[GAME][FINISHED (but still worked on)] Final Columbus

[Yal]

Ahem. Let me introduce you to my flagship project, that ended up top-15 in a competition with 300 entries. Final Columbus.



What is below is just a copy-n-paste of the GMC topic of the game. It should get the message across even if you don't know some of the abbreviations. Play and have fun, 12+ hours promised.

If you have played Cave Story, you will feel like home. If you haven't, hopefully my intinutive level design and HUD will take care about that. But being a TSR member, you're obviously a real gamer; you'll have no problem.

Note: big-sprite scenes are still work-in-progress.


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Final Columbus v1.2.5
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Final Columbus was my comp06 entry, although it has evolved a lot since then. It´s a Cave Story-length 'flatform' shooter, based more on shooting than platforming, and more on exploration and collecting than on beating levels. "Levels" in this game is what you gain after killing enough enemies, and you can select what stat (HP, Attack, Defence,...) to upgrade, actively! Tanking or sweeping? Survive or dominate? Up to you.

On top of that, the game features a complex plot - ten to fifteen hours of gameplay - with carefully designed characters. Just a few minutes in, you start to notice that everyone has some unique traits, and as you overhear discussions and pick up lost items, everyone's backstory slowly comes together.

NAL himself rated this game #2 in his personal top-50 list of the entries in Yoyogames' competition06.

Players of the Comp version will notice heavy graphical improvement in sprites and tilesets in 1.2.5.
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Part of an exploration team, you are sent to a ruin City to search for old, forgotten science materials that might be of use for the post-apocalyptic community that lives in tomorrow's US. Being the youngest member of the group, you're treated with disrespect from the scarred soldiers that make up most of the rest of the group, but find support in the "official nick-namer" Cain, the underestimated nerd Sarah, and the coffee-addicted medic Al, whom you know from before.

As a young soldier, your duty is to protect the scientists while they survey the sites of the City, as well as to locate and extract Lore from the areas and dungeons that are too dangerous for unarmed people to enter. You will find overgrown greenhouses, runaway thermal plants, ancient Egyptian-ish sandtombs, caves filled with poisonous mushrooms and/or lava, and flooded slums with the skeletons of your Ancestors still intact. You will fight living robotic fans, angry birds, defective turrets, rats on caffeine, and mutated three-eyed electric turtles in your underpaid quest for knowledge. You will need to select each stat upgrade with care to get the upper hand against all the trials that try to make your life, and the lives of your friends, end early...

When strange events take place in the Water Tower, the group is scattered and you suddenly have to think more about surviving than your original orders... but without forgetting your original reason to join: to find out the truth behind the death of your father.

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The game offers varied gameplay in three levels of difficulty (Casual, Intended, Hardcore), having you alternate between exploration of the abandoned city, shooting your way trough tight corridors in best Metal Slug style, protecting scientists from enemies coming trough walls, ceiling and background, driving and mastering several kinds of veichles... including battle mechas with and without gatling gun turrets, a helicopter, and a subway train.

NAL himself rated this game #2 in a top-50 list of the entries to Yoyogames' competition06, in particular because of the gameplay.

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Game Size: Around 5 Mb.
Game Version: 1.2.5
Game Maker Version: 8.0 (Pro)
Screen Size: 480 x 272 (Windowed, selectable, does not change resolution, F4 for fullscreen)
Genre: Platform shooter / Exploration / RPG
Players: 1
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PAGE ON YYG
Final Columbus is a Featured game at YYG, in other words a Staff Pick. It is filled with roughly 12 hours of varied gameplay and has 6 different endings.

BOX.NET MIRROR
This mirror isn't updated as often as the YYG version, mostly because of my memory . You can use that if you prefer hosting sites over gametube.


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Even More Screenshots (some of them are outdated):
S-ATG Laser in action. Poor rats.
Title screen
Hovercopter scene - with the improved 1.2.0 tileset!
Big-sprite chitchat scene
She talks a lot, right?
Fishes in the sky
Cutscene with a mystical man...
Grass Dungeon - battle generic monsters
Monster Nests in action
Pause menu
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Just play it already! You're missing out on something fun!


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[Cobalt Blue]

going to try it and see whats happens. ignoring the awful graphics, of course.

[Yal]

ignoring the awful graphics, of course.

Heeeeeeey! <__< I'm specialized in gameplay.



Side note: check out some of the original graphics from 1.0.0:


I'd be somewhat grateful in your shoes. You don't know what you've missed...

[Cobalt Blue]

ok, this REALLY needs a complete overhaul of its graphics. they just simply do not make any justice to the gameplay.

[ThePortalGuru]

The gameplay in this game is LOVELY, to say the least. I agree 100% w/Fuchikoma. You definitely need to get in contact with a pixel artist that'd be willing to get this game overhauled graphically.

