Macheads! First upload of my new platformer!

Click below for the very first version of my new game. Written in BMax, as yet no build for PC. OSX only.

Use the arrow keys to walk.

[z] is jump.
[x] is attack: the following combos are available...

[forward]-[forward+x] - while landed = flying kick
[x]-[x] = kick then punch
[x]-[x]-[x+up] = kick, punch then uppercut
[x]-[x]-[x+down] = kick, punch then spinning kick
[x]- while in the air = flying kick
[x]-[x+down] = flying kick then thrust kick

[c] is throw coconut, should you pick one up (hold longer for further throw)


[Try playing with the coconuts, see if you can jump on the trees. See if you can find all the cards.]
_________________________________


I know there are plenty of bugs still, but I think it is finally worthy of an upload. I want feedback from as many of you as possible because I need to work out if this game is worth continuing with. It would require an enormous commitment, but I am prepared to undertake it if I feel like other people like the idea as much as I've enjoyed making it so far.

Let the comments rip!

Thanks,
Sonic


Pre-alpha v0.43 of Pico-Pico

Wow, I think "polished" is the appropriate English word for this neat little screeny.
I'm waiting for the PC version :)

Thanks, I have access to a PC at the moment so I might have a go at building it. I wonder if I'll come up against any cross-platform issues?

nice pastell design. Sunny atmosphere. looks good.

Looks fun!

PC VERSION PLEASE... :P

Tested it on my iBook G4, 1.3ghz, 1gig RAM. Runs smoothly. Love the graphics and absolutely adore the little red guys when they get angry. That's just brilliant.

I didn't realize at first that you could jump higher by doing a jump-kick instead of just a jump, so had trouble getting on top of one of the platforms till I realized this. The character slides quite a bit which I don't like, but maybe that's just me being an anal animator :-). I got stuck when I walked of the edge just beyond the first palmtree, and couldn't jump or do anything other than walkl left or right inside the ground. Also, there was something weird happening with the camera from time to time. It goes in and out which is cool, but sometimes it seemed to snap very close in on the character for like 1 frame. Didn't know quite what it was and didn't manage to repeat it consequently. Other than that very cool work.

Looking forward to seeing the completed version.

Ragnar

Ah the close zoom is an unfinished feature...

It zooms when you press down near a signpost to reveal what it says.
I will have the game pause and the foreground go translucent.

As for falling off the bottom - you should die really, but that's not implemented yet either. You can press [5] to reset the game.

I also should mention a few things about it.

Test Machine
========

1GHz G4 Titanium 15" Powerbook.
OSX 10.3 Panther / 512 Mb Ram.

If there are problems with yours please let me know.

Bugs
===

I'm interested to see what you think of the feel, so I should mention the bugs that I already know about.

1. Occasional falling through platforms when switches are flicked.
2. Enemy AI forcing them into rapid left-right turns.
3. Lots more enemy AI 'quirks'.
4. There's a tree top in the middle of the stage.
5. The y-sorting of sprite's draw order is a little quirky (ok very).
5. No jump anim / sound.
6. Coconut will have a timer, so you can't keep it forever.
7. Destructible blocks will cause shards to fly out as they break.
8. You can't win!

Editor
====

The editor is included. Press E to enter it.
From there you'll have to figure out the key commands as I can't be bothered to list them all.

Here are some of them if you fancy a go!

[T] go to tileset page
[M] switch edit mode
[P] turn preview mode on/off
[, and .] flip between planes

Press [shift] in tilepage to cycle through tilesets
Press [space] to cycle through options

Hey Sonic,

looking lovely mate! Great work.

IPete2.

Looks interesting.

Don't forget to try jumping on the trees. They act as springs!

Well congratulations are in order...

This was actually the first and only application ever to actually cause my mac to crash since I got it last July!

And not just @#!*ing around with a forced quit either, proper hard crash requiring a power-cycle. That's quite an achievement!

I won't hold it against you though as this does look completely lovely and I'm looking forward to seeing how it progresses!

Sorry to hear about the crash... Did it crash mid-game or in startup?

Mid game, only a few seconds in, I'd just read the first sign and then hit [b] as indicated on the sign (of course that should have been [x].

Second time I tried it worked fine.

keep up the good work, it looks great already

Aha - pressing [B] pauses the game. You then have to press [P] to unpause.

That was just added for screenshots. Probably wasn't a full crash then.

Oh right, nice and logical then!

Well it wouldn't let me Command-Tab out to another app, nor ctrl-option-esc to force quit so I'd say that was fairly crashed.

Either way it forced me to switch the machine off and hence lose a bunch of other stuff which was open.

I'd suggest that you:

a) Make sure the signs which tell you to press [b] when they actually mean [x] are changed to show what you are *actually* meant to press!

b) If you're going to pause, allow an any key to resume or print up what's going on - especially when you use a different key to resume to the one which just froze the app!

