Crowdfunding a game I'm developing: ReTux (Mario-inspired game)

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quantumgravity
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Joined: 04/22/2013

I love the humour of the intro ;)
besides it looks great.
Thanks for developing it without enough financial support.

hack and hack
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Joined: 04/02/2015

From a purely programming point of view, this is beyond nice!

About the level design, a minor thing bothering me is some of those big green vertical pipes appear like they're on the foreground (like a wall) when they're not at all.
Other than that, the music, the design, it all works very well. Redoing the graphics (more pro) would make it even better.

Adding some specific, more unique gameplay possibilities would make it a really great game, taking it beyond the good "clone" status to a really original game (tons of possibilities here).

I like the weird 90's dance club music that appears sometimes, it gives a funny WTF moment. Speaking of the music, some of it is impressive.

Bravo, it's inspiring.

onpon4
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Joined: 05/30/2012

Thank you. :)

A full graphics overhaul is unlikely. The new run animation alone cost $200; that could easily expand to thousands of dollars if everything is replaced, which would make the game a huge financial loss for me with what has been raised at this point. But I'll be paying artists for touch-ups: making sure all the tiles tile properly, adding a proper "break" effect for boxes, and adding a sort of ice shatter effect for the ice bullets, in particular.

suitsmeveryfine
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Joined: 08/15/2014

I like the new little changes, especially the running animation. I also like the story element of the game, although fighting the king alone over a 5% fish tax is a bit petty perhaps. Maybe he could meet other penguins along the way with whom he could communicate? Perhaps they're also against the king's rule and want to help out?

onpon4
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Joined: 05/30/2012

Yes, Tux is an anti-hero in this game. My current plan is to imply, through a dialog exchange with one of the bosses, that Raccot actually has some sort of evil plan. But Tux is going to ignore all that and keep his focus on his opposition to the fish tax. A sort of circumstantial heroism thing, and a bit of a parody of the typical hero/villain dynamic.

Adding other penguins isn't something I'm going to do. That would probably cost another $200-$300 for the sprites (unless they were lazy recolors of Tux, which I don't think would cut it), and it would be mostly superfluous. As for having such NPCs help you out, I don't now how I could add such a mechanic that works in a reasonable way for an action platformer, and there's no guarantee that it would be trivial to implement.

suitsmeveryfine
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Joined: 08/15/2014

I was thinking that they could help out by giving hints, keys, fish, kicksleds or weapons from inside their igloos. They wouldn't need to be moving around, but, yes, it would require some drawing of course.

A sort of circumstantial heroism thing, and a bit of a parody of the typical hero/villain dynamic.

I like this. By the way, have you planned for i18n so that the game can be easily translated using PO-files? If so, I believe that many here are ready to help you with that.

onpon4
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Joined: 05/30/2012

> By the way, have you planned for i18n so that the game can be easily translated using PO-files?

No, but if there's interest in that, I can look into it.

suitsmeveryfine
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Joined: 08/15/2014

I'm interested at least. If you think this game should ever exist in other languages than English, then it's much easier to implement i18n from the start. I'd be happy to translate into Swedish, the native language of The Penguin himself :)

hack and hack
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Joined: 04/02/2015

Ah that's right, forgot about that.
Anything animated represents several images to change.
What about the tiles though?
Just changing some tiles could make instant modifications (in theory).

Approximately, how much fixed images are they besides anything that's animated, even the plateforms maybe)?

onpon4
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Joined: 05/30/2012

These are the graphical defects I can think of that I intend to fix:

- Inconsistent coloring in some of the snow tiles (a few of them are more white than the rest)
- Seams when tiling the castle tiles
- Lack of a proper freeze sprite for the flying Spiky
- Lack of a "break" effect when crates are broken
- Lack of a "shatter" effect when an ice bullet hits something
- Ugly rusty spring compression images

If you're asking how many images are in a tileset, it depends on the tileset. The castle tileset has 30 32x32 images in total, while the snow tileset has around 200 images of that size. I think the cost of replacing one would generally be about the same as the cost for replacing an animation.

hack and hack
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Joined: 04/02/2015

I just downloaded the SuperTux data files, and, yeah, that's a huge quantity of images.
I can see now: the problem is that the SuperTux team used blur (they should have sticked with flats).

What's interesting though is that at a small size (like for a portable console),
the game looks pro, maybe with a non transparent high contrast text background for better readability.
Perfect example: see that igloo in the intro? In classic pixel art, it would look infinitely better.
I was comparing with mario 1 to 3 designs, all the shadows are simple flats. I think it looks better.

Hey, maybe a trick is to mass-modify all the files to push them to a lower res with imagemagic, thus maybe giving them a nice pixel effect.
Actually I just tried the GIMP pixelize filter.
It can look better, but it doesn't eliminate that blurred look completely.

onpon4
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Joined: 05/30/2012

Another new alpha release of ReTux is now available:

https://savannah.nongnu.org/forum/forum.php?forum_id=8432

With this, the graphical flaws have been fixed. All that's left is 11 more levels, the level editor guide, Raccot, and some bugfixes (mainly a bug in xsge_physics that can sometimes cause rocks to push you through a slope if it falls on you).