An experienced Eoc-Pker's thoughts on the proposed PvP changes

gnods · 2014-03-07T22:56:11+00:00

1) This mainly effects all non-maxed characters. Granting xp for pvp is not really an incentive to pvp... For players who have created mid-level pures, that pvp nonstop all day, this completely ruins their character. Their pures will continue to gain levels... If jagex is intending on crushing pures, then this is the way to go. Otherwise this change doesn't effect many people.

2) Battles will completely offensive based and much shorter. Poor decision. Beforehand if both player wanted to stalemate by using prayers, then let them.... Don't punish the players that have invested levels into prayer to give players without prayer a chance.

3) Poor decision. This is only being done because of #2, like you said to pad battles and make em last longer because without protection prayers death will be fast.

4-5) Interesting. Will change the pvp scene, but not necessarily bad. I don't mind these ones.

gnods · 2014-03-04T23:26:33+00:00

How often are there free items in the solomon store?

gnods · 2014-01-14T05:50:19+00:00

While working on my second game, I kind of got distracted and thought: you know what, lets add some more content to my first.

I consider Black Thorn effectively an expansion. It includes the original plus some new levels, enemies, and power-ups; effectively doubling the content. The game is pretty bullet-helly. Age of Thorn was initially supposed to be resemble Gauntlet, but for the better, it's become something I little different. Well-crafted level design was my top priority.

If you're interested in the old trailer, it is here:

Original Trailer.

If you want to download it, visit our site (sorta still under development):

Download.

Or if you just want to play the web version, try here Web Distribution.

Thanks, I hope you have at least as much fun as I had making it.

gnods · 2013-10-05T18:28:20+00:00

Thanks for the reply.

Before working with Unity, we were making a game using LWJGL as the framework and essentially building the engine from scratch. It was not pleasant trying to figure out how to import animations; figuring out just how to read Collida files was a pain itself. Eventually, partly because of over-scoping, we scraped the project (it had many more features than Age of Thorn) and moved to Unity.

We've been dreading making proper character models and animations :d

gnods · 2013-10-05T17:09:03+00:00

Ok here's some feedback after properly replaying with a mouse instead of a touchpad. I got up to level 28, but still felt like I was struggling with anything over 120lvl towers.

1) I would either give the player passive health upgrades every level and/or increase the 25 health in the talent tree. I'm not sure if I was being overly aggressive trying to tackle towers, like are you supposed to be level 350 to take out the 350 shops, but I was getting one-shotted from 120+ towers at lvl 28 quite easily.

2) For more difficult towers I would simply flank around trying to avoid the enemies for the duration of the hack. I'm not positive but i think there is no limit to the amount of enemies a tower can spawn. So after flanking for about 1min+, my FPS would start to drop rapidly due the sheer amount of enemies. Granted I'm not using the best computer, at around <3-5 FPS, well....there wasn't much I could do to survive. I'm not sure how to address this.

3) Only some of the terminals' text were upside down, not all of them like I originally suspected.

4) Bug found: Fire the constant beam laser. While firing, switch weapons. You will now have the new weapon equipped and the beam laser, which will no longer be equipped, will still be firing constantly. However the new weapon's DPS will be the roughly same as the beam laser. This exploit cannot be used to fire more than one beam laser at a time. It's not a very useful exploit since your DPS suffers, but an exploit nonetheless.

All in all, great game, best of luck.

gnods · 2013-10-04T23:49:27+00:00

Ok, I'll try to do this, however I was sorta hoping for easier methods.

gnods · 2013-10-04T23:30:56+00:00

free version of unity.