:)

Pretty good looking screenie!

(Don't have a Mac, so can't give the game itself a try.)

It does look good, may try it if you do a PC version.

Plays really well here, and no problems apart from those already mentioned above.

I wouldn't mind the option of redefining the keys though, as they're not my first choice for this sort of game - basically because I was brought up on the old Z/X etc combination.

On my crappy iBook (@500Mhz 192Mb) the program try to start but then it stops immedialtely...it can run in windows? What are the min specs?

Quote:

>>Oh right, nice and logical then!

>>Well it wouldn't let me Command-Tab out to another app, nor ctrl-option-esc to force quit so I'd say that was fairly crashed.

>>Either way it forced me to switch the machine off and hence lose a bunch of other stuff which was open.

>>I'd suggest that you:

>>a) Make sure the signs which tell you to press [b] when they actually mean [x] are changed to show what you are *actually* meant to press!

>>b) If you're going to pause, allow an any key to resume or print up what's going on - especially when you use a different key to resume to the one which just froze the app!

:)


Yeah I know it's confusing - and the pause button was only added seconds before upload to do the screenshots. Once again, apologies - it won't be the final system of course!

The redefine keys will be added, as will gamepad support (in fact it is designed to be played with a pad) - [x] being called [b] in the game is to reflect this fact. Perhaps I should remind you that it is only in pre-alpha stage, and I really want feedback along the lines of 'feel' and 'fun factor'. At the moment, the keys defined are the least of my worries!

I'm sorry you lost your work. Unpausing then pressing ESC would have worked, but you weren't to know!

I'll upload a version with no pause and no editor soon to stop any confusion.

Thanks!

[edit: double post... oops]

Wow, that's a pretty cool little game. A couple things that jumped out at me immediately...

It takes forever to load. What's up with that? When I started it the first time, it was stuck on a black screen so long that I tried to force quit. Then, right as it was quitting I noticed the game starting up.

Also, there are a lot of little bugs involving collision detection. For example, if you are in the middle of a kick when you run into something (eg. a block on the ground,) you'll keep kicking over and over as long as you keep running into it.

Sonic, when I run this I get a black screen for a few seconds and then it returns to the desktop. Any ideas?

My iBook only has 32mb graphics ram, and it ran fine. So you don't need 64mb.

@ Joe Hocking

Thanks for the feedback. I've also noticed that bug with the attack moves not finishing when you hit a wall, and it's on the mental list - but thanks for mentioning it!

I have a nightmarish system to debug that reads tiles' slopes and converts them into euclidian geometry that's checked for collision. It's being refined, but it's still very convoluted code.

As for the startup, I am also experiencing this problem.

It is one of two things (I have yet to fully test it).

a) the graphics loading
b) the sound loading (some are .ogg's)

I've read a rumour that blitz is very slow at decomp-ing .ogg's, so I am worried it might be this, as this is the format I have chosen.
The only alternative is that it could be the graphics loading, but with a max of 32 mb (see ragtag's post) I think it is unlikely.

Anyone else experience this?

@ everyone who's tested it

Once again, thank for the props everyone, but...

... do you think it could sell?

That's the big question - because I'm not sure I have a year or two's work in me if it's just not commericial. (Bearing in mind that the move system and the enemies themselves should be much refined, and there are lots of cool ideas you haven't seen in this short demo...)

Take care,
Sonic.

No. I don't think it will sell. You asked for my opinion, and I could be dead wrong, so forget it and go ahead! follow your dreams. :-)

I have no special talent to guess what sells thousands per month or what does not sell a copy a month. I could never predict the next big shareware/comercial seller. So take what I tell you a grain of salt (as everything you read on the Internet).

The chances of any of us "getting rich" or even "earn a living" writing a single indie game are about "0" to "none" in my opinion... based or reading a lot on the Internet and talking to a lot of authors...

The changes of "living out of indie games" are greater if:

- you write some titles (read have several ones generating sales simultaneously), which takes years to achieve, and a lot of "not so enthusiastic periods". Finishing and polishing a game that you thought was 80% done will be a whole lot harder than you might think.

- don't quit your day job or get one (whichever applies to your case).

- learn from your mistakes and be realistic on what you can produce. Do not even imagine you will get a nintendo style triple AAA quality, hugely polished title. Make it as fast as you can, make sure you have the energy to finish it, wrap it (i.e. showing the strong points of whatever you produce) and sell it. Most people aim for the moon, that's crazy, and a lot of unfinished titles are the evidence. Check out the gallery right here... and imagine what happened to a lot of those "great" games behind the pretty screenshots.

- Have a lot of luck, a lot of talent, or both. Yes there is nothing "amazing" technically speaking on some of the computer games industry best sellers. Testing and inventing concepts creates more "winners" when things work than writing the best implementation on a old idea (the bet of the games industry in the past 10 years or so). You can follow either road, rewrite whatever sells "plus some cherry on top", or invent something new (try, fail, retry, fail again, prototype, test concepts, and maybe, just maybe... you'll have the next Tetris, Lemmings, wolfenstein in your hands).

