RIOT Tag-Team coding competition


Congrats to the winners! A surprising top 6 indeed :) . Not that they didn't deserve it :D . The voting was extremely hard.
 
I'll see about whipping up some sounds for Paper Wars. No promises, though.


EDIT: Here's some, made with SFXR. I've also got most of the raw .sfs files in case you'd prefer to modify the sounds. What do you think?

Hey man, thanks a lot for that! I'll def take a listen to this. We haven't decided exactly how we want these sounds, might actually be a lot less "chippy" and more analog.

Really, that top 6 is completely different from what I expected... But I'm happy, I'm 4th while I thought I wouldn't make the top 6 at all (with all the comments about the demo being to short)... Thanks to those who voted for Rainy Day :D

Congrats to all the winners! And thanks for the votes Panda friends! I think you guys helped put us over the top :lol:


The top six was completely different to what I expected. I voted primarily based on the quality of the gameplay. My top list consisted entirely of Pandora games. You guys have a very high bar on quality and original concepts. Its sooo refreshing to see people trying NEW ideas. I only wish these successful new ideas were better acknowledged.
 
They're chippy because that's what SFXR makes. Someone pointed out BFXR, an improved version, to me today, though. At a first glance, it is indeed much improved, but I haven't taken a closer look yet to see if it can produce more realistic sounds. Maybe I'll crawl around for some public domain effects or something.
 
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Congrats to the winners :) I'm guilty of thinking Saturday night was the deadline rather than Friday so my votes failed to make it in, sorry guys.


Just want to say the quality overall of all the titles I was able to try via Pandora alone was amazing, I'm sure those for other platforms were of equal quality aswell.


I personally would have gone with Shootet, Prometheon and PuzzleTube as the most polished overall titles. Shootet struck me as very original (didn't know about it being closely related to an older title) with excellent music and presentation, Prometheon despite being txt heavy initially, also had great music, clever graphics and I loved the Pipboy style minigames for the hacking, seemed like a very fleshed out world with lots to do in the basic run n gun platformer style but with a good story. PuzzleTube was a nice concept on the genre, beautiful presentation, again great music and very polished.


I enjoyed the Skylark demo, the backdrops are stunning and I look forward to the finished game one day. Which of course goes for Rainy Day which was such a teasing taster of what will hopefuly flesh out to a great, perhaps commercial game, same goes for Skylark. The Rainy Day gfx are gorgeous aswell. Paperwars was a surprise and I was late to get that PND but I felt it lacked a little in presentation and explanation (not my usual genre) but it looks great and plays nicely, so I'm not surprised its done aswell as it has.


Piratebaby was fun but a little frustating. It could do with sound but thats understandable given everything PokeParadox has had going on, but I would have preferred the toolbar to remain in place (as it wasnt blocking anything) and it was fiddly with nubs or stylus to keep bringing it back up. I'd also have preffered the option to multi-feed the little ravenous sod as it was quite time consuming but I took it to late Lv3 and will continue to nurture it to see what happens.


I failed to get Schizophrenia, Gigasun, or Panta vs Dragon to run despite multiple downloads, so cant comment on those for now but I also found that only Prometheon would run from HF6a4 desktop out of all the above titles, and they had to run from HF4 instead (again despite multi-downloads) , so something was up with my SD install.


Thanks again to all the teams, some real gems there and I shall get the rest working to see what I missed :)
 
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"...Which of course goes for Rainy Day which was such a teasing taster of what will hopefuly flesh out to a great, perhaps commercial game..."


Rainy Day will be free :D and most likely open-source too ;)
 
Piratebaby was fun but a little frustating. It could do with sound but thats understandable given everything PokeParadox has had going on, but I would have preferred the toolbar to remain in place (as it wasnt blocking anything) and it was fiddly with nubs or stylus to keep bringing it back up. I'd also have preffered the option to multi-feed the little ravenous sod as it was quite time consuming but I took it to late Lv3 and will continue to nurture it to see what happens.
Well I'm thankful to see some positive comments... at least mostly positive! :) The toolbar could easily be made to stay in place... I guess I'm guilty of liking the hiding effect... I can make this optional.


Multi feeding can also be implmented, I guess, but I suspect that tweaking the mechanics of hunger and such will better add to the experience. Also if you can see the source, it is intended to have different food types, with different nutritional values...