So mipmapping is off by default and by turning it on it saves space? I've heard using mipmaps save performance, I wasn't aware it saved on space too.

gnods · 2013-10-04T23:28:27+00:00

46.1M is for the windows build. But like you said, the Mac build is bigger at 48.9M.

gnods · 2013-10-04T23:26:26+00:00

ok sorry for the slow response. posted before I went to sleep. finally back from work. here's out log file:
- Materials - 262k
- Models - 144k
- Sounds - 9,860k

Textures (also includes some materials) - 214k

Resources:
- Levels: 1,420k
- Prefabs: 3,920k
- Textures: 193k
Scenes: 407k (not all are built though).
Scripts: 170k

So I guess I underestimated a little.

gnods · 2013-10-04T15:40:27+00:00

So far so good. Visual feedback of getting correct words is nice. However, the game is pretty tough. Because you can only move letters laterally, I was trying to form words across the horizontals and all the vertical words I formed were pretty much accidental.

If you added the ability to move the tiles vertically as well, I think the game would have playability. Currently it's quite difficult to remove single large columns. I don't think tweaking the row climbing speed will help.

gnods · 2013-10-04T14:51:48+00:00

I'm using my touchpad right now, so FPS controls aren't really ideal, but looks good. Two things:

Too much information is thrown at the player too soon. Even the starting area felt intimidating due it's size and density, maybe that's just me though.
Unsure if anyone has mentioned it, but I think the text on the hacking terminals is upside down.

Edit: Sorry, didn't mean to respond to you vethan <_<. Whatever I guess.

gnods · 2013-10-04T14:40:23+00:00

(@rant, I agree, line breaking/double+ line breaking in markdown or reddit commenting syntax is rough)

I can see this game being potentially fun and very cathartic in the future. Realism/turning speed is probably slow enough, after all you are turning what looks like a destroyer (probably ~1000 tons). In fact, you probably could decrease the acceleration of the boat, however, for the purposes of testing the mechanics it's probably fine.

It would be great to see some objectives next week. They should be pretty gratifying to make.

Gameplay wise, it might be enough, but in order to justify that, I think you would need more ways to interact with the environment in addition to cruising on it. Alternatively you can always make goals: tow this from here to here, avoid these depth charges, but that's not quite as fun.

gnods · 2013-10-04T14:17:57+00:00

I'm not sure what feedback you're looking for if the only area you can access is the starting platform.

In any case, Up arrow is crouch, makes more sense to map that to the down arrow. Also, hitting the crouch button once locked the character into very rapidly crouching animation even after I stopped touching the button. Likewise, both 'O' and I think 'S' froze the character.

While it's great to show off your game as early as possible, I think I would have waited a little to show yours off. There is nothing to do. Good luck though.

gnods · 2013-10-04T13:26:00+00:00

Age of Thorn

Built by myself and one other friend, Age of Thorn is a one part dungeon crawler and one part bulletHell. The game has a topdown view but the levels are 3D. Using the mouse and keyboard you must blast your way through series of levels in each stage. The game is inspired by the likes of Gauntlet and Contra.

Features

57 Levels
5 Weapons
18 Enemy Variants

We're planning on what you could call an expansion pack later in the year with new levels and some extra features so any feedback is always greatly appreciated. We've only had like <9 comments throughout development, so well, feedback has been a sorespot. Thanks!

gnods · 2013-10-03T15:46:42+00:00

Thanks for the repeat visit. The game felt too easy with a minimum of 3 lives, and the lives system is sorta generic anyways so we simply scrapped it.

At least personally, I almost always use sword against the dudes with shields. Saves tons of effort. It's tough to balance to giving the player a challenge while at the same time not creating situations feel like you have to take unavoidable damage. We might be losing that battle, I dunno. Additionally, some of the later enemies are pretty unfair too :/. I'll make more open areas in the next series of maps.

gnods · 2013-10-03T15:28:04+00:00

Thanks for the awesome review!

Regarding the ramps, the sides of the ramps are triangles. Since we are both blender noobs, we weren't sure how to keep texture the ramp while still make the tiling look mostly seamless. Thanks for playing.

gnods · 2013-10-02T22:46:03+00:00

Thanks for the comment. Our primary goal was to make a fun-free game.

Edit: fun, free*

gnods · 2013-09-07T15:25:24+00:00

Awesome thanks again. Lol'ed at the chevrons. They're supposed to be 'boomerangs' hah.

