New Game: The Legend Of Vraz

Zatun_Jai

Hi,

My name is Ayush and I am from Zatun, a video game development company in India. We are working on a 2D action adventure platformer game “ The Legend of Vraz “ for PC. This game was created using the Microsoft XNA framework and it features never seen before 2D graphics, cute characters and an enthralling game play set in exotic Indian locales.

Game Features:

• Exquisite hand painted 2D Art with stunning 2D graphics never seen before.
• Chic and cute characters each with their distinct personality and AI.
• A forgiving gameplay providing for a unique player experience while encouraging the player.
• 15 Stages with 4 distinct locations and each location giving an exotic feeling of fantasy of being in medieval India.
• Achieve 5 goals to win the princesses hand while battling it out with 14 different enemies.
• Use the bow with 5 different types of arrows or jump on the enemies.
• Stylized Particles and FX amidst a soothing soundtrack.

Game Story:

Vraz, the prince is in love with princess Avi and to win her hand in marriage agrees to the 5 tasks set by Avi’s father - Baapji, The Maharaja of Kund.
The 5 tasks are:

* Earn 100,000 coins or equivalent gold for the wedding
* Bring a the biggest and the brightest red rose
* Bring a diamond studded heart
* Bring the traditional sword
* Bring a traditional horse

However, the Vizier of Kund has other plans. He is in love with Avi and realizes that if he can marry Avi, he will be the future king of Kund and may be one day of the entire region.

In the meantime, Vraz unaware of Vizier’s plan agrees to Baapji’s condition and the game begins…


Screenshots:













Game Videos:

[ame]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mjEAsgxUF-k[/ame]


[ame]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8Te4hldT2ys[/ame]


We have our site - http://zatungames.com/ with our in-game videos and screenshots and I would appreciate if you could have a look at them.

Thanks for your time and looking forward to your feedback.

Warm Regards,

Ayush

Yozora

Zatun_Jai wrote: »

and it features never seen before 2D graphics,

Well you got that bit right. I have never seen a game like this. All the objects seem to be so randomly proportioned. Like 2 min into the "jungle level" video on your site you got this background layer that looks far into the distance, and then behind that layer is something that should be the 1st layer. Hard to describe, just watch the video

The animations also look.... 8 bit?
Gameplay wise it looks like mario, except in mario you didnt have to stop every 10 secs and spend another 10 secs shooting arrows. Mario also runs a lot faster, this seems so slow and tedious. I don't see how anyone could look forward to playing this in 2009, its not that its terribly bad, its just when you compare with the games currently on the market, especially small indie games - even free flash games, yours seems to be incredibly lackluster and dated.

Try looking at other games to see why they are fun. The collecting of coins isn't the primary gameplay mechanic that makes Mario and Sonic fun. Its the speed and fluidity of the controls. I cant comment on how your game feels but it definitely doesnt looks smooth judging from the animations (especially the jump and receiving-damage animations)

Neox

i have a dejavu

[ame]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KzJtcnyplFU[/ame]

Zatun_Jai

-Yozora

Thanks for your comment.

The style for the game we have chosen is the "Indian Miniature Painting style". Look it up under google and search for "rajasthani miniature painting" or "Indian Miniature Painting style"

The miniature paintings are mostly flat and lack perspective but what sets them apart from the rest of the paintings is the detail that goes in each individual element.

Regarding animations and the gameplay, they appear really smooth in the game. May be the video is taking a really long time to load on youtube. I am really not sure.

The objective of the game is not just collecting coins but other collectibles and there are various interactive objects as well in the game.

We never intended to make the game as fast as mario or sonic.

We just updated the story to give you a better idea as to what the game is about.

Yozora

you're right it kinda fits that indian miniature painting style, I just dont like that style at all

From the 2 videos I dont see many interactive objects, there are some enemies and there are disappearing/moving platforms.
The poor animation is not youtubes fault, I'm talking about the lack of frames and how a jump animation is simply the walk animation in mid air and the falling animation is the same as the idle pose.