You grew it to L3? Congratulations... are caring well for it, I'm pretty sure you've taken the preview release to it's limits. Which baby type did you end up with? There is a L4... but it comes with not treating the Baby so good... maybe you are lazy and don't want to clean up the doo doo... who knows what will happen...


As for Baby types you can see in the resource folder there are nowhere near as many different types as I want there to be. So the aging and evolution is currently very... simple


EDIT: Just an FYI, I made some progress with my scaling algorithm:


PirateBaby PokeScale 2X (Image wouldn't embed...)
 
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today I was playing PaperWars hotseat with a left-handed colleague. It was quite difficult for him to hold the stylus in left hand, and move camera with left hand :(
 
I look forward to Rainy Day and Skylark making final appearances and despite the brevity of Rainy Day (haven't finished the skylark demo) they are both very worthy titles that have occurred as a result of this competition and the pairing of good coders. It was correct to submit them to the competition given that they arose from its requirements, even if they are as yet unfinished.


Piratebaby I gather also took the gfx guy from another joint project and it's nice also. As to where I got, I am surprised I took it to its limits, as my baby remained in its shell, as helmet and diaper into Lv3. I recall, patience, hygiene, and health, where I had to inject it a few times to cure an illness but it didn't progress any further. I figured I had to neglect it awhile, to perhaps administer more medicine but it remained at lv3 and not emerged. Returning to it now on HF4, with a reboot, finds it has dropped back to lv2 but any attempt to take a snapshot via Someguy99's screen capture method, causes the Piratebaby screen to refresh to the intro demo screens


I also would like you to acknowledge, that I have never played any Tamagotchi type game in the history of my video game experiences (spanning the majority of retro consoles, handhelds and to a lesser extent computers) and am utterly dis-interested in all such ideas. However, this is a Pandora baby and I care for Pandora, as an idea, a project and a unit, and if it has a baby associated to it, as a game I have to nurture, then I will. If you can develop a less time constraining variant of this, with friendlier controls, options for alarms, routines of care to be applied, multiple monster types to breed etc then I will happily raise whatever I can, on a daily basis, during daily Pandora useage. Eventually when the Pandora project has nurtured far enough to spread properly into the mainstream crowd, it would be appreciated, if automatic over the wi-fi hotspots etc and BT, would recognise other Pandorae by default and have our Piratebaby's all grown up as savage monsters, interact and kill each other, or act as a future MMORPG for Pandora users only :) We need something netplay to oust the Nintendo / 3ds / Sony crowd etc, even if for nothing other than a parody and I am not suggesting your game is that.


As to me looking into your source files, (I'm far too dense) I'm afraid, as, as far as I've had time for, is to work through mcobits guides to compiling and PND packing ABE.pnd and I hit several hurdles with that alone, that I must return to and overcome, as I would like to port software to Pandora oneday, if I can get the time to get a brain to do so. I have the upmost respect for BlueProtoman for example, who has gone from a once opposed member of the forum (never by me (except in a deliberate redneck Hakmanplayer joke), as he was funny), to a porting machine in his own right, also helping out with game projects and forum moderation, at I believe just 16 years old, whilst teaching himself to program etc. Its amazing what people can achieve and strive for, when something takes their attention. Pandora wins again! :)
 
Piratebaby I gather also took the gfx guy from another joint project and it's nice also.

Yeah, I (coder from Rainy Day) did them :) Glad you like them even though I didn't/couldn't put as much time in them as I wanted to... But I'll sure keep working on the game (as a distraction from coding for Rainy Day) :D
 
Your welcome to the deserved compliment on both games, Rainy day is stunning.


