UNIVERSE - Eventuality [DONE]

[toaster]

Here's my game idea. Basically there is a spinning vertex that is causing gravity to pull the player toward it. This is bad, and the player will die. This will lead to a variety of puzzles as well as the gravity pull from the vortex slowly increasing in power. It takes place in a space, and does have a message that has to do with Universe, but I'm still working on it.

EDIT: SwfCabin is horrible. I am looking for a better way of hosting it online. Until then, I would recommend just downloading the .swf file.

Download or Play online at https://sites.google.com/site/itstoaster/games/eventuality
Use arrow keys to move and "x" to jump.


EDIT: (0.8) http://www.swfcabin.com/open/1326881174 New Version, yay. The game is pretty much playable, however I'm still tweaking some stuff and adding things. I still plan on adding the storyline and music, which I'm still working on. And I promise next pageant I'll make a game in color.

EDIT: (0.9) http://www.swfcabin.com/open/1327171370 Story is in place, and the vortex is now spinning. I also toned down the difficulty to make it less frustrating. In the future I do plan on making a hard mode though.

EDIT: (0.9.5) - http://www.swfcabin.com/open/1328560783 Removed wall jumping, and wall sliding. Also tweaked difficulty. Removed a puzzle that was hindered by poor controls.

EDIT (1.0) - http://www.swfcabin.com/open/1328909526 Tweaked diffulty, added a little bit of music made in pxtone, changed jump controlsl to x

EDIT (1.1) - http://www.swfcabin.com/open/1329300230 Fixed difficulty in sawtooth section.

[Eddie Cameron]

Awww, I pictured a vortex in the centre of the screen. With this one I found that the difficulty came from the platforming, rather than the vortex, since it was pretty easy to get away from. I am pretty terrible at platforming though.
One issue I had was that I couldn't re-jump if I walked off an edge instead of jump off it, possibly intentional?

[toaster]

Escaping more from the vertex mostly means the gravity caused by it. Being unable to jump was unintentional, and I am trying to remove it, but so far I haven't had much luck. The platforming can be a little unforgiving, and It is going to be toned down a bit in the final version.

[mildmojo]

I, too, was expecting a kind of radial gravity platformer based on the description, but that might be because I've been coding on a radial gravity platformer lately. =)

The platforming in the latest version seems to work pretty well. I learned wall jumping before double jumping, though; you might find a way to switch that order around?

Graphically, I like your style. The parallax starfield looks nice. You might find a way to indicate that the fade out means you've reached a checkpoint. This could be as simple as putting the checkpoint's number on the screen, which could serve to be a kind of level indicator that players could refer to when talking about the game.

I'm not sure what I was supposed to learn when I got to the big gap. There seems to be an invisible floor that I can double-jump to, followed by a gap, followed by some invisible blocks and gaps overlaid on top of the actual graphics. Is this a bug, or is it intentional? Like, I can double-jump into the big gap, land on nothing at the bottom of the screen, run like I was on solid ground, jump onto the platform on the far side, then collide with invisible blocks. Jumping over/under a couple of invisible blocks, I fall through the floor and die.

[toaster]

That puzzle had to do with the top and bottom half of the screen being the same, just the bottom having different stuff. I think I might change that because it doesn't work especially well. The jump is pretty tough

[mcc]

- I really like the stark monochrome style.

- You could introduce the walljump and double jump more clearly than you do-- i.e., maybe there could be jumps which require the double jump or walljump before you get to the initial "teeth" that require you to use them. I found the walljump only by accident, and I found out about the double jump only after I came back here and read the thread.

- The walljump seems very strange-- this sort of high lunging upward. It felt unphysical (what is the avatar doing, which is causing it to lunge off a wall and move almost directly vertical? why can it jump so much higher on a walljump than a normal jump?) and also made a lot of the jumps much more difficult than they needed to be. The double jump is also kind of capricious-- if you walljump you don't get a double jump, if you land and then fall off a platform you don't get a double jump. The game might actually be easier if you remove the walljump, I rarely or never walljumped on purpose but sometimes, especially late in the game (that one near vertical chute) I found myself getting my double jumps "stolen" because I walljumped by accident before I hit the apex of my jump!

- The fade out surprised me too, I couldn't tell it was a checkpoint.

