Light From Within Demo

Atarath

Member
Here is the demo for my game Light From Within. Please let me know what you think and if you run into any bugs. Thanks to those that have helped me and who diligently post on the forums. And if there are any scripts that I'm using that you'd like, I am happy to share :)
 

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dale_coop

Moderator
Staff member
I love this cover Art! <3 Can't wait to try the actual game... (tonight).
Thanks for sharing it.
 

Dirk

Member
Lovely cover art! I'm still playing, but I want to mention two things: I find it härd tö reäd the text with äll the ümläüts and maybe the font itself. The other things is, when I got the shield I had to press a button to make the text go away, but this also triggered the shield so I lost 1 spirit.
Cool game so far and very polished!
 

red moon

Member
wow, your cover image is amazing, love the watercolor effect! Can’t wait to play the demo later tonight!
 

dale_coop

Moderator
Staff member
Oh wow... just started playing with it and you did an amazing job. I love the Zelda feeling of it... the breakable tile animations, secrets, ...
Please, make a small tutorial on how you did your skeleton guards AI ! I swear there are following the player. Love it!
 

Atarath

Member
Thank you guys! I can do pixel art better than I can actually draw, so I did the cover image with assets straight from the game and photoshop.

dale_coop said:
Oh wow... just started playing with it and you did an amazing job. I love the Zelda feeling of it... the breakable tile animations, secrets, ...
Please, make a small tutorial on how you did your skeleton guards AI ! I swear there are following the player. Love it!

Thank you Dale! My AI script isn't terribly efficient and I was planning on trying to rewrite it at some point, but I am happy to post it.


Dirk said:
Lovely cover art! I'm still playing, but I want to mention two things: I find it härd tö reäd the text with äll the ümläüts and maybe the font itself. The other things is, when I got the shield I had to press a button to make the text go away, but this also triggered the shield so I lost 1 spirit.
Cool game so far and very polished!

Thank you Dirk! Yeah, I noticed (especially on an actual NES) the text may be hard to read. I will probably drop an umlaut and maybe the shadow. Also, thanks for the heads up about the shield. It doesn't engage when you talk to NPCs after getting it, but I think I know why it does initially and will fix it. :)
 

dale_coop

Moderator
Staff member
Played last night... it was very pleasant... even more than that, I had a lot of fun! The graphics are really good, I love all the animation details. It helps to create this living world.
I agree with Dirk, the font is difficult to read.
 

Dirk

Member
Generally speaking I love umlauts though ^^

I beat the boss in the cellar and must say I got goose bumps! Really disgusting! Great job! XD
It also didn't help that I'm not too keen on big spiders to say it nicely :)
The small ones are somewhat cute though :)
 

Atarath

Member
Thanks guys! The character Ella actually fidgets and blinks her eyes a bit if you stand still.

And that's good to hear Dirk! I actually had to watch a bunch of spider gifs to figure out how to animate the legs because spiders have a very specific gait.
 

Atarath

Member
I just found a game breaking bug myself. If you get hit while attempting to open the chest that gives you the shield, sometimes it will skip the dialog. You won't get the shield and the room will trigger. I will need to fix that!
 

red moon

Member
Ha, I couldn’t figure out where to go either after getting the key! ill play again tonight. Overall, i thought it was fantastic and really deep for a demo. Visually, it was very beautiful and consistent across the board. The best part is that i found it relaxing to play. I really liked your color palette choices and the hud colors and presentation...excellent work overall and cutting weeds is always satisfying!
 

Vonwoah

New member
I still want to finish this game. I got up to meeting the king. I'm sure there is a lot more to this, but here's my thoughts so far.

Positives
  • The music is insanely good and catchy! Did you compose it?
  • The story and setup for an adventure is brilliant. Coma fighter, so cool!
  • Love the style of art

Bugs? Constructive Criticisms
  • On death, when attacking (B press) I hear attack sound effect. This happened before getting the sword
  • Attacking when player is facing idle (down) the sword hitbox is much smaller than attacking something sideways. I've noticed it's easier to kill the bats at a sideways stance
  • Destructible plant walls fix themselves when leaving and returning to screen. Intentional?
  • Solo bat on screen cannot be killed. Intentional? (screen with dirt path that is in a cross)
  • Dialogue text I found difficult to read. Such a great story, it's unfortunate that it's hard to immerse myself when squinting and thinking to myself that it's hard to read.
  • Would be cool if the text windows would immediately leave versus the scroll fade out block by block. I want to get back to the game.
 

dale_coop

Moderator
Staff member
Vonwoah said:
  • Would be cool if the text windows would immediately leave versus the scroll fade out block by block. I want to get back to the game.

