100 Orcs [WIP]

New Updated web player: https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/39578945/100 Orcs Proto/100 Orcs Proto.html

Heres what I added:

- Kill Count
- New Orc Enemy
- Revamped the camera (You can see passed the level as this moment and where the orcs spawn, I'm not concerned about this yet)

Your goal is to kill 100 Orcs. Please let me know what you think about the difficulty. Too easy? Too Hard? Not fun? What ever.

Thanks!

 

Latest Webplayer has this bug when I go over to the left.

On Chrome for Mac.

Really fun though, enjoyed it.

 

@KheltonHeadley How strange about the bug. I will investigate! I'm glad you enjoyed it.

Same thing is happening in Safari.

 

I had the same edge-blur thing happening in Chrome for Windows 8.1. (Posted in your support thread about it)

I also managed to get the orcs to stop spawning without hitting 100. At one point it did kill a large clump of them with 1 hit, so I'm wondering if some of them didn't register for the score.

 

@NomadKing Thanks for the feed back! I will look into it!

 

I believe I've narrowed it down to my new camera. It has something to do with my shake script and how it is following the hero. But luckily! I think I have come up with a new and better way of doing this anyhow! Stay tuned!

 

They killed me lots of time and the orcs stop to spawn at 80 (Frist time) and 71 (Second time). Why don't you include some platforms to jump over (orcs too)? It could be cool By the way, new orcs are awesome

P.S.: I've the same bug on Chrome as @KheltonHeadley.

 

Well shoot, I guess I'm gonna have to figure out a new way of keeping the count!

 

How are you doing the count right now? Is each orc adding to the count when it dies? To me it looks* like the count only goes wrong on multi-kills.


*Disclaimer: How something looks and whats going on aren't always the same thing!

 

Right now I have it set up that each time the orc's health reaches 0, the count goes up by 1.

 

Hmmm... what happens if an enemy goes to below 0, does it still increment?

 

That's a good question! Perhaps this is the problem. I will check it out when I can.

 

amazing! cool! great! concept art at it's best! but, i'm running at 5fps on your game... I'd love to play it but please look at performance issues. I make a few hundred a week on Kongregate for super simple games, this could easily be a 20k USD per week kongregate.com game, just work out the kinks.... can't wait to play it!

 

the art you make is good , also sprite sheet nice animations .

 

@realghetto & @Developer007

Thank you both for you kind words!

 

Bad art, unpleasant animations.

 

And the developer is quite the arse!

 

I've made some updates to the spawning system in hopes to alleviate the performance issues:

https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/39578945/100 Orcs Proto/100 Orcs Proto.html

Also, I really can't thank you all enough for the support and feedback. I would have quit along time ago when I first didn't make my own deadline if it wasn't for your encouragement! So thank you!

 

Hey @Bridin this is great!

VICTORY!!!! none shall pass!!!

I played a "few" times(8-11 times maybe more) then recorded my last 2 playthroughs after honing all that orc slaying skill
and actually managed to win the last time.

The main performance problem right now is when you die. The framerate just drops to around 3 fps. During gameplay everything played mostly smoothly.

Anyway heres' the video(720p) of the 2 last playthroughs(with ma victory!) so you can get a visual feedback.

*The video is unlisted but if you'd like me to remove it after I will. I just don't know where else to store it online with an embeddable link.

Really like the art. Keep up the hard work this is really fun.

 

Looking good!

Congrats on your progress so far, keep up the good work

 

@Kaji.Atsushi Thank you!

@SememeS This is great man! Thank you for recording this. I'm glad you enjoyed it! I will take a good gander at the video when I get the chance. Shying away from work at the moment! But evening will come soon enough!

 

Same strategy as me.

 

@SememeS Again, thank you for letting me see the game play out. This was very insightful. I wonder what would happen if somehow stopped the orcs from attacking the player once the player was dead. This is something I will try tonight!

 

It looks pretty cool! A suggestion for the combat: A button where the knight dashes backwards like in the castlevania series on handhelds. I think it could make the combat a bit more dynamic.

 

Thanks for the suggestion!

I really had such a terrible time with the character controller that I am very hesitant to switch courses and add something like this at the time. Espcially since I am already months over due when I thought I'd ship this product!

I defiantly don't disagree with you on the dynamic part.

 

Just played it. Like everyone else, I really love the art style, it's adorable! I like that you have the two different orcs in the prototype but I am really looking forward to when you can put more of your great art into the game. The art is really why I want to play it, and seeing just those two enemies over and over again is repetitive. I am really looking forward to when you can get add all your different orcs into it and those great trees you made. Honestly I'm looking forward to when it's finished. It looks great! Keep up the good work.

 

@FancifulFox This means a lot! Thank you so much. I can totally get the repetitive nature in its current state and you wonderful people on the forum will get the worst of it for sure. I'm really focusing and trying to hone in on the gameplay, so the builds will be mostly of the same level looking for bugs and what not. But never fear there is more to come! Here is a screenshot of a level I've been slowly putting together.

 

Here's to hoping!

I believe I've made a number of improvements to the systems that run the game logic. Please take another gander at the demo and see if you continue to have not so idle performance!

https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/39578945/100 Orcs Proto/100 Orcs Proto.html

I'm feeling good about where I am at right now. Kind of a benchmark. Next plans is to add the rest of the enemies and maybe try out a new weapon!

Another note: I've zoomed in the camera just a bit. Good idea or did you like the original better?

