Niece's birthday
King of My Heart by John Mark McMillan, performed by Kutless
Hi all. It's been a relatively uneventful month for me. My niece had her second birthday, and her parents held a celebration for that combined with Father's Day. She's starting to approach intelligible speech. Maybe for her next birthday I'll give her her first game system. >)
This month's progress has been mainly about getting Zelda's Triforce Guard ability to work. As a reminder, it works similarly to Celes's Runic ability in Final Fantasy VI; Triforce Guard absorbs the next purely magical attack made by the enemy and gives the mana used to perform it to Zelda. I'd decided to implement a general counter system and make Triforce Guard part of that, which I did...but it still needed some special code for the unique traits of the ability. At any rate, after much coding and debugging, the counter system in general and Triforce Guard in particular seem to be working (although I wouldn't be surprised if more bugs crop up when I implement more counters).
Also, thanks to something I mentioned to a pastor in a small-group session at the Fire Conference, I've been contacted by somebody thinking about making a game based on a book series she is writing. She asked me to keep the details in confidence, so I can't say too much about it, but it sounds like her game concept would be much better played as a group role-playing experience than a single-player game. I advised her to make a paper prototype and play it and refine it a lot before even thinking about making a video game.
The TF Slack group is slowly picking up steam by branching into multiple scenes. I had a scene with newcomer Zunzune, a Goron with a small tame dragon, as one of my own Goron characters, Royba. It was just a chance meeting on the road with an exchange of pleasantries, food, and the sale of a bombchu, but it was amusing enough. John happened across the the Gerudo Fortress and met its denizens, most notably Shemri and Nabooru. Being a newcomer to Hyrule, he was surprised to learn of the clan's self-accepted (by Nabooru at least) reputation as thieves and all-female quirk. o.o; Luckily Scruvo was eventually distracted from flirting on John's behalf by Sheikah (Shemri's cat).
Super Mario Run:
Apparently this game hit Android back in March without me noticing. c.c Oh well, no big deal. I downloaded it, played the first four stages for free (yay for the return of the shareware business model!), then decided, eh, sure, I'll pay ten bucks for the rest, especially seeing as I need to keep up with Nintendo's important releases. This particular release is important more because it's a business experiment for Nintendo than because of the gameplay, but still.
The basic premise, of course, is to reduce Mario gameplay to the simplest, most vital actions so that it can be played with a single "button", by tapping nearly anywhere on the screen (nearly because there are still some regions near the top reserved for bringing up the pause menu and the like). Mario runs forward automatically, and performs whatever action makes sense in context (usually a jump) when the screen is tapped. There are a few interesting little peculiarities beyond what you might think. Rather than requiring the player to jump before reaching an enemy to stomp on them (although that still works), Mario will automatically vault over most foes that he encounters at ground-level, and a tap at that moment will act as a stomp. The first reason for this which comes to mind is to make things easier for the highly casual audience which smart phones are known for. After playing through the game, though, I think a more important reason is so that the player has an option (namely "don't jump") to deal with situations where there are hazards coming both high and low and not enough warning time to clear both with a jump. There are no power-ups aside from the basic Super Mushroom and the occasional Starman, which is a little dangerous in itself because it makes Mario run faster (it also pulls in nearby coins though). There are also no extra lives exactly, but you start each stage with two bubbles, which will float Mario backwards through the stage if he "dies" until you tap to release him. You can also tap a button to manually use a bubble, which can be handy if you missed a special coin.