Whilst Piratebaby could do with some further animations, as after-all, we are on the deck of a PirateShip on the high seas, riding the waves (wi-fi - BT), and our aim is to hijack and Pirate other Pandora's pirateships, who are as yet not out their swaddling. Therefore we need at least some animation of passing scenery, rocking waves, occasional storms, gigantic octopi / squid / (those weird mariners monsters on maps, some of which actually turned out to still exist etc), an occasional "come chum of this shit" moment from a perfected Carcharodon carcharias ("love to prove that wouldn't ya, get yer name in tha national geographic"), and if really pushing the barrel, while its afloat, I could say Anthony Hopkins pop up and chucks an uncharted triffid or two, or scraping the barrel further Russell Crowe and a viola and some sea spitting reptiles that blighty has yet added to the compendium of weirdshit that grows elsewhere. Anthony's plants have helped to fill in any blanks however...most interesting
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I think I haven't yet said it over here: Congrats to all the winners. :)


And now, although this makes me sound like a beggar, I would highly appreciate any comment about Schizophrenia, so far there were very few (highly appreciated, they gave me a lot of ideas for improvements) - I also haven't gotten a single comment about the graphics for example.


If you don't like it, that's fine, but please tell me why.


The reason I am pushing it like this is because I care for my projects and am always trying to improve, so please give me some feedback about the gameplay, graphics or whatever.


I feel like if I could make the graphics as eye-popping as the ones used in Rainy Day I wouldn't have this problem :p
 
I've given you most of my feedback already, but one thing I didn't comment on was the graphics. To put it short: I like them. They are clear and fit the game style nicely. I especially like the little details :) . A parallax background instead of an all-blue backdrop to give it some depth wouldn't hurt though :) . I would've done one for Wars: Commando, but I hit a performance issue.
 
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...any comment about Schizophrenia...

Graphics is fine I think. Some levels look unfinished, like that one with big "SORRY", but you definitely know about this. Music is good. Some explanation about controlling the character are necessary. Usually that is done by a straight-line introduction level, where player just moves across the screen and reads the instructions like "press A to jump", "Now it's time to learn cloning, press Y and move the cross onto this skull and press Y to clone it, move the pointer somewhere else and confirm cloning it", "Now try cloning yourself", "press up to enter door". You could make an "extra" zero-level with just that. After it is finished by player successfully, enter the first-level where the plot starts.


And please add some extra hotkey for swapping characters, you can use keyboard for that. For example "Enter" or "p", because L/R aren't working in my case :)
 
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I've given you most of my feedback already, but one thing I didn't comment on was the graphics. To put it short: I like them. They are clear and fit the game style nicely. I especially like the little details :) . A parallax background instead of an all-blue backdrop to give it some depth wouldn't hurt though :) . I would've done one for Wars: Commando, but I hit a performance issue.
Yes, you feedback already helped me a lot :)


I am glad you like the graphics, background images were planned but cut due to time constraints. They will most likely make it into the final game.

Graphics is fine I think. Some levels look unfinished, like that one with big "SORRY", but you definitely know about this. Music is good. Some explanation about controlling the character are necessary. Usually that is done by a straight-line introduction level, where player just moves across the screen and reads the instructions like "press A to jump", "Now it's time to learn cloning, press Y and move the cross onto this skull and press Y to clone it, move the pointer somewhere else and confirm cloning it", "Now try cloning yourself", "press up to enter door". You could make an "extra" zero-level with just that. After it is finished by player successfully, enter the first-level where the plot starts.


And please add some extra hotkey for swapping characters, you can use keyboard for that. For example "Enter" or "p", because L/R aren't working in my case :)
Yes, the "Sorry" text indicates places where levels are left unfinished.


Explanatory text actually already is in the game, basically exactly what you have mentioned it explained like that in the first two levels (when it becomes relevant).


I don't like games that actively teach the player how to play (like "press Y to clone that box over there to active the button"), instead games should teach passively by introducing gameplay elements one by one and let the player figure out what to do with a slight difficulty curve. That is way more rewarding and the player does not feel stupid or like the game takes the superior role of a teacher.


Buttons obviously have to be mentioned, but that is already in there (albeit cryptic, I have to admit - thought that might fit in the overall concept of the game doesn't it?).


The structure of the game/levels currently is basically a straight clone of Braid - I liked the idea of having one "home" level in which you start (and Braid also explains all the buttons in the first level and let's the player figure out the rest of the gameplay elements on his own - which worked quite well in my eyes).


So do you feel the gameplay elements are still left unclear after the first three levels?


Eventually the game will have customizable controls, so your re-mapped R/L buttons should not be a problem ;)
 
today I was playing PaperWars hotseat with a left-handed colleague. It was quite difficult for him to hold the stylus in left hand, and move camera with left hand :(

its a carry over from it's Caanoo heritage.
 
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