Super 2D Adventure Simulator

Hello All,

Here is my latest and 4th game.

I tried to create something that imitated the old 8 bit style adventure games. I quickly realised that the graphics were stupidly hard to do in that style, so it's ended up.. well, I'm not quite sure where!
The sound is also aimed at an 8 bit style, and I think this has worked out pretty well.

It's a simple 2D adventure where you collect coins, keys, avoid (and eventually get to kill) enemies. There are various items to find and collect to assist you. (Some coins early on are too high and so forth).
You can enter many buildings and "interact" with the occupants.
There are two controllable characters, each with unique abilties, both of whom you will need to use to complete the game.
An objective list can be accessed that guides you along and hopefully avoids any confusion about what needs to be done.
There are no platforming elements.

Here are some screenies :











I'd appreciate any feedback, whether it be positive (especially so!), negative or ideas etc.
Please do keep in mind that this is a hobby - I'm not a "real" programmer by any stretch of the imagination.
Nevertheless I am open to criticism.

Keys are numerous depending on which character you control, but basically;
cursor keys left\right to move left or right
cursor up to jump
cursor down is the action key (enter doors, go up pathways etc)
space is fire when available.

There are other useful keys that will be displayed when you start the game.

If you manage to get into the arcade in the screenshot above, there are a couple of nice little surprises.

This is Windows only I'm afraid, and it does have the sound delay on Vista - something I've not got my head around how to fix despite reading bits and pieces on these forums.
It doesn't run (well it does but you can't see anything) on any machine with an onboard graphics card and that has less than 512MB of RAM.

Here be the download link :

http://www.buzzardgames.com/direct/2dsetup.exe

Enjoy! (hopefully!) :-)
Thanks.

i like it. its a nice little old school game, and i love the graphics, kinda like retro meets southpark.

Hey this does look like the old 2D adventures, neat. As for Vista sound, don't use the FreeAudio driver in BMax, use DirectSound or OpenAL (required additional DLLs in the exe folder).

You know what? I spent ages searching on the sound thing, but never found an answer.

One of my friends read the above and found a post made three weeks ago (long after I'd given up hope of a solution).

Brilliant. All sorted with DirectSound. Thanks.

"It doesn't run (well it does but you can't see anything) on any machine with an onboard graphics card..."

huh? What did you do to force or cause this to happen? Please explain, thanks. (It works fine on my onboard Intel.)

It was more a covering myself statement I guess.

I've tried it on 3 machines, 1 laptop, 2 servers and it ran, but the graphics were just coloured rectangles.

I suppose this could be due to drivers etc. though, since servers aren't meant for gaming!

And trust me, if I did do something to force or cause it to happen, I wouldn't have a clue what because it wouldn't have been intentional.

You wouldn't happened to have been using Remote Desktop to connect to the server and view your game, would you? If so, you'll get the blocky stuff because RDP doesn't fully support OpenGL graphics.

No, I wasn't. I've made that mistake before! :-)

The graphics are like Rainbow Island but twisted (south park genre).

Looks great. It has a real "Everyone's a Wally" look to it. I'll grab this over the weekend when I have some free time.

@Arry: you are welcome. OpenGL doesn't work as reliably on crappy graphics cards as DirectX I found - I just got white rectangles on some PCs.

Thanks for the comments about the graphics - much appreciated.
I was inspired by Pyjamarama on my Amstrad CPC. Aaah, I loved my 464... built in tape deck, colour monitor... Anyway, where was I? Ah yes, graphics. I wasn't too sure if I'd achieved what I'd set out to do, but it seems I at least got close. Thanks again.

@Grey Alien - yes, white rectangles are what I was seeing.

The white rectangles are most likely because the dimensions of the textures aren't a power of 2. I had the same issue. Newer graphics cards seem to ignore this requirement.

Had Pyjamarama on C64, also Popeye. Both weird games.

Love the retro style

Finally got around to putting up the high score table last night:

http://www.buzzardgames.com/super_2d_adventure_simulator/scores/