Speaking of, special coins! This is what makes the game worthwhile for a Mario veteran. In each stage there are five pink coins to collect, some relatively easy, some hidden in blocks, some out of reach apart from a tricky wall-jump or series of enemy-stomps. Snag all five in a single run, and -- you unlock a variation of the same stage with five purple coins in new locations! Then it's five black coins! They sometimes add little modifications to the stage itself too, like an extra wall of blocks in the air to kick off of in order to reach a coin. It's hard to be entirely sure, but I think it may be occasionally necessary to use a character other than Mario. There was a black coin in stage 1-4 that seemed downright impossible to get as Mario; I eventually resorted to playing as a Yoshi and using his flutter jump to reach it. That's the only one I wasn't able to get as Mario so far, though. If you're really dedicated, you could even try for the highest possible coin score on each stage, and it does record your best for you. Ordinarily I'd love that, but in this case I won't bother because there are random elements which could affect how many coins you can snag in a particular run, like a cluster of coins which flies out of a block when you hit it and may drop one or two into oblivion before you can reach them. :P
And then there's the Toad Rally mode. In this mode, you take a run through a stage that really is endless, composed of pre-existing segments strung together, and try to gather as many coins as you can before time runs out. A meter builds up as you go, filled by your actions -- basically, the more you tap the more you're likely to fill, PROVIDED you don't run into a hazard with your reckless flailing. ;) When the meter is filled, you go into a coin rush, in which coins become more numerous and Mario runs faster for a time. You're supposedly playing "against" some other random player, and their ghost is shown moving along through the stage alongside you, although I don't know how strict they are about recreating that player's actual run. I know for a fact that if you do a rematch against a particular player, their score won't necessarily be the same next time, which could mean it's selecting one of several recorded runs, or it's just simulating the player's general skill level with random actions and mistakes. At the end, the winner is awarded Toads of various colors, which helps you unlock buildings for a landscape-decorating thing. A few of them actually have mechanical importance, like unlocking a new playable character. Unfortunately, this is a veeeeeery grindy branch of the gameplay. Red Toads are far and away more common than the other four colors; you're likely to win less than ten of each of the other colors for a Toad Rally win, and lose one or two for a loss. You need 400 Toads of every color if you want to fully unlock everything. They also throttle how many Toad Rallies you can do by requiring tickets for it, though unless you pour some serious time into it each day, you'll probably gain the tickets faster than you can use them.
One more little hitch: this game isn't as portable as you might think because it requires a data connection to play. That might not be a big deal if you have one of those phone plans that includes data-over-phone as part of the package, but for us frugal sorts with pay-as-you-go plans, it can only be played in places with Wifi available.
Bottom line? It's a small game (24 short stages) and not quite as engaging as a typical Mario title, but it's also a sixth of the price of a typical Mario title, so yeah, I'd say it's worth it.
King's Quest IV-VII:
We all know what this series is like in general, so I think I'll just do a quick overview of how things changed from one chapter to another.
King's Quest IV: Pretty similar mechanically to the first three, though it took a step up in graphical quality. It stars King Graham's daughter Rosella, as she seeks a magical flower to cure her father's illness and in the process contends with an evil fairy with winged monkey minions.
King's Quest V: Back to starring King Graham himself. His castle with his family inside it is zapped away by an evil wizard, and Graham has to go rescue them (although he spends the first two-thirds of the game or so solving random problems until he finds the items necessary to head towards the evil wizard). Another step up in graphics, and they started using voice-acting too. Not very good voice-acting though, and it's a bit of a pain because there's no subtitles and you have to listen carefully or you might miss a vital clue. Contains arguably the series' most opaque puzzle, involving putting stuff onto the ground for no suggested reason. On the plus side, it made the series' most valuable mechanical leap: ditching the text parser and direct-control walking for a purely point-and-click interface.
King's Quest VI: King Graham's son Alexander gets his second starring role in this one (the first time being King's Quest III, since I didn't explicitly mention that in my previous review). He sets off to visit a princess he briefly met at the end of King's Quest V, and finds that the vizier of her island kingdom is in the final stages of a scheme to take the throne (big surprise, right?). This game experiments heavily with ending variations. It's not quite the first, you could get a tragic ending in King's Quest IV if you missed doing a sort of side-quest, but King's Quest VI involves multiple optional segments that add aspects to the epilogue.
King's Quest VII: This time you alternate between Rosella and her mother Valanice. The graphics take a huge transformation here, going from pixel-art to cel animation, although due to the processing limitations of the time, it's not very smooth animation. The play progression is more linear in this one, separated into distinct chapters with their own areas (although in the later chapters you can and to some extent must revisit old areas). They also threw in a simple yet valuable alteration: when you die in-game, you can continue from the point just before whatever choice caused your death, even if you didn't save beforehand. In the death screen menu, your character will even say something to lament their demise, occasionally providing a hint of how to get past the danger.
