Very nice! The graphics are incredible, probably the best i’ve seen since Boom, and much more stylized! I especially like the background image… has kinda a sketchy look to it, very cool :).
I’ve gotta say though that the gameplay looks pretty dull. I hope that there are more objectives than what you’ve had in the two videos, at at least some more interesting controls. This looks like the graphics will keep me entertained for a bit, but the gameplay is NOT (from what Ive seen) up to par with them.
thanks everyone for the response. I know i havn’t been updating much but I have been spending a LOT of time on this thing. (some might say too much)
Cray- Thanks for the stars dude- i really like your work so it means a lot to me.
for anyone who hasn’t had a look check out this guys 3rd person template. I would have loved to start this project with some kind of template- epecially for my AI (which is still a bit pants)
sam- I’d love to dissagree with you but it does seem a bit dull at the moment. Thats something I’m adressing hopefully. I’ve been trying to get all the game-ish elements working like scores and time limits etc… I’m hoping once that stuff is in place it’ll be kinda fun to play.
I have heaps of ideas about what i would LIKE to do with the game. I think getting some preditors in there would be great- something to attack the caveman or to steal the critters away from him. Obviously a greater veriety of critters would be more interesting too. I can also imagine multiplayer being fun - might play a bit like hungry hungry hippos.
HOWEVER, time is running out (for the contest at least) - and knowing me, without a deadline not much will get done after that. SO don’t expect much from that list (if anything )
Man looking even better now. Cant wait till the background is in, u could make that volcano in the background randomly erupt, and then shortly after lumps of burning rock could fall from the sky for the caveman to dodge. Just one idea, wouldnt be to hard to do compared to making full enemys etc.
Theres 2 weeks left, in my experience a lot of the best and most impressive work is done in the final weeks! (at least for me)
I wouldn’t like blood in it, it’s kind of cute and stylised as it is and blood would just ruin the innocence ^_^. I’m looking forward to this game progressing. I love the cute animals :o
Gotta agree with penguin and dragon about the blood. Its not really the look i’m going for. But hey you do get bright happy stars when you hit something - that’s gotta be worth something… right?
What about the games where everything turned into fruit when it died- those were the good old days.
I think the bright stars will do good for the game, hey, it worked in Looney Toons, it will work in this game since like someone else said indirectly it’s like a cartoon;)
As promised, I’ve just uploaded a playable WIP version of Thump Stuff. Definitely some things i want to get done before this contest is done, some are gameplay related, some graphics and some just fixing stuff which is broken. Will i have time…who knows?
For the moment though i was keen to get this thing out to make sure it works at all for people.
here’s the link:
NOTES:
the help screen is not hooked up yet so don’t bother with it.
controls are:
W,S,A,D for movement and RIGHT CTL to thump
for the moment the arrow keys are hooked up to navigate the camera- this was for testing and I intend to remove it for the final version.
there are some other random keys hooked up to things for testing which may do strange things- i also intend to remove all these.
oh yeah P is for pause (just like a real game )
This version has a new background featuring some state of the art Multi-planing. Also I’ve got different colour moles which I’m hoping will do different things (eg, bonus time, bonus points, extra life…something like that). For the moment they all give you extra time.
the levels are completely out of balance right now as far as difficulty/challenge/time/points. I really have to get that working a lot better in the final game to make this thing fun. Currently level 4 is probably impossible to pass - doh.
Not much time left now. Good luck to everyone who’s competing.
This is great! The gamplay was fun, I love the double thump bonus. The animation and models are top notch too.
Now my critiques;
I almost didn’t download because of the 73 MB filesize. The caveman scene alone is 20MB which is way to much. I suggest when you release the game you use compressed texture files (like JPG). You may loose a little bit of image quality, but it’s not that noticable compared to the mippmapping that is allready taking place. (I think the large file sizes were slowing the loading of levels too, the first load screen takes about 4 minutes to load for me.
Also, I’m on my work computer which is not that great, but It seems your game needs a lot of optimizing (mainly with the rasterizer). The exe was almost unplayable, I tried the blend and shrunk the window way down and it was better, but still bad; 2-6 FPS on the main screen, and 10-12 in the game scenes.
Small things: ‘press a key to start’ needed two keypresses on multiple occaisions.
The red snuffleupagus corpse never faded out.
All in all 5 stars, I hope to see some last minute polish and good luck in the competition!
Too high system requierments. At my ATI radeon x800 pro, 1GB RAM + 2.1 Ghz AMD single core, my fps is 9 or something :(. Checked your models and they are stunning! And I love the music. You got my vote.
Nice little touches too, like the rocks flying up into the air when you pound the ground. I just wish it was mouse controlled as being constrained to 8 directions gets frustrating when you’re just a tiny bit off. I absolutely love the animation for the elephant-trunk things when they get whacked. Hooooo yeah. That’s some thumpin’ satisfaction.
thanks to everyone who’s responded, i really appreciate the encouragement as well as the crits.
Sounds like some people are having some pretty serious performance issues with this game :(.
Unfortunately I don’t think this game will ever be optimised enough to run on some older or less powerful machines. I’ve really enjoyed taking advantage of all the fancy glsl shading and being able to get a bit of detail into my models too- i don’t think i would have been as interested in this project if i had put too hard a limit on myself in terms of performance.
jplur- for what its worth my loading time is about 10sec for the first screen and i’m getting around 30fps during the game.
Depending on time limits maybe i can release a version which will have a bit more emphasis on performance - no promises, I’ll see how i go.
Also apologies for the missing dll - xvid.dll. apparently this can be found in the blender install directory. (thanks Minifig for that)
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