Oceanscapes

frodewin 2018-04-23 15:18

Treated the text advaneture part like a text adventure first and was heavily confused. After a restart and closer look at your screenshot I understood the game and made the points easily. Then the game announced that the bug is fixed and we can go back to graphics mode and I got a Windows message that the Godot engine has crashed. I think this is a real bug but it was funny in this situation after this moment. I really envy you about your idea - this is a great combination of incompatible genres and good storyline around it, thanks for the game!

init-py 2018-04-23 15:42

@Frodewin Whoops - that's a real bug :P I'll fix it when I get home. Thanks for your feedback!

init-py 2018-04-23 23:52

@Frodewin I got home and tried out the game - I don't seem to have the issue you're describing. Weird.

smooth 2018-04-24 01:42

Not Bad at all

themonsterfromthedeep 2018-04-24 16:37

I think I understand the game pretty well. However, I couldn't manage to get anything to happen on the second level, even after mapping out the whole thing in Notepad. I must have mis-mapped it.

I think that's the problem--there's really no way to get anything done without mapping out the whole level, which takes 16 moves, and is really tedious, and it's pretty easy to not even map it correctly, which just means that it's kind of a chore to get anything done.

I think the concept is good, but I don't know how the actual gameplay could be done in a way that would be fun.

init-py 2018-04-24 20:50

@TheMonsterFromTheDeep Thanks for the feedback! I totally understand what you mean. The entire level is shown before the text-based interface, so you can look at what's possible before clicking.

I guess it's probably pretty hard to visualize the entire thing in your head. Maybe I could show the graphical level at the same time as the text interface some way? I could pop up a separate console window with the text-based interface, or show the text on top of the graphical interface. That way it would be easier to actually play the game. Maybe I'll redo the game with some sort of interface like that.

(btw, on Level 2 you can move the crab at (3, 2) (origin point in the top left of course) to the left.)

themonsterfromthedeep 2018-04-25 01:47

@__init__.py : I would agree that showing the graphical interface at the same time as the text-based interface would work better -- you could even, e.g., have it in the background of the text interface, with something like a cracked-screen graphic or something similar. That might be cool.

automatonvx 2018-04-29 23:55

argh, i made it to the impossible level, and was making my escape, I saw the crack to the ocean and went west and godot crashed. Strangely I don't know if this was intentional or not? Anyway really great idea of combining match 3 with text adventure, and the writing was pretty emotive. After i realised what was going on i just noted down everything in notepad to keep track. I don't think you need to display this at the same time, manually keeping track of everything is sort of part of the fun. Its been some years since i had to manually make maps of games on paper but hey why not.

init-py 2018-04-30 00:02

@automatonvx nope, that's not intentional, and I can't reproduce that bug at all. I've had multiple people tell me about random crashes or the game not starting up at all, while other people on the same/similar platforms had the game working perfectly fine. I don't think Godot is something I want to continue using in the future, as I had a lot of VM/implementation-related bugs pop up while I was working on the game. Thanks for the feedback!

impiaaa 2018-05-06 05:21

Hah, funny concept, but really tedious of course. I did notice some oddities while playing, like that a whole row of 4 disappeared instead of 3 (or maybe I was placed somewhere I didn't expect when it disappeared), and that you can't clear a row by moving a non-matching thing (in these games I usually expect the two things to swap, so it doesn't matter which one you move).

synedraacus 2018-05-06 05:25

Linux build works fine for me (64bit Linux Mint 17). I like the idea, but it really needs some QoL fixes. Showing both game screen and text console was mentioned already, and I would really appreciate some commonly used parser IF commands (ie `examine`/`x` for looking at stuff, `take`/`grab` as synonyms for `pick up`, `exit`/`quit` to end the game).

init-py 2018-05-06 14:36

@impiaaa There should be rows of 4 disappearing at a time - do you mean a row of 4 in which one of the items is not the same as the rest?

The second one is intentional, because the game that this game takes place inside of is meant to be badly written. I now realize that was a bad idea, and it's not clear/just makes me look lazy (I could have easily fixed that, but I wasn't really thinking). Oh well.

init-py 2018-05-06 14:38

@Synedraacus noted! I didn't add `examine/x` as they weren't really relevant to the actual gameplay, but I probably should have done so in order to be more consistent with other text-based adventures.

distorter 2018-05-06 16:18

Great idea! I think that the game would have benefited from the player being able to see the level as they play, as it's a bit tedious to note down the position of everything, but otherwise I like it!

irwatts 2018-05-06 19:22

I escaped! Super cool ending to an fun game. I loved the genre mashup and tasteful use of word art. The scores required not matching the level screen was a little odd, but it just added to the mystique. I'd say it's not just match-3/text-based adventure, but also part memory game!

kr4ft3r 2018-05-09 10:53

Humor behind the game concept and how it starts is superb. Love the descriptions as well. As for gameplay, I did play MUDs a lot and a few text adventures, but prospect of having to solve match three game inside a text adventure is a bit of a torture for me personally, of course that is part of the humor of the whole thing, and I'm sure people who enjoy memory challenges will find it way more fun. The game can easily crash, when there is a lot of wall bouncing and perhaps fast typing, not sure. I'm curious as perhaps i may use godot engine in future, do you think those crashes are caused by rapid programming or is it engine quirks?

aerosavior 2018-05-09 21:26

Was very confusing at first but simple once i understood the appropriate commands. Help section should just say 's,e,w,n' instead of telling me to go a direction as I cannot 'go up' or 'go forward'. Overall a pretty tedious game

chainedlupine 2018-05-11 20:59

Cool idea! Though I have to agree with above, mixing the board with the text game would have been easier to figure out. Like, maybe you could trigger a visual representation of the board (even if just shown in broken text) somehow.

I mean, the mapping part is cool, that's also part of the old school era of these texture adventure games, too!

I did have some minor glitchiness with the text input, but nothing that liberal use of the backspace key couldn't fix.

init-py 2018-05-15 18:31

@kr4ft3r i'm pretty sure they had to do with the engine, because they were inconsistent across machines. i wouldn't recommend Godot overall as it has a lot of bugs that i ran into.