TombClimber finished

[Firlefanz]

Hello,

I finished my game 'TombClimber', made with the Delphi Sanctuary's Omega headers for Delphi.

Anybody interested can take a look

http://www.ericbehme.de/tombclimber.html

Firle

[Alimonster]

I like that map artwork! I'll try out the game some time over the weekend (there is a shareware version, yeah?) and will give you my opinion.

[Firlefanz]

Hi Alimonster,

thanks for the reply. I am just uploading Version 1.1 with minor bugfixes. I am very anxious to hear if you like it

Frile

[WiZz]

i will try it when i will be at home, after few hours.
P.S. Screenshots looks cool

[WiZz]

well, it is good game, but it is very slow

[Traveler]

Hi Firlefanz,

Probably like many others, I too was quite interested in your game when you first mentioned it some time ago. Needless to say I was quite pleased to see the eagerly awaited words "TombClimber finished" Great job!

Anyway, on to the actual game. The logo and intro are pretty nice. However, I wanted to skip them after the third time and tried to click out of the logo animation when the game suddenly minimized. You might want to fix that.

Because I was already playing some mp3's (quite loud I might add) I wanted to shut down the background music.
You definitely need to change the way you handle your options. For instance the sound. Because I didn't knew how the change worked (I exepected a slider or something) I clicked on the word sound and suddenly the bar next to it displayed 0. Clicking another 60 times to get a decent volume is not what you want your players to do. Especially If you need to click another 50 times to eliminate background music.

Then the game itself. Somehow, the game is very slow. I think because of the alpha fading that is happening all over the place. The level screens and texts fade away way too slow. I understand that the fading my be a nice effect but you dont want it to affect the gameplay. Everything is nearly going in slowmotion especially when the character is shooting.

Speaking of shooting. You really need to spice this up a bit. The reloading takes way too long. At some points it actually hinders hasty retreats when for instance shooting a bat with a fireball also coming towards me. Also I'd really to see a few more weapons. Perhaps give the enemies a few more hitpoints and give the player an uzi or something.

The ropes are a nice change to the usual stairs in games like these. But having bats flying near most of them takes a lot of the action away, since you need to wait for the bat to come up for you to shoot it, before you can make your way down. If you happen to miss, like I did in the beginning, you really wish you had a granade or something to throw to the bat. Also I missed the option to jump off a rope. There was one time were I was going down one and noticed a bat flying up. I could have jumped off of it savely to a floor next to the rope, but instead I had to climb up again in order to save a life.

There are quite a few things that could be done to improve the game, apart from the problems with the options and minimize bug I noted.
At the moment the game lacks action. It runs slow and takes a lot of time to finish, where the actual reward of a level in general is very little. In my opinion the time it takes to end a level is currently too high in relation to the action you find. Take Diablo for example. Levels are enormous, but there's action at every step the player takes. I'm missing that in this game. Add variation and challange the player. One shot one kill does not do that. It has no difficulty, gives no satisfaction.

I hope I didn't sound to negative. Again, my hopes at the beginning were high, also due to the screenshots I had seen earlier. But screenshots don't tell a thing about gameplay and thats what's really missing. Fix that, and you have a great game.

[Firlefanz]

Hello,

@WIZz: Slow: Take a look at the manual, perhaps you should change something with the config-tool, color depths or VSync or ZBuffer? The game requires some Direct3D features, so on older cards it could be slow, perhaps try changing the detail.

@Traveler: Wow, that was a very long statement.
I will think about these bugs, and the alphablending thing.

But this game is not just an action game, it requiers some timing and some thinking. Perhaps new weapons would be a good idea, but reloading should take some time because shooting should not always be the only possibility. And the ropes with thos bats on it should stay like they are, I like them. In later levels, there are also worms and scorpions climbing up thos ropes.

TombClimber was not mend to be an action game only, it is some 'Find your way out and collect some treasures' game, and no shooter. A shooter I will do next I think

thanks for the feedback
Firle

[WILL]

Hey, I can't get it to run.

Any way to get a minimum requirements list?

My only restriction that I can think of is that my video card is an ATI Rage Mobility-1 with only 8 megs physical and AGP x2 resized to 64 megs.

I have had issues mostly with programs that try to load way too much data into texture memory. Then again could be something else.

The Rest of my system's specs:

NEC VERSA SXi Laptop w/
Pentium III 800MHZ
512MB SDRAM
Maestro ESS, etc.. soundcard (Not Creative Labs, but It's pretty good )

Looks like a pretty neat game though...

[Firlefanz]

Hi Will,

must be the grafic card. Perhaps you could try the Config.exe, setting the resolution to 800x600x16 bpp instead 32 bpp. This helped on my notebook. If it is not working then, I think it won't run on your grafic card, sorry :cry:

Firle

[WILL]

Hey... that did it actually. As you can probably tell. But only barely it runs extreemly slow, which isn't so good since I have run Deus Ex, Gothic, etc and they run pretty well at low-end settings. But I'm sure it'll run nice enough on a P4 though.

Really fun game I must say though. I love the concept. And I do miss playing the good 'old platform games.

Sorry to say, but a really annoying thing happened just as as I exited the game. Some error dialog poped up, but instead of switching to Windows to view it, I was stuck in the same graphics mode for the game, yet my controls were able to manipulate my desktop. You might want to make a fix for this if you haven't already(I've only installed the original when your first 'Finished' post was made).

Keep up the good work. Hopefully your next release will be a bit more optimized and have improved graphics engine too. Pretty darn good for non-commercial development team.