Project Giana with Chris Hülsbeck, Fabian Del Priore and Machinae Supremacy
category: offtopic [glöplog]
Live in a Box .. might be a good band name!
In relevant news, it looks like the action on the Kickstarter page for Project Giana is picking up some pace: http://www.kicktraq.com/projects/project-giana/project-giana/#chart-daily
\o/
Most likely reason: This heise news ticker article with 200+ comments.
(The comments are rather critical though.)
(The comments are rather critical though.)
98k, yay! \o/
heise comments: Everyone's a critic, pessimists, sheesh.
heise comments: Everyone's a critic, pessimists, sheesh.
gloom: my business are going alright, thank you very much
Jcl: that's good to hear, because based on the ROI (and related)-nonsense you've stated in this thread, it sure didn't count in your favor. :)
gloom: your precious oppinion will be taken into proper account, thank you very much again :-)
okay so there's a playable demo out and i gave it a spin.
visually i won't even comment on it, the pictures speak for themselves, it looks gorgeous and i was surprised how much personality they manage to put in to the two different characters simply by the different stance they have (the bright giana stands upright, the dark one is more leaning forward). it does, however, get slightly overwhelmingly busy / confusing when you're not sure about what you're seeing is a platform or just scenery, and some of the traps are somewhat too well hidden.
this brings us to the gameplay, and i'm somewhat hedging on this one: the controls are mostly tight but i'm not sure if they're intuitive: you have one button to switch between the two modes, and two separate buttons for the special moves, which also switch if needed. the problem is that i mostly found the "switch" button useless because all i did was use the special move buttons - i think it would've been a better idea to have one button to switch and the other one to trigger the specific special move related to the current given mode. there are a couple of clever ideas, like the whole eversion-style "this only hurts in one specific mode", but at one point it throws you an ghost enemy which only exists in one mode, then another one that exists in the other, but they both come at the same time and they can fly through walls so it's impossible to avoid them. the special moves themselves are fun, although the occasional pinball-style highspeed mayhem turns the game into sonic, which is never a good thing, and while you can headbutt enemies that way, the sprint itself is limited so on more than one occasion i ended up dashing towards an enemy only to run out of speed 10 pixels before it and die because he got to me first. the water parts of the levels are particularly unforgiving.
the biggest letdown is the music itself, although the page notes that it's work in progress - the MaSu version of the track obviously we've heard before, but the "standard" version i dont feel adds anything apart from "replace instrument with occasional vst".
it's a very promising start as far as the game goes, but it needs that one specific part of work still which i call the "valve-factor": massive amount of playtesting and controls tuning.
visually i won't even comment on it, the pictures speak for themselves, it looks gorgeous and i was surprised how much personality they manage to put in to the two different characters simply by the different stance they have (the bright giana stands upright, the dark one is more leaning forward). it does, however, get slightly overwhelmingly busy / confusing when you're not sure about what you're seeing is a platform or just scenery, and some of the traps are somewhat too well hidden.
this brings us to the gameplay, and i'm somewhat hedging on this one: the controls are mostly tight but i'm not sure if they're intuitive: you have one button to switch between the two modes, and two separate buttons for the special moves, which also switch if needed. the problem is that i mostly found the "switch" button useless because all i did was use the special move buttons - i think it would've been a better idea to have one button to switch and the other one to trigger the specific special move related to the current given mode. there are a couple of clever ideas, like the whole eversion-style "this only hurts in one specific mode", but at one point it throws you an ghost enemy which only exists in one mode, then another one that exists in the other, but they both come at the same time and they can fly through walls so it's impossible to avoid them. the special moves themselves are fun, although the occasional pinball-style highspeed mayhem turns the game into sonic, which is never a good thing, and while you can headbutt enemies that way, the sprint itself is limited so on more than one occasion i ended up dashing towards an enemy only to run out of speed 10 pixels before it and die because he got to me first. the water parts of the levels are particularly unforgiving.
the biggest letdown is the music itself, although the page notes that it's work in progress - the MaSu version of the track obviously we've heard before, but the "standard" version i dont feel adds anything apart from "replace instrument with occasional vst".
it's a very promising start as far as the game goes, but it needs that one specific part of work still which i call the "valve-factor": massive amount of playtesting and controls tuning.
See, you should write articles for Kotaku :D
disclaimer: this is of course a REALLY first impression and i'm well aware that playable demos are not representative of the final difficulty curve. :)
Tomaes: just out of curiosity, what are they complaining about? (didn't have the time to try the preview yet)
oh and one big big big plus: dying never breaks flow and respawning is almost instantaneous.
keops: mainly about the fact that there isnt an awful much of the original game left in the new one, so the term "remake" is a bit misleading.
havent read all the comments, tho.
havent read all the comments, tho.
Yeah, this looks much more like a sequel than a remake. Not that it's a problem, on the contrary.
Wait, did anyone claim that it's a remake?
Downloading that demo right now...
Downloading that demo right now...
wysiwtf: I'm not sure they ever mentioned it was a "remake" and that's good because they don't have to strictly follow the direction of the original one, which gives them more creative freedom (hopefully).
considering that the original was pretty much just a mario clone, thank god they made a rayman-cl^W something original instead.
i dont think they ever officially said its going to be a remake (allthough it wouldnt surprise me if one or another newspost about it claims it to be one), yet people seem to want to see the content of the original appearing.
according to gamestar.de the demo is a little brushed up pre-beta thing they had lying around for some time, so i guess it doesnt really reflect the current state of development.
according to gamestar.de the demo is a little brushed up pre-beta thing they had lying around for some time, so i guess it doesnt really reflect the current state of development.
That demo is pretty sweet... Although at some point it suddenly decided to run at 1fps and then returned to normal frame rate as if nothing has happened. :D
Looks very promising! Now why is it so complicated to use kickstarter without a credit card...
Looks very promising! Now why is it so complicated to use kickstarter without a credit card...
Gargaj: Thank you very much for trying the game and for posting your thoughts and feedback. It is much appreciated and we will take it into account as we continue to make the game better.
One note I would like to add is that we realize the music tracks you are hearing are the same we've heard before and have used for most promotions, but we have around a dozen tracks for the final game. Promised. ;)
The good part is we're getting a lot of feedback and we'll use that to fine-tune and improve. Anyway, thanks for everyone's enthusiasm! All the best,
BFG GingerEffect
One note I would like to add is that we realize the music tracks you are hearing are the same we've heard before and have used for most promotions, but we have around a dozen tracks for the final game. Promised. ;)
The good part is we're getting a lot of feedback and we'll use that to fine-tune and improve. Anyway, thanks for everyone's enthusiasm! All the best,
BFG GingerEffect
you're welcome - on second thought it's mostly just the ghosts that were irritating since there's no way to kill them except that beam of light thing which only appears once per level so either you kite them back all the way or try to outrun them which is not as easy as it sounds because the levels are a bit crammed and as said, they can fly through the wall. :)
Just downloaded the demo. After Chrome warning me that the exe is malicious, I installed it anyway. Unfortunately I get an error message after clicking 'Play':
GSGameExe_DX9.exe has stopped working
Windows is checking for a solution to the problem...
Switching to DX11 also doesn't work.
The PC is running 32-bit Windows 7 with an NVidia 8800GTS.
GSGameExe_DX9.exe has stopped working
Windows is checking for a solution to the problem...
Switching to DX11 also doesn't work.
The PC is running 32-bit Windows 7 with an NVidia 8800GTS.
Now isn't that dedication? They even join the Pouet jungle to read feedback. I'm glad I backed them and spammed the entire interweb about their project :)