Author Topic: All To Get Her  (Read 104738 times)

vgperson

  • Cutest
  • ****
  • Posts: 258
  • Cutes: 110
  • guess i'll have to... make them fall.
    • View Profile
    • vgperson.com
Re: All To Get Her (Cutey Preview)
« Reply #135 on: August 04, 2017, 08:55:09 AM »
Uploaded the final beta!!! It's pretty much releasable I think, but you should check it and probably beat my times on the last levels.

I disabled the beta features, so you'll have to play from the beginning as normal. Or...
Spoiler (click to show/hide)

I made some changes to levels here and there, which unfortunately did make some times slightly higher, but I had my reasons. Other than a few where I added platforms to climb back up without rewinding but they shouldn't have affected times, they are as follows...

0-12 (A Slight Problem): To make it more natural to hit the "having trouble?" trigger with Brooke, I put an iron box instead of a block in the place you need to jump up to. Time trial should be the same, though, since you can still just throw the other box over it.

1-2 (Special Deliveries): Dealing with two wood boxes on a ledge you can only reach by jumping across float boxes (and can't get back up to once you fall) felt like too much for such an early level. The new version is simpler and should be faster.

1-4 (Safety Net): I wanted to dissuade people from still having a wood box in the next level, since originally that would probably happen to just about everyone, and it really messes up the concept of 1-5 when you do. The new version requires crushing an extra Slime with a box, so it's definitely a little slower.

3-5 (Heavy Press): I wanted to give the Brattybat more room to actually demonstrate its behavior before you let it out (the fact it floats on one level instead of falling down, and moves back and forth). It's a little slower now.

3-6 (Box Product): Not sure if Sylvie found/used a strategy of using Destroy to skip the door or not, but yeah, I didn't realize you could, and don't really want that.

4-6 (Danger Drop): I realized you could defeat all the Slimes with only two bombs, so I moved one down. Time should be the same since the fast strat ignores the Slimes.

I improved spell snapping (both modes) by giving it a priority when snapping from a half-tile. It chooses "the most solid of the two tiles," favoring blocks over boxes and other stuff. This probably doesn't impact times directly, but it should make things less annoying.

I changed how the top/bottom extend blocks work to not be glitchy, which happened to make bombing through the floor to the screen below possible. So if you can manage to do it, then go ahead.

For convenience, I made it so Destroyed blocks silently auto-Revive when you clear a screen, as I realized how frequently you had to clear a Revive from a previous screen which you'd probably forgotten about by then. It only does this in the official dungeon, so you can still do wacky stuff in the editor.

Lastly (and at the last minute), I felt it'd be nice to allow people to make use of Levvies-less Asha without going all the way with Mute, so I added Levvies and Nega-Levvies (EDIT: too lazy to update the build now but I'm renaming these Eivvels because that's way better) collectibles to the editor. Grabbing a pair of Nega-Levvies "blocks" the Levvies from being used like Mute does, and grabbing a pair of Levvies restores them. Kinda like the boots in BAPuz.
« Last Edit: August 04, 2017, 09:02:45 AM by vgperson »

vgperson

  • Cutest
  • ****
  • Posts: 258
  • Cutes: 110
  • guess i'll have to... make them fall.
    • View Profile
    • vgperson.com
Re: All To Get Her (Cutey Preview)
« Reply #136 on: August 05, 2017, 12:40:29 AM »
Actually, in addition, what do people think about being able to drop through platforms? Because as it turns out, I think it's literally only required in the level that has to have a help icon to explain it, which is one of the few things you might never/take forever to figure out on your own unless you're familiar with games that do it. It can be helpful sometimes, but it can be annoying to drop as soon as possible in something like 0-5, and there could be more interesting level designs if I removed the ability to drop through them (like in BAPuz).

