You Pageant - APBIO [DONE]

[toaster]

PLAY OR DOWNLOAD NOW: https://sites.google.com/site/itstoaster/games/apbio
http://www.newgrounds.com/portal/view/595358?updated=1
(If you play online, the screen is a little stretched, I'm still not sure how to fix it and make it play at a normal aspect ratio online)

Well, seeing as their hasn't been much action on this page yet, I might as well post my game for the You Pageant. I thought about what the biggest thing in my life is at the moment, and the largest source of frustration came from the topic of this game. So I figured I'd vent that frustration in the form of a weight based puzzle platformer. So here it is:

Yeah....

Anywho... Progress Report:
4/5/12 - Made pretty much all of the visuals for the game. Working on putting them into Stencyl, which is so incredibly tedious, let me tell you. lol.

4/6/12 - Ran into a bug. Less than a week into development and already bugfixing. Huzzah!

4/28/12 - Finally finished. I had a lot of problems with this one. It did not turn out to be exactly as I intended. I hit bug after bug after bug after bug. So in actuality the game was really made in less than a week, without including all the time I spent completely stumped. Ah well, I'm done, and so is this game. Thank you for playing.

[Terry]

Cool! Looking forward to some updates :)

[Jack Sanders]

That acronym was intentional, right? :O
"AP BIO"

[toaster]

Yeah, the acronym is completely intentional

[toaster]

Well here's an update. I got pass the glitch I'd been stuck on, and now it works, so I'll be mostly working on level design now. So here is a screenshot.

http://imgur.com/6LvoG

[mcc]

I downloaded this to my computer and played it there to get around the aspect ratio problem.

I did not figure out the "point" at first. When I couldn't make that first big jump, I actually assumed something was broken, or maybe something didn't work right on macs, or... having that one book+jump combo early on is a workable if brutal way to suggest the weight trick via level design, but I feel like the way it was laid out only communicates the trick by itself if the player is certain that the jump is "supposed" to be possible to get past, and I unfortunately have played enough of these compo/ludum dare type games that if I can't get something to work, my first assumption is it's because something is wrong with the game rather than that something really clever is going on I'm missing (I've seen the first option happen too many times). I had to back out and look at your Google Sites page a second time, and once I saw the "weight-based" comment on the page I got it. I think, if you could figure out how to do flash embeds, maybe a page that has your game embedded in it and contains the "weight-based" hint somewhere on the same page with the flash would help.

Once I actually worked out what I was supposed to be doing, I liked this a lot! The concept is really clever and one I've not seen before. I've often daydreamed about a "reverse metroid" where each item reduces your abilities but it hadn't occurred to me the idea could be implemented so cleanly and efficiently as this. There's a lot of economy here in the art, design etc-- I liked how the game was basically a single one-room puzzle.

There's a sort of aggressive sadism in this game I sort of like. I liked that the platforming mechanics were set up as to impose legitimate challenge on top of the basic book puzzle-- normally in a puzzle platformer like this moving around would not be part of the challenge but I found myself actually having to concentrate on nearly every jump or I'd be destroyed. I liked the music, the whole sort of atonal droning thing set a "something is not quite right here" mood well. ( I hope these last two elements were intentional :D )

[Ronsho]

Yeah, I second that. I thought the inability to jump high enough had something to do with the aspect ratio problem. I enjoyed the game, though, after reading this comment. It's pretty unforgiving, though.

[toaster]

Thanks for the feedback. I tried looking into how to embed my .swf, but so far have not yet found anything that works. Do you know of any service, or code that could do this?

[Ian Snyder]

What kind of problems are you running into exactly?

And are you looking to embed the swf on your own site, or are you ok with hosting it somewhere else (swfcabin, newgrounds, kongregate, etc).

[toaster]

I was hoping to embed it on my own site, but now that I think of it, I might look into newgrounds.

[Ian Snyder]

Here is the code I use to embed flash things on my site. I ripped it from somewhere else originally (I forget where). html is not really my thing.

Code: Select all

<html>
<head>
<META HTTP-EQUIV="Content-Type" CONTENT="text/html; charset=ISO-8859-1">
<title>ian.janasnyder.com</title>      <!-- NAME -->

<style type="text/css">
body {
   color: #FFF8E2;
   background: #3D1A21;
   margin: 0;
   padding: 0;
   font: 10pt/1.3 Trebuchet MS, sans-serif;
}
a {
   color: #3D1A21;
   text-decoration: none;
}
a:hover {
   color: #3D1A21;
}
#center {
   text-align: center;
   position: absolute;
   top: 50%;
   width: 100%;
   height: 1px;
   overflow: visible;
   visibility: visible;
   display: block;
}
#flash {
   width: 800px;         /*   WIDTH         */
   margin-left: -400px;   /* -(WIDTH / 2)      */
   height: 600px;         /*   HEIGHT         */
   top: -300px;         /* -(HEIGHT / 2)   */
   position: absolute;
   left: 50%;
   visibility: visible;
}
#after-content {
   margin-top: 10px;
   text-align: right;
}
</style>
</head>

<body>

<div id="center">
<div id="flash">

   <object classid="clsid:d27cdb6e-ae6d-11cf-96b8-444553540000"
      codebase="http://download.macromedia.com/pub/shockwave/cabs/flash/swflash.cab#version=9,0,0,0" id="game" align="middle"
      width="800" height="600">                  <!-- WIDTH, HEIGHT   -->
      <param name="movie" value="siteLoader.swf" />   <!-- FILE NAME   -->
      <param name="allowScriptAccess" value="sameDomain" />
      <param name="allowFullScreen" value="false" />
      <param name="quality" value="high" />
      <param name="bgcolor" value="#FFF8E2" />      <!-- FILE NAME, WIDTH, HEIGHT (below)   -->
      <embed src="siteLoader.swf"
         width="800" height="600"
         quality="high" bgcolor="#FFF8E2" name="game" align="middle" allowScriptAccess="sameDomain" allowFullScreen="false" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" pluginspage="http://www.macromedia.com/go/getflashplayer" />
   </object>
   
</div>
</div>

</body>
</html>

Maybe it will help you.

[toaster]

Well, I'm not too good at code, so I'm not really sure how to make that work, but I uploaded it to newgrounds: http://www.newgrounds.com/portal/view/595358?updated=1