Unfortunately the link of the video file doesn't work anymore.
But judging from what i can see it looks like great fun.. like some kind of "Mario Party fun".
Well, nothing more to say at the moment. Happy programming!

Don't worry about the video. It was jerky anyway (my pc is too slow for decent video recording) and showed the non improved AI.
The current AI works way better than the one seen in the video, that's why I removed the video.
I hope I can sort out the remaining bugs during next week. I was about to release the demo on thursday, but then I suddenly found several more bugs, and after fixing those, the AI has a problem with obstacles (this should not be related, though). I'll try to get the whole thing ready next week.

While the AI still does not work as nice as expected, I'll try to keep my promise at least one time.
Here it is. The first official demo after a long long pause.
Hope you aren't too disappointed. But now enjoy!

Some hints:
- In the player selection screen you have to press the fire button again once you're finished with the setup.
- When waiting a bit at the main menu, a game demo will start
- Default resolution is 640x480. If this one does not work for you, use a command line parameter (see readme.txt below) to start with a different resolution. Afterwards you can change the resolution in the options menu.

http://www.chaostroll.de/4lw/4lwdemo.exe (~11.5 MB, temporary download address only, please do not link!!)

readme.txt
Code:

---

-----------------------------------
Four Little Warriors - Demo Version
-----------------------------------


>> Introduction

Thanks for trying out the new demo of Four Little Warriors.
The game was a try to create an unique game.
It features chaotic, but yet simple and intuitive gameplay.
To get most of it, gather some friends and play together.
Don't worry if you get lost the first few games, you'll get
used to the game pretty fast.
Not everybody will like this, of course. In case you're one
of those who actually liked it, I want to say thank you.



>> Goal of game

Try to get as many power crystals as possible.
Hit other players and kill golems for additional
crystals.
Add chaos to the game by collecting special items
found in wooden boxes.
Not all items are good for you. Choose wisely.



>> How to play

Player status: - Amount of crystals
               - current place
               - games already won (yellow dots)
               - stamina (red bar)
               - ammo (blue bar - only for weapons)

Yellow player: Cursor keys  - movement
               CTRL         - attack/block
Red player:    W,A,S,D      - movement
               Q            - attack/block
Blue player:   Mouse move   - turn left/right
               Mouse right  - forwards
               Mouse middle - backwards
               Mouse left   - attack/block
Green player:  Joystick 1   - movement
               Joy1 button1 - attack/block
(Control layout can be changed in the options menu)

Attacking and blocking:

Normal attack:  hit attack key once
Special attack: when stamina is maxed hit attack key twice
Block:          Keep attack key pressed (requires stamina)

The stamina amount influences strength of the attack



>> Items/Objects

Crystal       - collect as many as you can get
Wooden box    - contains special item
Red arrow     - Increase speed
Blue arrow    - lower speed
Orange arrow  - change camera angle
Green arrows  - randomly change positions
White arrows  - steal crytals from other players
Yellow arrows - share crystals with other players
Brown arrow   - turn camera upside down (not in demo)
Red crystal   - Grow crystals to give double score (not in demo)
Cape          - limited invisibility
Shield        - limited invulnerability
Magnet        - soaks crystals nearby to the player (not in demo)
Mine          - can seriously hurt you (not in demo)
Fireball      - weapon
Acidball      - weapon (not in demo)
Lightning     - weapon (not in demo)



>> Command Line

Command line parameters allow altering game settings
-w3d          - run the game in compatibility mode
-wnd          - run in windowed mode (causes problems with mouse control)
-nj           - disable joystick
-nm           - disable mouse
-d videoX     - choose different startup screen resolution
                (replace X by 5,6,7,8,9,10 for different resolutions)
-d alphadepth - enables 32 bit alpha transparency



>> System Requirements

You really shouldn't worry about that.
I played the game on a P2 333MHz with a Voodoo3.
If you should experience slowdowns, change the shadow and 
special fx settings in the video options menu.



