Freedom Planet (v. 1.4)

[Serephim]

Have you ever seen Egoraptor's Sequelitis of Mega Man? Take lessons from that and subtly teach the player that instead of making it blatantly obvious.

That video has become the god-chosen instruction manual for game design all over the internet...not that he was wrong in most of it, though. Egoraptor was mostly attacking modern games which force cram sessions in control knowledge into your head because they devote no time to warming up the player with the actual game itself (which is probably why newcomers fail at modern games).

i digress; he could easily just stick an arrow there, but i like going with the idea someone posted of being forced to push a log out of the way to show that it's possible, because that was my issue -- i didn't know it was possible. That segment DOES force you to push the log out of the way, but there are far too many ways to get distracted with the terrain. I was trying to find vertical paths and stuff.

Doesn't really matter though. Like i said, i havent had a gaming "DERP" moment like that in years. Stuff like this seemed almost common back in the older days. The beauty, even if he doesn't change it, is that the player will never make the mistake again.

And nobody should ever complain about the difficulty of the first level of a game like this unless it's too hard. There's nothing wrong with the difficulty of this game right now.

[Strife]

Widescreen anyone? It's surprisingly bug-free; the only real issues with it are graphical in nature, and most of the work would involve getting the level cards and menu interfaces to stretch dynamically depending on your chosen screen format. If I spend today working on it, I should be able to throw it into the next update.

[Candescence]

Edit: Yes, please, widescreen would be ace. It would help immensely in a game like this.

Just unlocked Carol... And holy hell, I love playing as her. It's like I'm playing as a Mega Man X character with Sonic physics, it's brilliant. Though wall-jumping is a bit more difficult than it really should be.

And I love how she says "DIDJA SEE THAT THAT WAS AWESOME!" at the end of the level, and considering I finished the boss by hitting him out of his own attack, I can't really disagree. The voice work in this game is great, btw.

That video has become the god-chosen instruction manual for game design all over the internet...not that he was wrong in most of it, though. Egoraptor was mostly attacking modern games which force cram sessions in control knowledge into your head because they devote no time to warming up the player with the actual game itself (which is probably why newcomers fail at modern games).

There's also very little subtlety involved in newer games these days, something that some older games were absolute masters of, such as Super Metroid's absolutely masterful methods.

Of course, there's the occasional instance in games where the developer either gives no hints whatsoever or their attempts at subtlety don't work - the infamous barrel, for instance. You know the one.

[Duckboy]

Widescreen would own

[Strife]

After some experimentation, it doesn't seem like there's going to be an easy way to dynamically alter the screen width during runtime, as long as I allow the display to stretch based on the window size. =/

The simple solution would be to just make this the default screen size from now on... but there's always the chance that someone might want to stick with 320x240 if they have weird display issues while going fullscreen or something. So, I dunno. xD;

[Kneecaps]

im sorry but i still can't download

[Strife]

Did you try the Mediafire link? http://www.mediafire.com/?7fbp87386baffht

[Violet CLM]

It took me forever to find the first hidden card -- the rest were more or less intuitive secret areas over a few playthroughs, whereas that first one was purely a matter of Lilac-boosting into the air whenever I wasn't sure what might be above me, until I finally found the right spot -- but I did it. Now to shave a minute or so off my time and try to get Carol. EDIT: I got the "Unlocked Carol!" screen, but the character select only lists her as a lock icon with some question marks for her name. What am I doing wrong?

Loving the game so far. No complaints about difficulty -- the first time through I wasn't sure it was even possible to die, I got hurt so infrequently. My main concern is the shield, which seems, well, pretty useless. It takes a long time to save up for it, the orb colors used don't seem to change it, and all it seems to do is add the equivalent of a single petal to your health. What am I missing here?

(The solitaire game is also incredibly simple, but, well, minigames. Better than Keen's "Paddle War.")

[LarkSS]

The simple solution would be to just make this the default screen size from now on... but there's always the chance that someone might want to stick with 320x240 if they have weird display issues while going fullscreen or something. So, I dunno. xD;

You could always use the Ultimate Fullscreen extension which will just add black bars to non-widescreen resolutions to preserve aspect ratio.

[W.A.C.]

I really enjoyed this game a lot but please, PLEASE don't lower the difficulty. You have no idea how refreshing it is to play a brand new game with a first level that's not insanely easy. The threat of death often makes a game a lot more exciting for me so the fact I actually died a couple of times in my first playthrough of the level was a nice surprise. However, I think I have a good compromise solution: difficulty levels. While I often hate how difficulty levels are often executed (hey my guns are much weaker and now it takes forever to kill one enemy), I think it could work if it's implemented well.

