Tanglewood

Hello all,

I'm pleased to announce the very first tech demo release!

The demo represents the first milestone in Tanglwood's development. It is a proof of the engine, editor, toolchain and content pipeline, the basic mechanics of the game, controls and platforming behaviour, the art and animation styles, and some early puzzles.

These two levels have been a sandbox for mechanics and puzzle testing since development of the game began, and with a little work they've been turned into functional showcases for Tanglewood's early progress.

Disclaimer

This is a prototype of a game in its very early stages of development. Some assets are placeholder, and all tech is a work in progress. The look, feel, quality and feature set may not be representative of the final product.

Features

The tech demo contains tests of the following features:

- Nymn: basic movement and platforming, sleep/wake up behaviour, running, walking, jumping, pushing (animation missing), rolling, gliding, death
- Fuzzls: all alert states, physics, and rolling behaviour
- Djakk monsters: initial encounter logic, A.I. behaviour tree, tracking, attacking, search patterns
- Colour abilities: yellow (glide) and green (time slow/cloak)
- Flues: varying output velocities and hold durations, multiple occupants, linked flues
- Boulders: physics, rolling behaviour, cracking and respawning
- Director Cam cutscenes
- Time of day system
- Static blockades

Known issues

It's an early tech demo/prototype, so expect to see these problems and more:

- Missing fall animation
- Missing push animation
- Framerate drop during Djakk monster encounter in Level 1
- It's possible to get Fuzzls stuck against walls if they're rolling fast enough to jump over flues
- It's possible to get the Fuzzls in Level 2 stuck by rolling them back to the flue at the start
- The Djakk in Level 2 can reach the flue on the right-hand side if left alone in search state for a long time
- It's possible to get Nymn to sleep in mid-air by jumping at the end of a level
- It's possible to push the boulder in Level 2 whilst using time-slow ability (boulder won't animate)
- Footstep sound effects take priority over others, which may result in some SFX cutting out whilst running (ambience, Fuzzl SFX)
- Many known sprite/background draw priority glitches, and tile flipping errors
- Dead Djakks use the older placeholder palette (yellow feet/teeth)
- Occasionally the wrong instruments are chosen for an SFX (emulator only)
- Double-tapping C with the cloak ability will choose the wrong palette

How to Play

For the very best experience we recommend playing on genuine SEGA Mega Drive / Genesis hardware, using a flash cart (Everdrive, Krikzz). The ROM is multi-region, and has been tested with European (PAL) and Japanese (NTSC-J) consoles.

For emulator users, the ROM is compatible with most major releases. For Windows users we recommend Regen (http://segaretro.org/Regen) and a compatible gamepad.

Download ROM

Tanglewood Tech Demo 0.0.11: http://www.mediafire.com/download/ssirr ... NGLEWD.BIN

Please tell us your thoughts!

We'd love to know about your experience, and we're all ears for constructive feedback!

Thank you for playing,
Matt

Hi folks,

as promised, here is some feedback.

First of all, thank you for offering the demo for us
Your tilesets are awesome. The whole look and feel is great and i can't wait to wander the woods and run from baddies in the final game.

Besides the known issues, here are some things i want to mention:
- Nym can jump trough cave sealing
- would be handy if powerups could be renewed at Fuzzies, so you don't have to wait for Nyms default state after failing a jump
- maybe swap run/walk so that running requires a button press (feels more natural for a platformer?)
- there should be some indicator of movement while in flight, its easy to loose orientation with the current background


Hopefully that was usable feedback, feel free to ask questions.

All the best,
Lennart

lennart wrote: - Nym can jump trough cave sealing

Yeah that's one we let slide for the demo, we have no "ceiling" concept in engine yet, and the tile draw priorities are wrong so Nymn clips through.

lennart wrote: - would be handy if powerups could be renewed at Fuzzies, so you don't have to wait for Nyms default state after failing a jump

Yep, I've noticed a few people struggling with this during the focus tests. Players caught on quickly that the power ups were timed, and would run straight back at the earliest failure ready to grab it again, but would hang around waiting.

lennart wrote: - maybe swap run/walk so that running requires a button press (feels more natural for a platformer?)

It was originally this way around (the "Mario" configuration) but was changed since it was the most common complaint from the focus testers. I was initially pleased with it when it was first written, but it gets old fast.

I've been paying attention to some of the work by the Special Effect charity, and the feedback Naughty Dog received for providing accessibility options to allow running/hammering-on/quicktime event controls inversion, so perhaps a configurable option for anything that needs holding down would be the way to go.

lennart wrote: - there should be some indicator of movement while in flight, its easy to loose orientation with the current background

The background was a rush job by a non-artist (me...) and will be the first thing to be redrawn once some editor improvements have been made. At the moment it's a single 64x32 tile frame that gets scrolled infinitely, so it lacks context. We can do better.

Thank you very much for the feedback!


EDIT: I've fixed the post approval thing, hopefully it won't ask again.

Hi!

I've created a thread in Sega-16 pointing to this one:
http://www.sega-16.com/forum/showthread ... emo-0-0-11

I hope it helps you to get more feedback.
I'll try to give you my own during the next weekend.

Barone wrote:Hi!

I've created a thread in Sega-16 pointing to this one:
http://www.sega-16.com/forum/showthread ... emo-0-0-11

I hope it helps you to get more feedback.
I'll try to give you my own during the next weekend.

Thank you very much!