The Other Brothers (TOB) - Public Beta Demo
polycounter lvl 14
Hello friends of TOB and lovers of Pixel-Art!
As you may know we released a closed beta demo of TOB a little while ago. It was received with great joy and people from all over the world had a blast. Now you can take the beta for a spin yourself if you haven't been able to before! Please download the TOB Beta Demo from here:
http://www.tobgame.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=10&t=23
May the Greentooth be with you...
Enjoy!
Thomas P.
As you may know we released a closed beta demo of TOB a little while ago. It was received with great joy and people from all over the world had a blast. Now you can take the beta for a spin yourself if you haven't been able to before! Please download the TOB Beta Demo from here:
http://www.tobgame.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=10&t=23
May the Greentooth be with you...
Enjoy!
Thomas P.
Replies
@bounchfx - Thanks for giving it a whirl! Would love to hear how you liked it!
Please enjoy!
Thomas P.
I suggest taking your time a bit to explore the level. It surely ain't "easy" but that is by design. A game that isn't challenging is after all... boring. Most people feel that the controls are actually spot on. You can try using your PS3/xBox controller, it makes a big difference actually (for the better).
Thanks for playing!
Hope you enjoy the game! Have fun
Great game, I liked it, and I know the game is in Alpha, but there some issues which I have the feeling every person is going to complain about once the game goes gold, especially certain British reviewers.
-First room dog is an insta-kill with a large amount of pixelated text, which can be not so great for certain people with certain screens, maybe instead have your character just bounce off the dog? Insta-kill seems too harsh, especially since the dog doesn't attack you (I honestly thought it was my pet and I was supposed to feed oil or something, as a sort of easter-egg thing).
-Environments are very loose, especially the jumping and platforming. Most games have what they call "Edge Lag/Save" in which even if your character is off the edge of a platform by a few pixels, the game will register the jump as a jump, allowing for the double jump to happen without issues. This is especially important since I noticed alot of platforms which are distant from one another, with enemies around and such can cause a player to jump and die.
Another example would be the ceiling anvil, usually in games like these the player will press their character up against the anvil so they speed-run (especially if there are no visual cues to danger like spikes) but in this case, when I do that, as soon as I'm under the anvil while it's going up, I get KO'ed.
-Controls are kinda loose too, but if more related to the above mentioned issue since inertia and such is pretty unforgiving. Example are the anvils coming down on you, your characters slow startup, small area to walk on, enemies around, and the fact that you barely have time to get through before having to double jump and die only to start from the start isn't boding for very well. The environmental hazards along with the controls are simply too sporadic.
-I'm not too sure, but I noticed alot of sections with leap of faith style gameplay, could you maybe allow the player to press down so they can see 'beyond' their vision limit? Also, maybe add border to around the level?
-Enviroment detail vs. what you can jump on needs to revisioned pronto, I couldn't tell what to jump on or not, a few times I jumped on boxes that were darker then the rest of the environment, other times gears which were of the same color saturation as me did nothing.
Also, you might want to look into what can damage you when and where. The fire balls at the end were going through the platforms I was standing on, that's a cardinal sin in gaming, especially if they push me back, and have no indication if said platform is a dangerous one or not.
Another example would be the cogs at the start of the level, they were black, so I naturally assumed I could jump on the machine itself but not the wheels.
Another example would be the light, I honestly thought I was able to 'sneak' through the level if I stayed in the dark (since the first henchman has a bug where it takes him slightly longer to detect me, even if infront of him, under the light).
-I couldn't make out in sheer panic (especially when 3 brutes attacked me) on where my life was, was it the birds I collected? Or the oil? Is oil only for points or is there a purpose in collecting them (EI: Activating the large machine in the middle?), also, time limited power-ups are grand if you want (not a fan of them, especially since they one-hit stuff) but maybe put up a timer? Half of the time I was running around only to have lost track of the little text that tells me time ran out for the tool and be pushed back in lava by the henchman.
The game is terms of artstyle and basic gameplay is fun, it's just that people will be pretty much saying the following and I just know they will "You get what you pay for" once it goes gold.
Ace Angel brought up much of what I was going to say, particularly in terms of the readability of the environment, what you can and can't jump on and the like. It's something that's often a problem in these more art heavy platformers. Pushing the backgrounds deeper and perhaps giving them a consistent differentiation from the foreground - darker, lighter, less saturated etc would help significantly. Id also avoid using objects for both interactive and backgrounds - the crates are an example of this. You need to build up a really intuitive visual language so a player can always tell at a glance how they're going to interact with a part of the environment
The movement dynamics I think aren't too bad at the moment - I've certainly seen a lot worse from some pretty high profile games, but they could be refined quite a bit. If you really nail the movement and make it feel really good to traverse the world it'll lift the entire game from good to great. That's probably not the most helpful of crits given that working out what constitutes "just right" for the heights and speeds and amounts of inertia and friction and input lag and camera position and whatever else, aren't particularly specific or obvious and probably highly subjective, but simply put, it'd be worth analysing some of the games that got it right (Super Meatboy might be a first port of call), then spending some time running and jumping about in TOB and tweaking your numbers.
Given that the birds function like Sonic's rings, it might be neat to have all of the birds cascade out rather than the two or three when the player is injured, giving them a small chance to recapture them.
A ran into a couple of bugs while playing too.
On initialy launching the game, the window appeared halfway between my two monitors. It popped into the right place when I maximized the game with alt-enter.
After dying and restarting a number of times - I didn't count how many but I'd estimate 6-7, on respawn the music and the majority of the sound effects stopped playing, leaving only the background ambience and the sound for picking up oil cans.
Keep at it guys. With a little tweaking this is going to be a great game.
Ditto with ace and Jack, and I also had the music and sfx loss after a few goes - clicking in and out of windowed seemed to bring it back on my next respawn, though.
I'd add that the text flying out of the toolbox pickups is a bit too fast to process - with the first toolbox, I missed the powerup expire message due to collecting birds and promptly got murdered by the angry hairy man. The next one I had no idea was a 1-up; seeing as it was the third one I'd found I presumed it was a throwing weapon and again was ravaged by hounds when I fruitlessly hammered action.
I think that would be the only overall issue I have with the game - the telegraphing of what to do and what does what is lacking:
-Some things are timed longer than others with no indication
-Item pickup text not easily readable when you're frantically in the middle of things
-Item pickup icon identical for multiple powerups, maybe they could look dffrent and cause a different visual/audio effect to convey what you got more clearly
-The cogs were intially confusing (dark bg element, only works when you push up whilst falling or jumping through them, which is a good way for it to work, but only once you work that out)
-Some jumps and actions requiring 4 or 5 deaths to work through as there was no indication that you'd need to, say, reverse back and run at it to pixel perfect double-jump it, or even how the timings of some things were meant to work
-Enemies also don't telegraph their attacks very well - some bumble right through you, so it can feel a little cheap when you die after they suddenly launch across the screen at you for the first time, or suddenly do a different move, like the uppercuts
-It's unclear what the birds and oil do at first, after finishing I still don't know what the oil is for but I guess it's used later for something!
But I suppose if I view the game as a 'learn how to deal with each new element by dying horribly over and over until I understand how it works to progress' kind of game and not simply as just an awesomely art-directed mario jump-and-run homage that I'd intially presumed, then I got on better.
Really, though, minor stuff - loved the greentooth too. It was a lot of fun already!
[ame]www.youtube.com/watch?v=TCIMPYM0AQg[/ame]
Thomas P.