with the text-scrambling ones you need a fairly big clue, or the range of options is just way too high.

Alright. I have no idea how difficult it is, because I already know all the answers. I have fixed that now.

Thanks for all the suggestions.

68

Bigosaur / Re: The Game is ON

« on: November 12, 2020, 04:46:10 PM »

The last puzzle piece I've not managed is

It's very simple, you can move one of the

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

triangular blocks on the side of the pyramid.

You probably never hovered the mouse over there. I'm amazed how you did all the rest so quickly, as I thought some of the puzzles would be confusing 

Could the zoomed in image get a goatee added

I'll try to draw one and see how it turns out. As I've been practicing a lot with this game, my artistic skills are in a flux currently, so I'm not sure what I can do. Some stuff I think "no way" and I just draw them perfectly. Some I think "that's easy" and I cannot produce anything that looks good in multiple tries.

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

Pick the low-hanging fruit

, is more of a hidden object puzzle

I tried various approaches for that one, but couldn't make it work without it being too easy. If you have some ideas... I'm all ears.

Skeleton...the text the guy says

I will change that.

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

Talk behind her back took a while, since I thought it would be talking over her head then got confused when putting him on top of her head and getting him to talk didn't work.

Hm, looks like I forgot about that possibility. I will try to change it so that you can only do one of the solutions. I could even change it to be 2 separate puzzles, but now I'm reluctant to go into that direction as there are exactly 200 puzzle pieces.

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

I think speak of the devil is a more common phrasing than "speaking" as you currently have.

Will fix.

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

I'd usually expect drinks on the house as plural rather than with shortening apostrophe as given in that puzzle.

I'm not sure what to do with that one. At first I wanted to do the plural variant, but then you need to have at least two bottles and placing one in the spot would still give you a possible solution (the current one). I even tried a singular without 's, but that sounds bad.

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

Time is money

I wonder if the secret-generating bit is too obvious to begin with. Perhaps you should click Boris to make that speech bubble show up.[/li][/list]

Not a bad idea.

I think has a real issue in that there are too many possible idioms about days, I was trying "any day of the week" and so on. I think if you change "You =" to "Me = "

I thought it would be too easy if it said "Me"?

I found it a bit odd when revealing the secret was a complete requirement of the puzzle, like in

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

Costs An Arm And A Leg

I wanted to use those to misguide the players, have them thinking "oh, this one is just for the secret puzzle piece".

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

• I feel like The Game Is On should have been more final somehow - like I did it and then had a bunch of stuff to go back and find, whereas it would've been cool if that was actually the very ending moment of completing the game.

I wanted it as well, but on the other hand, I wanted to allow the players to solve the puzzles in any order they want. Hm, maybe I could split that one puzzle I mentioned above into two puzzles, and move this one to the end of the game, so it unlocks when you have all 200 puzzle pieces?!

I enjoyed it all anyway - well done, was very good fun

Thanks!

69

Bigosaur / Re: The Game is ON

« on: November 11, 2020, 10:08:19 PM »

I re-did the animation with a different character and he's back in the game. I'll probably make a new trailer with him as well, but it's enough to explain the story.

The game is complete now and ready for testing. There are 200 puzzle pieces in total over 61 levels. The level selections are the following areas from South-East Europe:

• The Bosnian Pyramid
• Dracula's Castle (Bran Castle in Romania)
• Đavolja Varoš (natural monument in Serbia)
• Radan Mountain (anti-gravity hill which is a natural optical illusion)

Each area has 4 hidden puzzles.

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

And there's also one puzzle locked in a safe on the main selection screen. It requires a 4-digit combination to open and every world has a hint for one of the digits.

I have update the build on Steam. If there are no bugs or things that need fixing, this will be the final version.

Hopefully I can iron out any bugs in a week or so, and then go back to developing the big Son of a Witch update.

