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Perfect, as long as you don't get hurt...or use your abilities...

  • pianotm
  • 01/26/2019 11:26 PM
  • 1502 views
Game: Flesh

Developer:Kainworks

Story: You are a necromancer trying to save the world from the demon horde. Demons have devastated the world and you go from location to location receiving help, advice, or insults, or dungeons battling demons. This game is very classic. There isn't much to the story, and it's pretty much just about the game. The story that is there is dark and bleak, and there is a question of whether or not your character is heroic or villainous. It seems clear. He's a necromancer trying to subjugate demons to his own will, but the people your character meets treat him as heroic, so...there's that.


"What is your name?" "It is Arthur of the Britons" "What is your quest?" "To seek the Holy Grail." "What...is the airspeed velocity of an unladen swallow?"
"What do you mean? An African or European swallow?"


Gameplay: This is a classic RPG in the tradition of Dragon Warrior, Ultima, or Might and Magic. You play as a simple sprite on a top down exploration map of the world. Creatures wander the map and are fairly easy to avoid but if you do, you get a battle screen reminiscent of Dragon Warrior where you face an enemy in a display box. The right is your character's mug with your health and energy bars and below are your commands and stats.

As you defeat demons, they may drop items which you can then use in the future to summon them in order to aid you. Use these items wisely because they are consumable. It's a really good system that makes single character turn based combat interesting. Aside from that, you have a spell you can use to attack enemies with. Other than that, you wander the map, find huts, castles, and dungeons, are given items or can sometimes acquire items. You have a home base where you start and can save progress. This looks very much like a classic 80s console game and succeeds in creating that atmosphere in every conceivable fashion.

Graphics: Very nice pixel art. The game looks professional and doesn't actually look like a RPG Maker game. Very simple and very nicely done.

Sound: The game also pays careful attention to sound, making sure that the sound effects and midi are all basic 8-bit, again very nicely applied.

Glitches: This can only be tied to the eventing system for showing the health and energy bars to the right of the screen. The lower your health goes, the greater the lag of the game. At about half health and energy, the lag cripples the game, making it unplayable. If you don't have healing items and have to race to home base, this becomes a game-breaking glitch. Literally the only thing you can do at that point would be simply throw a fight and die so you can respawn at home base. Fix that, and the game is perfect.

Conclusion: Flesh is a love letter to classic video game RPGs. The game is ordinarily a must play. However, the game is pretty much devastated by a serious glitch tied to it's graphics display and health system. It's not impossible to get past, but it will definitely sour the experience.

Posts

Pages: 1
Thanks for the quick reply!

There are only two parallel processes working at the same time, one controlling the health and energy bar and the other some other random stuff, as I was aware that abusing that cause these type of problems.

The way I setted was meant to use just 2 pictures for bar that overwrites as the health goes up and down. Maybe there was something wrong about the way I made the conditional branchs work.

I'll look more closely to see if there's something else it can be causing this issue!

EDIT: I might have found where the issues originated. Thanks a lot for the insight! Hope the newer version fixes the problem (it seems to have got rid of the sttuter and lag on Windows 10).
pianotm
The TM is for Totally Magical.
32347
Okay:

How many parallel processes do you have running?

How many pictures are you using for the healthbar? Are you deleting each picture as the health goes down and the new picture displays, or are you just overlaying them?

These are the things that will kill your framerate.

Have as few pictures as absolutely necessary on display. Run as few parallel processes as you can get away with. At any given time, there should only be three picture overlays on that screen: the main frame overlay, the health bar, and the energy bar. As health and energy go down and you need to put up new pictures for the bars, you need to make sure the ones that aren't relevant get erased. Each time the process calls a new picture, the old one needs to be erased. You should also only need a single parallel process controlling your health, with each indicator bar getting its own conditional branch.
Just... WHOAH!

First and foremost, a HUGE thank you for writing a review for the game. I'm beyond flattered and grateful to your words!! Trust me when I say I really wasn't even anticipating something like this!

Now, I'm also terribly concerced about the glitch you mentioned, specially when it's caused by something it was added just to give a little more flavor to the aesthetics.

I have access to two computers with similar SPECS, one running Windows 7 while the other runs Windows 10. I never noticed anything close to lag on the first, but after reading your review, I tried to test the game a bit more extensively on Windows 10. And... there you go, the problem was present and exactly as you mentioned. Not only that, there's also extra loading times here and there, something that I wasn't aware at all as it never happened on the other OS.

I'm totally clueless about how to fix it and why it's only showing up when the HP/EP bars are lower than maximum! I believe the way the OS handles the program has something to do with it as well, but maybe the way I evented it worsened the problem.

Once again, thank you for your review and sorry that you have to endure this performance issue! Although not game breaking (to some extent), after experiencing it, I agree on what you said that it really, really deters from the enjoyment.
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