This is an awesome, well-designed and all around fun game though, and I'm really looking forward to more things from you.

[Dazz]

Yeah, it plays pretty well, but the text during the intro stays on screen WAY too long and tapping twice makes the disappearance happen again, and you can keep it going forever.

I like some of the style you've used on the graphics, but agree with everyone that this could do with a lick of paint to make it look great. Then you'd be getting somewhere.

[Yal]

...tapping twice makes the disappearance happen again, and you can keep it going forever.

Oh. That's a glitch. Will fix.

I think the time the text stays on screen is just a matter of taste, though.

As for graphics...

It might be good to point out that I were originally making the game for a competition with a strict deadline, which forced me to prioritate a bit. And I'm not very good at spriting with the standards you have over here (after all, this is a community dedicated to making pixel graphics).

But I want to become better at it, and I figure TSR is a good place to visit every once in a while - there's so many masters to study and learn from here. So I'll stick around.


You know, I find spriting so exciting because I'm getting better at it so quickly! I don't know how you guys felt the moment when you realized you liked to sprite, but I sort of... want to hug everyone in the world.

Here's some half-related graphics by me.

The leftmost one is Sunshine, the protagonist of a cancelled project whose engine Final Columbus use. The only reason I did that game was because Cave Story had inspired me a ton and I wanted to do something "similar, but better" (Guess how good that went?). Notice especially how the gun is drawn in like 10 seconds and has no artistic value at all. Also note how her palette mixes up two shades of pink with the sharpest, most annoying green shade in existence.
In the middle is Mario Norris as he looked when I submitted the game to the competition. I've gotten some GMC feedback along the lines of "The hero looks like an octopus. Change", which is pretty harsh graphical feedback (because everyone knows that nobody can draw over there).
The rightmost image... It's Mario's current sprite. I read trough the spriting tutorial over here (the one mentioning that dithershading isn't the only way to shade, that pillowshading sucks, and that the best angle spriters should use is roughly 26.5 degrees). I read that trough once, went home, worked with the sprite for 20 minutes or so, and that was the result.

Put short: I absolutely love the spriting advice I've gotten here.

And I kind of realize that I have to redraw all the graphics in the entire game to have the same high standards as Mario's new sprite - for instance the small bird enemies comes to mind. But I won't whine. The more I draw, the more experience I get, and thus I become better. I shall do so! Thanks for pointing out that I'm not as good as I think. It's always better to compare oneself with those who are better than those who are worse. (And there's a lot of people who can't draw at all over at the GMC, anyone want me to hijack some of their screenshots? )

[Alpha Six]

Just a little somethin' I whipped up quickly (about half an hour).

Notable Changes

• Palettes. The original used 18 colors, whereas this uses 15. The reds were entirely unused and I added one new color for the skin, which is just a little something extra and isn't really necessary.
  
• Use of pure black and white. This is usually a bad thing to do. You want to use slightly darker/lighter shades of white/black in order to make your work pop out.
  
• Your colors look too much like MS Paint default colors. They aren't interesting to look at, and you haven't used any sort of hue shift, so the colors just sort of blend, rather than cooperate.
  
• In a piece like this, dithering is completely unnecessary. You can make stuff like the dithered gun pop out more with properly placed shading.
  
• I know I mentioned it already, but hue shift! It makes your colors look nicer and give the sprite more life overall.
  
• Don't be afraid to attempt to conserve colors by using colors with similar hues to add blending. You'll notice that I used a few pixels of blue to outline and add detail to the green, rather than create another green shade.
  
• Don't be afraid to experiment with colors and shades, either. Mix around a few colors until you find stuff that blends! (Example: the small light blue shade in the gun)
  
• If you are using MS Paint, when creating a new color/modifying an existing one, use the HSL (Hue-Saturation-Luminosity) controls, rather than RGB (Red Green Blue).

[Yal]

Just a little somethin' I whipped up quickly (about half an hour).

You call that quickly??? Half an hour is about the time I spend on making a complete spritesheet for a character. (Then again it seems like my graphics suck)

Time is sort of a big priority for me, as I don't have much free time. I'm pretty OK with decent graphics if they take a reasonable amount of time to make over awesome graphics that takes hours to make, and in general I prefer quantity over quality. I'm pretty into game design, and most average players doesn't spend tons of time looking at the graphics because they're pretty, they're giving them a glance to see if they're interactable or scenery. The graphics in the first few levels or so needs to be extra pretty to hook the player, but once the player grows used to the game one can drop that level a bit without them noticing. One of the reasons you should never make the first level early in development (since later graphics tend to be prettier when you've grown into the style used).


Hue shifting? *Googles* Aha. Thanks for mentioning that! One of those useful techniques I've never heard about before.