 

Very nice gameplay, like the responsiveness of the characters movement, and of couse the artstyle
I like the new "zoom", still able to see more than enough

I did encounter a few bugs though:
The orcs stopped spawning after a 4 resets, and i was no loger able to reset the game any further (just in case its related to the stuff you were just trying to fix)

And a few small visual bugs:
if you keep holding down the jump-button without moving or moving to the right (going left didn't do this for me), it result in some akward character motion.
Also if you hold down the "down"-button ("s") while moving and then stop moving, while still holding down "s", the character keeps running in place.


Out of curiosity, have you thought about adding some kind of "combos"(like 1: attack, 2: attack 3: finisher) or different attack-animations / attack moves?

other than that, keep up the great work

edit:
Just noticed i can't restart by pressing "R" after completing the game either. Great fun though

 

I like the new camera distance, and the FPS issues when you die seem to have gone entirely now, so good work there

On the reset issue that Dejrullen mentioned, I wonder if this could be the cause of the counter issues you had before (linked to the reset / spawning and not the actual count itself) Definitely worth looking at when you get round to that bug.

EDIT: Could it be as simple as the Orcs on screen at a reset just get 'lost'? Not counted as killed and not re-spawned.

Another one for the small bugs list: You can still change direction when dead

 

Why don't you increase the attack speed or the attack range of the armored orcs? It's so easy to evade their hits.

 

@Dejrullen Great bug finds batman! Thank you for the tips! I will try these out and see what I can do to stop them.

I've defiantly considered adding combos in terms of like Orcs killed in a row. The attack animations are randomized at the moment. When I first built the controller logic I didn't know how to string them animations together. i think I know enough now that I could make something. We will see.

@NomadKing Yay! I'm glad the FPS issue is gone. And that's kind of funny on the changing direction after death. I don't think I'm gonna worry too much about that. When you die I'll pull in some kind of a Score screen with a restart button and so forth. You shouldn't be able to see him after that.

@gongalf I defiantly don't disagree. At first they were too hard. As soon as they were done with the hit animations they immediately attacked and I never got past 20 or so killed. I guess it just takes a bit of finessing to get it right. Thanks for the tip!

Kelly

 

Looking good Bridin! The only bug I found was that you can turn during an attack and since it is a fast-paced game that it kinda hinders a quick attack then turn and jump move which I think would be quite frequent.

 

Thanks Lazdude17! I will put it on the list of things to look at and see what I can do.

 

Ditto to Lazdude17, perhaps a slight tweak to the speed of the sword animation. This would solve a balance issue where you're vulnerable to orcs right after swinging.

 

Friends I've got some exciting stuff to share! Or at least, I'm pretty pumped about it. In my original prototype I wanted three kinds of weapons, sword, arrows and bombs!



Due to the lack of experience and knowledge I decided had to forego the arrows and bombs because I was just stumped on how to get them to work!







I decided to give it another go! And I'd love to hear your feedback!

To use the arrows you hit the right mouse button and bombs are the left shift key!

https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/39578945/100 Orcs Proto/100 Orcs Proto.html

 

Bow seems a little OP.

 

For sure, next step is to make it stop after a few hits. Maybe 5 or so I think. You will only have a limited number of arrows or bombs. I cant decide if these are pickups or you start with a set number.

Something I will continue to work on for sure!

 

It's nice to see the other weapons making a reappearance

Sadly it appears the FPS issue is actually still here, but only under certain circumstances. If you jump about and let a lot of orcs build up, then jump into the group so they all attack, the FPS drops (I went from 60 to 3). Oddly this only seems to happen when they do the attack and not just from their being X many orcs on screen. Perhaps there something in your attack code that's causing a performance hit (possible something that's allocating memory)

 

Sad day about the FPS issues. I have been out of commission for a few days. But I'm back now and I'll figure this out! May have to find a different way to determine when the Orcs know to attack.

 

I've made an updated version of the demo in hopes to solve the FPS issue when the orcs attack. Let me know if it works for you!

https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/39578945/100 Orcs Proto/100 Orcs Proto.html

 

1st time I died and the fps went down to 3 and 4. 2nd time it was flawless and the 3rd time they stopped spawning after 85.

 

I still get the FPS drop when too many of them attack at once (Easily repeatable by avoiding them for a while then jumping into a big pack)

 

Strange that it went perfecto on the second time. And I thought I had fixed that stop spawning bug! Blah! Thanks for the insight. I will continue to hammer it out! This is the hard part, the easy part seems to be putting the levels together. Hang tight! And thanks for all the feedback everyone!

@NomadKing I will test this soon. Maybe even make my dude invincible for awhile and spawn all 100 at once and see what framerate I get.

 

Maybe post your attack code here? Seems like you are doing something wrong, judging by the drop in frame rate.

 

It's all playmaker code, not super shareable unfortunately.

 

Looking at the scene, it seems the attacks are too frequent. If you don't put a timer on them, then it will happen every frame. Lots of orcs attacking would result in a massive slowdown if the attack triggers lots of stuff.

 

The timer is real short. It's the duration of the animation before it decides what the next attack is. But! You could be on to something.

I've been running into some strange 2D trigger enter behavior throughout this development. When I originally set up the hit events when the player hits the orc, it would work perfectly if the Hero was on the left side of the orc general dude. But when I attacked him from the right. It would go through his health completely as if the trigger was will being shot off as soon as it cycled back to the beginning of his logic. So if I hit him from the left it took two hits to kill him but if I hit from the right, it would drain his health and he would die.

I wonder if an intermittent raycast would be better to check if the Orcs should attack or not. Something I will try when I get the chance.

 

Maybe it's cheaper to use distance to determine if an orc attacks.

 

Another round! I drug out my 6 year old laptop to play test it on. Had 50 fps even with 15 plus enemies on the screen attacking me at once!

I also updated the bombs. They now hit on impact.

https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/39578945/100 Orcs Proto/100 Orcs Proto.html