Fireball Dungeon 8bit wars entry

[craigd]

So this is where the entries go.. :}

Fireball Dungeon

I think it only goes up to level 8. No winning screen, so please don't hold out for one after the last practically impossible dungeon ;p Just wanting to lessen your disappointment if you luckily get past that dungeon :}

You'll spot what's not finished and other things which were added at the last minute.

There is a bug with the Skullio monster. It can walkthrough walls to get you sometimes... I think I know what's causing it so that'll be my first bug fix for this haha

[therevills]

Cool 

Just had a quick play, I like it! Are you going to finish it after the comp?

[craigd]

Thanks man. Glad you liked it.

Well I had multiple players (1-4) planned for the compo..
as well as bosses..
and puzzles..
and an actual storyline too...
plus many more levels.

Would be a shame not to try and implement those at some point eh ;p

I've found a few bugs while playing the online version, but can't seem to replicate them locally. urgh. Thankfully the deadline for bugfixing is pretty generous :}

[Imerion]

Just tried this. Looks really promising! Graphics are really nice, but I'm not sure I'm doing things right. I try to move around but some sort of hidden walls block me, and then I suddenly start taking damage and lose. Perhaps something is not rendering correctly here? (Screenshot attached.

[Derron]

Hitbox of the enemy seems to be bigger than the sprite - at least I got hit while I think I was far enough away - or something else hit me...


bye
Ron

[craigd]

hmm you shouldn't be blocked by anything on that level. I'm wondering if it's a bug! NOooo.. :/

The thing that's killing you is the Screamer (that broccoli looking thing haha). If you get within a certain radius, it'll scream and take health from you. I didn't realise it was rapid firing like it is.

I wish game balancing was allowed during this debug week. Ah well. It's the one thing I wish I'd spent more time on.

[Xerra]

hmm you shouldn't be blocked by anything on that level. I'm wondering if it's a bug! NOooo.. :/

The thing that's killing you is the Screamer (that broccoli looking thing haha). If you get within a certain radius, it'll scream and take health from you. I didn't realise it was rapid firing like it is.

I wish game balancing was allowed during this debug week. Ah well. It's the one thing I wish I'd spent more time on.

That sounds like a bug fix rather than a balancing thing if it's running amok. Surely no issue being allowed to fix that before the end of bug fix week?

[craigd]

That sounds like a bug fix rather than a balancing thing if it's running amok. Surely no issue being allowed to fix that before the end of bug fix week?

Sorry, I didn't make it clear and re-reading what I wrote I can see that I wrote it wrong. I was referring to the Screamer when I mentioned balancing. I really did want to put more time into that enemy but had more important things to get in there before the deadline. I think the hit radius is too big now that it's been brought up.

The "invisible wall" or whatever Imerion encountered sounds like a bug but I can't reproduce it at all on itch.io. Everything works as it should.. well except one bug I found but I can't reproduce that locally. It only happens on itch.io. If you bought items ingame, then die, then start a new game, you start with those items. Can't see why it works perfect locally but not on itch.. been trying to fathom that one out pretty much all week haha

[Imerion]

The thing that's killing you is the Screamer (that broccoli looking thing haha). If you get within a certain radius, it'll scream and take health from you. I didn't realise it was rapid firing like it is.

Ah, then I get it. I tought I took damage even though it hadn't touched me yet.

The "invisible wall" or whatever Imerion encountered sounds like a bug but I can't reproduce it at all on itch.io.

I tried running the game in Firefox instead of my standard browser (Falkon) and there it worked! Very odd, but now it works great. Still quite hard though!

[craigd]

Ahhh all is great then haha

The Screamer enemy is a monster from an old game called Dungeon Master. I wasted a lot of my late teens on that game. Also, it's on the first level because I wanted the player to figure the Screamer out before they got too far and it killed them, then the player is like "wtf just hit me???".. like you did ;p

Hard? Yeah it is a bit, and I really wish I'd spent more time balancing the game. Ah well, always time after the comp

Thanks for checking it out

[Qube]

@craigd - Incase you are missing this in your other thread :

You shouldn't use semi-transparency for the ghost - the image above has 65 colors.
Removing the ghost (drew a black rectangle above it) I still see 58 colors.

Dunno how this happens and if this is allowed to get "bugfixed" during this week (For me it would be ok - maybe you did not "color pick" your colors but used a "looks like this green" workflow).
I did not check it further - but some "ground tiles" look darker: did you by any chance tint them individually ("SetColor 200, 200, 200" before drawing them to make them a bit darker) ? If so - just remove that tint ("bugfix").

Ahh yeah. I forgot to mention that. The only time I was going by C64 colour limits was in MultiPaint. That was enough of a challenge for me haha

NOTE: I've attached the dungeon graphics sheet I was working with (some test stuff in there..) to show it can be loaded straight into MultiPaint.

Once in the engine, I kind of gave up on colour palette limits. The floor is drawn at half transparency over a black background, while some tiles are drawn with even less, for a bit of variety. At full brightness, I felt like my eyeballs were being stabbed ;p

The transparency of the ghost was quite important in this game but I never got to implement that side of things...

Thanks for checking it out

Yeah, 65 colours is way above the palette provided for the C64 - Sorry but you're going to have to fix your game before the week of bug fixes closes on Sunday 7th @ 23:59:59 GMT. You posted the correct sprite sheet so you'll have to change over to that and get rid of any alpha sprites as that increases colours too. As stated in other threads, if an entry has a colour or two by accident then that will still be valid entry but 65 colours will not as that's unfair to the other entries.

[craigd]

@craigd - Incase you are missing this in your other thread :

Yeah, 65 colours is way above the palette provided for the C64 - Sorry but you're going to have to fix your game before the week of bug fixes closes on Sunday 7th @ 23:59:59 GMT. You posted the correct sprite sheet so you'll have to change over to that and get rid of any alpha sprites as that increases colours too. As stated in other threads, if an entry has a colour or two by accident then that will still be valid entry but 65 colours will not as that's unfair to the other entries.

I forgot to reply to Derron as I didn't know what I was going to do about it. It kind of left me in a worried state hahah

I never even thought about semi-transparency introducing new colours. It was hard to get the floor looking right and still able to see everything that's going on. I settled for lowering opacity... which worked at the time. That was at a time when I wasn't sure if I'd be entering the compo.

After much trial and error, I think I found a decent balance. Still not too happy with the result, as it seems a bit noisy, but it's the best I can do. Too much black and it looked like holes where the player could die :}

The ghost works better I think.

I've updated