Trial by Viking - Out today on Steam!

Thank you Testfor!!

 

Update #41:

Recently I had sent out some video of the game to a few youtubers. One replied saying he liked the look of the game, but that the death animations looked a bit "jankey". He suggested that maybe a ragdoll death would be in order. I hadn't planned to do this because of some technical limitations, but after thinking about it some more, I found a way to get past that and add them. Let me know what you think!



By the way, Trial by Viking is currently running a KickStarter campaign. There's some new video of the game there too. Any help you can lend is hugely appreciated!

Thank you!
Dustin

 

I would have said that adding 'rag doll death' to a game like this would be just weird. You only see 'rag doll death' in a game made with full polygonal 3D characters in environment, but this is a 2D 'Castlevania' mechanics style game (which never features this at all). However, the purple puff of smoke makes it look good.

As for the word 'jankey'...

 

Thanks ANTMAN! This game actually is all polygonal 3D characters and environment, it's just orthographically projected so that it doesn't add perspective to the rendering.

As for the word "jankey", that was a direct quote from the youtuber that suggested the ragdoll deaths hah!

 

Update #42:

After some reflection, I thought it would be a good time to show the zoomout feature. Since the levels in TBV are not super huge, there is no official map, but if you hold up for 1 second, the entire view will zoom out, showing a larger portion of the level. Players who learn to use this to their advantage will have a much easier time figuring out the lay of the land, especially in the harder levels towards the end of the game.

By the way, Trial by Viking is currently running a KickStarter campaign. There's some new video of the game there too. Any help you can lend is hugely appreciated!

Thank you!
Dustin

 

7 minutes to go on the KickStarter campaign!

 

Update #43:

It's been a while since my last post, so I have a lot to update here. After getting greenlit on Steam, and a successful Kickstarter campaign, I put my head down and got to work. It seems to have paid off. Trial by Viking recently became one of 20 winners of the 2015 Taco Bell Indie Game Garage contest, and has been nominated for Best Desktop/Downloadable in the 2016 Games Connection Development Awards taking place in two weeks! I will be at Games Connection demoing the game in the Awards Pavilion if anyone wants to stop by and say hello. There is a shuttle there from GDC.

I have recently completed a demo that I'm pretty proud of as well! You can try out a copy for Windows or Mac right now by clicking here.

So the game is releasing on Steam in less than a month. March 29th, just after Easter. I'm pretty nervous. I haven't gotten a lot of coverage on games sites, but that's to be mostly expected as an unknown indie dev I suppose. Hopefully things go well

Here's a new gif for you all! Troll boss. Don't worry there are 27 bosses, so I don't feel like I'm spoiling too much.



I also wanted to talk a little bit about AI. I was recently having trouble with my simpleton flyer AI getting snagged on walls. I had talked previously about how I use the last *seen* position of the player as a target for this particular AI, but I never implemented any path finding. This AI isn't supposed to be *that* smart. What I've done however seems to work really well, so I will try to explain it a bit here.

So this flyer AI flies toward a target. It's pretty simple in that respect. When it hit a wall however, it got snagged and stopped or slowed down a lot (and also looked silly doing it). So I started using a little linecasting to help. I cast a line from the AI towards the target at a distance of about one unit. If I get a hit against a platform, I figure out what the reflection vector is. From the target vector and the reflection vector, I can find the halfway vector between the two, which should be a vector that is parallel to the surface that my linecast hit. Using this as the new direction instead of just trying to keep going towards the target, means the AI will slide along the wall at full speed instead. This usually means it will end up finding it's target again, and head towards it once there is no wall in between. It's not perfect, but as I said, this is one of the first AIs you encounter, and it's not supposed to be *too* smart. Here's a small scribble to illustrate what I am talking about.



Anyways, thanks for listening. Let me know if you have any thoughts or comments.

Cheers,
Dustin

 

If the mainstream gaming sites don't give you enough coverage, try the niche / specialized sites, like the ones catering gto retro games, 2d games, jump 'n' run games, viking games (?), fantasy games... and also be sure to create threads on every forum that your game might fit in in the slightest. Try to contact gaming magazines as well. I assume you already read all the guides out there that deal with indie marketing, if not, do it Getting the word out there is as difficult as making the game itself

Besides Fire & Brimstone, the game also reminds me of a faster, more fluid version of the Bitmap Brothers classic Gods. I think I already mentioned that somewhere in this thread though

 

Oh for sure. Yeah, I reach out to every site I can. Very few open emails though (I need to write better subjects maybe). Also probably wasn't good to plan launch two weeks after GDC. xD Oh well.