As for some thoughts of the game. While the art direction could be improved (I've made suggestions in the past), it's a lot better than I expected and the animations are great. I had a lot of fun speedruning the level to unlock Carol so you should definitely do more in the future when it comes to unlocking stuff from getting fast times. Adds more replay value on top of levels that are already very replayable. There really isn't much else I can say that other people haven't already said both here and on Retro, but the game is definitely an example of why we take certain aspects of Sonic games for granted. (The rings system, ball form while jumping, spindash, etc.) Makes me wonder if the rings in Sonic games are really that great of a system. One thing I do think could be improved that someone on Retro suggested is the idea of being able to attack while holding down. Not only would it be a nice ability to have, but it would allow you to add more stuff like shorter enemies without the game feeling cheap or maybe some in-game puzzle ideas.

[Strife]

Yeah, I like the idea of adding difficulty options. Last night I replaced the "Lives" feature in the Options menu with the ability to choose between Easy and Normal. On Easy mode, petals give twice as much health when collected and the player's mercy invincibility is longer.

Difficulty is a tricky subject, but I hope the folks who enjoy a challenge don't mind me making DV harder to die in. I really don't think it's a good idea to leave the stage as hard as it is in the final version of the game. Rest assured, future stages in the full version will offer more challenging situations.

You could always use the Ultimate Fullscreen extension which will just add black bars to non-widescreen resolutions to preserve aspect ratio.

I am using that extension... But the thing is, I want to be able to stretch the screen (2x, 3x, etc) AND have the ability to change the screen width at runtime. So far, I can only seem to do the latter with the Window Control object and only if screen stretching is disabled, so it looks like I can only have one or the other. =/

[W.A.C.]

Good call on replacing the lives feature with a difficulty setting. The lives system seemed pointless since getting a game over always just resulted in me starting from the last check point.

[Strife]

Yeah, definitely. It's only going to be like that in Time Attack, though - In Adventure mode, you'll have to pay crystals to continue from the last checkpoint, else you start from the beginning of the stage.

Anyway, I added a Hard mode in there too, so now there's the traditional Easy-Medium-Hard setup. Easy gives you twice as much health per petal, while Hard kinda does the opposite by making enemies do double damage - which should offset the fact that I put more petals in the stage.

I won't be making enemies behave any differently between difficulties as it would skew Time Attack records too much, so the difficulty just determines how squishy your character is.

[Violet CLM]

I got the "Unlocked Carol!" screen, but the character select only lists her as a lock icon with some question marks for her name. What am I doing wrong?

No thoughts?

[Strife]

I thought I replied to that. Sorry. xD;

Anyway, check the Time Attack record and see if your time is indeed below 6:15:00. If it isn't, I can PM you the cheat code to unlock her to see if that works.

[Cleberson]

Nice work Strife, i really love your fan game

[Violet CLM]

It's 06:07:36. I beat it a second time under 6:15 and got the You Unlocked Carol! screen again and still no available Carol in the char select. Tried again, beat it under 6:00 and that time it worked. Looks like you're checking against two different times at two different places.

[Strife]

Thanks Cleb!

Violet - Ah, it appears you are correct. I set the message to appear with a time of less than 6:15:00 whereas the character select screen locks it until you reach 6:00:00. Augh. xD;

Anyway, I've decided that in the next update, I'm going to map Lilac's boost to the C button instead of requiring a double jump. As a consequence, she will not be able to store an extra shield. Carol will still be able to, though.

[W.A.C.]

[LINK]

Does this game have a false positive or an actual virus?

[Cleberson]

Thanks Cleb!

Violet - Ah, it appears you are correct. I set the message to appear with a time of less than 6:15:00 whereas the character select screen locks it until you reach 6:00:00. Augh. xD;

Anyway, I've decided that in the next update, I'm going to map Lilac's boost to the C button instead of requiring a double jump. As a consequence, she will not be able to store an extra shield. Carol will still be able to, though.

Well, i got the same bug when i unlocked she. BUT, when i restart the fan game, carol as been apeared in character screen.

[Strife]

I'm not sure. My AVG reads the ZIP file as infected, but when I extract all the files and then scan them, they're clean.

As a precaution, I already re-uploaded clean ZIPs to IndieDB and Mediafire. I unfortunately have to wait on the SAGE mirror until they tell me which e-mail address to send the new files to.

[TailsSena]

Most compressed files will show up as infected when they really mean "potentially infected."

I attribute that to their inability to scan the contents of the archive.

[Rawr]

Hey check it out, you're on Destructoid.

[Strife]

I caught wind of that earlier, Rawr. It's so much win. :'D I can't believe it.

[FanGameRevolver]

two bugs i've found so far,

1.) collecting the unlimited energy, hitting quit, and then playing a level starts you with the power-up.

2.) one of my playthoughs the falling block just stopped, I know I reflected off it as it was falling, possibly getting stuck in its collision. once I touched it again it fell though. bizarre that one.

And of course the obvious false unlock.