WIP: Cynthia Johnson

[Tricky]

Cynthia Johnson

The page of the game on Game Jolt



Meet Cynthia Johnson. An archeologist who believes in the existence of forgotten realms, like Atlantis and many more and she starts her quest in Egypt to search for clues to solid evidence these realms actually exist.

Cynthia is a puzzle game, in which Cynthia is always placed in a puzzle you have to solve, by either moving Cynthia around or to make a grab stuff she can push or pull or swap or collect. Her quest starts in Egypt, but who knows where she has to go next? As you complete a realm new realms with new puzzles will unlock.

The game will feature on-line charts of those players who did it in the lowest amount of actions or the least amount of time. Can you beat other players?


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Like I said this game is a work in process. I am still adding new puzzles to it. I have not yet really decided how many that will be, but I do have a bit of an idea in this. This is just a nice puzzle game, in which all puzzles have one goal. Cynthia must reach the exit. How you do that, is up to you to puzzle out. The game has been set up in a "full package" for Mac and Windows. For Linux users I've set up a download with for now only the .love file itself. The game has been set up for Love 0.10.2

This WIP-demo only contains the realms Egypt, Ireland and Greece. Savegame files are set up to be transferrable to the full version, though.

If you find any bugs I don't know of, please notify me in my Issue Tracker

[ivan]

Hello, Tricky.
Looks like a respectable start, but your game needs work.
You lost me with the download size - there's no reason a game like this should be 90 Mb. Please make sure your assets are properly compressed (PNG, OGG or FLAC).
Based on the screenshots, the buttons look too tiny. If you want to support mouse/touchscreens then I'd suggest just moving the character towards the cursor. Having to click on buttons to move adds an unnecessary layer of complexity.
Don't want to sound too discouraging, but the art needs work too.
Good luck!

[Tricky]

I've kept the art simplistic for two reasons. I'm not the greatest art designer, I shall admit that. And besides I wanted to go for a more old school look. The high download size is most of all... the background music. They are just mp3 and ogg files. All I can do to reduce the download size is remove them or drastically lower their sound quality. The game scripts have been designed to ignore the music if it doesn't exist. My RPG games (not written in LÖVE, but available through Game Jolt too) do feature non-music versions, however the reason why I didn't do it yet for this game is because I need to change and re-upload the game too much at the present time, and uploading at Game Jolt can be quite bothersome too. The final version is very likely to be split up like that.
Moving to the cursor has been considered, however this is a puzzle game, and the route you have to take is something the player has to puzzle out. It's basically one of the key elements. Moving to the cursor would destroy that element and is why I chose not to in this particular game. The RPG games I mentioned earlier work with an A* pathfinder routine, since that element didn't play a role there, or at least not as heavily as it does in Cynthia Johnson. I already made a Lua version of that routine (originally written in BlitzBasic), which I can use in basically any Lua based engine (including LÖVE). Trust me, I thought that one through. I know it LOOKS needlessly complex, but this is NOT a point and click adventure.

[ivan]

Tricky, I'm trying to help you out here.
It's fine if you don't want to include a reasonably-sized .love file and a screenshot in your post.
But keep in mind that you're not going to get a lot of feedback this way.

[Tricky]

Screenshots are not that much of a problem. If that is what you want, here


And there are more in the link I provided.

As for the size I've already told why it is the way it is. My prime concern is getting the game to work at all. Putting all music files in and out the love file works counter-productive in that, but I've already said how I've taken my pre-cautions to allow smaller downloads too once the game is in the finalizing stage. Like I said I've already taken the high sizes of this game into account before I began working on it. What I've shown now is only what I have so far, nothing more.

The RPGs where non-music versions are there were working with a very sophisticated patching system, allowing me put the music files in different resource archives. Creating a non-audio version was easy there. Just leave the music patches out of the distribution and tadaaa... I used features for that zip doesn't support, though and as LÖVE ties me to zip... :-/

Also, I'm not angry or throwing mud or anything. I'm only explaining why things are the way the are at this point and why I chose certain roads for this particular game. The mechanics of a puzzle game are quite often questionable until you got the full point of the developer's goals, and I knew Cynthia Johnson was a bit of a strange beast that would easily be taken the wrong way, when I started working on it. Actually before that already I'm therefore not surprised you came up with the point-where-to-go idea (and I had already translated that A* routine from Blitz to Lua before this project began, or even the first ideas for it were on my drawing board), as it already crossed my mind but I dismissed that idea as that would cause the computer to solve most of the puzzles for you or the very important factors of it. So I'm not saying you're crazy for brining it up. The production I've planned after Cynthia will actually make great use of an A* based pathfinder routine, and I'm also brainstorming to set up a very fast interface for that. With fast I mean, fast for the user to find all functions and make use of them. But then again, that won't be a puzzle game, and thus allowing me (and also requiring me) to think differently.

Don't take me for a brat unable to deal with criticism. I've been trained as a reviewer on semi-professional level, and I am even working as a moderator (on Game Jolt) in which I sometimes have to judge "feedback fights". I do see the logic in your feedback, and based on that I just saw a few more in-depth explanations of the game itself and the current dev situation where in order, to clear up any form of misunderstanding some roads I took could cause (and which I also kind of expected). Perhaps I need to shoot a few more tutorial videos on YouTube, in order to get a few things more clear.