NEOPHYTE'S PROFILE

I thought everything on the internet was a trick. :(

Yeah Half-Life 2 did not have clever puzzles, and they obviously were just throwing those into the full game so they could say LOOK INNOVATION!

But you have to take the other things into consideration. There was nothing truly like the Gravity Gun before Half-Life 2. It's not seen as an impressive weapon now since many games now have replicated it, but 5 years ago it was pretty amazing. Many FPS games did not have a decent story other than the Half-Life games (well there's Deus Ex and maybe a few others but it is rare). It has very good pacing, with new weapons and enemies appearing every so often so things are never really stale. The game doesn't necessarily have exceptional writing, you don't see it. However, the voice actors know their characters personality, and they pull off how they act flawlessly. I can't stress how important this is, because they really do a good job. They show emotion, there is no doubt about this (see: HL2 Episode 2). There is also a very good distinction between the characters, and it is much better than standard FPS games where you have a captain yelling "GET TO THE HELIPAD, BLOW THIS UP, ETC" or Bethesda voice acting. The fact that most of the scenes unfold while you still have control of your character (like Nightblade said) is something that few developers know how to do correctly. It isn't perfect, but you grow attached to these rag tag bunch of characters who are rebelling against all odds. And when something bad happens, you feel for them.

Lots of people don't like Half-Life, but I don't think you can deny that it did a lot of things right for the FPS genre. It has a really unique feeling to it when you play it. But I think it might bug some people because this feeling is so different from other FPS games. I think that's a good thing, though!

I've got a good group of L4D friends now. We usually don't even have enough room since there is more than 8 of us, but at least they know how to play and have fun. I also have too many friends that have added me through very close, fun games. But I can't play with anybody else really, there are too many quitters and people without mics in the game. It can take 30 minutes just to set up a decent game, and it's just impossible to get through a whole versus mode if you're playing with pubs.

I only remember two contests. There was the one where Disillusionist made a DBS that was incredible for its time, and then this one I think.

But I still remember this, it was pretty fun. It's still on my hard drive after all these years. When I first played it, I remember not getting it at all. I was completely confused back then, and I think the average user would still find it confusing. However, it's still very incredible in terms of coding. I don't think it would work if the game played out like most DBS RM games where there are dozens of battles. Something short that focused on bosses similar to Shadow of Colossus would be great for something like this, though.

Well Xenogears did it right. There is nothing to compare here because it all depends on the execution. You can have as many characters (secondary or not) as you want.

Let's take Xenogears for example, though. In the beginning, you start off with just Fei really. Sure you have towns people and all of the key characters in that town, but they are quickly finished off and are really just there to provide motivation for the player and Fei. About 2 hours into the game, you really only have 3 key characters to follow (Fei, Citan, and Elly). As you get more involved in the conflict in Xenogears, the plot begins to develop a lot. In return, more characters are introduced to keep things going. It's kind of like a timeline. If you introduce too many characters at once, it's like trying to take jabs at different spots on the plot timeline at the same time. It gets confusing, and things begin to fall apart. And even though the creator has this whole timeline in his/her head and knows what the purpose of each character is, he or she still has to know where those characters should be placed on the timeline. Within the gaps of the timeline (between the introduction of one character and the next), that time is generally used to develop the character that was just introduced. Of course that doesn't mean you stop when the next character is introduced, but the gap is there to give the player some insight on who that person is.

But yeah if you have too many at an introduction, it's tough to develop them at the same time. You can't expect them to be great characters within that time frame, but there needs to be set times or points in the game (the beginning is best since it is the most important part of a game really) where you can focus specifically on a character. And you absolutely have to show the difference between a primary character and a secondary, which can get difficult. Secondary or not though, you have to set the correct pacing between all characters, no matter how minor they are.

author=Max McGee link=topic=3093.msg60618#msg60618 date=1233822977
What's sad is that I've played both and the Nazi Zombies bonus mode of Call of Duty: World At War is a much better zombie co-op game than Left 4 Dead.

Oh no you didn't.

NO
YOU
DIDN'T. >:(

The Nazi zombie mode sucks because it's basically holding out until you die. It has nothing on Left 4 Dead. Co-op on the game gets boring after a few rounds, but the Versus mode is so much better than any other zombie game. The game sucks as just a campaign or single player game, but playing with friends never gets old. Seriously if you can get 4-8 friends to play the game with you, it is one of the best experiences ever. It is the best multiplayer game next to things like Halo, TF2, and CoD 4. CoD 4 is better than CoD 5 at everything.

I'd like to know how the gameplay is, you didn't describe it at all. What is it like? Have you done anything to the DBS? What about outside the DBS, any good gameplay features? Honestly the story and characters are not too important for me in an advertisement topic since it is all in a persons presentation. But I will say that you threw WAY too many names out there that nobody will care about really. There are just too many of them, and I can see people getting confused if you don't show the importance of some of them in game. Try not to drop so many names at once, I see that some people have already said this. The screenshots look nice, though.

Some pointers off the top of my head:
-Do not extend dialogue that doesn't fit inside of one message box (see your first screen). It's much easier to take in the information when it doesn't end mid sentence. Modify your dialogue so that it fits, you would be surprised at how much more professional (and how much easier on the reader) it is when you don't do this. Just end that sentence with "began" and modify the following sentence by replacing the next few words with something different.

-Gabriels battle character is cut off by the system set.

-It doesn't look like the battlers animate. Correct me if I'm wrong. If they don't, fix that!

-Create borders for your facesets. Open up an image editing program and make borders around the facesets (I would make something similar to the system set for consistency). Right now they don't look right in the message box because they're cut off.

After posting all that I just checked the game on the website and you have a little bit of gameplay details. I'm not sure how it is though, they don't seem like much to me. I don't believe I played your last release, but I vaguely remember you telling me to. I'll wait for this, since it seemed very much like a beta or alpha release last time. Good luck with the project!

Topic name doesn't work for attention, by the way. If anything, you're HURTING your game by adding that, even if it you weren't serious. Your game should be able to stand on its own two legs without you (the creator) hyping it up like that.