Teh Room - Game

talk design
1

Hey Everyone!

I have a game that I’ve been working on for a while on and off. It is a puzzle game inspired by an old high school teacher who introduced me to a game that I was/am trying to remake and improve upon.

The game is called “Teh Room”. I could babble on for a bit about it, but here’s some stuff you’d probably want to know:

  • Direct Download: [COLOR=Red][here][/COLOR]
    -You are the blue square.
    -Controls: Arrow keys to move, space to restart
    -The main goal is to get to the green block; the door.
    -If a monster/enemy sees you, the game will pause. It may seem that the game is frozen, it’s not. You’ve just been seen so the pause is so you can find where the enemy saw you from.
    -You can push light gray walls
    -If you have a walls above, below, and on both sides of a enemy so that they can’t move they’ll delete themselves automatically after a second or two.
    -A enemy (purple and gray w/ red diamond squares) can only see you if you are horizontally or vertically across from them with nothing between it and you.

Okay guys, I’d like to know what you think about the game. Things to add, remove, etc. Things to think about, anything. I’m planning to make reasonable fixes, so just let me know.

I’ve had some problems with people not wanting to download a exe, and I can understand why you’d feel that way with the internet being the way that it is, but to make the most of this game, I used some functionalities of Zinc which compiles swfs to exe.

Direct Download: [COLOR=Red][here][/COLOR]

2

Hey there!

First off, I know from experience that uploading a game to a sharing server (RapidShare, MegaUpload, etc.) won’t bring you many reviews around here, for the method isn’t very popular among the users (so I’ve learned). But knowing how you must feel with so many page views but no answers, I downloaded the game a played a while. (Megaupload isn’t a personal favorite, because every time I want to download something I have to launch that stupid toolbar)

Anyway, getting to the matter at hand. The game is pretty basic. An interesting, never old, puzzle theme, implemented in a minimalist and simple frame. The first thing that bugged me about the game was the list of levels. It’s rather ugly, when you have to choose from a list of xmls. Maybe some titles would’ve been more appealing, but that isn’t all that important. (they do have names, but something like “Level 1 - Bla bla” is what I had in mind)

After looking around the game files for a while, I think I got your programming method around this and I must admit, it’s not what I personally would’ve done, but it’s ingenious, nonetheless. But rather tedious, if the whole 01234 sequence was filled by hand. A whole lot of work went into this, and I think the game’s simplicity doesn’t do justice to that amount of work.

After playing around through several maps, I got kind of bored, and that’s because the game doesn’t show incremental growth in evolution, it’s just standard puzzle solving with constant elements, and after figuring out your way around them, the game begins to lose it’s mystery.

Overall, a good game, definitely a lot of work and sweat put into this, but I think you should find ways to make the game more interesting for a longer period of time.

Well done!
Cheers.

3

Thank you mastermode for your reply,

As for the game not showing growth: I can completely understand what you mean. I think the problem is lack of varying enemy types. What do you think? I have a whole lot of ideas for other enemies that I’m planning in putting in the second version of this game. I guess you could say this game is just a “test the waters” type game. It’s the first complete game I’ve put together.

As for the level menu, I thought it was kind of lame, but it gets the job done. I think I’ll put together a couple swfs and let everyone choose from which they prefer most.

Do you have any suggestions as a more easy way to deal with the map files? I’m completely open to suggestions.

I was thinking of a lot of different things to make the game more incremental, so don’t worry I’ve definitely got a lot of ideas documented.

I’d like to hear more suggestions! Please! Anyone, Everyone? How could I make it easier to download?

4

Well, with what you’ve said in mind, then it’s a 10+ success for a preliminary effort. I’m happy to hear that you’re going to expand this game.

Well…regarding the file uploading…Usually, if it’s not something like “click and presto!”, then probably no one is going to download it. Some user here came up with a proposal, when I wanted feedback for a game I made, in which he said if I sent the file to him, he’d host it on his server.

Here’s the link to the thread:

Maybe if you contact him, he’ll be able to help. Other than that…I don’t really see how you could attach a 2+ MB file here, or a quick solution for users to download it.

Hope this helps.

5

[Edit]
horizontalTween: Has the simple tween-in feel

inRoomMenu: Tells a bit more what the game is about, allows player to get controls down, and upon completion of a better prototype (making the movable walls movable), user will be able to experiment and figure out how the pushable walls work. Arrow keys move the player, and upon actually finalizing this menu, there would be better indication of how to use it (the previous and next buttons would glow, etc. Something would indicate that the blue square is the player).

6

Dude its a flash movie, I was over here thinking that it was like c++ code or something like that. Flash belongs in a swf format, not an exe one. exe’s are a scary thing on the internet, your lucky I don’t care to mess up my computer and downloaded it and played it. Its a nice little game, the enemies are very annoying and made me stop tho.

7

I needed file output, and directory reading abilities to be able to do some of the things in the game. To do that I used zinc which compiles it from swf to exe. I can’t really help that, unless users manually saved the data outputted from the screen to a file.

