OLDPAT'S PROFILE

Your artworks are not bad at all, good work!
The shading with all those "random lines" works. You remind me of myself some years ago. I used to draw "aggressive random lines" in order to give details to my drawings. The difference being: I REALLY sucked at it, yours look good.
Good job, keep it up!

author=Dragnfly

author=OldPat
Marty's supposed to look a bit cool and good looking (There's a reason why he's always sorrounded by chicks, after all. Well, ok, he was rich as well, but...). Think of him as a much more stupid, a much more silly and a much less badass version of Ryo Saeba from City Hunter and you get the picture.

I always saw him as one of those types of guys that women would be really attracted to... until they spent time with him. Basically, if they saw through his tricks (like Flo did) then they'd see him as an annoyance. They'd either stay for the money and looks or push him away, and the ones who pushed him away he'd just get attracted to. It's a vicious cycle.

Guy with the nasty skin - Freakin awesome. He seems like a real schemer too.

Christmas - I'm surprised that snow isn't melting with all the HOT in there.

Sketches - Your expressions and line work are good as always. Actually, this topic lets me see that you're getting way better. Also, man those lips:) I'm usually surrounded by anime art so lips are usually not a focus (or they don't have any at all) so sometimes I forget how nice they make a lady look when they're drawn properly. Most artists I know draw them like giant slugs sticking to the girl's mouth.

Thank you, Dragnfly!
It makes me happy to know that some improvements can be seen. I'm trying to reach a high level when it comes to drawing artworks, doing design for characters and such(and basically every other aspect of game development). It's still a veeery long road for me, I still lack so much, but for now I won't stop!

author=Dragnfly
Guy with the nasty skin - Freakin awesome. He seems like a real schemer too.

Oh, you'll see. 8D

author=Dragnfly
Christmas - I'm surprised that snow isn't melting with all the HOT in there.

Perhaps it actually IS melting! Will never know, since the artwork is not animated.
After finishing this drawing I wasn't all that satisfied. Something for me went horribly wrong while doing it somehow. But the more I look at it, the more I like it. Although I did very stupid mistakes with her anatomy.

author=Dragnfly
Sketches - Your expressions and line work are good as always. Actually, this topic lets me see that you're getting way better. Also, man those lips:) I'm usually surrounded by anime art so lips are usually not a focus (or they don't have any at all) so sometimes I forget how nice they make a lady look when they're drawn properly. Most artists I know draw them like giant slugs sticking to the girl's mouth.

I think every part of the body deserves attention, as it helps with expression a lot. Drawing lips is one of those things, they really boost a character expressivness for me.

I'm getting used to it, but when I decided to draw more precise lips for the first time I too felt it was really difficult. And the first lips I ever drawn were far worse than slugs! xD

But I'm happy that I learned, they really help. Especially in games like Karma Flow where I need the women to be somewhat sexy, elegant and "almost realistic" looking in order to help "boosting" the noir aspect of the game (sexy femme fatales are common in most old-style noir movies) and do a bit of contrast with the game's overly "dirty-and-evil" criminal atmosphere.

(Please, forgive my bad English from here on out^^')

I'm about 25 hours in now.
'Till now, I always thought this game would've turn out to be yet another failure.
Mostly because I didn't like FFXIII (seriously, a corridor with a bad, convoluted story and reaaaally bad characters. The writing in there was so bad I can't believe someone got paid to make something like that) and also because this game required 10yrs to be finished. When a game takes so long to be released it's never a good sign.
One of SE's character designer, Roberto Ferrari, did said in an interview that Square Enix was badly organized during development, and the story and the whole concept was scrapped and redone more than once, year after year. A lot of things scrapped or re-writed completely.
Stella? Gone. Too bad, she looked like a really cool character.

Yet, I'm liking it. It has its flaws, but there are some pros as well.

I'm a fan of Open World games, way before they became mainstream. I don't particularly like the fact that every software house tries to make the "BIGGEST OPEN WORLD ON THE MARKET!1!!" everytime and use it as self-promotion. Mostly because when a massive Open World comes out, you can feel it's really huge, but it always lacks depth. A lot of emptiness around, small villages here and there, no seriously interesting things to explore.
It's the case of MGSV, for instance. I liked the game a lot, but the Open World was sooooooo empty and... mostly full of useless areas, when not on a mission. I expected way more easter eggs and things to unravel on a Kojima game but whatever...
I grew up with games like Gothic. The first two chapter, Gothic I and II, had a fairly contained Open World. And yet it was full of mysteries, things to do, monsters and such. It felt so alive, every NPC had his daily routine and things around you changed according to your actions and story progression (in a really significant way). This days nooo, it's all about how huge the world is. Who cares if it's empty and static? It's HUUUUUUUUGE.
Meh.