Click to viewHi all. It's been a relatively uneventful month for me. My niece had her second birthday, and her parents held a celebration for that combined with Father's Day. She's starting to approach intelligible speech. Maybe for her next birthday I'll give her her first game system. >)
This month's progress has been mainly about getting Zelda's Triforce Guard ability to work. As a reminder, it works similarly to Celes's Runic ability in Final Fantasy VI; Triforce Guard absorbs the next purely magical attack made by the enemy and gives the mana used to perform it to Zelda. I'd decided to implement a general counter system and make Triforce Guard part of that, which I did...but it still needed some special code for the unique traits of the ability. At any rate, after much coding and debugging, the counter system in general and Triforce Guard in particular seem to be working (although I wouldn't be surprised if more bugs crop up when I implement more counters).
Also, thanks to something I mentioned to a pastor in a small-group session at the Fire Conference, I've been contacted by somebody thinking about making a game based on a book series she is writing. She asked me to keep the details in confidence, so I can't say too much about it, but it sounds like her game concept would be much better played as a group role-playing experience than a single-player game. I advised her to make a paper prototype and play it and refine it a lot before even thinking about making a video game.
The TF Slack group is slowly picking up steam by branching into multiple scenes. I had a scene with newcomer Zunzune, a Goron with a small tame dragon, as one of my own Goron characters, Royba. It was just a chance meeting on the road with an exchange of pleasantries, food, and the sale of a bombchu, but it was amusing enough. John happened across the the Gerudo Fortress and met its denizens, most notably Shemri and Nabooru. Being a newcomer to Hyrule, he was surprised to learn of the clan's self-accepted (by Nabooru at least) reputation as thieves and all-female quirk. o.o; Luckily Scruvo was eventually distracted from flirting on John's behalf by Sheikah (Shemri's cat).
Super Mario Run:
Apparently this game hit Android back in March without me noticing. c.c Oh well, no big deal. I downloaded it, played the first four stages for free (yay for the return of the shareware business model!), then decided, eh, sure, I'll pay ten bucks for the rest, especially seeing as I need to keep up with Nintendo's important releases. This particular release is important more because it's a business experiment for Nintendo than because of the gameplay, but still.
The basic premise, of course, is to reduce Mario gameplay to the simplest, most vital actions so that it can be played with a single "button", by tapping nearly anywhere on the screen (nearly because there are still some regions near the top reserved for bringing up the pause menu and the like). Mario runs forward automatically, and performs whatever action makes sense in context (usually a jump) when the screen is tapped. There are a few interesting little peculiarities beyond what you might think. Rather than requiring the player to jump before reaching an enemy to stomp on them (although that still works), Mario will automatically vault over most foes that he encounters at ground-level, and a tap at that moment will act as a stomp. The first reason for this which comes to mind is to make things easier for the highly casual audience which smart phones are known for. After playing through the game, though, I think a more important reason is so that the player has an option (namely "don't jump") to deal with situations where there are hazards coming both high and low and not enough warning time to clear both with a jump. There are no power-ups aside from the basic Super Mushroom and the occasional Starman, which is a little dangerous in itself because it makes Mario run faster (it also pulls in nearby coins though). There are also no extra lives exactly, but you start each stage with two bubbles, which will float Mario backwards through the stage if he "dies" until you tap to release him. You can also tap a button to manually use a bubble, which can be handy if you missed a special coin.
