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Forgotten Tales - Demo version #470578
01/22/18 20:06
01/22/18 20:06
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Joined: Aug 2014
Posts: 57
Y
Yking Offline OP
Junior Member
Forgotten Tales - Demo version

Today, after 5 years of development, I finally want to present my project for the very first time.
Forgotten Tales is a fantasy action adventure game that takes elements of RPG and action games but also introduces some that are new.

----------------------------------------------------------------------

I always wanted to create my own video game, but apart from using Basic or PHP I never could find a reasonable option to do so.
I spent my time imagining how my game would look like, wrote a storyline, designed items and tried to come up with activities and quests.
About 6 years ago I first got my A7.5 Extra Edition 3DGS, after one year of it collecting dust I finally decided to put it to good use.
The manual became my night lecture and the tutorials became my daytime side activity.
And then, after trying out the same code for a hundred times with no success,
I always had this forum that I could go to, and for sure, people like Reconnoiter, Superku, txesmi, Ayumi, 3run, Ezzett, Wjbender, Fred_Flintstone, Kartoffel, Hellthunder and WretchedSid were always there to help.

Originally starting as a programming exercise, new functions got added to the code continuously, until one day I finally spent more time playing it, than programming it.
And at that point, after renaming my project to “Codename: Legendary Adventure”, it became the bane of my existence for years to come grin.
No matter where I was and what I was doing: This project followed me around the world.
I programmed at home, in airports, in airplanes, in my university, in universities abroad and probably a million places more.

----------------------------------------------------------------------

What you can see here is the finished demo version. I am hoping to receive criticism, reports and suggestions, so I can further improve it as well as improving the overall code.
The game is currently available in English and German, selectable in the settings menu.
There is no spoken dialogue yet, as I currently don’t have the means to record over a hundred pieces of different dialogue laugh .


What is this game?
Forgotten tales is a mainly mouse controlled, 3rd person top view, action adventure game with elements of RPGs, but also with elements that are new. It is using the A8 Engine.

The current state of this game
What you are seeing on this site is a finished demo version.
Currently, there is no full version, however, the game code of this demo is nearly full-featured.

The full version
The full version of this game is my absolute goal, but I am unable to do it without help.
I would require a small team of people, designers for 3d models, textures, sound and music artists and level design.
For now, what I need most is feedback, which will help me to decide on what to do next.
A kickstarter campaign would be a dream, but for the moment, I just want to focus on getting feedback.

What this demo contains
This demo does not have a storyline or side quests on its own, it gives a tutorial and presents the main features and gameplay.
You play first one and later two characters, fighting through hordes of foes and solving small problems and riddles.
In the end you will enter a testing area where you can try out everything at once.

Content and style of the game
All this games content, except the music and the sounds are made by me. This includes the code, the levels and the 3D models.
The overall graphics style of this game will remain, but if given the opportunity, I would replace some character models and animations with better ones, preferably done by an artist.
The same goes for the 2D textures (such as the GUI and the inventory).
Lastly, the music and the sounds would be completely replaced with custom made pieces of work, also done by an artist.

Settings
Starting for the first time, the game will be in window mode 800x600 and in English language.
The most common resolutions can be selected in the settings menu, as well as the “Desktop”-Resolution which will simply use the same resolution as your desktop.

Translations
Immediatly holding Shift and T after clicking the game-executable will open up “Translation Mode”.
This is a feature that I created to make it easier to localize the game and to format text properly.
Text is currently in ASCII format, but the coding structure makes it possible to turn this into a Unicode game relatively easy.

Alpha, Beta, Demo
What you see here is an old-fashioned demo, no Greek letters involved laugh .
However the version of this demo might change, as I react to criticism and bug reports.

Multiplayer
This game, the demo and the full version, will not have a multiplayer.
It was originally not intended to have one, and adding one in a stage this late would require a complete rewrite of the code.

Requirements
I cannot give specific requirements yet, but I believe that a semi-modern PC with a graphics card will be necessary to play this game at full capacity.
It is supposed to run in 60 FPS, but you can check this by pressing F12, which will bring up the FPS counter in the top left corner of the game window.

