[Prototype] Witch Hunter

Rigormortis

I'm learning Game Maker. It's so fast! Woohoo!

Witch Hunter is based on The Lost Vikings from Blizzard way back then. This version is only a short level and you can't do a whole lot, but I think it demonstrates what the game wants to be about. All the controls and stuff is explained in the game, except for R. If you press R the game will reset. Use this if you get stuck or something. The collision detection is not 100% accurate.

I got all the art from a Liberated Pixel Cup entry from Open Game Art. The entrant's name is Johannes Sjölund.

So please give it a play, and as always post any feedback, comments or thoughts you might have. :D

Witch Hunter

Tuism

Gave it a quick play, cool stuff! :) I like the way it plays out, has lots of puzzling potential. Feedback follows:

Bugs
1) If you're walking and press space, your previous character will continue his walk animation (no biggie)
2) I can push through walls with the knight's control skill :P

Thoughts
1) The wizard still feels like he's jumping instead of levitating :P How about teleporting for more variety? Go through walls (like what the knight is doing now :P) I feel the abilities would be more engaging if they were less like each other (punch through walls is like picking locks with different sprites)
2) Give the option for party to follow the leader, with sort of like a toggle. But yes that'd require much more AI coded in.

Good stuff :)

dislekcia

I really like the idea of the Knight punching blocks and rubble to move them around. So he could punch barrels to move those repeatedly, but punching a breakable wall would just create a pile of rubble 1 block-space away that would then fall downward until it hit the floor. This could go a long way to differentiating the characters, although I feel the Wizard needs another mechanic, possibly enemy related?

I also feel like your level design could be more compact, you can teach the player a lot more in a smaller space. One of the major things to consider with level design is that you want a puzzle to be basically contained in a single screen, mainly to prevent a player from "scouting ahead" with the "wrong" character and then having to go fetch the right one to move forward - it always feels good having the correct character for a situation, so I'd definitely tailor the tutorial to work that way.

If you had the wall punch = rubble mechanic in, you could explain how the Rogue got stuck (cave-in) and also teach players about the crawl mechanic at the same time: Knight punches wall, forms rubble that would allow the rogue to jump up on it, then hold down to move through the 1 block-high hole the Knight had created.

P.S. Typo on "Know" in the second (I think) popup - from the context, I think you mean "No" ;)

Rigormortis

@Tuism, I know about those two bugs :P I hoped that no one would notice the knight being able to teleport :P I get what your saying about picking locks with a different sprite. I'll need to think of some cool stuff that would actually make their abilities unique.

@dislekcia, I actually don't want the puzzle to be contained in a single screen. I am not sure if this is a good or bad thing though, because I havent experimented with it properly yet. But I want the player to be able to explore with the characters and treat the whole level as a puzzle to be solved and each character has to solve their part. The first level design is pretty crappy for that though, I'll try to do better with a next one. :) And I'll look for the typo :P

Thank you for playing guys :D I appreciate it.

Tuism

I think if they don't move as a party (like Trine) and separately as they are now, I think having single screen puzzles help - the feeling of "arrgh, now I gotta go fetch that guy" when you explore and run into things like that feels like a schlepp. If you contain it in a screen, the player can "work out" the approach and not get surprised and have to backtrack. It's a backtracking thing, IMHO.

Good job, keep it up :)

dislekcia

Yup, backtracking is what I was talking about avoiding. Also, allowing players to see a whole puzzle in one go would enable them to set up a plan and then execute on that - later on you can use that planning and throw spanners with action events ;)