Speaking of, special coins! This is what makes the game worthwhile for a Mario veteran. In each stage there are five pink coins to collect, some relatively easy, some hidden in blocks, some out of reach apart from a tricky wall-jump or series of enemy-stomps. Snag all five in a single run, and -- you unlock a variation of the same stage with five purple coins in new locations! Then it's five black coins! They sometimes add little modifications to the stage itself too, like an extra wall of blocks in the air to kick off of in order to reach a coin. It's hard to be entirely sure, but I think it may be occasionally necessary to use a character other than Mario. There was a black coin in stage 1-4 that seemed downright impossible to get as Mario; I eventually resorted to playing as a Yoshi and using his flutter jump to reach it. That's the only one I wasn't able to get as Mario so far, though. If you're really dedicated, you could even try for the highest possible coin score on each stage, and it does record your best for you. Ordinarily I'd love that, but in this case I won't bother because there are random elements which could affect how many coins you can snag in a particular run, like a cluster of coins which flies out of a block when you hit it and may drop one or two into oblivion before you can reach them. :P
And then there's the Toad Rally mode. In this mode, you take a run through a stage that really is endless, composed of pre-existing segments strung together, and try to gather as many coins as you can before time runs out. A meter builds up as you go, filled by your actions -- basically, the more you tap the more you're likely to fill, PROVIDED you don't run into a hazard with your reckless flailing. ;) When the meter is filled, you go into a coin rush, in which coins become more numerous and Mario runs faster for a time. You're supposedly playing "against" some other random player, and their ghost is shown moving along through the stage alongside you, although I don't know how strict they are about recreating that player's actual run. I know for a fact that if you do a rematch against a particular player, their score won't necessarily be the same next time, which could mean it's selecting one of several recorded runs, or it's just simulating the player's general skill level with random actions and mistakes. At the end, the winner is awarded Toads of various colors, which helps you unlock buildings for a landscape-decorating thing. A few of them actually have mechanical importance, like unlocking a new playable character. Unfortunately, this is a veeeeeery grindy branch of the gameplay. Red Toads are far and away more common than the other four colors; you're likely to win less than ten of each of the other colors for a Toad Rally win, and lose one or two for a loss. You need 400 Toads of every color if you want to fully unlock everything. They also throttle how many Toad Rallies you can do by requiring tickets for it, though unless you pour some serious time into it each day, you'll probably gain the tickets faster than you can use them.
One more little hitch: this game isn't as portable as you might think because it requires a data connection to play. That might not be a big deal if you have one of those phone plans that includes data-over-phone as part of the package, but for us frugal sorts with pay-as-you-go plans, it can only be played in places with Wifi available.
Bottom line? It's a small game (24 short stages) and not quite as engaging as a typical Mario title, but it's also a sixth of the price of a typical Mario title, so yeah, I'd say it's worth it.
King's Quest IV-VII:
We all know what this series is like in general, so I think I'll just do a quick overview of how things changed from one chapter to another.
King's Quest IV: Pretty similar mechanically to the first three, though it took a step up in graphical quality. It stars King Graham's daughter Rosella, as she seeks a magical flower to cure her father's illness and in the process contends with an evil fairy with winged monkey minions.
King's Quest V: Back to starring King Graham himself. His castle with his family inside it is zapped away by an evil wizard, and Graham has to go rescue them (although he spends the first two-thirds of the game or so solving random problems until he finds the items necessary to head towards the evil wizard). Another step up in graphics, and they started using voice-acting too. Not very good voice-acting though, and it's a bit of a pain because there's no subtitles and you have to listen carefully or you might miss a vital clue. Contains arguably the series' most opaque puzzle, involving putting stuff onto the ground for no suggested reason. On the plus side, it made the series' most valuable mechanical leap: ditching the text parser and direct-control walking for a purely point-and-click interface.
King's Quest VI: King Graham's son Alexander gets his second starring role in this one (the first time being King's Quest III, since I didn't explicitly mention that in my previous review). He sets off to visit a princess he briefly met at the end of King's Quest V, and finds that the vizier of her island kingdom is in the final stages of a scheme to take the throne (big surprise, right?). This game experiments heavily with ending variations. It's not quite the first, you could get a tragic ending in King's Quest IV if you missed doing a sort of side-quest, but King's Quest VI involves multiple optional segments that add aspects to the epilogue.
King's Quest VII: This time you alternate between Rosella and her mother Valanice. The graphics take a huge transformation here, going from pixel-art to cel animation, although due to the processing limitations of the time, it's not very smooth animation. The play progression is more linear in this one, separated into distinct chapters with their own areas (although in the later chapters you can and to some extent must revisit old areas). They also threw in a simple yet valuable alteration: when you die in-game, you can continue from the point just before whatever choice caused your death, even if you didn't save beforehand. In the death screen menu, your character will even say something to lament their demise, occasionally providing a hint of how to get past the danger.