If/when you find how to "fix" that one, we'd be interested too ;)
 

Mugi

Member
drawing tiles on screen the way the textbox does it is a pretty resource intensive task.
Im fairly sure that the way the textbox is drawn is made as it is for performance reasons, It can be sped up or even made instant, but it will start risking graphics corruptions at that point unless enough resources is freed
to ensure that a full text box can be instantly loaded under any circumstances.

making it instant without doing anything else as it is, would propably cause the game to momentarily freeze as it loads new data.
alternatively, it could be made really fast, but that would require switching rendering off for loading the text, which would make the screen flicker black everytime a textbox is drawn.
 

Vonwoah

New member
Oh interesting, I had a hunch that could have been the reason why tiles were drawn in. Games that can pull this off, Crystalis for example. Does that game have a special chip or something?
 

Mugi

Member
they're generally just better optimized games.
it has to be accounted in nesmaker that the game engine is not exactly well optimized for ANYTHING, because it's designed to do a little bit of everything for every type of game.
for instance, your game is running 2 sets of physics engines on top of eachother at all times, which is a massive waste of processing power.

the main reason we've been able to pull off things like 4-directional scrolling and parallax without scanline counters and still maintained gameplay in dimension Shift is because we've spent a year optimizing the engine, removing parts of it, and rewriting
slow code to be less slow. For instance, if one would slap the scanline counting code we use into a vanilla nesmaker engine game, it would still work, but the game would run at half-speed at best.
 

Bucket Mouse

Active member
Now that I've tried it on a real NES (thanks to my new Everdrive)....
When you put the game on a real CRT, things get cut off on the edges...like the first row of letters in every text box.

Also, the Mapper 30 fix posted on this board doesn't allow for save states, so I gave up after dying at the Zelda Blade Traps a million times. To me it doesn't seem like there's enough time to get out of their way.
 

Atarath

Member
red moon said:
Overall, i thought it was fantastic and really deep for a demo. Visually, it was very beautiful and consistent across the board. The best part is that i found it relaxing to play. I really liked your color palette choices and the hud colors and presentation...excellent work overall and cutting weeds is always satisfying!

Thanks Red Moon!

Vonwoah said:
  • On death, when attacking (B press) I hear attack sound effect. This happened before getting the sword
  • Attacking when player is facing idle (down) the sword hitbox is much smaller than attacking something sideways. I've noticed it's easier to kill the bats at a sideways stance
  • Destructible plant walls fix themselves when leaving and returning to screen. Intentional?
  • Solo bat on screen cannot be killed. Intentional? (screen with dirt path that is in a cross)


  • I can't seem to recreate the sound effect glitch, but thanks for the heads up. The hit box facing down may have to do with the enemy hit box rather than the sword itself. Enemies have a shorter hit box from the top to give the illusion of depth. The darker colored bats are much harder than the regular bats. They also have a different attack pattern and will fly toward you.

    Bucket Mouse said:
    Now that I've tried it on a real NES (thanks to my new Everdrive)....
    When you put the game on a real CRT, things get cut off on the edges...like the first row of letters in every text box.

    Also, the Mapper 30 fix posted on this board doesn't allow for save states, so I gave up after dying at the Zelda Blade Traps a million times. To me it doesn't seem like there's enough time to get out of their way.

    The blade traps can be navigated without getting hit. I made sure that it could be done without damage because otherwise that's no fun. But it probably is easier on a keyboard vs controller. I also noticed that on my NES the hud gets cut off from the top. I was not on a CRT tv. Are these things something I need to compensate for? Would building the game around a smaller play area eliminate those problems?

    Also Bucket Mouse, is your name from Link's Awakening?
 
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