Honestly, I may have only left it in because I already had it from Loverinth's engine, but looking over the finished game, I could easily remove it and it might be for the better. (I think it's probably too late to make Portaboxes into something cooler, but oh well.)
« Last Edit: August 05, 2017, 12:50:53 AM by vgperson »

hubol

  • Cutesterest
  • ******
  • Posts: 1135
  • Cutes: 630
    • View Profile
    • hubolhubolhubol
Re: All To Get Her (Cutey Preview)
« Reply #137 on: August 05, 2017, 02:34:07 AM »
i dont think i got past area 2 yet but i intend to..... anyway if you really think it's only used in that one place and its not of much use otherwise, then i dont see why you shouldnt remove it!!!!!!

aimaina

  • Administrator
  • Cutesterest
  • *****
  • Posts: 1320
  • Cutes: 211
    • View Profile
  • Pronouns: she/her
Re: All To Get Her (Cutey Preview)
« Reply #138 on: August 05, 2017, 03:13:28 AM »
nice jorb vg.... not sure when ill check it out might be a while
~Without love, the truth cannot be seen~

this is watermelon :watermelon: put her in your signature so she can achieve world domination

vgperson

  • Cutest
  • ****
  • Posts: 258
  • Cutes: 110
  • guess i'll have to... make them fall.
    • View Profile
    • vgperson.com
Re: All To Get Her (Cutey Preview)
« Reply #139 on: August 05, 2017, 06:13:28 AM »
Okay, yeah. Reuploaded with platform-dropping removed, some inconsequential changes in accordance with that, and the all-important Eivvels change. I also realized a strat to lower the 5-1 time quite a bit.

juner

  • Cuter
  • ***
  • Posts: 172
  • Cutes: 101
    • View Profile
Re: All To Get Her (Cutey Preview)
« Reply #140 on: August 06, 2017, 12:00:26 AM »
Played up to 3-9 so far in two-player mode, here's a video if it's helpful to watch other people play through the game...

Its fun! first time i've played past the zone 2 levels, looking forward to playing more

Worked fine with a controller for p2, could maybe be a controls toggle per player for jumping only on key/button presses rather than if the jump button is held? Think this was mostly an issue when jumping between floating platforms.

only issue we encountered is that the 'having trouble' bit with brooke in 0-12 can be beaten without asha's help (12:45 in the vid)

vgperson

  • Cutest
  • ****
  • Posts: 258
  • Cutes: 110
  • guess i'll have to... make them fall.
    • View Profile
    • vgperson.com
Re: All To Get Her (Cutey Preview)
« Reply #141 on: August 06, 2017, 02:46:09 AM »
Whoops, I totally overlooked the 0-12 thing. I think I've fixed it by putting the door one block lower, giving Brooke nowhere to stand to Unmake the box... unless you have Asha grab one of the lower ones to bring up, but I can deal with that. Semi-related, I think I'm going to add some visual aid to the Spell Selector tutorial.

Sure, I can add Hold vs. Press in the control preferences. Dividing between P1 and P2 is a good point... The other preferences are specific to Asha or Brooke, and I feel like people won't swap characters often enough/for enough time that it becomes a hassle to go change, so maybe those are fine as is.

EDIT: Actually, double-fixed 0-12 by lowering the door further and adding a little up-floor section to get back up. (Though I had to lower it... a lot, because you can actually get almost all of the lower boxes up...)

EDIT 2: Uploaded all those changes. Also, the video is cool! I was stunned by your 2-10 strategy. I just can't make that level foolproof, huh... It was also interesting that you seemingly forgot you had the Levvies sometimes but found alternate strategies? I'm sure many later levels absolutely need them, though.

Also I laughed at trying to Destroy Asha.
« Last Edit: August 06, 2017, 04:47:45 AM by vgperson »

juner

  • Cuter
  • ***
  • Posts: 172
  • Cutes: 101
    • View Profile
Re: All To Get Her (Cutey Preview)
« Reply #142 on: August 06, 2017, 10:53:59 AM »
Yeah i definitely forgot about the levvies sometimes... glad you liked the vid!

vgperson

  • Cutest
  • ****
  • Posts: 258
  • Cutes: 110
  • guess i'll have to... make them fall.
    • View Profile
    • vgperson.com
Re: All To Get Her (Final Testing!)
« Reply #143 on: August 09, 2017, 11:24:17 PM »
Okay, I found a cool major skip on 5-3 (I knew there had to be one!), so I brought that staff time down to 16.0. I also realized the end of 5-8 has a pretty obvious easier approach, so I made a fix to change that, but there is also a fairly clever strat that brings it to 26.0.