Back to the topic. FFXV world is HUGE and yes, there are a lot of areas which serves no real purpose, but exploring it sometimes do feel somehow rewarding and seriously, the art direction is SUPERB. I never felt the urge to fast travel because the view was amazing and the world is so good-looking. It really helps with the "friends who embark on a journey" theme, and it feels very "Final Fantasy-ish" (also, loading screens are long enough so it doesn't make that much of a difference, fast travel or not, most of the time...)

Random encounters, drops and little thingies that help boost your crew's abilities (walking boostes Gladio's exploration skills, using your Chocobo often boostes his level, etc) really helps give purpose to the game's world.
Exploration is also rewarded with the unravel of secret dungeons (I assume they are mostly post-game kind of dungeons. They looked pretty damn difficult to complete so far :S). I don't know if it's gonna be this way until the end, though. I don't expect to see interesting drops, enemies and dungeons around every single corners of this massive open world. We'll see about that.

The world is full of side-quests. Really, there are a lot of them.
Most of them are fun to do, but the majority are repetitive, copy-paste missions.
Each of them will take hours to complete, but not because of the side-quests per se. Mostly because of the driving\walking\chocobing you have to do in order to reach your destination and then fight\take object\talk to that someone\capture that fish.
That seemed to me like an excuse to boost the game's total playtime. You're going to spend a LOOOOOOOT of your time inside that car. And the driving is... No, you don't drive that car. The game gives you the impression that you're driving it, but mostly is all about keep pressing that R2/RB button and then wait for it to reach your destination, occasionally tilting the left analog stick in order to change your route (and it's impossible to go off-road). Meh.

The world is cool to look at and, as I said, I enjoyed the trip because of the amazing visual. But seriously, how long is this gonna last before it starts getting annoying? I can't spend a good percentage of my playtime driving in semi-automatic mode. Good thing there are dungeons, and pretty intricate and long ones too (didn't expect that at first).

I wanted much more conversations between the party while driving, but those are much less frequent than I expected, mostly during important main quests and after certain events.

For now, the writing is still a biiig problem. The story is told in a very slow, random way. Like LockeZ says... what's with that scene with Iris? How come they knew her? What's the story there? Why am I raiding random Imperial outposts? Why didn't I get that boat to Altissia and I'm now hunting for random Ancestral Weapons and summonings?

I mean yes, of course, because I need to fight the Empire and that things will help, but... it sounds sooo much like an excuse to make the story last long enough to make it worthwhile.

The story is told in a really bad way, random villains appearing out of nowhere and disappearing all of a sudden (what's the deal with the first encounter with Aranea? What... why did she... when... how... huh?)
A lot of things happening in the background, no proper explanations at all. Why?
Ok, sure, I missed watching Kingsglaive, perhaps I should've gone through that one first, but still...
Why can't FFXV explain things to me properly? Why do I have to pay for a movie and watch it in order to understand the plot of this game?

So yet again, writing is still the series' weakest spot.
And yet I'm liking this game, why?

Mostly because of the gameplay, the visuals and the main characters.
The party of FFXV (a party of people who tries to save the kingdom although seeing the way they look it seems to me that they are going on a tour around the world in order to promote their new j-pop album) is composed of four main characters and they are the stereotyped-like-hell kind of guys.
The serious protagonist, the wise guy, the muscle one, the comic relief.
And yet, the game did a good job making them interact with each other.
Random dialogues, puns, the camping, Prompto's photos, the random events...

Very simple characters with... for now almost non-existent backstory, but it really feels like you're watching their long journey towards their final destination, seeing them interact with each other and trying their best to survive and overcome all sort of difficulties.

Good job there.
Also, I'm really digging the combat system. It has its flaws, mostly bad camera and why on earth are the summonings random?! (For now, I only managed to summon Ramuh twice, and everytime during fights with level 10 Garulas that were about to die under the might of my level 35+ party. Well, thank you, Ramuh. You could help me with those "one-hit kill" daemons once in a while if it doesn't bother you so much...)

The new magic system is ok. I do miss the Fire, Firaga and all of the other classic magic skills, but it's fun to experiment with making new magic grenades through alchemy.

Also some fights are really epic and fun.
Although the game is reaaaaally easy. I saw the Game Over screen just once, and that's because I went suicidal against the daemons at the beginning of the game.
Dunno if it's because I do a lot of side-quests. Maybe that's the reason but right about now I don't feel over-leveled at all, and yet...

And damn that food looks good. 10yrs development, guys. All of that in order to give us proper #FoodPorn!

For now I'm liking the game. It still has heavy flaws in its writing. Very beautiful Open World, but some travels are really long and a pain to do just to complete one or two shitty sub-quests. I'm looking forward to the much more linear 2nd part of the game to see if the story kicks off.

It's a fun game, full of things to do and I like the interactions between Noctis and the other three dudes. It simply suffers from the "Open World at all costs" kind of mentality that results in repetitive missions, loooong travels and back-sitting story.