70

Bigosaur / Re: The Game is ON

« on: November 03, 2020, 07:20:21 PM »

Mm, I agree that the new movie does mess the semi-reference up. That said, I think it's maybe sort of good for the game to have a core viewable character as a mascot/puzzle intro, so I'd maybe replace him with something rather than just cut out from having any central puzzle-introducing character at all?

The problem is that I would have to redo the whole animation. We shall see.

71

Bigosaur / Re: The Game is ON

« on: November 02, 2020, 06:56:39 PM »

I look forward to playtesting! I do wonder if Boris looks a little too much like Borat?

Perhaps you are right. I have thought that people have mostly forgotten about Borat and similarity wasn't that important, but it looks like he released another movie now, so I don't want to risk anything here. I'm removing the Boris character and all the references from the game.

BTW, I'm nearing the final beta test version. 52 out of 60 puzzles are ready and I already have the graphics ready for puzzles 53-56, just need to cut out the pieces and program the game logic. My plan was to have to complete game ready before December 1st, but it might be sooner.

72

Bigosaur / Re: The Game is ON

« on: October 24, 2020, 03:14:01 PM »

I'm making some progress with game art this week:

https://imgur.com/gallery/Y94fRVO

Plan is the have the playable beta with all levels in by December 1st.

73

Computer Game Development - The Indie Alley / Re: Epicinium - strategy wargame with environmental mechanics

« on: October 20, 2020, 02:56:24 PM »

This is very interesting. I will download and try it out the next weekend.

74

Pangolin Games / Re: Exile Princes Closed Beta Testing

« on: October 20, 2020, 02:39:11 PM »

Hm, I think search could then get annoying in the later game/when you want to be trying to do a lot of escort missions and have to sift through a load of random stuff. Plus the way search works which I guess I should also clarify is that the game doesn't pre-load the results of searches, and you can search a tile a bunch of times through the game (though you can't do it multiple times in a row) - searching is more "roll the dice on the random generator for this terrain type" rather than "discover this thing I've generated here as part of the map" if that makes sense? I'll have a think anyways.

Maybe I need to play the game more to get a feel of what would be the best way to do it.

Anyway, my comments were all based on initial impressions, and I wanted to get those out before I learn more about the game. Once you understand how the game works, it's impossible to look at it from new player's perspective.

If I knew those 4 screens where the entire world, I would definitely play the game differently. So, maybe it would be enough to communicate that in more clear way?

75

Pangolin Games / Re: Exile Princes Closed Beta Testing

« on: October 20, 2020, 01:55:43 PM »

bigosaur: keyboard hotkeys which are really important to how I envisaged the game being played. E.g. rather than going into the menus you can just hit "Q" for a quests log

Maybe underlining the Q letter in the Quests icon, etc. would be enough to figure it out for most players. Although, if the game can be played with mouse exclusively, I like to lay back and lift my left hand off the keyboard. 

I understand that search could be used for important stuff, so maybe give just a regular search popup on every step and keep the Search option as the deliberate one when you want to risk a more dangerous enemy or find something hidden there. As for highlighting, Civilization games have done it right IMHO. When you learn (hear a rumor, etc.) that there's something interesting on a map tile, it adds an icon to it (it's a small hut in Civ IIRC), so you know you can get there. Maybe a simple question mark symbol would be enough.

As for map scrolling, there's an alternative solution, make the map transition when the player enters any tile adjacent to the border tile. That way the player would never walk on border tiles and would always be able to see at least the adjacent ones.

As for 2x2, etc. map selection, maybe a better naming would be to use the actual number of tiles tiles, so 2x2 map would be 10x8 (or whatever it actually is, I'm on a different computer now, so I cannot launch the game to count), 3x3 would be 15x12, etc. This would make it clear that it's the world size.

Now that I realize how small the map is, I would actually give more attention to each particular tile. I was under impression that there was a whole huge world to discover, so I didn't give much weight to any single tile investigation.

Thanks for the tips.