Noted on the black/white.


I'm using Game Maker 8.0's built-in Sprite Editor to edit sprites. Kind of like MS Paint but with alpha transparency support, and it's pretty good for 16x16-style images. But I've recently stumbled upon Paint.NET, which kinda blew my mind, so I might be switching in the future...

By the way, that red shade comes from the background of the screenshot I copied the character sprite from, I were at a computer without access to the game files. It's not part of the sprite and I missed it when erasing the unrelated stuff.

By another way, that green gun is shooting out oil. That's what the gray-blue parts near the muzzle are supposed to be... perhaps with too low contrast though.




Finally... Keep in mind that where I come from, I'm competing with this.

Spoiler

[ThePortalGuru]

Just a little somethin' I whipped up quickly (about half an hour).

You call that quickly??? Half an hour is about the time I spend on making a complete spritesheet for a character. (Then again it seems like my graphics suck)

When you're spending time doing a rough and going over and refining it, yeah, it typically takes about that long.

[Alpha Six]

I'd also like to throw out that it's marginally easier to make a sprite sheet out of a character once you've made a solid base. One nice-looking sprite taking 30 minutes doesn't necessarily mean that every frame will take 30 minutes to look nice, since you already have solid reference material to go off of.

[Medevenx]

I actually offered to sprite for the game and he said he would rather get better at spriting and do all the spriting himself.

[Yal]

I'd also like to throw out that it's marginally easier to make a sprite sheet out of a character once you've made a solid base. One nice-looking sprite taking 30 minutes doesn't necessarily mean that every frame will take 30 minutes to look nice, since you already have solid reference material to go off of.

You have a point there. Didn't think about that.

I actually offered to sprite for the game and he said he would rather get better at spriting and do all the spriting himself.

You know, I didn't post about the game here to scout for sprite artists, I posted about it to get it played.
And I'm not saying that I don't liked the sprites you made, it's just that... I have a emotional bond to the sprites I've made (let's leave the tileset and the backgrounds out of this sentence, because I agree that they are sloppy and awful, respectively), I want them to be a certain style, and I want to say by the end of the day: "I made this game.".

...So I guess I just don't like giving credit ; )



By the way, the game has around 400 (multi-image) sprites ranging from 4x4 pixels (Digger debris) to 256x408 (Final boss' 5th form), 38 backgrounds, and a tileset of around 220 different tiles. Redrawing all that would take aeons and be quite tedious, so I wouldn't really recommend anyone to offer to do that.

[Proton]

Really?
Only the tilesets and backgrounds?

Try every single graphic you've shown.

And what's the point of having that "certain style" when it looks like garbage?


The graphics are awful.
They are beyond horrid.
Without a doubt, they make me distrust this game.


I still don't want to play your game because the ugliness of it is too distracting.

Something like that menu - so clunky and so poorly designed - looks like a pain to navigate.


Have an emotional bond all you want, but if you want something better, you have to work on it and deal with it.


Or just let someone else do them.
If you let such a big ego in the way of something greater, you're really just hindering your chances at that greater something.

[Zee]

I'm gonna go with a stream of consciousness trial of it.

Muting this immediately, I do not enjoy this sound.
Going to options... holding down left arrow to reduce volume to 0... I have to click it a hundred times to mute it? Ok, I'll just mute my computer.
Do these menus keep getting uglier?
Protagonist is named Mario... yeah, I'm just gonna check out on the story part, I want to see how the gameplay works. That's the important part of the game.
Pressing Z during the dialog seems to makes the text flash and reset it's movement speed.
I also can't seem to skip this cut-scene, obnoxious.
That's a Fire?!
Giant teethy money is "just an antlion, phew"?!
His name is Cain... how... *sigh* whatever
Oh hey, suddenly gameplay finally happens.
...
Ok... bullets are overlayed on top of the gun. Kinda sucky.
Yay, more meaningless exposition.
That fade was awful.
OH! Just what I wanted... more exposition.
Jumping... flickering exposition.
A purple floppy disk... oh, you're still talking, let me hammer Z until you shut up.
Hey a pan, maybe I'm in control no- no, still talking.
Oh god, I'm out of the ba... that was a truck?
A 'city'... I've built more realistic cities in minecraft. Hmm... the window IS open right over there...
I begin walking right, and that's not the right direction to go... FINE.
I walk left... and stop. Oh, this is a platform? Really? There's no contrast...
*goes to hit x button.... finds no x button*
*CTRL+ALT+DELETE*
*Delete Zip folder*

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Fix your graphics, they are literally making this difficult to enjoy. Also, some user-friendliness would go a long way, like being able to skip cutscenes & mute things easily if we don't care for the sound. Overall, it seemed like you were trying to hard to make a game like Cave Story, and missed the mark pretty significantly.