Captive

by Toddab503
Wander, Hope, Survive...!
ID:924375
 
In Captive you take on the role of a simple traveler who, unfortunately, angered a sorcerer whom in his rage banished you to a dungeon with no clear escape in sight.

I originally made this game for the Game in A Week contest hosted by OasisCircle, but after some time, and consideration I realized that this game could be bigger and better than I originally expected.

So with that in mind, I decided to halt development indefinitely until I have the time and interest to design the game properly. The current version available is not a very good demonstration of what the game is like, it is an outdated model from before any experimenting I did after the contest.

Please do not judge the game by the version available. This hub will be updated with new information as soon as development on Captive resumes.
Since you want to keep working on this, I thought I'd give you my review.

The list of things that you want to add are good, but I think before that there are some other issues you should tackle.

First of all, the control scheme is absolutely horrible. If the game requires two hands on the keyboard, you should never have to use the mouse. If the mouse is being used, only one hand should be enough for all keyboard controls (the one exception would be typing in a chat). There are a few ways you could fix this - have the player attack with the mouse, or make inventory controls that use the keyboard.

Second, the movement and interaction with the world is not very fluid and sometime buggy. I'm talking about A) the fact that you can't move diagonally by pressing two directions, and B) the way the game detects what is in front of you. In many situations it appears that I should be hitting a monster or breaking a barrel, but it won't work...I have to get into the right position before it will work. The locs var might help you with that.

There are some bugs I found as well...when you are standing on a broken barrel, you cannot fight or shoot your bow. You need to include some way for the program to ignore broken barrels. Also, the inventory seems to have one extra slot which shows up outside of the grid.

I do think this could be a fun game, especially when expanded with the things you listed above, but I suggest you improve on the fundamentals first and then move on to adding content
Hm. I could of sworn I had made WASD allowed as alternative movement keys, but I just glanced at the interface macros to find I didn't. I think that'd of helped make the control scheme decent at least, so I'm disappointed that I forgot to do that.

I was completely new to pixel movement when creating this, and still have more to learn with it so those are some unfortunate issues I definitely want to put time into now that the rush is over. I didn't even think about diagonal movement, though, because it's not something I've ever really used on BYOND. I'm noticing more and more people get into it lately, though.

I also should of mentioned more of the bugs I was already aware of, but that bit about the extra inventory slot is definitely new to me so it's good that you mentioned that.

Thanks a lot for all of your feedback. I do plan to clean and polish things up more before I get into additional content, so hopefully a lot of this can be ironed out.
Yeah, you probably used some way of checking the adjacent tile from the loc of the player, right? So with pixel movement, you still have a single loc, but there's another variable called locs which is a list of all tiles you are overlapping.

There are many ways to address that issue but, I think the locs var will at least get you started on the right path

good luck :)