Tiny Tales - 8 Bit Wars entry

Started by Imerion, April 04, 2019, 20:18:52

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Imerion

I decided to create a thread here in case anyone had feedback or bug reports. :)

My entry, Tiny Tales, is a mini-adventure where you explore the land, solve puzzles, fight enemies and level up. All on a single screen! The game adheres to the C64 palette and a 320x200 resolution. I believe (almost) all 8x8 tiles are within the four color limit. The idea was to cram in as many places, puzzles, secrets, etc as possible on a single screen and make it challenging despite everything being in view from the start. Besides puzzles there are enemies to fight and level ups to gain. :)



You can find the downloads here:
Windows: https://www.dropbox.com/s/vaqc2ea1te5ardu/TinyTales-Beta-Win.zip?dl=0
Linux: https://www.dropbox.com/s/ivhc3fujxlco4ho/TinyTales-Beta-Linux.zip?dl=0
MacOS: https://www.dropbox.com/s/4xgzstq37douenn/TinyTales-Beta-MacOS.zip?dl=0

All media was made by myself. I wanted to have music and a few more sound effects, but time ran out. In case someone decides to test it I am especially curious if it works well in Windows and MacOS, which I don't have and therefore can't test. In Linux the game should run in fullscreen automatically, but I heard that is not the case in Windows so any reports about that would be interesting too. Thanks for reading!

Derron

You have some nice sprites there (fountain, mountain, fence - and "princess"). Was not able to test it yet but looks promising already.


bye
Ron

craigd

Very nice looking! I'll check it out properly when it's not so late haha

iWasAdam

Agreed. it all works together really well :)

Steve Elliott

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

Imerion

#5
Thanks for the nice comments!  :D

And here is a bugfix release! I fixed a handful issues with things getting stuck, enemies not taking damage, things not displaying as intended, inventory behaving odd, etc.

Here are a few more screens too:






The download links above should have been updated!

blinkok


Derron

1)
Figure does not center at "grid cells", so you sometimes stuck in the middle of two cells. you then need to walk until you reach a wall/end of level so it corrects the figures position
This sometimes leads to paths not being "walkable" as you were 1px too far left or so

2)
While you move on a collectible you shortly see a text describing it - but as you move, it hides the text if you did not stop right ahead of time

3)
how to reach the blue shimmering sphere?

4)
I used one of the spheres in the brown/swamp (right of the bottom-left-"eye" in your screen). Text vanished too fast to know why and what happened.

5)
The top "key hole" for your necklace: what did that do on activation? Used the water-roses before to reach that area on top.


6)
That moveable "?"-block next to the keyhole: you push it to the right but it then pushed downwards at the end?

7)
Some enemies gave +HP on attack and some reduced it: intented?


As I did not see any savegame option I think I need to play it from begin on again when trying it next time?

bye
Ron

Imerion

#8
Hi Derron, thanks for your comments! :D

For others reading who hasn't played the game: the text below contains several spoilers and solutions. ;)

1. Yes, that is a known problem. I did some small adjustments in the bugfix week release, but it still happens on some occasions. I have been thinking about tightening that up, or simply let movement free and don't even try to make it tile-by-tile. Which do you think would be better?

2. The delay should definitely be longer. Will fix that!

3. That is one of the harder puzzles. Stop reading if you don't want the solution: (In the top-left corner of the screen, above the castle, a unique flower will grow as you finish a few of the other puzzles. If you go there you receive magical seeds that you can plant in the patch of dirt beneath the wall close to the sphere. This will cause vines to grow that enables you to reach it.)

4. Was there a grey box next to you? It should appear after certain other things have happened. Each sphere goes into one of four such boxes. Placing all unlocks the final cave. If this happened without the grey device being there it's a bug.

5. That activates the device in the center of the ruins, where another item goes.

6. It's supposed to be pushed right and then down later on. Pushing it right is to reach the keyhole, pushing it down is to reach the area to the right. It's mostly there to obscure that area and detract from the real path through: the water lilies.

7. No, that sounds like a bug. Will look into that too once voting is done and I can bugfix again. :)

Sorry, no option for saving. I might add something like that, but at least it goes quite quickly once you know what to do.

Imerion

I created a page for the game, as an alternative to the Dropbox links: https://imerion.gamejolt.io/tinytales/

The version there has icons added, but nothing about the game has changed compared to the release I made during bugfix week.

Derron

3.
I saw the item next to the house and also went to there but for me no interaction was possible.

5.
Once activated (as said I used the item at the key hole) .. what to do that there? I of course tried all items at this spot yesterday - but nothing did create a reaction or different message (at least not that I was aware of).

6.
You were able to push it down right when standing left of it


The interaction bugs might be based on the little offsets in the movement.



My last compo entry "Maze Raider" was written in Godot too. Instead of using the provided physics methods for doing collisions etc. I wrote my own grid system + movement functionality.
As my character and other moving entites were only allowed to do up/down/left/right movements (not diagonal) I could simply check if my current "next cell" target is on the right/left/top/bottom and set the velocity accordingly.

As the velocity was set I just needed to check if the next-cell-center-y when up/down movement or -x for left/right was reached (or even more than that). Once this happened I set the velocity of the the character to 0 and the center x or y (depends on movement direction) of the character to the position of the grid. Of course you could center both: x,y to keep it even more "grid like".
To offset characters a bit from the center I had an individual offset-vector for the entities which is not used for movement logic but collision and rendering (so: position + offset).


bye
Ron

Imerion

Again, thanks for your detailed reports and comments, I really appreciate it!

3. Strange, will look into why that didn't happen. It should trigger automatically once red flowers are blooming there.

5. The mystic key that you can find by digging in the little garden at the bottom right of the screen should work there and should make four devices appear around the mountain area. The person in that house hints that a key was lost in the garden and you can see that one flower has an odd color - that is the place to dig.

6. Ah, now I get it. That is another bug.

That is a good tip! As you say I had some problems with Godots built-in physics collisions. I should probably use another method, your idea sounds smart. If nothing else for my next game. As it is I have some ideas on locking objects to the x or y axis and such to prevent them from going to the wrong place. Will definitely go over and adjust these things!

chessish

Loojs very interesting an nice. Keep up the good work

Imerion

Quote from: chessish on June 07, 2019, 21:10:15
Loojs very interesting an nice. Keep up the good work

Thanks! :)

I haven't posted here for a while, but Tiny Tales has received a bunch of updates and can now be considered the game I actually envisioned but didn't have time to finish within the compo deadline. ;) The latest version, 1.2, can be found here: https://imerion.gamejolt.io/tinytales/

If someone is curious a changelog can be found within the posts here: https://gamejolt.com/games/tinytales/407690

It was great getting a deadline to focus around, so I'm really hoping for more competitions like this to join. :D