>> Credits

Music               - Sandman
Bass Player         - Ian Luck
Character Models    - Hai_ok
                    - Traker
Additional Sounds   - George Pirvu
                    - Sonicfire
Additional Textures - KTS/Crew99
Additional 2D Art   - Robotriot
Additional Models   - Loopix



>> Feedback

If you have any proposals or feedback please contact
me at unsinnspala<at>firoball.de



>> Web

http://www.4warriors.de
http://www.firoball.de


- firoball - 04/27/06

---

very nice firoball! finally its there i like the outcome, controls and gameplay feeling reminds me of some good old console titles.

the only thing i find hard is that you have to press [ctrl] [ctrl] and [enter] to start a game.

so people come and download this great game, it may not have graphics like with the sphere engine but the gameplay is very unique and its actually a "finished" game with 3dgs.

YES!!!!!!!!!!! ITS THERE!

I followed this project since Firo ever talked about it, so I'm quite happy with the release and its very charming that it is finished with the A5 engine Too bad that you can only play it in one stage, but hey! its a demo! I did some notes which can benefit the game:

- controls: especially for this top down perspective it would be nice if you could provide a second method of controlling the character with an camera oriented absolute movement. Means: if the user presses the right arrow key, the character moves to the right and if the user presses the upper arrow key the character moves up. So no need for turning.

- camera: its obvious that the camera zooms in/out to fit the screen so that all characters are visible. Perhaps its better to add a range around the human charcters so that they see where they are running when they are in one corner of the screen: I ran into the bottom-left corner of the screen and I didnt saw anything and than all in a sudden the monster bashed me down: I didnt saw him! PLUS, maybe you should exclude CPU characters for your camera zooming, when they are teleported, because they fly up in the sky and the camera snaps with speed forth and back... is that necessarily?

I only saw crystals on the screen an no health and armor things... I ran out of energy very soon. I have to play it again!

So... I hope you can finish this with some more stages. I think it has networking.. thats pretty cool. Do you think you will port it on A6?

Ciao and best wishes!
Christian

whoo...feels and looks great...like a REAL game!!! Can't tell much about the gameplay yet...exept that it's all going very fast and that I first have to get used to it

Some answers:

Controls: I've heard this suggestion several timesalready, but the bottleneck is the keyboard. When having movement relative to the camera you will end up pressing at least two keys at the same time - which makes it impossible to play for two players on just one keyboard in most cases. With the current controls you can at least take care that you don't press too many keys.
I'm not sure whether I'll still touch this, as it has major impact, also on the AI behaviour (time for turning into an direction can be different and such things). Plus it kills the fun when the camera is rotated and everybody who isn't used to it gets confused

Camera: The problem described often happens when a speed extra is collected. This was intended as aou're not supposed to have perfect control over your character in speed mode. Sometimes this problem happens in slowmotion mode as well, because I'm changing the arc, I'll hav e to think a bit more about it.
I've had this problem with the camera jerks when teleporting. This is why I limited the z height (maybe the limit needs to be set lower). It should not snap forth and back, though. Strange.
There is a chance I forgot to set fps_max to 100 in the demo. This can cause such issues... I'll check this later.

Network: The game had A4 network support, which was rewritten since then (A4 networking was a bit buggy). I had to drop support for it. Re-implementing network would be hell a lot of work maybe even impossible with the current code layout, so unfortunately I have to answer this with: Sorry, no network/online gaming.

A6 port: This game will be finished with A5. It's more work than advantage porting this game. My next project will use A6 and at least some shaders - promise

Player menu:
When playing alone(!) a single stroke on the fire button and then enter key when done is sufficient. However I'll probably add a "press fire button when ready" message because this is not clear. This second confirmation is required so the game cannot be started once everybody has set up his player. In the demo there is not much to select here, the final version will allow different warriors to select from. This is a just for fun feature, they all have the same abilities.

Armor/Health:
There is no armor and no health. It's all about crystals.
You cannot run out of energy permanently.
The two bars are stamina and ammo.
Stamina automatically recovers. The more stamina you have, the more damage you'll do on a golem and the more crystals you can steal from other players. Wehen blocking, stamina is drained, maximum stamina (when the yellow/orange particle appears and a short sound appears) allows to do special attacks.
All you need to do is to get as many crystals as possible by collecting them, slaying golems, attacking other players, or using special items out of boxes.




