Phoenotopia (Zelda-like 2D side scrolling RPG)

[jacobalbano]

Ah yeah, completely understandable. Things to keep in mind for next time.

[zachwlewis]

I can’t seem to log in with those credentials. Can you upload it anywhere else? (Don’t forget to site-lock it!)

[Quasar]

Odd… The account for FP-User got deleted. I’m not sure by what rules fgl goes to prune accounts. For now you can use this account name and password:

Username: Viewer54321

Password: huntzeroeight

Alternatively, you can PM me your email and I’ll create an account for you I could host it somewhere else too if that’s more convenient for everyone. Any place you recommend? I know fgl adds encryption, so I haven’t really had to think about it. Is a site-lock be enough to protect a game?

[zachwlewis]

A site lock will be enough of a hassle to prevent the majority of sites from just copying it and putting it on their sites. If the game is really, really good, you can’t stop people from reverse-engineering your code and putting it on their websites.

[Linck5]

I just made an account my own on FGL and serched for the game on their search bar.

Also, my game always freeze at this place

In the beginning, It didn’t freeze. I have died two times and everything was fine until then. On the third attempt, after taking some damage from the guards, the screen froze, and no command was responding, but the music still played normally. Then I realoaded the page, went there again, and it froze the same way when the first guard came out. Then I reaload the page, and this keeps happening all the time, always when the first guard comes out now, in the exact first frame he appears at the screen.

[Quasar]

Yowza! Thanks for finding that game breaking bug. That picture is really helpful. There shouldn’t be more than two soldiers at any point during that fight.

I’ve tracked it down and fixed it along with these other fixes: 2nd boss’s lava pools are destructible and you can now look at an item’s description regardless of money or inventory space

As for alternate hosting, I’m not having much luck: fastswf and swfcabin both rejected the file due to size restrictions. I was able to upload the file on to megaswf successfully, but it doesn’t seem to load. (link here: http://megaswf.com/s/2661332 / see if you have better luck)

Though if you can, I’d prefer you played it on FGL, since the game tracking feature lets me see people’s progress. It’ll help me make informed decisions for balancing difficulty and money.

[Linck5]

I could load and play with the megaswf link without a problem.

[AniMittra]

perhaps just host it on dropbox? make it public and send us the link

[jacobalbano]

That opens up the possibility of it leaking or being re-hosted on other sites. You can’t site-lock to Dropbox, I don’t believe.

[Deamonr]

You can sitelock to dropbox, because each user has a unique id that goes into making the link.

[Quasar]

Thanks for your help guys. I’ll host on dropbox if there’s a need for it. Is there anyone here who wants to play the game and is unable to use both fgl.com and the megaswf link?

[AbelToy]

Guys, you can just create a FGL Developer account and play it.

[Linck5]

So I reached the robot that says the next part of the game is in development, and I have some things to say:

The only part in the game where I got stuck was the Thomas’ Lab. When I first saw that robot, I realized I couldn’t do damage to him, so I though “ok, then It’s not the moment do deal with this robot”. So I went back to almost every place and talked to almost every NPC to see if I could find a way to progress. That was quite annoying. Maybe it was just me being stupid. But maybe there should be something indicating that you were ready to make do with that robot.

I broke the old woman’s pig in Oreas, and I felt so guilty about it, eheh. Then I gave her a gold bar and I don’t know if that triggers something.

Before I got the javelin, I thought I would get double jump or something like that to reach high areas. The javelin mechanic was a quite good and original surprise. Only bad thing is that sometimes it takes time to throw it exactly where you want.

I don’t understand the attacking mechanic. If I press rapidly the attack key, sometimes the attacks don’t have delay between them, and sometimes they have. And sometimes I don’t get delay between the first and second attack, and sometimes I don’t get delay between the first, the second and also the third. But it seems to be random. I can’t find a proper timing to do all the three attacks without delay. And this seems to be important because when I focus my Ki to do that magic blue attack, when my attacks don’t have delay I end up doing three magic attacks in a row. At least the sprites show that, I haven’t tested in enemies.

Quite nice game. I’m excited for the next part.

[Quasar]

Thanks Linck5 for your feedback!

I had a friend play the robot recently too and they also got stuck. I am thinking that I will change the first iteration of that fight, so that the robot will hang up and stall indefinitely to allow the player to have all the time they need to discover its weakness.

If you broke the old woman’s piggy bank, giving her a gold bar is just for you to feel less guilty It doesn’t lead anywhere else after that. Though maybe it should… I will think on this.