And it doesn't need to be as fast as mario or sonic, I was just talking about what made them fun. As far as I can see from your videos there is nothing that makes this game particularly fun. Braid is a good example of a modern 2d platformer that is relatively slow. But Braid had very clever gameplay mechanics and puzzles.
Gish is another good example of a modern 2d platformer. It was good because it required you to think and navigating through the levels using the abilities felt rewarding.

And then theres Trine which looks very pretty and also has physics puzzles, different characters with different abilities which lets the player solve puzzles in a variety of ways.

Action platformers like castlevania/super metroid/mega man aren't that fast paced either (although it may require twitchy actions like wall jumping and dodging projectiles quickly), but they have exploration and RPG elements and lots of weapons, lots of enemies and lots of bosses to play with. They are fun because of the intense action.
Unfortunately your game doesnt fit into this genre either.

This doesnt mean all "slow" platformers need to have puzzles or be action-oriented of course. But they need something. And I fail to see what your game has (other than the "art style").

Zatun_Jai

Hi Yozora,

Thanks for your honest feedback.

Regarding the interactive objects, we havent posted any videos of it yet on Youtube. We wanted it the players to discover it while they were playing the game.

I do agree that Braid and Trine are really good examples of Platformer with Puzzles.

We do not have any puzzles in our game and it does not fit into the first genre. What it does fit into is the action genre .We do have various types of arrows the prince can collect in the later levels and as the game progresses, you have newer enemies with a lot more smarter AI. There are bosses with whom you fight to complete your goals and the levels are a lot bigger.

The videos show in this post are from levels 1.3 (only till the second checkpoint) and 3.1 (only to the first check point).

cholden

I understand the style you speak of, and this is not it. This game presents a LOT of different art style. In most cases the art itself is ok, but when clashed together all these different styles are a complete train wreck.




(1) Things that may be hitting the "Indian Miniature Painting style" are most of the backgrounds, random vegetations/props and some UI. This is the best stuff represented.


(2) Next you have made-in-photoshop style art. This is the stuff that clearly gives away what tools where used to create them. The main offender here is the grass obviously being photoshop's basic grass brush which is so overused it's laughable. The other photoshopy stuff is blatant use of smudging without clean-up or sharp gradients.


(3) Photoreal texturing is the next art style style. This is paint or sourcing something fairly realistic then overlaying realistic textures to keep things flat and realistic for applying to models for lighting in a 3d game engine. To me, this is the most humorous styles represented because this is a 2d game with no lighting at all.

(4) Straight photosourcing. Unlike the previous use of realism, this is just cropping pictures into your game world. Unlike with previous posts, you can't try to explain your art style, do shit like this and expect people to take you seriously. Yes there is some well painted work in this game, but next to pictures it's value is completely deflated.


(5) The final style is what mostly the characters represent. It's a standard, 3d cartoon style. Again, not even close to "Indian Miniature Painting style" just generic 3d toons. While basic in style they aren't bad, what's killing them is the default rendering. No effort has been put into their shader or lighting, it's pure default (the dead give away is that they fade to pure black on the underside like there's one default omni light taking care of everything.

To learn more about character shading, I direct you to Andrew Hickinbottom. He's one of the master of realizing this style in three dimensions

pure toon shaded (like a 2d animated cartoon)
http://andyh.cgsociety.org/gallery/165360/
http://andyh.cgsociety.org/gallery/388341/

3d toon shader (like a pixar movie)
http://andyh.cgsociety.org/gallery/785848/
http://andyh.cgsociety.org/gallery/757330/


Every piece of art that actually represents the "Indian Miniature Painting style" looks great. Some is downright amazing, but everything else ruins it. Unification of artistic style would be a huge plus to this project.