Secrets
The 4th post of this thread will contain all the secrets that can be found in this demo.

Download
Click here to download
The file size should be about 84,1 MB.
Unzip the file and you are ready to go!

Last edited by Yking; 01/28/18 18:21.
4 Comments
Re: Forgotten Tales - Demo version [Re: Yking] #470593
01/23/18 18:21
01/23/18 18:21
Joined: Sep 2003
Posts: 6,861
Kiel (Germany)
Superku Offline
Senior Expert
Superku  Offline
Senior Expert

Joined: Sep 2003
Posts: 6,861
Kiel (Germany)
First, congrats on reaching this stage of development at all! The background on this game's development was a nice read. wink

Tried it earlier today, much longer than I originally intended to.
It's a little rough around the edges right now but there's potential for a nice game in there! The introduction (including gates and interactive stuff) was enjoyable, stationary guns and similar spice up the gameplay nicely.
The armor/ HP/ damage system is fine.
Liked the items as well but you should first decide how crazy your game is supposed to get (going overboard with rocket batteries or something), then base the items in an appropriate setting. Currently, the rockets should have more of a fireworks like impression IMO.
The water bucket and burning stuff section drags on for a tad too long.
The get over here chain is cool!

- Clicking items can be a hassle. I suggest you add an additional object<->line distance check (line from camera to mouse pos or similar). This would solve the additional hassle of clicking stuff behind trees/ objects as well.
- Enemies getting stuck on a ton of things is an absolute no-go. I was abusing the lamp posts to fight enemies 5min into the game. It's not fun. You need real pathfinding and let's say obstacle avoidance.
- I'd decrease the minimum walk-to or turn distance, meaning that the character always moves except if(vec_to_angle(...) < 0.1).
- You could try an ISOMETRIC camera.
- You should probably remove the soft gradients ground textures to make it look more consistent.
- Try adding (rather high res) shadow mapping so it looks like stencil shadows.
I'd say take a look at Zelda Wind Waker (Gamecube - not the Wii U remaster!): https://youtu.be/IyxTw_AlRaA?t=8m31s
An object shader which adds a 1 bit shadow to your objects could make it look more appealing. In general, Wind Waker Gamecube is a near timeless and IMO beautiful style.
- Fighting needs to feel a little more snappy. You could try the line distance check here as well. The animations are pretty rough (animations are the worst, I hate doing them!!) so it's hard to say how it would feel with better animations.
There is a website called Mixamo: https://www.mixamo.com/#/
It offers free to use animations ever since it was acquired by adobe.
The game called Ooblets is using them for example: http://store.steampowered.com/app/593150/Ooblets/
It should be possible to use them in A8, haven't looked too much into it yet though. This would boost your game's look and feel a lot I think without the pain of having to do the animations yourself (except importing pain).

Hmm that's it for now, hope you find some of that useful.


"Falls das Resultat nicht einfach nur dermassen gut aussieht, sollten Sie nochmal von vorn anfangen..." - Manual

Check out my new game: Pogostuck: Rage With Your Friends
Re: Forgotten Tales - Demo version [Re: Superku] #470613
01/24/18 20:13
01/24/18 20:13
Joined: Aug 2014
Posts: 57
Y
Yking Offline OP
Junior Member
Yking  Offline OP
Junior Member
Y

Joined: Aug 2014
Posts: 57
Hello Superku,

Thank you for your review and your suggestions,
this is the very first time that someone else besides me has played this game laugh
When working on a project for a long, long time, I usually start losing the outside perspective and therefore your comment is quite valuable to me!

I want to address your reply a bit, perhaps it can help to answer some questions laugh

The game is supposed to be pretty crazy, but in a light-hearted way. Descriptions, dialogues and items are supposed to be humorous, but I thought that writing every single item in a unique humorous way would be too much, so I kept simple items with simple descriptions.

