The Binding Force Demo

I change the block animation to something that doesn't collide with tiles for 0.2 seconds when block switch moves the other block. This is to avoid it from randomly becoming stuck, which it has done. Though I don't know why it would make it fall through the tile since it takes longer to fall than that. I guess I'll try reducing it and enabling continuous collision detection.

Jon, do I have to wait until judging is over to fix this?

You can fix it now. Both of us have already judged this entry and most of the others.

The explanation you give is consistent with the error described on a slow enough or distracted enough computer.

My Mac definitely counts as one of those computers. I got the same block falling through the floor bug.

Well, this is extremely strange.

I enabled continuous collision detection for the block, but then it started landing midair when the bottom of the block was at the same Y position of the half-tile to the left of it, so I changed the animation to a 11x12 (instead of 12x12) animation to prevent that, but now sometimes the game and my browser freeze when the block is about to fall, forcing me to kill the plugin container via the task manager. I have no idea what's going on.

A game specific hack is to constrain the y coordinate to not go below a certain point (the floor)

A game specific hack is to constrain the y coordinate to not go below a certain point (the floor)

Yeah, I tried that but removed it because I thought it was causing the error. I'll try having just that and not continuous collision detection.

For those of you who were having issues with the block falling through the floor, it should be fixed now. If it is, please let me know.

Confirmed to be fixed. ^_^

This post addresses issues brought up in the reviews from the contest judging.

>Irock's new game is stellar in terms of presentation -- he just needs to be reminded that tricky platforming isn't really fun with a keyboard

I can't tell if the issue here is the loose controls or the fact that the game is played on the keyboard. Super Meat Boy is outrageously popular on the PC, and it's a very challenging platformer. Cave Story is probably the most praised indie game of all time and it features some maddeningly hard platforming.


>Few things were overlooked (such as mentioning the controls in game)

That will be in the full game for sure.


>The only notable flaw was in the (lack of) tightness of the controls

That shall be addressed. I usually prefer tighter controls myself, but I had just gotten used to the slowdown settings I set when I first started the game.


>My only reservation, and this is based just on the demo, is that the game feels linear and “play-through” and could be more fun if the player were forced to slow down and explore.

I absolutely agree. The final game won't be as linear- I just didn't want to make a ton of dead ends for the demo without anything interesting to find.


>The boss was just OK for me and got repetitive, even after the speed up upon reaching low health.

It's my intent to give the boss more than one patern. I kind of put off doing the boss until the last couple days so I wasn't able to in time for the demo.


>The final area’s music got repetitive for me since the most time was spent in that area.

I'll see what I can do about that. I just recently started learning how to compose songs that don't sound like one long boring section, so I'm still trying to get the hang of things.

This post addresses issues brought up in the reviews from the contest judging.

>Irock's new game is stellar in terms of presentation -- he just needs to be reminded that tricky platforming isn't really fun with a keyboard

I can't tell if the issue here is the loose controls or the fact that the game is played on the keyboard. Super Meat Boy is outrageously popular on the PC, and it's a very challenging platformer. Cave Story is probably the most praised indie game of all time and it features some maddeningly hard platforming.

I think he was frustrated with the combination of the loose controls and several parts early on where one slip up could lead to redoing a large part of the level. Particularly the jumps involving a single block to a single block.

Maybe I'm crazy, but I thought the controls were perfectly fine. I don't remember having any issue with them while playing.

A lot of the challenge of Mario games is dealing with your character's inertia so tighter controls are not automatically more fun, otherwise every game would have shmup-like controls in which you stop and start instantly.

I think the thing to do is to balance the amount of tightness and the amount of looseness. Both extremes can take a significant amount of time to get used to, depending on what games you've been playing. A middle ground is probably the way to go.

I think you should add a small cutscene in the beginning, and maybe the end, using the new cutscene pack, it would add more depth to the game, since it already has the adventure "cavestory" feel to it.

There will be a cutscene in the beginning. I didn't touch the story at all in this demo.

Update: Increased horizontal air slowdown. Hopefully this is better for some of you.

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