Not that I dislike the purposes of this game. The massive Open World really makes you feel like you're on a big journey with your friends.

author=Dragnfly
Happy New Year, you guys!

I'll admit I was kind of frustrated to see the lack of feedback and downloads too, considering how much I pimped the game to people.

For the score explanations, I'd recommend just putting it on the screen. Marty's tutorials are awesome and hilarious but they're already long enough and any player who understands your indirect kill system should be able to understand how the scoring works if you have an "Indirect Kills: 5 = +50 points, Alerts: 5 = -50 points" by those parts of the scoring screen.

After the testing was done, I took a pretty long hiatus from this game. It's just something I do when I'm done testing a game so that I don't start disliking it. When I came back I still really enjoyed the gameplay and especially the final battle.

Sorry that I don't have much more to say. I like it, I recommend it to people who I think would also like it, and... that's as far as it goes. One friend even told me he liked it (he's a huge MGS fan) and I told him to come here and comment and he said that he couldn't be bothered to make an account. *shrug* it's just the era we live in, I guess.

I can't think of much to change in this current game. For a sequel most of the stuff I'd like to see is pretty standard:
bigger maps, more side missions, more equipment, maybe another playable character who is different in some way, and of course new kill methods. I really want some way to lure enemies a short distance to a spot where they can be hit by a train or car or something.

It's not sadistic because they're the bad guys LOL

Happy new year!

I'm glad you still like the game and it's good to hear that there are other people who like it as well (MGS fan too! Yay!)
Thank you for spreading the word.^^

As for the stuff you'd like to see in the sequel:
I can say that all of them will be present in KF 2 although...
"Bigger maps" it's still a big question mark.
That's because yes, I've managed to optimize the code A LOT. It's much less of a mess in comparison to its predecessor. And that's something I did because I really want to expand the game's maps and give much more freedom.

But there are still some things that may prevent bigger maps from working well:
- Bigger maps = more difficult mapping. I'll have to try to differentiate each areas by using just one set of tile per map. It may prove to be difficult (also considering the fact that my mapping skill isn't all that great, but I'm trying to improve).
- Although the code is much more optimized, it's still not guaranteed to work well on big maps. There are a lot of things I have no control over. For example the Pathfinding plugin. Bigger maps will surely result in much more complicate calculations in order for that plugin to find the right paths and it may slow things down (considering the fact that I'm trying to implement pathfinding for more NPCs in comparison to the first game, in which only the targets, the bosses and the dog in the second episode had one).

It's just something that I need to properly test. No way to know until I have a prototype ready to be played.
The other solution would be to have more than one map per level and to give the player the impression that it's just one big map (for example by having no transations when teleporting from one map to another).
That, however, will require much more work with programming in order to make targets and other NPCs move from one map to another and for everything else to work.

I will find a way.

Thank you again and have a Happy New Year!


(Car incidents as killing methods is something I look forward to implement. 8D)

I also felt similarly weird about the scoring system at first. I think in my notes I said that I actually got a really bad score on the second mission at first because I thought that not killing anyone but the target was the way to go.

D'oh! I just checked and... you're right, you too told me about that.
During that time I was really busy adjusting and adding things in the game that... I completely forgot about it (or somehow skipped?) ! Forgive me! ;\

from a 'video game player' perspective I would always assume that the harder approach (not killing anyone) would give me a higher score.

Yeah, that's right. Most stealth games usually reward non-lethal approaches and things like that. Strange I've never considered this during development.

Since Flo is an assassin and performing an indirect kill is slightly trickier than killing the enemy directly (which detracts Karma Points and that is bad for the score), I thought it would've been better to reward the player for things like that.
It needs proper explanation, yeah.

I could add a few extra line of dialogue for Marty in his second commercial in order to explain it or I could just add the received points in the "scoring screen" at the end of the mission (something like: "Indirect Kills: 5 = +50 points, Alerts: 5 = -50 points").
(Or do both).

As for the lack of feedback: I dunno. It could be. I mean yes, it's part of the reason probably. The fact is there's a big gap between download\views\subscribers and "endgame impressions", which are only three in total, two of which from you betatesters (you couldn't escape from my urgency to know MuaHhaHAhahaHAHa ehrm).

Just wanted to know if there was someone among the subscribers who played it and somehow stopped because of some, I dunno, strange game breaking bug? Because that someone thought the game design\level design was bad in some sections? Things like that.
Knowing will be of some help to me.
I realize there might be a whole lot of other reasons (maybe someone didn't appreciate the game's genre, maybe most of the downloads\views come from unregistered guests, maybe someone finished but doesn't want\have time to write a full impression\review and I can understand that, etc...)
but just in case, you never know.

I want the sequel to NOT have any reason for anyone to give up on playing it! 8D
So any feedback is appreciated and will help the cause.

That's all, just a quick reminder that everyone can come here and kick my butt with criticism, that's fine. xD