I completed a playthrough today. I encountered a few bugs, and a few things I deem problems with the design.
This was played on Windows XP with Service Pack 3 (and other current patches).
Bugs:
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Exiting the editor and continuing to play often causes extreme slowdown, and sometimes crashes. It’s speedy and stable when entering, and actually inside, the editor. The problem is observable while exiting, and the slowdown appears to be reliable though the crashing is not.
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Dieing in the level “Bombing Fools” causes me to respawn in the level “Darkness Central”.
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Dieing while delivering the final blow to Milgram causes something strange to happen. Frogatto turns glowing white with a blue tinge. Part of the ending conversation plays. Then you respawn in the area just outside Milgram’s room. The in-game controls no longer respond, but the Escape menu works. Using the Escape menu to return to the main menu leaves you with a main menu that doesn’t work. Restarting the game fixes this, of course.
Design Problems:
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There should be a hint around invisible paths. It could be audio (wind sound?) and/or video (cracks, as in the original Zelda?), but there needs to be one. Expecting people to grind against every wall, and jump into every bramble pit, in the hopes that there’s a invisible path, isn’t very reasonable.
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There should be a visible hint around bottomless pits. I frequently have to make leaps of faith to reach parts of a level. I can’t tell the difference between there being a screen below me, and nothing at all. I suggest rendering the bottom edge of the map with a visible marker (a strip of spikes, or skull and crossbones, or a slow ‘beating’ red flash?), and making sure this is visible from where the character stands on a 768 pixel tall screen.
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Coins and golden fruit could use more sparkles. Sometimes silver coins are hard to spot in gray backgrounds. Golden fruit are frequently very hard to spot, because tree leaves are often rendered over them (I think this is a bad decision) so only their sparkles show through. They’re especially hard to see in the amber-colored trees.
Other ‘Issues’ That Aren’t Bugs:
This stuff may be my own ignorance or just a matter of taste, but I feel the need to share it.
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If there’s a way to view the achievements you have, and the ones you don’t yet have (and how to get them), I have yet to figure it out. This should be made more clear.
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The game is very short. What there is of it is wonderful. The controls are perfectly tight. The graphics are gorgeous. The music is great. There just needs to be more of it, especially for $10. Most other $10 games are quite a bit longer.
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Consider a different save system. I’d rather not have to replay long stretches just because I needed to close the game. The current system forces me to do that since the save points are far apart. The respawn points are usually sanely placed, but they don’t save to disk. They could save to disk, but there are times I would have liked to ‘rewind’ (e.g. the room right before Milgram’s, where if I miss a coin I can’t go back to the start of the room given the way the room must be traversed (you can’t go ‘the other way’)). Personally, I’d like all the respawn points to be made save points, with a more traditional PC save system, where I can save/load as many files as I please, and am asked if I want to overwrite them.
A Personal Note:
This is intended as constructive criticism. I quite like the game, and don’t regret purchasing it. A list of bugs and other problems is necessarily purely negative. For examples of things I particularly liked: the forest levels (everything), the sky in the dungeon levels (orange moon, and purple and red sky), the music in Milgram’s room, and the amazing engine and editor.
We’re strongly hoping to fix that down the road; not sure quite when, though. 1.4 or 1.5.
The design problems are less pressing than the errors, so we’ll look at them later.