One more thing:
I know the gameplay is strange, and I know you don't understand much the first time you play. It takes some time to get used to it. So everybody who did not uninstall the game after only a short try: Thank you for actually trying

Update:

- I confirm the camera bug. Did not notice it yesterday. Will be fixed.
- Found another AI bug. When knocked down sometimes the AI gets confused. I'll look into this issue.

whoa nice job firo, its clear to see you put alot of work into the game. Nice job so far.

During play its obvious that your bots arent using any tighter pathfinding like A*star or something, but this really isnt needed since your level build is small and reletivley open for them. However alot of times a bot would get stuck in that little broken down hut running into a wall, and many of the warriors would clump together in the middle of the map running into each other. Do you have some sort of short term steering behavior? Maybe that would eliminate some of the running into walls/other bots. Code the bots to throw a short range trace in front of them, and if it hits something, turn away.

I did like the walking line of golems, smacking warriors if they got too close, it added that "environmental hazard" like supersmash brothers or mortal kombat. Though at first it was a little jarring to be completley knocked out when they swung at you, and it broke the momentum of the run. But however, as I kept playing, I made an effort to watch out for the golems, and this actually worked out gameplay wise, as I was a bit more patient and cautious running around them, giving them more of a threat factor. Really cool.

I totally understand where you are coming from in terms of too many players on one keyboard, cause I tried making a 2 player game with a somewhat reasonable amount of key control, and it ended up freezing one players state when another player pressed too many keys. With that said, I dont know how your supposed to make it reasonable for that many players to play at once. The mouse turning was a little awkward, and even when I gave it time it still was a little touchy (especially when the "rotation" event happened, but we all know thats supposed to make us confused ). I wouldnt know any way to accomadate that many human players at once with as little conflict as possible, without an extra game pad or joystick (that still is fluid an intuitive)

Swinging the sword was nice, when you wanted to stay and bash another player into submission, but how about if you also include a running attack swing? Maybe this would decrease the dependency of a player set himself up before he attacks. Running around collecting crystals was great fun, but when I wanted to attack someone, I was forced to stand still, increasing my chances of getting pummeled by that golem, or hit in the back by another cpu. Of course a moving attack wouldnt break your game unless you overpower it, but maybe this could offer a little bit more fluidity and freedom to the chaos.

With the stamina bar, you could add an announcing animation to the bar that is big enough to see from the corner of your eye. When the stamina bar is full, throw off a big sprite on the player's bar that is the players color. That way while the player is concentrating on running and fighting, he could get a clue that he has full stamina without having to pull his eyes toward the bar.


What I liked:

I liked the color palette, it was pleasant and attractive, very much like a comic book. Lots of gstudio'ers think that since their game is cartoony, they can throw in some outlandish colors thinking it will match the palette, only making the player go blind.

The animations where smooth, especially with the transitions. Out of lazyness I usually just pop right into the next animation, but with animation blending it really adds alot.

Pretty much everything else

Good job so far firo, I really really like the game so far, hope to see it finished and maybe at the gamestop down the street

Disappointed!?

You're crasy, your game is awesome!

Espacally all the menu effects! O_O
All the rotation stuff that flys around, it must have taken tons of time to make it look so nice!

And it was _not_ difficult to get into it.
I read the control description and the rest was clear.
Thus after a few minutes I wasn't killed all the time any more.

It has a well gameplay even if I expected that the arrow keys let me walk to the direction they point to, but it is ok like it is.

There's only one thing that you could build in (maybe).
I had problems to find my character sometimes, thus it took some seconds after a teleport or view rotation until I realized that I'm the one in the corner hit by everyone.
Maybe it's just because I'm partially color blind, but a trinangle with the player color over his head could help?

I think next saturday I'll paly some rounds with a friend!

A very nice game you made, young padavan!