As for programming and design, I'm going to call you out on that too. The movement is molasses, underwater and slow. This type of unresponsive locomotion drives gamers insane. Part of platforming/action game design is to ability to smoothly transition through the worlds. Watch a few speed runs to see what I mean. That arrow is useless. It has such a high margin of error, and the aiming is hazardous. There's also no visual transition between monster you can jump on versus monster you have to shoot. This is a big FU to the gamer. You see, even in Mario if you couldn't jump on a monster it has spikes on it's head so it was clearly dangerous to the touch. Telling us gameplay improves at boss fights grants you no reprieve here. You're outright saying there is no gameplay until you suffer through the unresponsive platforming zones. Because collecting coins and jumping on platforms isn't fun gameplay alone, it's basic locomotion mechanics. And the video have already shown us that it and the combat are difficult even for the demo player to grasp.

But enough of this scathing reality. What can be done to improve it? Firstly, as other have said, smooth out character movement. It needs to be fun and intuitive to dash around complex jump puzzles. Consider some sort of locomotion upgrade in the world. Mario had all kinds of things, yoshi, flight....run. Expand radius of the bow's arrow damage so it can be used quickly. Having to spot and aim is totally counterintuitive to this gameplay style, and is BROKEN. Next, considering making the bow an upgrade item you find in the level along with other weapons or at least a variety of arrow types to find in each level. Back to the basics here, mario > super mario > fireball. The basic upgrade system gives the user a REASON to pick up items along the way.

"We do not have any puzzles in our game and it does not fit into the first genre" No. You have to HAVE a genre before something doesn't fit into it. This more of the avoidance of programming and design as forementioned above.

Baddcog

I think the screens and first part of the vid look pretty good overall.

I agree that the jump anim is really stiff and really brings it down. I know Mario is very similar in that respect, I don't think he does much more than swing his arms and legs. But he's really squat and he has no torso to bend. Your guy has a really long torso which makes it look really stiff.

I also noticed that the arrows shoot from under his hand by quite a bit. Should be above the hand. That's probably a fairly easy fix and would help alot IMO.

AsaNYC

This seems like a really beautiful idea! I LOVE the idea of a game in the visual style you described!

That said,I agree with the previous posters that your art team has not quite got that together yet and the weight of the character's motion programming looks incredibly unpleasant to control.

Vraz has no inertia when running off the platforms and drops like a brick. His initial jumping velocity is very low and this is resulting in both taking a while to go up as well as come down. This is terribly unpleasant in a game that does not incorporate the jump speed as a mechanic which can be controlled. But these might only be symptoms of a different aspect.

Is your programming team using a simulation here of some kind or are they using preset movement curves and falloff? Even a simple simulation with mass, inertia, and velocity would probably help this come together immediately. I think you can use simple curves for acceleration and even jumping velocity which would allow you to fine-tune the weight and movement of Vraz as you collect more feedback.

The art situation is pretty much what CHolden illustrated. If you actually pull this off as a visual style, you'll be turning a LOT of heads. That said you need to focus the art director into thinking that every asset needs to look like that. They'll all need to be hand-drawn and painted in that style for the 2d assets, or modeled in the structural style as well as hand-drawn and painted in this overall aesthetic. All the assets need to combine to create entire screens that look like one of these paintings.

Don't let this discourage you. The modeling will require very little changing, but he'll need new textures and a shader that:

1. Utilizes the soft surface specularity of the paintings and eliminated the plastic look Vraz has now
2. Eliminates the lighting altogether or at the very least makes it ambient and adjusts it to reflect his environments lighting and
3. Adds the overall texture of the paper to the world of pixels. Do NOT underestimate something that subtle.

Xoliul

Yeah I noticed too, you're not using gravity or acceleration in your character movement code. You can clearly see this when he jumps, the speeds stay constant, and there's no arc when he jumps, it's a linear function.
Kind of silly you don't have this: every basic Flash platformer tutorial on youtube tells you how to do this...

System

Like the idea but cholden hit it on the head, the third screenshot got my attention straight away with the photo just stuck on. That's a major factor which makes the game seem unpolished. A consistent art style is required for it to be pretty and immersive.

The gameplay is boring, coins are one thing but what about adding elements like traps, did you ever play Pitfall by Activision? I know this game is old now but it is still enjoyable because it requires skill and has an aspect of danger.

The characters as you say have their distinct personality, I see none in this character. He makes no sounds and the animations as said are choppy.