The Castle

[michalis]

My PGD competition entry, The Castle is available here.



The game is basically like a first-person shooter, except that your main weapon is a sword So the fight is mostly short-range. Atmosphere is a more-or-less fantasty setting. 3 levels included, packed with creatures, items, sounds and music.

The version currently for download is 0.6.3, which already got some fixes and improvements comparing to version 0.6.1 that was submitted for PGD competition.

The game is available with all the sources, binaries for Linux and Windows are included. Everything is done in FreePascal, using OpenGL and OpenAL. 3D models of everything (levels, creatures, items) were done in Blender and then exported to VRML.

Requirements to run: good OpenGL performance and around 300 MB free memory. Preferably NVidia graphic card, as there are still some unresolved issues with Radeon.

[Robert Kosek]

I must apologize, but your game takes forever to load and there is no "Level Restart" option. I refuse to take the 10 minutes it takes to load to fix a problem I have created, and seeing that it's similar to a roguelike, I'll be making many mistakes.

No hard feelings or anything, but it's just unplayable for me.

[michalis]

I must apologize, but your game takes forever to load and there is no "Level Restart" option. I refuse to take the 10 minutes it takes to load to fix a problem I have created, and seeing that it's similar to a roguelike, I'll be making many mistakes.

No hard feelings or anything, but it's just unplayable for me.

There is a "Level Restart" option --- it's just called "New Game" "New Game" option will allow you to restart the game from any level that you reached at least once. At the beginning only the 1st level is available, but once you "unlock" 2nd or 3rd level, you will be able to restart the game from there any times you want.

As for the "forever loading" problem: the game takes about 36 seconds to load *for the 1st time you run "New Game"*. When changing from level to level, or when reentering "New Game" e.g. after you died, the loading time is about 10 seconds. However, this was all talking about NVidia GeForce cards.

What graphic card do you use ? Radeon ? Then this is unfortunately a known problem --- the game takes a couple of minutes to load there, and there are other rendering issues. See the "TODO things" on the webpage, and the "TODO" file inside the game archive. I plan to fix these things, but it's hard without free access to any machine running Radeon (seems that everyone around me use NVidia). Some progress may occur around the end of this week, i.e. 2006-05-28.

[idee_fixe]

Michalis,

I've played your game a bit now, the load times were fine for me, less than a minute (and I don't have a beefy system).

I like the game overall, but I have a big complaint - you lose too much damage when you fall! Sometimes you even get hurt when you jump and there is a slight decline! The ghosts were a little hard to fight too, but once I figured out where the scroll of flying is on the first level I didn't have too much trouble!

It's a cool idea (smart to us VRML for the levels, too!), good job!

[michalis]

I like the game overall, but I have a big complaint - you lose too much damage when you fall! Sometimes you even get hurt when you jump and there is a slight decline!

You're right. I placed this on my TODO list, I'll make the "acceptable height to fall without life loss" higher and lower the life loss factor for the next release.

The ghosts were a little hard to fight too, but once I figured out where the scroll of flying is on the first level I didn't have too much trouble!

That's good, so the game is both "challenging" and "doable" Initially ghosts moved slower and were much easier to defeat, it was a suggestion of Szmon&Kaśka (the ones mentioned in the "Credits") to make them faster to be more challenging.

It's a cool idea (smart to us VRML for the levels, too!), good job!

Heh. Thanks! Actually it was smart to use VRML, *and* it was smart to design most of them in blender

[Robert Kosek]

There is a "Level Restart" option --- it's just called "New Game" "New Game" option will allow you to restart the game from any level that you reached at least once. At the beginning only the 1st level is available, but once you "unlock" 2nd or 3rd level, you will be able to restart the game from there any times you want.

With the load time this makes "New Game" impossible. I find that the player moves far too swiftly in the air.

As for the "forever loading" problem: the game takes about 36 seconds to load *for the 1st time you run "New Game"*. When changing from level to level, or when reentering "New Game" e.g. after you died, the loading time is about 10 seconds. However, this was all talking about NVidia GeForce cards.

What graphic card do you use ? Radeon ? Then this is unfortunately a known problem --- the game takes a couple of minutes to load there, and there are other rendering issues. See the "TODO things" on the webpage, and the "TODO" file inside the game archive. I plan to fix these things, but it's hard without free access to any machine running Radeon (seems that everyone around me use NVidia). Some progress may occur around the end of this week, i.e. 2006-05-28.

Yes, I have a Radeon 9800XT, and the loading took 10 minutes. Which is why I won't play until you fix that problem.

[WILL]

Yeah, I got the Radeon problem too as per my previous post in your other topic.

[Traveler]

Radeon problems having been mentioned earlier by Dirk and me in this thread.

[NecroDOME]

I'v tested your game.

The game runs fine, the bosses are maybe a bit easy.
The first boss in the castle itself: just hover overit with your Scroll of Flying, slash it with your sword and it just stands still. Almost the same with the big spider at the end: jump on it, slash it with your sword and yout done.

Graphics are simple but nice, but you could build a wall of fence around the first level to get rid of the invisible walls

Try to make jumping more smoothly and less falling damage. I jumped of a litte hill and got damage from that little jump.

Overall a nice game.

[michalis]

I'v tested your game.

The game runs fine, the bosses are maybe a bit easy.
The first boss in the castle itself: just hover overit with your Scroll of Flying, slash it with your sword and it just stands still. Almost the same with the big spider at the end: jump on it, slash it with your sword and yout done.

The trick with defeating the bosses with "Scroll of Flying" is known. It's sort of a reward for the player for experimenting with flying. Although defeating SpiderQueen even with the help of "Scroll of Flying" should be quite hard anyway... I think that I'll remove one of the scrolls, so that player can use only one scroll for 30 seconds --- this should make the fun harder.

Graphics are simple but nice, but you could build a wall of fence around the first level to get rid of the invisible walls

I like the idea of "wall of fence", but it's difficult to make this look natural. *Too difficult* for me anyway To make it look natural, the wall must use real 3D fence (i.e. not textured billboards), and the fence must be also scattered around the level to make it look more natural. So for now the "invisible walls" look better than the wall of fence I can model...

Try to make jumping more smoothly and less falling damage. I jumped of a litte hill and got damage from that little jump.

idee_fixe also mentioned this in this thread. It will be fixed for the next release (which will probably happen next weekend --- I planned to do it this weekend, but too little time).

Overall a nice game.

Thanks!