Rogue Story - My submission to the Indie Game Maker Contest

[AnachronicDesigns]

Update: Rogue Story: Phase 1 Version 1.02 now available for PC, Mac, and Linux

Version 1.02 includes important fixes of game-breaking bugs as well as many gameplay tweaks and performance improvements.

Hi all! Just wanted to let you know about my submission to the 2014 Indie Game Maker Contest.

My game is called Rogue Story, and it is a top-down action puzzler that requires quick thinking and fast reflexes. The art still is designed after low-fi pcrpg classics.

I didn't use the RPG Maker for this contest because I already knew how to use Unity. Sorry to post a non-RPG Maker game in these forums, but I thought there might be a few people interested regardless.

Please let me know what you think and enjoy playing! There are certainly a few bugs because I was rushed to meet the deadline, but I think it came out pretty well regardless and it is totally playable.

All the best eh!

PC Version:

Mirror (Medafire)

Direct Download (Dropbox)

Mac Version:

Mirror (Medafire)

Direct Download (Dropbox)

Linux Version:

Mirror (Medafire)

Direct Download (Dropbox)

 

[AnachronicDesigns]

Forgot to include a link to the game page: http://contest.rpgmakerweb.com/game/view/id/457#.U7HfAvldWt8 , so here it is!

 

[twistedshadows]

I just tried out your game, and while I liked the graphics and the setup, I had a really hard time getting anywhere because I moved so slowly. It took a long time to move anywhere, and then in the dungeon I was trying out, I would die pretty instantaneously if a rat saw me because they could run really fast and I couldn't move away at all. My knives also didn't seem to be hitting them once they were on top of me. However, on a postive note, I enjoyed the way that you placed signs and text. That was an interesting take on providing information and I think it worked out really well without slowing down players or giving too much text all at once.

 

[AnachronicDesigns]

Thanks for checking out the game and for the kind words! Can you tell me please, is the player movement still really slow if you hit the 'F' key to cycle through different speeds? The player should be able to move from slow to fast depending on the speed set with the 'F' key. Super-slow movement is a bug I ran into a couple times during development though. It always went away after I restarted the game, so I think it might have something to do with the control code not initializing properly but I haven't been able to pin it down exactly.

If neither of those suggestions helps and it's not too much bother, could you let me know a bit about your system specs? That info might help me diagnose the problem. Midnight here, so I'll check back tomorrow.

 

[twistedshadows]

I tried using the F key to set the movement to super fast, and in the starting area it seemed to make a slight difference, but once I was in a dungeon it went straight back to super slow now matter what speed I was at, and then seemed to stay there. I went back just now and tried it in windowed mode to see if the fullscreen I was using earlier had an impact, but it was still super slow.

I started to type out my specs but I think this will be easier since I don't know all that would be pertinent to you. I have this computer:

http://www.cnet.com/products/asus-g50vt-x5/specs/

I can see how much CPU I'm using at any given time, and with your game it does spike pretty high.

 

[AnachronicDesigns]

Hmm... I'm sorry the game is not working properly for you yet but thanks for the info and I will try to figure this out after work today and release an update soon. The cpu usage should not be making the player movement slow, although it is possible it could make the gameplay choppy (low fps). There is a lot of detail with all the sprite animations, and I haven't been able to get everything to batch together to lower the draw calls down to 1. I've got NGUI batching all the tree sprites together, all the water sprites together, etc., but when I try to put everything under a single panel it breaks the batching for some reason even after I've added all the sprites to the NGUI atlas... then the draw calls jump up into the hundreds. Currently the game is running with around 10-20 draw calls in the smaller earlier levels and 30-40 in the larger later levels. Hopefully I'll be able to improve the performance with some more optimization, and in the process figure out the movement speed issue. I do think they are separate issues and I thought that I had made the movement framerate independent, but it is possible maybe it is being affected by the cpu speed...

Thanks again for your time and patience and I will post here when I've go an update finished and hosted online.

 

[AnachronicDesigns]

Hi! I've uploaded a new version of Rogue Story that should fix the movement problem. Turns out it was an issue with the 'Fastest' 'Fast' and 'Simple' default Unity quality settings that can be chosen in the the resolution dialog at startup. Something about these settings (still not sure what) was causing the super slow movement, so they have been disabled in this new version. The new version also includes some other small fixes and optimizations. Hope this works for you now, and please let me know if there are are any bugs or performance issues on your machine. Enjoy!

Download Rogue Story V1.01

 

[AnachronicDesigns]

Rogue Story: Phase 1 is now available for Mac and Linux. See the original post for new download links

 

[AnachronicDesigns]

UPDATE: New Version 1.02 is now available for download (please see links in original post above). This update greatly improves performance by using object pooling, and includes a variety of other enhancements and optimizations.

 

[Indrah]

Here's my very quick and sketchy take on the game (link for info on why it's so short and all that jazz)




If this game is a troll game, bravo. If it is NOT, the walking speed is INEXCUSABLE and there is just NO way I am going to play through that. I'm not sure if I did something wrong, but the game wasn't telling me jack squat either.


I guess the simple oldstyle graphics are sort of nice, but not much else I can say.

 

[AnachronicDesigns]

Hi Indrah, thanks for checking out Rogue Story: Phase 1, and I appreciate you making a movie about it for sure!

I'm guessing you're playing the contest version (1.0) which unfortunately includes the ultra-slow walkspeed bug that you encountered. The walk speed should work properly if you choose the 'Fantastic' graphic setting from the Unity visual quality settings in the startup window when you launch the game.

Version 1.02 also includes a few other fixes. This release can be downloaded from the contest site: (http://contest.rpgmakerweb.com/game/view/id/457#.U9bi-_ldWt9).

Please use the text links in the description to get the newest version. The green download now button still links to the old broken version, because it cannot be edited after the close-date of the contest.

All the best eh!