Thingio Side B: The Grand Illusion, NCFC demo released! Also questions.

Get the Thingio demo and OTHER MIGHTY FINE PRODUCTS at Tech Wing's NCFC booth here!


I guess it's about time I updated everyone on the status of Thingio Side B. It hasn't gone too far, as I've been making sure the NCFC demo worked properly enough. I've also been waiting for Retriever II to complete his level editor/loader engine. Given the mess that I've made the code in the game, I'll likely redo most if not all of it again, given that levels will have to be rebuilt with the engine, enemies will have to be redone to fit the engine and Mario probably won't even fit into the engine. This does bring up something though...

Am I really ready for this? It feels like lately, the more I work on fangames, the worse I get! Maybe it's because I feel like I have to do bigger and better things, especially now that games like SMB DDX and Toad Strikes Back are out and fully released. I kinda worry I'm getting over my head and all, but I've got all these plans, all these materials, level designs, ending sprites, and that awesome wallpaper Peardian made exclusively for the demo... on the Clickteam "programming" side, I'm mostly doing it on my own, from what I've learned here, back to my experience from messing with Sonic Robo Blast. I've gotten pretty far, even without static platform engines and advanced mathmatics, though I'm just a bit worried I'm gonna happen upon a glitch or an error that'll break the entire game once I recode it again. I just want to state ahead of time I'm sorry if anything happens and I end up canning this game, as I basically have in a way with most of my other serious weird projects.

At least this isn't just a flash trailer though.

While the game will be rebuilt again, please do tell me anything you like or dislike about it. I understand things like the tutorial level's miniboss are a bit hard, and that without hardware acceleration the Star Level runs rather slow at times, otherwise, comment and criticize, if you can.

This post has been edited by Someguy on Oct 25 2007, 12:39 AM

I love you

Anyway, the engine is as smooth as butter, only a few problems, like sometimes I punch the eggs from the tut boss and they hurt me, but otherwise, pretty good.

Whether or not this will match up to the original Thingo, however... from a gameplay point, it excells amazingly. From a story point, since I wasn't really paying attention, I caught none (if there was). But hopefully it'll have the randomness and flavor that made Thingio... well, Thingio.

Engine felt a bit rigid to me. I think it needs a bit more flexibility in the movement since in the tutorial level alone I was constantly falling into holes because of set jump distances. Hard to describe. Also those springs are a pain. You should make it so that when you hold them down you jump higher, rather than having to press fire 1 in mid-air as well.

Also if I were you I wouldn't be focusing on one engine for the entire game. Side A was great because it threw aside boring old Mario formula and made sure you were doing something brand new and unexpected every level. This demo's got three levels that play the same... a bit dull in comparison. No doubt you'll have crazy stuff later on, but some peeps might get turned off if all these are at the start especially if they were expecting more of Side A's "magic". Then again you have said you're updating the engine so I suppose it might not matter.

But not too bad so far, although honestly I enjoyed Melatonin 3 more.

I've been a bit worried the direction I'm taking the game will turn off the fans of the original in an attempt to attract those who disliked the original, attempting to focus on a smaller set of better quality gameplay engines. Of course, this demo only features the first Mario engine, and
Spoilers:

Halfway though the game Mario's general gameplay style changes due to an item.

The current plan is for each of the four main characters to have their own distinctive play style, but that might turn it into a kind of Sonic Adventure 2, where you end up only enjoying one or two characters... I'll be listening to any suggestions, because it's being redone I'll have much more room for larger changes.

May I ask how the engine is rigid, by the way? Is it the general lack of control over diving and the springs or the level designed around such movements? I mostly made the springs the way they are in the first level(and tutorial) because otherwise moving platforms would usually send players off to death.

This post has been edited by Someguy on Oct 25 2007, 01:19 PM

Downloading as we speak. Hope this is good :>

It's things like Mario will always go a set distance depending on what you do and you don't have much control over it. For example when Mario jumps while walking he'll always go a set number of pixels to the right. You can't stop him falling down a hole which you might be able to prevent in a lot of platformers. Stuff like that. It just doesn't feel right.

And I've no deal with the springs other than the "press fire 1 to jump higher" method. Rather than having to press fire 1 while springing I would have thought it would make more sense for Mario to jump higher after you've pressed down on the springs. Easier on the user to control. Again, difficult to describe.