As far as the enemies being very annoying, what annoyed you? Did they move to slow, too fast, stay in the same position too long, what did you mean?

8

Ron, what was stopping you from just embedding the SWF in an HTML page, and sending us a link to that? As is commonplace with Flash work :smiley: :wink:

As others have suggested, personally I wouldn’t have opened this file, unless someone had vouched for it first.

.exes are just not the done thing man.

9

[quote=rumblesushi;2326497]Ron, what was stopping you from just embedding the SWF in an HTML page, and sending us a link to that? As is commonplace with Flash work :smiley: :wink:

As others have suggested, personally I wouldn’t have opened this file, unless someone had vouched for it first.

.exes are just not the done thing man.[/quote]

Well I sort of vouched. I said I downloaded and played it…so…that pretty much made it safe. I actually hoped that once people saw that the file source was ok, more will gather up… ^^

Regarding the exe bit…I kind of have to stick with Ron with this. If you’re going to make a game, and have such functionalities as saving progress, loading progress, I don’t know what else…many things, all these can be easily done with Zinc.

I used Zinc on my game, because I didn’t really see an easy way around live updating an xml file without using php code or using C/VB/other languages, which frankly I don’t know much of.

So given the situation, I thing an .exe format is totally justified, and I don’t really understand the skepticism around downloading files. I trusted every user here which had an executable and it never blew up in my face. Oh well, to each his own.

Cheers!

10

I know you did, that’s why I downloaded, and I’m going to play it in a minute :wink:

I just wasn’t sure of what advantages a local .exe would have, to a normal online SWF.

I’m usually not sceptical at all, it’s more than I wonder why one would compile the game to a .exe, when it’s normally standard to export Flash games as SWF and stick them online.

11

Okay, now I get where you’re coming from. Well, I was generalizing, not restricting it solely to those who answered here ^^

Yup, normally I would figure it would be normal to post a game online, I mean, that’s where we usually see all Flash games, but there are some cases (I’m speaking from my own experience) that when you don’t have all the PHP knowledge you need to make an online game that handles external files, you resort to the alternative ^^ (I made a game that you’d see being played online, but I ended up doing it for offline use, just like an application)

So, glad we have things sorted out ^^

12

Sure, so just out of curiosty, what does this game do that wouldn’t be possible as an online SWF without PHP knowledge?

Also, why would one compile it with Zinc rather than Flash’s own .exe compiler? Does flash’s compiler not support external files etc, is it just for basic, self contained Flash files?

13

I just had a go. Pretty clever little game. Personally I didn’t find it that fun or compelling to play, but that’s mainly because I don’t like puzzle games - well other than Tetris :smiley:

Good work though, and I must say - being that the maps appear to be a combination of JPGS and XML docs, I haven’t got a ****ing clue how you developed this :slight_smile:

14

From what I understand, Flash’s exe compiler just envelopes the swf in the exe format. That is, I don’t think it actually adds much functionality. I’ll have to look that up though.

As for things that “Teh Room” does that normally can’t be done:
-Reads all xml files from a directory dynamically.
-Has the ability to save a xml file.
-Automatically maximizes the window when you go to edit a map.
-When you save a map, you get a nice jpeg to accompany the map xml so that if you ever want to play a level and know what it looks like, but don’t remember it’s name, you can find it.

[edit]
Thank rumblesushi[U][/U], I’m all about finding out what would make a game more fun. What was some things you thought of when you played the game that would make it more fun? I’ve got a long list of things I’m putting in second version of the game, and I’d love to get some more ideas from other people. :smiley:

15

Ron - sure thing.

Well partly I am a visual person, so although I sometimes I appreciate really simple graphics, they have to have a certain charm or colour combination to tickle my fancy.

I’m also a big fan of speed, arcade style console games are my favourite.

If there was 1 criticism of your game, it would have to be - too static. I don’t like to feel like I am the only thing there, the only thing moving. Certainly a couple of levels of yours were more frantic, with moving enemies, I preferred those.

And even if the enemies weren’t moving, perhaps just have something moving, even subtly, just to give it a slightly more dynamic atmosphere.

For example, the game that kenwood just posted, was really really simple, and whilst I recognised that it wasn’t as clever as “teh room” it drew me in a bit more, and seemed more playable, purely down to the speed and constant motion.

16

I hadn’t really thought of putting a focus on speed, but that’s something I’ll definitely base some enemie[COLOR=Black][U]s[/U][/COLOR] around. I wanted this game to be a puzzle game, but I now that I think of it speed would add a lot of playability to the game.

Thank you very much for putting that out there rumblesushi :smiley:

17

Okay, I’m thinking about renting a server for a month or so, so that I can put out a embeddable version of Teh Room that I will constantly update with all kinds of things such as possibly new enemies, menus, layouts, etc so I can find out what everyone loves/hates before I start cooking up the real version of Teh Room.

I’m posting because I want to find out if anyone would be interested if I did? Does anyone find Teh Room fun at all? Have all of my “Teh Room Dreams” been for nothing? I’m trying to find out how many people would actually even check it out and post their opinions about it.