Dimension Shift Byte-Off 2019 Demo

Mugi

Member
the first post has been updated with a link to v0.04 that fixes the issues mentioned by kasumi, including:
- attack not registering or being overwritten by other actionstates
- the boss warps now make the player invulnerable to prevent "warpdeaths"
- screen boundary code was rewritten to no longer tilt when you transition screens while hugging the right wall.
- the screen will also not wrap while hugging the wall and falling down either.

the sound test room is just an easter egg and not really an actual feature of the game (yet) but inputs on the sound test have also been fixed.
 

Sorinkun

New member
hello, im very impressed! registered just to say that your demo looks fatastic
will u finish this game tho? and ad a potential two player option?
 

Mugi

Member
Sorinkun said:
hello, im very impressed! registered just to say that your demo looks fatastic
will u finish this game tho? and ad a potential two player option?

Thank you. i hope you enjoyed playing it. :)

Yes the plan is to finish this game, and no, at this time, there is no plans for including 2 player mode.
 

Raftronaut

Member
The control here is superb.

Not to mention the incredible graphics, animations and music.

I am very impressed

Bravo!
 

Mugi

Member
digit2600 said:
And..your boss just kicked my ass... Nice of you to take that select cheat out lol....

xD yeah the boss is hard, but the cheat is for deving purposes, not for actual play.
i can assure you that the boss is beatable just fine, but it does take a few rounds of playing to get used to it's randomness :p
 

digit2600

Member
I'm sure I can go back there and beat it... I just have to actually tackle it carefully this time.. Once it split into little slimes, I was thinking, you sick bastard lol... these things are aggressive !
 

Mugi

Member
yeah i guess 6 phases is a little much, but i wanted it to rather have more phases with less HP each than make less phases and have you beat each one for 10 minutes.
it has slightly more variety this way.
I might go back and rebalance it later on (HP/moving speeds etc) but we'll see.
 

jorotroid

Member
Yo! So I have been putting off playing through the byte-off submissions. Partially because I told my friend who put together my manual for me that I we would go through them together and we haven't been able to work out a time for that yet. Partially because I'm so bummed about how mine turned out that haven't been able to check out the other submissions. But after seeing that you've gotten multidirectional scrolling started, I realizing I need to get my act together. So I played through yours first.

As others have said, really awesome game. Music and graphics are top notch.

Controls are tight, jumping feels tuned for the levels you've built, and the basic punching mechanic is solid (though I do hope you'll have some alternate forms of attack for the final game to change things up).

The hanging mechanic works great, but I wonder if I hadn't either seen your WIP thread, or if I had never played Shatterhand, if I would have been able to figure out that the mechanic was there.
It's about have way through the stage where you have to use the mechanic in order to proceed, but I wonder if some people might get there and think they reached a dead end and missed another path behind them. I think part of the problem is the hanging grates sort of blend in with the rest of the background. It would be nice if you maybe had a different colored one at the point where you want players to first know about hanging to attract them to trying to interact with it. Maybe even put one in that intro stage that you have to use to scale up a cliff to get the crystal.

If I may make one complaint about the graphics in the temple is that even though you have a variety of detail, it feels there isn't much variety. It feels like you are only using two background palettes for then entirety of the level even if that is not the case. So I would like to see more colors used, but I also would like to see some more distinct larger structures to give different parts of the temple different personalities.

Not to get too hung up on the hanging mechanic, but there were some level design choices that I didn't understand. I'm guessing you have some sort of pickups planned for later that didn't make it in to this version. The first grate near the beginning of the temple leads you to a platform with a torch and a blob. I don't understand why I would want to go up there. A little further and there is a series of grates above an electrical current, and after that is a pit that leads to a more difficult path. In general, I feel like you've put these grates in areas of or leading to danger and that sort of feels backwards. I feel like you're actively trying to disincentivize me from learning the hanging mechanic.

The enemies and the boss feel like damage sponges which can be fine if that's what you want, but part of the problem is that there is no juice to fighting enemies at the moment. I think adding a hitting sound effect and enemy defeated sound effect would go a long way to making fighting the blobs more engaging. That teleport sound effect could even be a pretty neat blob hit sound for the time being.

All in all, it's going in great direction and am looking forward to more. Not that you were waiting for me to play it, but still sorry I took almost a month to get to it.
 

