I’m playing through Challenging mode now, and I am in the cave.
I don’t think it’s fun to have every flat surface carpeted with dozens of the little white creepers. Additionally, in Darkness Central, the game’s FPS actually drops dramatically halfway through the level, rendering it nearly unplayable. Perhaps there is some way to ensure that new monsters are not spawned if there are already enough nearby.
I think that might be the worst-infected level, so it gets better as you get on at least. Re speed: What sort of system are you playing Frogatto on?
Uh, the only thing I can think of is to disable desktop compositing effects, if you’ve got them enabled. My laptop is about the same specs as yours, something by Acer, stats on the OS, memory, and CPU. I had problems with framerate until I disabled all the fancy things, at which point it jumped from 30 fps to 400 on the titlescreen. :-\
[quote=“rjaguar3, post:1, topic:324”]I’m playing through Challenging mode now, and I am in the cave.
I don’t think it’s fun to have every flat surface carpeted with dozens of the little white creepers. Perhaps there is some way to ensure that new monsters are not spawned if there are already enough nearby.[/quote]
These were carefully tuned to have gameplay that actually worked; “flood” enemies are hard to do right, and they’re something we’ve been gradually figuring out the "do"s and "don’t"s of. Probably the most important factor we’ve worked on is that they’re non-blocking. You’ll get hurt by them, but they never “trap” you - you can always dash right through them. They’ve also got unusually low HP; ideal for blasting through with a flurry of energy shots.
Finally, of course, we’ve had them set up since the start to be capped in number per area. If you’re playing on challenging, you’ll find they have about twice the count, and their spawn rate is quite a bit faster.
Like many “onslaught” levels in FPSs, it’s a kind of enemy that forces you to keep moving - if you don’t like them, well, they’re only there for a few levels after that. Halfways into the caves, when things go deep blue, that’s the end of them.
That’s a serious performance/setting problem on your computer; it doesn’t drop a single frame on mine, and mine’s pretty old. I suggest trying what DDR pointed out.
I never thought they were particularly problematic, even in large numbers. They don’t directly attack the player, they can be killed by jumping on their heads, and it looks like all the spawn points in Darkness Central are carefully placed so that the creepers all follow a path that causes them to eventually die (either by falling into the water or leaving the level), rather form an infinite clump.
(Note that even though my forum title says I’m a developer, I didn’t have anything to do with the level design; in this case, I’m a player disagreeing, not a stubborn designer refusing to listen to criticism)
EDIT: Ninja’d by Jetrel. He probably did make the level, but he’s also pretty good at taking criticism. Didn’t mean to imply otherwise, I just wasn’t expecting him to answer exactly then.
I’ve also never had trouble with frame rate in Frogatto, but I agree that there should probably be a failsafe to keep them from spawning past a certain upper limit just in case.
I’m not sure that’s necessarily a good thing for the later levels to be easier. Ideally, an enemy should be introduced in a less-threatening context to give the player a chance to learn the rules, and then once they’re comfortable things get serious.