Glad you like the Javelin. Maybe I’ll have it so that if you stick the javelin at the wrong place but it is against a wall, it’ll restore your stamina a bit, so there’s less delay for the next throw?

For the attack mechanic, that’s sort of a bug that I kept in as sort of an “advanced secret” technique. I was trying to detect if the player was spamming the attack button, and if they were spamming, then have them skip a bit of the attack animation and go straight into the next attack. The bug was that this also allowed multiple ki attacks in a row and is quite powerful (you can defeat some bosses in one iteration with proper timing). With that said, there isn’t really a science behind it. You kinda just spam the attack button and hope you pressed it JUST as the animation is ending. But in explaining it, I thought of a better way to make the multi-ki-attack more deliberate. I’m going to count the number of times they press attack during the attack animation, and if it exceeds a certain amount automatically go into the next.

Glad you liked the game so far! I will post again here when the final arc is ready.

[Zpiggle]

Beautiful game. Maybe something to stop one having to traverse whole areas to get back to the map though? Have the map accessible from inventory or something (at least in towns/cities if you don’t want it abused to get out of fights with low health)? It’s a bit of a pain to walk the whole way back. Though that may have been because I somehow missed the house in Atai city with the potions, and was wandering around the various areas for quite a while.

The abundance of hidden rooms is cool. It’s pretty difficult in bits, though personally I like the challenge. I can’t seem to make my way through the well, the enemies there are hard to drop.

A small bug (possibly): I’ve played through the main parts so far, I think, but when I came back to the sheriff’s office/gaol in Atai city (planning to go down the well), the bandit leader has vanished from his cell, and the other bandit says “I’m not telling…” and the sheriff is in the inn and the prison. The prison is still open though. I don’t really have any more info though, I’m not sure when it happened.

As regards “They don’t appear to want it”, they was used for ages until sometime in 1800s where for some reason it fell out of favour, and is recently making a come back. It would be a bit odd, I think, if one were to use it when speaking of a person in front of you, since you know (presumably) their gender, but not wholly unreasonable. Anyway, it’s just semantics, and not really important.

[Quasar]

Hi ZPiggle,

Thanks for you feedback! Glad you like the difficulty!

I’ll have to think about having the world map accessible from the inventory. I do like the idea, but need to think about it carefully since there’s potential it could break the game if you skip out on cutscenes or other sensitive areas.

As for the bottom of the well, that part is really rough, and I plan to polish it a lot more later. The red zombie bots are invincible and can only be defeated by dropping them down the chasm.

I went by your description and looked at your fgl playlog, and was able to find a game devastating bug!

The reason occurs due to an array of booleans I manage which enemies/crates point to to indicate they’ve been broken/defeated. This lets me check and keep enemies and crates from respawning if you beat them. Normally, this array is reset when you access the world map or die. Since the well connects town and the bandits’ lair, the whole area is too big for the array, so I reset it manually under the well if you touch an invisible trigger. That’s the only time that invisible trigger appears and I just discovered that it also resets the game’s internal clock to 0 (which is in the beginning, before the abduction and the bandit leader being captured).

I’ll be working on a fix and will PM you a debug button combo you can press to set your game’s internal clock back to its original value. But it seems you’ve reached the end of the 3rd arc, so there wouldn’t be much more to see right now. I’ll let you know when I get the final chapter in!

Regarding “They don’t appear to want it”, would “The person does not want it” be better? It’s singular but still gender-neutral.

[Quasar]

@Zpiggle, the bug is fixed! Sent you a PM

[NazoSystems]

Man! Just looked at the trailer and the game seems huge and not to mention beautiful. Will test the game out as soon as I can. Our programmer has a question though. Did you run in any lag issues when building the levels? They seem really big. We are using OGMO to make our levels. Are you guys using something else?

[Quasar]

Good questions! I haven’t had any issues with lag so far. Though my computer is pretty new, so I’m not sure how the game would run on older computers. I did receive one report that the game ran a bit laggy on Macs using the Chrome browser.

The biggest level reaches a max size of 120 x 30 tiles, and each tile is 16 x 16 pixels, so maybe I am not pushing it really hard. At most, a level will consists of two backdrops and two tilemaps (one for tiles in front of the player, and one for tiles behind the player).

For levels, I am using the Tiled Map editor (http://www.mapeditor.org/). I like its speed and it has some nice features, namely automapping!

[Quasar]

Bump! The game has released today on newgrounds!

Link here: http://www.newgrounds.com/portal/view/644696

Big thanks to this whole community! You guys are great!