Sacred Lands - Code a game competition - May 4th to June 30th

Started by iWasAdam, May 17, 2018, 06:14:40

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Matty

I played it - very, very polished, but outside my skill level to be any good at it...will take considerable practice.

(Win 7 Home Premium)

Qube

Only had a quick 20 minute play on this so far... Very well presented and nice work on the sound side of things and overall polish.

So far though I'm finding it hard to play and find it frustrating to try and aim and fire the lasers accurately while flying. Sometimes I get the laser sound but I can't see anything coming out from the ship ( MacOS 10.13.5 ). The ship also appears to climb at different rates?, sometimes the ship climbs quicker than other times but I'm not sure if that's intentional or something I've missed so far?.

Too early to give proper feedback as I think I need to spend more time getting to grips with the whole game mechanics. But from what I've seen so far, tip top work :)
Mac Studio M1 Max ( 10 core CPU - 24 core GPU ), 32GB LPDDR5, 512GB SSD,
Beelink SER7 Mini Gaming PC, Ryzen 7 7840HS 8-Core 16-Thread 5.1GHz Processor, 32G DDR5 RAM 1T PCIe 4.0 SSD
MSI MEG 342C 34" QD-OLED Monitor

Until the next time.

iWasAdam

very interesting about the skill level - this is similar to what people faced with zarch ( and I simplified how it works too)  ;D

ok. some inside details about how the flying works
nothing is strictly binary (on/off), when you apply power the longer you hold it the more power increases. so to hover, you will need to find the sweet spot and stop using power and just hit it occasionally to keep you sort of bouncing...

the same with left/right. you can only turn in flight (power or not) but it is cumulative. You are not really turning, but rolling left or right

forward and back will ONLY work when power is on. they too follow a curve, but the curve is parabolic, so once it starts to get faster/slower it does it more a more quickly -  forward is faster than backward.
the ship also points down as you go forward (that is what going forward is doing). and as you are pointing down, applying power will also go in the down direction too.
Similarly going backward angles the ship toward you with the nose pointing up, so the ship will also rise when going backwards.

Now for the real inside tip. The power trees are the main key, with the trees being secondary. lazers are used in reserve as they take up too much power. but do they...

sometimes flying might not be the best option...

Xerra

I think it's a fantastic effort in all honesty. I've put a bit of time in trying to work out how to play this evening because, like the others, I have found it quite hard to get used to flying the ship. I think it's meant to be that way , however, so I think recommending practice rather than going in to try and make it easier would be the correct solution. I've made a few notes which I was going to put about the game when I've looked at all of them and created a voting post but you might want a look at these regarding a couple of bugs. Just in case you want to fix them or I've not understood something.

Was confused as hell at first but then found what keys did from options menu.

Love that the game has a tutorial and saves progress.

Reminds me of both Virus on the Archimedes and Sentinel - both great games for inspiration.

Found R key seemed to be a level skipper - perhaps that was meant to be disabled? :) Nice ending screen for winning the game.

Bug? Winning the game music plays as well as title screen music when you go back to it after completion for a while. Game also seems to keep title screen elements on screen and keep level skipping when starting again after seeing end screen.

Presentation of this game is excellent. Background graphics, menu's etc. Feels like a commercial game. You want to play it as soon as the title screen kicks in with all the funky displays. Love the Atari VCS box cover.

Seems very hard to play with keys but again I wasn't very good at it so no complaints.

Easily the most complete game for me. I kept wanting to play it even though I was rubbish at it.

M2 Pro Mac mini - 16GB 512 SSD
ACER Nitro 5 15.6" Gaming Laptop - Intel® Core™ i7, RTX 3050, 1 TB SSD
Vic 20 - 3.5k 1mhz 6502

Latest game - https://xerra.itch.io/Gridrunner
Blog: http://xerra.co.uk
Itch.IO: https://xerra.itch.io/

iWasAdam

ooh, press R to win!
Yup thats debug stuff. I'll get on and sort all of that out... I'ts interesting that it's still active - should not be - Will have to check that
(report: you found a low-level bug  ;D need to recompile and up the results now)

recompiled and upped :)

I'll look into all the other stuff as well. great feedback on that front.

It does seem that people are having trouble with control of the ship. (i know that was the issues with Zarch as well)

iWasAdam

What would happen if this was taken a step further...


You would need a new ship, but maybe one with lots more detail...

iWasAdam

ok,
V1.02 is now ready for updating.

https://adamstrange.itch.io/sacredlands

The changes mainly address fullscreen and tutorial bugs as found above:
lots of minor bugfixes

added the current location of the rings to the grid display

fullscreen mode is now standardised across Windows/Linux platforms with correct resizing and saving.

Tutorial mode has been fixed - there were bugs that caused constant ship explosions.

Tutorial mode text has been changed to make it obvious which keys do what and how rings/horns operate

Tutorial mode bug fix to prevent 'next' tip/help from not advancing

Internal key scanning code changed to make it work the same across platforms

land height detection modified to prevent the ship from exploding when close but not actually hit.

difficulty slightly changed so that easy and medium give a little more fuel to make it not quite as brutal

Steve Elliott

#142
Cool.  Maybe after the comp ends we could have a week of testing to identify bugs before voting commences (no new features to be added).
Win11 64Gb 12th Gen Intel i9 12900K 3.2Ghz Nvidia RTX 3070Ti 8Gb
Win11 16Gb 12th Gen Intel i5 12450H 2Ghz Nvidia RTX 2050 8Gb
Win11  Pro 8Gb Celeron Intel UHD Graphics 600
Win10/Linux Mint 16Gb 4th Gen Intel i5 4570 3.2GHz, Nvidia GeForce GTX 1050 2Gb
macOS 32Gb Apple M2Max
pi5 8Gb
Spectrum Next 2Mb

iWasAdam

No problem on that front. Any bug hunting is always good...

The one thing which is really good is finding the cross platform issues and nailing them. These are then absorbed into any project that comes next  8)

BasicBoy

The Windows version of 'Sacred Lands' appears to be missing from the download page? Just the Mac and Linux versions are available. I'm a Windoze user!

I wanted to download and play the recently updated version v1.02 (I already have v1.01 on my system, so I guess it's no biggie).




iWasAdam