Mugi

Member
i think i've stated it multiple times over the course of development now that the enemies and such were (are :p) very rushed.
the only reason the stage even existed for this demo was because i forced it out so that the demo had something to play.

as such i do appreaciate criticism and feedback but im also well aware that the gameplay so far is quite boring, as the development has been more or less 100% engine features.

as for the wall climb, it was somewhat shoehorned into the stage, but i did actually want it to sort of blend in. I've never been a fan of that trend in nes games that the devs used some kind of extreme color combinations to go out of their way pointing out that something is somewhere. And there is also the fact that the general color of the stage eats 2 palettes, then the health platforms eat one, and the boss platform eats the last one, so thats that. Although i might toy with the shading to make them stand out a little more than they currently do. We'll see (as for the random platform with the blob at the beginning, that's there to make you figure out that you CAN go up there by climbing the wall) the long climbing part that makes you fall down to what i generally refer to as the "bottom route" is something that's supposingly your punishment for failing to climb through it :p
the hanging mechanic is also much more obvious (and also forced on you) in the cavern stage. there is a ledge at the beginning of the cavern that you cannot climb without it, so there's that. I will propably implement something similar to each stage.

at any rate, i've already decided that the entire demo stage will be wiped out and the temple will be remade completely for the actual game (pending because... scrolling, lol)

what comes to attacks, yeah, there will be more. the idea is that throughout the game there will be white crystals that you can use to enter the shop, which will offer you weapons (you will have money, like shatterhand does that you then use to purchase things, and pay health platforms.) Unlike shatterhand though, DS will propably have it's powerups permanent as im not sure i want to deal with the companion system (i have one programmed but it's..... not very good :p)


sound effects and such are totally wip at this time, a punch sound exists but basically no other SFX has been done yet. They will come as time passes.


i wasnt really happy with the demo and what it offered myself tbh, but i did want to put it out there regardless, so that's that i suppose :p
i have much more planned for this game which i have partially started demonstrating in the WIP thread, but yeah, the demo i was not happy with...

we both seem to have the same dilemma with our games, being too obsessed on making them scroll to give enough time for other features :p
altough yours already has powerups and proper enemies.... mine has... blobs, lol.

at any rate, im definitely starting to get into things proper now that the main engine is finally doing what i want it to, but seeing how lately only interest people have towards my game is whether or not i hand out my scrolling code, i might or might not post that many updates.
 

jorotroid

Member
I hope I was able to provide some new perspective instead of rehashing things you have already heard. It is sound like you have a pretty solid vision of where your game is going. And even if the demo didn't have all the features you wanted, you still put out a very polished demo (which for me, I think that is ultimately worth more).


Mugi said:
at any rate, im definitely starting to get into things proper now that the main engine is finally doing what i want it to, but seeing how lately only interest people have towards my game is whether or not i hand out my scrolling code, i might or might not post that many updates.
I can't do the constant updates. I feel very uncomfortable sharing things until I think they are ready. But on the other hand from what I understand, it's generally better to consistently share to keep people thinking about your game. I just can't bring myself to do it. Right now I am working on something (not scrolling related) for my game that is going really well so far. And even though I think that what I have so far is looking really good, it's not done so I don't want to share. Of course I have to be mindful that I don't put myself in mental state where nothing will ever be ready. I only shared a new version of my scroll code because dale linked to the old one on facebook and I felt worse about the idea of someone using the old code with its issues than just releasing a new version. Maybe if I can hurry up and get the scroll core done people will stop bugging you for yours; but I guess I have to add multidirectional scrolling now in order to compete :lol:
 

Mugi

Member
i always like feedback. even if it's not particularly insightful, it can bring up thoughts and ideas for how to improve things further.
a lot of what you said is things that have been on my mind but i actually like that i got reminded about the whole deal with wall tiles being so ninja in the temple that some players never figured out the whole function exists :p

I do have a fairly solid plan on how im going to progress with developing this, but there's always that stuff that's already there which still needs a lot of poking.
tilesets constantly evolve (check out the update on the intro tileset i posted in WIP, gigantic improvement over the v1 !) and such on...

what comes to sharing things, my view on that is quite the opposite of yours, and while i admit that i dislike displaying unfinished features, at the same time, i love displaying them and hearing out what people have to say, and more often than not, even seemingly random comments or just compliments in general about something specific, spark more ideas to further refine or just improve the existing.
Such rubberducking is good for projects i think.


i've been consitently trying to point it out to people that you're actually working on a core you wish to share with people, while im actually just trying to make a game, but while everyone wanted 2-way scrolling like it was the end of the world, it doesnt look like many people are actually using yours. Maybe that will change once you whip out a 4-way scroller :D
 

thisjustin2001

New member
I played the demo of your game shortly after last year's Byte-Off wrapped up, and I gotta say, this is probably my most anticipated homebrew game on any platform, not just NES. I was just curious about something. How has development come along this last year and any ETA on the full release or another demo? Keep up the great work!
 

Mugi

Member
thisjustin2001 said:
I played the demo of your game shortly after last year's Byte-Off wrapped up, and I gotta say, this is probably my most anticipated homebrew game on any platform, not just NES. I was just curious about something. How has development come along this last year and any ETA on the full release or another demo? Keep up the great work!

we're developing it as we can. It's been on a bit of a standstill due to real life complications and frustrations with the game engine but it's still progressing at a somewhat steady(ish) pace.
the project thread for dimension shift n the WIP subforum has more up to date information about the current state of the game.
 
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