Extinguishing the fires in the village really takes a lot of time, but for myself it was not obvious, since I played this part over and over and can do it really quickly myself. But I think you are right and I should probably reduce the amount of fires in the next version number wink

Clicking items is a little bit hard - especially when zoomed out completely. I partly solved this problem with the "Fast pick up function", which collects all items nearby. But I can probably make the area for a successful click a bit wider, so I try to adress that!

There currently is a pathfinding method in the game code, but I deactivated it since it burned relatively much of the CPU power, and since the viewable area is not too big, I thought that it would work just aswell. However, I should probably work on including the function again (as effective as possible) since waypoints are already compiled into the maps and it would be a waste not to use them now grin

I am not really sure what you mean with the minimum walk-to or turn distance, could you elaborate on this?

New camera modes would be possible, but currently they wouldn't work with the maps, but I like the idea laugh

I am terrible at making maps overall, at least when I have to make huge maps. Will try to improve the ground textures!

Yes, you are absolutely right about the shadow mapping/shaders. I always thought about it but I believe I would need the Pro-Edition to use shaders and I only have A8-Extra right now for publishing this demo.

I had the exact same feeling as you when it came to making the fights happen: At first they were even less snappy, so I tried to give some visual feedback with the "attack ring" on the ground, opening the info box and widening the clickable area around an enemy so they become easier to click. Making fights more snappy is an ongoing issue that I am facing, I try to give two options: Either clicking once or holding the button to keep attacking. I have to get some inspiration for this overall issue laugh

As mentioned, the animations are not very good, because I suck at making them grin
I thought that, for demo purposes, the current animation state was okay, perhaps has a certain charme to it, however as always, I will try to improve!


Again, thank you so much for your review, it's the type of constructive criticism that I hoped for!

Re: Forgotten Tales - Demo version [Re: Yking] #470628
01/25/18 15:45
01/25/18 15:45
Joined: Sep 2003
Posts: 6,861
Kiel (Germany)
Superku Offline
Senior Expert
Superku  Offline
Senior Expert

Joined: Sep 2003
Posts: 6,861
Kiel (Germany)
You're welcome!
I see. Just keep it consistent to some degree (like don't add lasers or high tech rockets/ ...) and it will be fine.

Ok then add it again and make it performant! Just keep the pathfinding calculations rather local (you could use my WED-path-based PF contribution as well, that's very fast and local only) and/ or add obstacle avoidance for let's say lampposts (for example every 8 frames iterate over ent_pvs entities, add relevant objects/ obstacles to an array, then iterate over them in the enemy loop and steer away from them (vec_diff normalized to (256-vec_length())/256) or similar).

Quote:
I am not really sure what you mean with the minimum walk-to or turn distance, could you elaborate on this?

Have a look at this: https://i.gyazo.com/d9b34dfde091ff6e4c49d90478f1aaea.mp4
For my taste there's too much room to click where the character only turns to and does not move.

Good luck polishing the gameplay, and give Mixamo a try!

Re: Forgotten Tales - Demo version [Re: Superku] #470650
01/28/18 18:36
01/28/18 18:36
Joined: Aug 2014
Posts: 57
Y
Yking Offline OP
Junior Member
Yking  Offline OP
Junior Member
Y

Joined: Aug 2014
Posts: 57
Secrets
Here is a little extra post, containing all the secrets that can be found in this demo.

1.) The first cornfield that you come accross when starting a new game can be entered via a missing piece in the fence.
Walk by the field and zoom in to find the entry more easy. Walk through the field and you will find a secret portable mortar.

2.) In the burning village, to the left side, you have the option to pull a lever, which will empty a water tank to extinguish fires.
If you look closely you will see an item where the flames were. Take it to receive a pocket fire.

3.) In the burning village, where you can use a special mortar to shoot water buckets, you can go into the field and find a chair on the right side.
Take the item on the chair to receive the wind amplifier.

4.) In the burning village, where you get your chain ability, check out the shelf that is to close by. You will find the paperweight item on it.

5.) In the open field where you carry your portable mortar around, the most northern bandit camp will have a secret item hidden behind some destructable goodies.
Pick it up to receive the lucky charm.

Playing a new game with these items can be quite a new experience.
All of these items can also be found at the end of the demo when entering the testing area.


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