Nocturne in Yellow (& Knuckles)

[SyntherAugustus]

It just happened. I'll see if I can reproduce it later.

[TerminusEst13]

-Why is the default use key "C"? Really? "C"? Make it "E" like the rest of use folks use.

I wasn't aware of what the general consensus for what keybinds are. Thank you for telling me.
I'll be sure to ask for more information on everyone's keybinds before making any default layouts that can be rebound anyway. The WASD and ESDF wars will be fierce, and the Dvorak hounds will feast upon the carcasses of the damned.

-Is it a salt crystal or a grenade? Make up your damn mind!

Salt is an archaic ingredient in ye olde gunpowdere, so both.

-Do you still not have a 16:9 monitor?

Yes, I do. I've had one for a long time. Is this question leading up to anything, or did you want to report a bug?

-The rifle dudes easily lose in a 1v1 battle against the javelin thanks to its stun power.

Not an issue.

-MAP07 was clearly influenced by Archie

Thank you for telling me what I was inspired by, I had never played this wad before and needed to know what I was influenced by.

-Please do not force the renderer to render HOMs.

nah

-I know you really like projectiles, but you really ought to limit the amount of sprites in this room. My computer can run nuts.wad better than this.
Another screenshot of it in action

Okay, let's look at this for a minute. Let's assume that you haven't defeated all of the enemies in the level before encountering the boss, and round down the amount of eyes that's come to about 700.
One eye spawns every 350 tics, which is ten seconds. 10x700 is 7000, and there are 60 seconds in a minute, so 7000/60 means 116.66666[...] minutes, which is a little under two hours.
If you honestly have not beaten the final boss after two hours, then I think the amount of sprites in the final boss room is probably the least of your worries.
If you really insist, I can have a timer that reduces the amount of effects after one hour. Or that instantly finishes the game and puts you in a bad ending.

The hom/archie nonsense in map07 should really be reconsidered. It's unprofessional looking at best.

I emphatically disagree. I believe the aesthetic is both appropriate for the local and fun to go through.

I understand this was made in a month, but that's no excuse to release something that lacks polish.

If you sincerely believe we could have done more during the entire month of sleepless nights and want more polish, then I'd like to encourage you to wait a little further until we pick this up again to sand down the rough edges. There's a lot of issues we'd like to address about the maps, the gameplay, the etc, down the line and make it a not-mediocre TC.
Unless you're saying that we shouldn't have released it, in which case uhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh.

Thank you for your input otherwise. Being able to run outside of the room during the actual boss battles is definitely a wee bit of a problem.

[SyntherAugustus]

Responses in bold due to a bajillion tags.

Before I begin, sorry for being a bit rude with my post. The endgame sort of frustrated me a good bit.

-Why is the default use key "C"? Really? "C"? Make it "E" like the rest of use folks use.

I wasn't aware of what the general consensus for what keybinds are. Thank you for telling me.
I'll be sure to ask for more information on everyone's keybinds before making any default layouts that can be rebound anyway. The WASD and ESDF wars will be fierce, and the Dvorak hounds will feast upon the carcasses of the damned.

The majority of retail fps games tend to use E as a use key. At least it's what I'm used to. C is normally reserved for some kind of crouch or prone maneuver.

-Is it a salt crystal or a grenade? Make up your damn mind!

Salt is an archaic ingredient in ye olde gunpowdere, so both.

While that's probably true, I was convinced for a while that the only way to get grenades was to get the "extra grenade" thing. Picking up "salt crystals" made me assume I was picking up something else. Perhaps it ought to be clarified.

-Do you still not have a 16:9 monitor?

Yes, I do. I've had one for a long time. Is this question leading up to anything, or did you want to report a bug?

I was referring to the fact that the boss chat graphics looked like they were developed for a 4:3 monitor. During Samsara development, I recall you had a 4:3

-The rifle dudes easily lose in a 1v1 battle against the javelin thanks to its stun power.

Not an issue.

-MAP07 was clearly influenced by Archie

Thank you for telling me what I was inspired by, I had never played this wad before and needed to know what I was influenced by.

Wasn't being terribly serious when I used the word "Clearly". I guess I should have chose better wording.

-Please do not force the renderer to render HOMs.

nah

I think there's better ways to convey the scene since HOMs normally indicate missing textures.

-I know you really like projectiles, but you really ought to limit the amount of sprites in this room. My computer can run nuts.wad better than this.
Another screenshot of it in action

Okay, let's look at this for a minute. Let's assume that you haven't defeated all of the enemies in the level before encountering the boss, and round down the amount of eyes that's come to about 700.
One eye spawns every 350 tics, which is ten seconds. 10x700 is 7000, and there are 60 seconds in a minute, so 7000/60 means 116.66666[...] minutes, which is a little under two hours.
If you honestly have not beaten the final boss after two hours, then I think the amount of sprites in the final boss room is probably the least of your worries.
If you really insist, I can have a timer that reduces the amount of effects after one hour. Or that instantly finishes the game and puts you in a bad ending.