 

I finally found time to play the demo.
I was pleasantly surprised by how polished thgame looks and sounds. Everything seems to have had a lot of work put into it.

Here are the things I noticed while playing:
The black screen while the game loads goes on a tad too long; impatient players might think the game has crashed and alt-tab out of it. Maybe display a loading screen like when the level loads?
The black borders to the left and right - Are they neccessary? They prevent the full use of widescreen displays.
No health potions in the game as far as I could tell, which makes the game pretty hard. I only managed to get to level 2 before I gave up.
The jump button on the left button, this is probably down to player preference but I like to jump on the bottom button. Of course, this could be changed in the launcher. Still, an in-game control setup is a must imho.
At the start of the second stage, when the lizard man respawned, he was named Lizard Man (or whatever) (Clone). I assume you instantiated a prefab here and the game didn't rename it, or rather just gave the name of the GameObject since Unity adds the (Clone) part to instantiated objects.
The hanging block that has to be cut down from the ceiling: If it is pushed under the overhang to the right, near the trigger plate, it's impossible to climb over it or jump on it... Which prevents the player from reaching the right side of the block if he wishes to push it back to the left.
Enemies respawn a little too quickly for my tastes; If I clear an area, I like to have some time to explore it instead of having to fight the enemy again. As it is now, I can't even cross the room before the enemy that stood in my way blocks my way again.

 

Hey Cherno! Thank you!

I'm worried about a few of the things you are describing because they sound like they may be bugs.

Level loading on most systems takes about a second. There was one beta tester that reported long loading times, but discovered restarting his PC fixed the problem so I never looked much further in to it. I'm not sure what could cause a thing like that, but I'm going to start googling.

I'm not sure what you mean about black bars to the sides. Is this on the main menu only, or is it during actual game play as well?

There are health potions in some levels, but I think the issue may be with the demo throwing you into the middle of the game without ramping up to it properly. For instance, in the natural flow of the game, you will learn that you can pull blocks as well as push them, which may have solved the block issue.

I really do agree with you on the in game control customization, but it may have to wait until the first major update. The work I want to do creating that will take a good amount of time to do it right. I will need it no queston for the XBox One version coming after. On my controller, the jump button is one of the bottom buttons by default xD, so it's really tough to get the defaults right for everyone's equipment.

And thank you for trying out the game! Launch is only a week and a half away, so not much time to make changes. Let me know if you can provide any more info about those bugs that you think might be helpful.

Cheers,
Dustin

 

I think the black borders are because I left the resolution at the default 1024 * whatever in the launcher (Even though I played fullscreen). It is throughout the whole game, including cutscenes.
The black screen before the main menu loads takes 13 seconds, on further thought it's not bad because the music starts halfway through so the player knows that something is happening The level loading goes much quicker. Anyway, I didn't mean to point out the length of any loading, but rather that only a black screen is shown.
After playing it again, I still think the second level is far too hard

 

Wow, yeah 13 seconds is definitely not natural. Should take about a second. I'll investigate and see if I can figure out what might be the cause. A loading screen may help, but this shouldn't be happening to begin with really. I've heard virtual network cards can really screw up a Unity game's initial loading time in a similar way for certain computers, but it could be something else.

 

I have no SSD hard disk so maybe it's just slower than what most people use nowadays.

 

I don't think it can be that. I play on regular HDD often, and no problems.

 

I'm going to add some life to the demo maybe. Check out this tester running that level though. Of course, they had been playing the game a long time already before. This level doesn't show up in the full game until 40 or so levels in.

 

He is far better at the game than I am I didn't even know about that move where you shoot a rope upwards. He is also not afraid to go for an aggressive melee style, which I avoid and thus get hit more often

 

Update #44:

Hey all,

It's been a long two and a half year road with lots of ups and downs, but today is finally the day. Trial by Viking was released on Steam and Itch.io this morning. Thank you all for the feedback and advice. Check out the release trailer!

Steam store link: http://store.steampowered.com/app/440800/
Itch.io store link: https://lastlifegames.itch.io/trial-by-viking

 

Congratulations You have achieved what is still a dream for so many developers, releasing a full game

 

Thank you Cherno!

 

Wow great its released I noticed juptier hadley covered the game. Otherwise I wouldnt have noticed the game was released.