Fantasy Land

[grudzio]

How is your progress on Fantasy Land? It is been a few weeks since the last news. I hope you did not abandon this project.

[Traveler]

I saw the entry too at Gamedev's 4e5 screenshot page, so I kinda agree with grudzio. It's most likely the only Pascal game competing.

[cairnswm]

The project is definitly still continuing - or will be as soon as my scouting effort into the dark side is done.

Been busy looking into C# Express and XNA Game Studio Express. And to be honest I'm impressed.

[grudzio]

The project is definitly still continuing - or will be as soon as my scouting effort into the dark side is done.

Good to know. But be carefull - the dark side is very tempting :hellspawn:.

[cairnswm]

Fantasy land version 1.1 is now available. This is the version that has been submitted as my GameDev.net 4E5 entry.

Very few and small changes actually. More of a clean up (and hopefully fixed the Multiple Heroes per Quest bug).

Download: http://www.cairnsgames.co.za/files/FantasyLand.zip

Some screen shots (each about 100kb - not compressed)
http://www.cairnsgames.co.za/files/Title.jpg
http://www.cairnsgames.co.za/files/Playing.jpg
http://www.cairnsgames.co.za/files/Finanaces.jpg
http://www.cairnsgames.co.za/files/Messages.jpg

(Hold thumbs for me to do well in the GameDev.net contest )

[Traveler]

Oops.. I just found a Fatal Exception error after seeling the witch shop.
Hurry and you might just be able to fix that in time. :!:

I was actually writing a more extensive report, but seeing as how that would take me at least another hour or so, I thought I post this one up front.

[Traveler]

Hmm,.. another one when selling the guard tower :?

[Traveler]

My post is getting longer than expected. I dont think I'll be able to finish it now. I'm afraid I have to finish it either tomorrow or the day after.

[Traveler]

I was actually planning on finishing my post from yesterday, but I then figured I'd first reread the previous posters on their bugs and suggestions. It turned out at lot of my problems were already mentioned ealier

On well, here goes anyway, although in a slightly shorter form:

Let me start with the good thing: the concept. Its pretty excellent! Then again you already knew this as it has already on a price

But, there is still a lot of room for improvements:
- Fatal exceptions
In short, they happen often. Too often, in fact.
I get them at the end of a turn, when selling buildings or even when removing a guard or hero.
They really made me wish there was some kind of saving feature that would kick in at the end of a turn so I could continue after a crash.

- Too easy.
Agreed, its not a bug, but still.
Put down a series of resource buildings and pay the kings tithe. Then add a few defensive buildings and put some guards to work and then slowly add more. I admit, The first time my finances didn't do too well, because of the many expensive buildings. But after that, I was a bit more careful and only added resource buildings and a few defensive structures. This seems like a workable strategy as my resources increased a lot, with only minimal effort.

- Help
It's very extensive, thats good. Unfortunately after returning to the menu I can't get in again. :-/

- The market.
First thing I noticed is that it isn't possible to click and hold to select a number of resources. Agreed, its not an big issue, but still it would be nice to have in case I want to select large quantities.
After having toyed around a bit to see if there were any exploits, I noticed that the quantity doesn't really affect things at all. For instance when I select 20 wood and click the sell button, only 5 wood are taken from my supply against 4 gold. Selecting more than 5 wood apparently wont make a difference. Buying seems to work the other way around. No matter the quantity or resource, I always sell 5 against 4 gold or buy 4 for 5 gold.

I realize you've already explained it in a previous post already, but I found it to be confusing nonetheless.

- Options
Hmm, again: saving and loading would have made a nice addition. A jump to the help page too. Restart does't work for me. At least nothing happens.

-NAG??
I'm afraid its a bit too late now to undo, but why the NAG advertising? I doubt you'll score any points with that?! Especially the lines about how Fantasy Land was developed for the NAG Game.dev contest number 10 sounds very odd to me, considering its an entry for gamedev's 4e5 competition!

-Layout
Another thing you should definitly take a look at is how the whole layout is designed. I realize your graphics abilities are not your strongest point, but really with very simple things you can do so much better. Take the main page for instance. The backgroundimage itself is very bright. Selecting a yellow font on top of large (nearly) white areas makes it all quite difficult to read. If you want to use a similar color for text, consider adding a bit of a contrast color around the letters to make it help stand out more. Also, consider which parts you really want the player to focus on. Right now everything has the same size, although with different colors and styles. It turns it all into a very busy picture. On top of that you're putting it all into a very small area. (which btw isn't a standaard 800x600 resolution either).

I've added my own version as a suggestion how things could be improved.

The main game layout also could benefit from a few minor changes. Something that immediately comes to mind are the large brown buttons. They really are too big! I can understand a large 'end turn' button because that's used the most. But for the rest?
You're building graphics are great, but right now they appear to be squeezed in there between the buttons and the big yellow containers. It kind of feels as if you want to have everything clearly visible, regardless of how it looks.

In all, its a pretty good game. However, IMO the bugs, the easy gameplay and awkward layout design, prevents it from being a really good one.