The screenshot timer shows the player at 11min. I must have triggered a bug

edit: You saw the twitch stream of me being unable to reproduce it. I wonder how I did trigger it.

The hom/archie nonsense in map07 should really be reconsidered. It's unprofessional looking at best.

I emphatically disagree. I believe the aesthetic is both appropriate for the local and fun to go through.

I understand this was made in a month, but that's no excuse to release something that lacks polish.

If you sincerely believe we could have done more during the entire month of sleepless nights and want more polish, then I'd like to encourage you to wait a little further until we pick this up again to sand down the rough edges. There's a lot of issues we'd like to address about the maps, the gameplay, the etc, down the line and make it a not-mediocre TC.
Unless you're saying that we shouldn't have released it, in which case uhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh.

I think what may have been better was to polish what you could and perhaps release the unpolished things later. In my line of work that tends to be the best thing to do if available. I'm saying this because you are intending to use this as a contest entry. Somebody on the irc chat was mentioning that said contest was being judged by "pink haired hipsters" and the rest of the entries were RPG Maker games. While that may be the case, there's other folks that will look at this, such as somebody considering this for a cacoward or even somebody who might land you a job in game development. I wouldn't label this as a 1.0 release if that was the case (edit: the OP clearly says there's bugs, which I should have reminded myself when making these posts, sorry). I'm happy that you're going to work on improving it though.

Thank you for your input otherwise. Being able to run outside of the room during the actual boss battles is definitely a wee bit of a problem.

[Blox]

This might sound like a bunch of excuses, but the truth behind why the game itself seems to lack polish is first and foremost because none of the people doing the mapping had anything near the amount of experience the coding/art department of the game had, and maps happen to be an extremely important part of FPS games. I do have to say that I'm not trying to diss anyone here; the results of this less-than-perfect lineup are still rather good considering the insanely tight deadline. gj to you guise

Besides that there's also the issue of a month being a surprisingly restricted amount of time for a project like this.
Hell, Term only got to finishing the final boss in the last two days of development - and the ones before that were all busted out throughout the last week.
That is not a lot of time to do anything, but despite that we still managed to crunch quite a bunch of bugs, polish various bosses and shit out the majority of enemy sprites.

"Polishing what we could and releasing the unpolished things later" wouldn't have worked for us at all, since we already cut corners and holes everywhere just to squeeze it out in time; biting the pillow and releasing subpar things were consequential to the fact that we really wanted to release a game and not a tech demo.

so really; remember to get mappers aboard the turbodev fps game train so that your lead coder won't have to spend over a week shitting out maps instead of doing things nice and proper, kids

[Medicris]

While that's probably true, I was convinced for a while that the only way to get grenades was to get the "extra grenade" thing. Picking up "salt crystals" made me assume I was picking up something else. Perhaps it ought to be clarified.

I'm surprised you didn't pick up on the extra grenade appearing on your hud every time you got one. I can see how some could miss it, though. I wonder if the new grenade or the entire grenade count meter should flash white briefly when collected to draw attention to it?

[SyntherAugustus]

The extra grenade pickup gives you a grenade. A salt crystal also gives you a grenade. They are named rather differently.

[idGamer]

The extra grenade pickup gives you a grenade. A salt crystal also gives you a grenade. They are named rather differently.

Yeah, but the Carrying Satchel also gives you room for another grenade; I don't see why the name difference is a problem.

[Cryomundus]

The extra grenade pickup gives you a grenade. A salt crystal also gives you a grenade. They are named rather differently.

Yeah, but the Carrying Satchel also gives you room for another grenade; I don't see why the name difference is a problem.

The problem is it's a case of visual discrepancy. You can see you have 5 or so black orbs at the start. When you get a satchel, you get another of those black orbs. When throw a grenade, it's a black orb.

When you see a grenade pickup, it's a white stone. Not only that, but when you pick it up, it's called a salt crystal. While it does give you another grenade, neither the sprite or the pickup name ever actually say that it's a grenade, it's implied to be something else entirely, and if the player isn't paying attention, they'll have no idea what the salt crystal even does. Heck, even the Satchels say "extra GRENADE capacity", not "extra SALT CRYSTAL CAPACITY", so there's not even any clues there as to what a "salt crystal" even gives you. Why Term never went with using one of the sprites for throwing a grenade or just using a blown-up version of the little black orbs is beyond me.

Really, it's just a case of very poor player communication and design choice.

Also, speaking of poor design choices, the drekyavech is completely useless from Map05 onward, you are never in any danger from them and can pick them off from a distance.

Additionally, in Map05, you can skip the red key and a VAST portion of the map when you take the portal for the first time.