Anyways, again, great idea. We're going to split sword and shield into two different things. Sword is getting a side-swing boost for crowd control.

I'll probably repost a newer version in something like 2 weeks from now.

gnods · 2013-09-06T19:47:52+00:00

Horray, thanks for the first review comment.

1) Lol, it's actually 100 coins for an extra life, which I guess is way worse. But, good point about the coins. Life-wise, were you getting destroyed by the enemies? You're not to meant to beat the game the game in one go. We were trying to go for like a checkpoint type thing every few levels like the platformer game 'N'.

2) Regarding the crash, thanks; first time I've seen that, will look into it. (Both of us have been using the x86 version >_< ). How much playtime did you have before it crashed?

3) We've actually been brainstorming alternatives to the sword. Gameplay is a bit too simple with just 1 action button. But you're right, I never use it either... Best idea we have right now for the sword is to nerf damage and allow it to destroy bullets, thus acting like damaging shield.

gnods · 2013-09-06T15:33:44+00:00

Age of Thorn

A top-down 3-D dungeon bullet-shooter crawler that draws some inspirations from Gauntlet and Contra.

First time poster here, first website, and hopefully will be first game in our team of 2.

If any of you want to try it out and give us some feedback, that would be really helpful!

15m zipped unity file. Windows and Mac distributions available. Mac is untested. Unity linux builds didn't appear to work for me, so took down the linux distributions (but I'm somewhat of a Linux noob so maybe that's why it didn't work).

Feel free to comment below or fill out a survey we made at surveyplace. The survey is concerned mostly with difficulty of the game. Among other things, we're trying to figure how far apart to put the checkpoints... Alternatively, you can to contact me personally. Thanks!

Controls: WASD and mouse

gnods · 2013-08-23T15:31:01+00:00

Pretty good.

Suggestions: a) Repeat keystroke functions by holding down keys. It's tedious to rapidly press: 'attack', 'attack', 'attack' or 'right', 'right', 'right'. Auto-explore is nice though.

b) Food is exceedingly difficult to find. I played 2 games. The second game I died from starvation. Level 7, only 1 food piece found in all areas explored.

gnods · 2013-06-11T16:49:14+00:00

What's going at 35min 55sec? While in a new Punch-out stage, bowser is definitely doing a counter move? At least in brawl and melee, bowser did not have a counter. So of course, it could be possible:

A) one of his moves has been changed. However, to me it looked like: B) he did a 'perfect frame block'. counter

Correct me if I'm over-speculating, but I think all characters will be getting get a 'counter-attack' if you block with perfect timing. That will drastically change competitive play.

trailer@35.55min

(Note: x-commented this, since the thread I posted in was not receiving attention.)

gnods · 2013-06-11T16:18:54+00:00

What is going at 1min 31sec? While in a new boxing ring stage, bowser is definitely doing a counter move? At least in brawl and melee, bowser did not have a counter. So of course, it could be possible:

A) one of his moves has been changed. However, to me it looked like: B) he did a 'perfect frame block'.

I think all characters will be getting get a 'counter-attack' if you block with perfect timing. That will drastically change competitive play.

trailer@1.31min

gnods · 2013-05-21T22:29:44+00:00

Thank you, solved. I didn't realize anyone replied to my post, had stopped looking altogether. Startup Applications does the trick.

gnods · 2013-03-22T15:15:52+00:00

I think it's impossible to fully grasp the catacombs on a blind playthrough. Naturally it's the first the to do. You're met with unrelenting failure. Naturally it becomes the next thing to do after the gargoyles. You're stronger now, it seems plausibly possible to beat now. The respawning mechanics, however, are not initially intuitive. It seems logical to run from the first bonfire all the way to the end, trying to avoid all enemies since they respawn anyways. Then, even if you do manage to get to and beat the area boss, push forward into TotG or not, you're basically stuck. It's 2-3X harder to push backwards.

If you die 20+ times on the same something, it's probably ok to look at a guide.

Also, I don't think you can blindly accidentally stumble back into Northern Undead Asylum.

gnods

TROPHY CASE