I'll probably release the game by this weekend even if I'm waiting on testers because I'm Impatient, so get your major bug reports in now!!!

juner

  • Cuter
  • ***
  • Posts: 172
  • Cutes: 101
    • View Profile
Re: All To Get Her (Final Testing!)
« Reply #144 on: August 10, 2017, 08:45:26 PM »
managed to play some more, finished area 5! here's the video. some of the puzzles get p tricky but its very satisfying once you figure the lynchpin.

did some fun bomb crimes and skipped a few bits of levels with them:
  • got a spare bomb from 4-4 and used it and some other bombs in 4-6 to get around the monster door.
    upon rewatch it's not much of a skip since the room gives you the three bombs you'd need anyway, but i guess if you bring a spare one in, you can carry it through to the next room. i just forgot to pick up the extra bomb afterwards...
  • skipped p much all of 5-1 with one bomb
  • our solution to the floating block staircase in 5-5 is possibly not the intended solution? fun though

since it took a while, 5-8 starts at 52 minutes, skip to 59:28 for when we actually solve it

vgperson

  • Cutest
  • ****
  • Posts: 258
  • Cutes: 110
  • guess i'll have to... make them fall.
    • View Profile
    • vgperson.com
Re: All To Get Her (Final Testing!)
« Reply #145 on: August 10, 2017, 10:44:47 PM »
The 4-6 skip is known and used for the staff time. Skipping all of 5-1 is wild, but I expected that kind of thing given levels where you can leave with extra bombs. Your 5-5 solution is absurd but okay. (The intended strat is to throw the iron box on top of the lowest float box, so you can stand on that without making the float box fall.)

I totally overlooked how you could use Danger to make a platform for the bomb at the end of 4-8 - you're supposed to learn to place bombs on boxes there. I'll remove the leftmost spike, I guess, even if that removes the necessity of placing the bomb before pushing it into place.

I noticed in 4-9 you could make Brooke jump while she had the selector open by pushing a crate into her, which is kind of weird behavior. She still needs to be on ground to cast spells anyway, but I wonder if I should disable the jumping in that case.

In general, you did some really roundabout/unnecessarily hard solutions, but it's cool.

SquareWheel

  • Administrator
  • Cutester
  • *****
  • Posts: 802
  • Cutes: 139
    • View Profile
Re: All To Get Her (Final Testing!)
« Reply #146 on: August 11, 2017, 12:47:23 AM »
Which registry key do I need to delete to start from scratch?  None of the new versions seem to work for me and I think it's because I have old save data.

vgperson

  • Cutest
  • ****
  • Posts: 258
  • Cutes: 110
  • guess i'll have to... make them fall.
    • View Profile
    • vgperson.com
Re: All To Get Her (Final Testing!)
« Reply #147 on: August 11, 2017, 01:43:27 AM »
On Windows, it should be HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\vgperson\All To Get Her. (Mac saves the registry stuff as files somewhere instead.) There's also a progress file in Users/___/AppData/LocalLow/vgperson/All To Get Her, but I mentioned that in the first post and it's less likely that's the problem anyway.

If you can figure out what exactly is making it not work (if it's all black, maybe one of the screen settings?), that'd be helpful, in case it's a problem that could occur for everyone else.

SquareWheel

  • Administrator
  • Cutester
  • *****
  • Posts: 802
  • Cutes: 139
    • View Profile
Re: All To Get Her (Final Testing!)
« Reply #148 on: August 11, 2017, 02:53:29 AM »
Ah, that did the trick.  I can see backgrounds and such now, thanks.

I think it was just because I had bad data from the first build, and that prevented me from loading a real level.  I doubt it's an ongoing problem, but I'll let you know if anything else goes wrong.

vgperson

  • Cutest
  • ****
  • Posts: 258
  • Cutes: 110
  • guess i'll have to... make them fall.
    • View Profile
    • vgperson.com
Re: All To Get Her (Final Testing!)
« Reply #149 on: August 11, 2017, 02:57:03 AM »
Hmm, the level loading really shouldn't have anything to do with registry settings; the fix there was about pointing to the level files within the resources, rather than local files that only existed for me in my development folder. Plus that only matters for levels, such as when you enter the first in-game cutscene - if the title screen wouldn't even appear, that's due to some larger problem.