- Although the text at the beginning says that nothing escapes the vortex, and the game is called "eventuality", I didn't feel much of a sense of inevitability. I felt like I was making a lot of progress getting away from the vortex. The game did kind of inspire this neat despairing feeling at how much constant work it was to deal with the vortex's gravity, and I liked how after the second or so checkpoint there was "nowhere to hide", i.e., the vortex would always pull you off the platform if you let go of the right button, but the vortex itself didn't feel like much of a threat. What if every time you did a checkpoint fadeout/in the vortex was closer, or the environment showed more signs that the forces of the vortex are about to tear it apart, or the starfield were moving more rapidly?

- The parallax starfield looked cool but it seemed to behave a little odd, if i was running right one of the rows of stars stayed more or less fixed on the screen. Since the stars are moving right to left wouldn't running right cause the stars to appear to speed up?

There were some moments (the spike segment) this seemed to capture some neat and unique platforming, but mostly I just found this extremely frustrating, and a lot of the frustrating came from the controls feeling broken (like the walljump). I eventually gave up in the "invisible floor" segment because I couldn't figure out what I was supposed to do, and the directly-up-this-chute bit I had to do every time I respawned took me a lot of tries each time (because the walljump acted so funny...).

EDIT:

That puzzle had to do with the top and bottom half of the screen being the same, just the bottom having different stuff. I think I might change that because it doesn't work especially well. The jump is pretty tough

I went back and tried again after reading this and still couldn't do it. I feel like one thing that makes this very difficult is that for no apparent reason, if you touch the ceiling you lose your double jump. So you have a low invisible ceiling which takes away your double jump and a long jump that requires a double jump.

[toaster]

Thanks for all the input guys, it's really helpful. In this next build I took a lot of your criticisms and used them. Here is a list of what I fixed.

Eventuality v0.9.5 - Play it here: http://www.swfcabin.com/open/1328560783
-removed wall jump and wall sliding
-added a level counter like thing
-removed mirror segment and replaced it with a choice segment (safe but time consuming or dangerous but quicker)

As to the starfield glitch, I can't figure out how to get rid of it. I'll keep looking in to it for the final one.

[Ian Snyder]

-removed wall jump and wall sliding

If this is true then I really don't understand how the jumping works... Also, I think that passage early on which requires you to land on 3 one-block thick posts in a row is too hard to be that early in the game. Maybe replace it with something a little less lethal?

Anyway, this was the first time I actually got through the whole game There are some neat moments. I really liked the part where you had to keep holding the run key down otherwise lose momentum and die.

[toaster]

If this is true then I really don't understand how the jumping works...

I'm not sure what you mean. You can double jump with Z. Also, yeah I will fix that first part. I forgot to in the last update.

[Ian Snyder]

Ooooh... I was thinking I had to hit my head against a ceiling or brush up against a wall before being able to double jump. Nevermind, I see I'm just overcomplicating things.

[mildmojo]

I tried the new build, and I don't miss wall jumping. I do think that early frustrating double-jump sawtooth area needs to be moved to the second- or third-to-last stage, though. I easily spent the most time on that part, and it's right out of the gate.

Finally made it to the end, and I really like the ending. =)

I've read that the most common key layout change in some European keyboards is to swap the Z and Y keys. You might consider moving your jump key to X or Shift.

[toaster]

Woo! Finally finished. I proudly present version 1.0 of Eventuality
PLAY IT NOW: http://www.swfcabin.com/open/1328909526

In this version I added
-music (a looping track)
-more difficulty tweaks
-made stage markers less stupid
-x button now used for jumping

Coming Soon:
I'm working on a version of this game for Newgrounds. It's going to have achievements and stuff. Yeah.

[mildmojo]

I tried your latest link today, but something's up with the page:

Warning: mysql_connect() [function.mysql-connect]: Too many connections in /home/swfcabin/domains/swfcabin.com/public_html/open/view.php on line 18
Not connected : Too many connections

Or is that just swfcabin being wonky?

[toaster]

It's probably just SwfCabin. I just tried myself and it worked fine.

[mcc]

OMG OMG OMG

In version 1.0, if you beat the game and then start a new game immediately, it layers a second copy of the soundtrack on top of the one that's already playing

It does this on successive so you can get an arbitrary number of phased versions of the song playing at once

That is AWESOME, please don't fix it :D