- Last but not least. Have fun. Make it a hobby you love. If it turns out that your hobby makes you (some or a lot) money it is great. You are a lot more likely to be a failure than a success as an indie. So you better love every project, make sure you have the energy stored for when things are not all that exciting, when code grows and starts to gain its own life and then comes back to haunt you... prototype, iterate, test stuff. Drop what does not work, or is not fun, pursue with a vengeance what does work in your prototype, forget everything else and focus on what is fun, different, and can makes your product stand out and a some sort of a chance to compete.

... I have been writing unfinished games since 1991, some were released as shareware... TotalWar 1 & 2 (Amiga), Universal wars (Amiga & PC bbs doors, for Xenolink and pcboard) and now I *will* finish and release"Su Doku Live". A lot of other projects failed... they were no fun, or got to ambitious for me to handle them, or I just tired of the idea or got drained of the energy required to finish them. Loving it. As much as I did 15 years ago. And no, none of them sold anything worth mentioning, even when I thought they would.

Most people that I know that wrote games got nowhere and quitted just out of sheer disappointment with sales. Well, I think they forgot rule #1: love it and do it for the fun... add the remote chance of actually earning money as the salt we need in food and in our dreams.

PLS

looks cool, reminds me of my Iron Fist game and Viewtiful Joe as well. I would like to play a PC version.

I second that. Good looking game in BlitzMax i'd actually be bothered to play.

I should add I posted this on indiegamer.com, after some honest, but brutal, criticism of the game. I thought y'all should know as I'm almost definitely putting the game on the shelf for the time being...

Quote:
============================================

Thanks for the honest and useful comments everyone. I really appreciate you taking your time to advise me.

I feel I should give some background to myself and this project...

I am a full-time, pro music producer and DJ, and have been in that industry for over ten years.

In my childhood, I was a very keen programmer, and released several titles for the Amiga in my teens. I began with simple freeware games, and moved on to what was my biggest project to date: a 2d point'n'click, Monkey-Island style game called 'Keith's Quest' (look it up if you like - it's available on some abandonware sites). The was classified Licenseware (the bracket slightly more expensive than shareware). It was a two year project, one of which was totally devoted to the game. I was lucky in that I had a spare year to devote to it, unlucky in that, by the time I released, the Amiga was on its last legs (c.1995), and sales were severely down.

Anyway, I'm mentioning this to show that I have the necessary in me to finish a large project (I have also finished a couple of music albums and a book - I tend to see things through once I have begun).

I know this is a risky genre, and producing a AAA platformer title is a very high aim for my first project, however, I would be prepared to put in the time if I really thought my idea had potential. Obviously the pre-alpha I have released is in no state to show off, but to even get it to the beta stage would require several more months of debugging / level-writing and playtesting.

I needed to know if it's even worth reaching that point. I perhaps did upload too early, however I don't know if I have the time in my life to commit unless I believed that, like me, the other indie developers thought I had something quite cool on my hands.

I am at a stage in my life where I would quite like a career change, and I know I have it in me to write some decent games, as it is my biggest love besides music, and I have the necessary experience and the technical knowledge (I have a degree in Comp. Science. from a decent uni.)

Now I am thinking I should follow the crowd and try a title with the scope of a match-3 (which by the way I am really fed-up with!) in order to make the funds available for a project I'd really like to do. I wouldn't make a match-3 itself, just a title with the same level of simplicity, as it [sadly] seems to be the only sure-fire way to make a living. I felt that this attitude was damaging the indie scene, as no-one was brave enough to attempt something different, but now I'm moving towards the opinion that - if you can't beat 'em up, join 'em up (sorry, bad joke). At least until I can fund a project like this.

I have several 'mini' game ideas, one of which has been in the works since about '92 and my brothers and I still play. This might be the kind of thing I need to get started on... Build up my company's profile to the point where I can get a team together for a bigger project like this.

So chances are, this will get shelved (something I really dislike to do) until such time as I can feel more secure in devoting two years to it (I had planned to take as much time as was needed - it took the best part of 4 months to get the game and tools to this point.)

Thanks everybody for getting back to me, I really appreciate your feedback.

Dude, I definitely don't think you should be giving up on this.

You've done a great job so far. The only real criticism would be that you maybe should have done a little more internal testing and ironed out a few more of the obvious bugs before releasing it for public consumption.

I think it would benefit hugely from getting some joypad support in their as soon as possible and just nailing a couple of the key things, such as ensuring the player can't fall through the floor etc.

I think it's great style wise and both my girlfriend and her 8 year old son loved the look of it. Callum asked when he could have it on his PC too..

Keep at it mate!