---

After you've warped to the blood cathedral and dealt with the gunman, jump up on the highest portion of a pew that's closest to the bridge and jump up once to get the attention of the drekyavech, and then kill it from below. Once it's dead, head over to the corner closest to the blue key. From there, you can run n' jump on top of the candles and platform up to the top of the corner decoration, and jump onto the bridge with the blue key. CONGRATS, you can skip the rest of the level and fight the map's boss. Also, grabbing the blue key breaks the red door's portal, so you cannot visit that part of the level. Not that you'd need to with the blue key in hand.

Also, speaking of Map05, I hate the boss. I really, really, really hate that boss. It's just a damage sponge that's hard to see, let alone hit, deal's a large amount of damage, and can OHKO you should you stand still for to long. It's also the point where I just gave up, put on God-mode, MDK'd the bastard, and went on with the remaining maps. I did turn God-mode off for Map06, but as my patience was literally spent at the previous boss, I just used resurrect for map06's boss. I really did like the maps for the set, but if there's is one thing I could suggest should you ever come back and polish this, it's this: Please give the boss's health bar's. Seriously, it would help so much with player feedback and giving a sense of progress. I just got tired of feeling like I was plinking away at boss's with no actual feedback of how much damage that I was doing that I just wanted to see the end of the game, I barely cared about playing good by the end of map05.

Don't get me wrong, I really, REALLY like what you've got here, it just kinda... falls apart at the end.

[SyntherAugustus]

Don't get me wrong, I really, REALLY like what you've got here, it just kinda... falls apart at the end.

Yeah the "gameplay jumping out the window" bit I mentioned goes in full force here. You're somewhat enjoying a Castlevania hip boss battle inspired game (the projectile dodging is fun, actually), when suddenly everything loses momentum. First, you see the tv fuzz, and the player character freaks out since they're suddenly scared of some character who we didn't know. Then, like myself, people who laughed at The Ring probably fell out the chair laughing hysterically, only to realize the game is being serious. Feeling a little silly, you attempt to fight the boss battle, only to demand more of the silly projectile dodging you were into. It's like having good momentum only to be tripped and smashed face first into a brick, fuzzy television wall just to shoe in a different theme into the game.

edit:
At least it's not Bioshock Infinite, where the main character is given a magical one shot killing bird. However, instead of sharing a beer with your clingy girlfriend that shits ammo out of her ass constantly somehow , you're stuck in a final battle situation since the game absolutely must have one.

[0bsidian]

Speak for yourself, I loved the MAP05 boss. It's kind of funny actually, because for me MAP05 kind of tanked in the gameplay department with the bad lighting and that annoying basrad with the shotgun, but I really liked the idea behind the boss and honestly if I was making it I'd have expanded on it and screwed with the player's head a bit more.

Also yeah, I had no idea what those "Salt Crystals" were either.

[Viscra Maelstrom]

i guess the map 5 boss could be really annoying if you have a really dark monitor and can't see the outline of the... thing. it did take me a few attempts to put it down, but it wasn't too terrible. just stay on your toes and keep an eye out. Antique Coin can help pinpointing down where it is going, though the rifle seems to be the best thing to damage it with.

maybe if the player got some kind of indication on that they have a grenade alt-fire and that salt crystals = grenades it would be less confusing. like putting "grenade" in parenthesis for the pick-up, or have the grenade satchels say salt crystal satchels. a test/tutorial level explaining some of the game mechanics could be a useful addition to include in future updates of this.

[idGamer]

Also, speaking of Map05, I hate the boss. I really, really, really hate that boss. It's just a damage sponge that's hard to see, let alone hit, deal's a large amount of damage, and can OHKO you should you stand still for to long.

If you stand in the corner, you have a significantly reduced chance of actually being hit by the boss, especially since he appears briefly prior to attacking (aside from the hazy outline).
Personally, like Obsidian said, I love this boss. He really stands out from the others, adding a little variety to the otherwise bullethell-esque collection of bosses.

[SyntherAugustus]

Why is standing in the corner waiting for some invisible boss thing to appear considered fun?

[idGamer]

Why is standing in the corner waiting for some invisible boss thing to appear considered fun?

Because the fight's all about being perceptive. You have to watch carefully for a hint of the boss; if you aren't ready for him when he appears, you probably won't have enough time to shoot him before he attacks.You can't just sit there relaxing until he appears, or else you're going to lost very quickly. Like I said, I think it's a nice change of pace to have a fight that requires patience and careful attention to detail instead of the other bosses who require quick reactions.

[Blox]

Salt crystals are indeed an archaic leftover from things that didn't make the cut and which should have been clarified more but weren't because we were too busy looking elsewhere and too used to it to notice the obvious issue right in front of our noses. Oops.

A boss health bar would be killer, too.