The world of Tycho Brahe

Hi guys,

Check this out - I've been working on a game about the famous danish astronomer Tycho Brahe and it's almost finished.

http://www.iosq.dk/tycho/ (18 mb)

To get started go to the above url and when the intro screen appears hit "Start" and then "Ok". You'll start in a room. You can talk to the king sitting on the throne or if you go to the door on the left, you can go to the island of Hven, where the main part of the game takes place.

It's in danish only, since it's meant to be an educational game for kids ages 10-14. It's only meant to be played online.

I would really appreciate all the feedback you can give me! What's the navigation like, visual style, is the text readable, etc.

I've also placed a temporary fps-counter in the left corner of the screen and I would be really interested in knowing what kind of framecounts you all get - especially on the main island in the game.

This version of the game is NOT for people using an 800x600 resolution

Thanks!

 

Thats really really cool! I am getting 40 -60 FPS on my Mac Pro. I don't know danish but it was still really really cool! I like the hexagon design. It reminds me of a board game.

 

i have a frame rate of about 50 on my pc (2X 3ghz, 2gb ram, geforce 7800gt) the text is redable except for when you talk to the people, you should change the red colour on the paper as the text is also red. except for that the only thing that really annoys me is the way you turn the character, i dont know how you could'v done it better but i dont like the way its done. its difficult to aim at somthing, maybe change camera aiming to the mouse.

oh and you need some textures, while its not critical it does make the game look slightly amaturish

EDIT

i just found a non repeatable bug, when i walked towards the left door on hven i suddently stood in mid air at about the doors hight, also whenever i get close to walls the game gets very jumpy


EDIT

also if you press shift to run you can run through the walls (avoid the doors where you have to pay a star )

just changed the game to full screen and managed to get the fps to around 100

some of the things you have to pick up (like the paper and ink at the priest) is almost out of reach and the controls doent exactly make it any easier

i looked at two of the pictures in the wierd little light blue roofed building, (cant remember what its called but tycho was in there), i enlargend them and then clicked ok, and suddently they started to drift in different directions until they hit somthing...

 

Wow! Very cool. I could almost understand what it was saying! And I also get around 70 FPS on my iMac 2 gHz Core 2 Duo

 

Neat, neat, neat. I'm doing something similar. I'm glad you've found a way to balance the effort it takes to add assets and the reward of making progress. I've been struggling with this, and omitting textures actually seems a good way to get everything set down before going back and sprucing up the world.

 

woah, that's very encouraging guys!

I'm amazed at the framerates you're getting - on my macbook pro 2.16 ghz core duo i'm only getting about 30 fps... looks like I've been duped by my apple-dealer :-/

about the textures: It was a very early decision in the design proces that we were going for a sort of cartoonish look, since it would've been almost impossible to do a fully textured game world for one person... but yeah, I agree, it would definitely improve it if it was textured.

I've uploaded a new version of the game with a bug-fix for a bug which may have caused the game to load very slowly and/or crash firefox. I've also changed the text-colour to pure black and removed the shift-key-run feature (which was just one I used when developing anyway). Please let me know if any of you are still having problems with crash/loadtime

shalow:
1. the non-repeatable bug sounds strange, I haven't had that problem in a while. Sounds like some kind of collision-weirdness... hmm... interesting.

2. about the camera: it's done that way to be as easy as possible to navigate. We considered binding the camera to the mouse, but that just made it easier for fps-gamers and harder for everyone else. Do you know exactly what's bothering you about it? it rotates too fast, maybe?

3. I'll look into placing some of the objects in a way that's more accessible tomorrow. Good point.

4. about the pictures: They're meant to fall down when you touch them, but not to slide left... I'll look into it.


And thanks for the otherwise positive feedback!

 

HINT: If you solve 3 jobs in the game, you can go back to where you started on the island (where the guy in the green clothes are standing in the shed) and he will let you get back to the king to report what you've learned on the island...

click on the status-button at the top of the screen to see how many jobs you've solved so far.

mostly relevant for those of you speaking danish, I guess :roll:

 

i don't speak danish so i can't really comment on the game interaction, but it works good here so far. i have an intel iMac i get around 50fps outside, except (for some strange reason) when looking at the castle in the center of the island. it doesn't matter if i'm close to it or far away, my framerate dips to 25 the second its in view.

a few suggestions:

-if you can i would make the doors swing open instead of just disappear.
-the light that follows the player around should be culled from all objects except the player (which should be on its own layer). the effect is only really noticable when you're near trees or anything tall - you get a distracting hotspot. it would probably improve performance as well.
-there are a couple of meshes (like the trees) that look like they have a combination of smoothed hard faces - i'd fix the smoothing so the look is consistent.

i kinda like the style of it, and it seems right for the demographic you're shooting for. your object fade works really well too. in the first version the turning seems a bit touchy but now it seems fine ; )

 

Really cool looking! I mean, I had no idea what was going on, but it was cool!

One thing: the character moves too slow and turns too fast - some tweaking will make it much easier to control.

 

I second that.

 

I've tweaked the controls, so now the camera rotates with half speed and the avatar moves 50% faster - is this better than before? worse?

I just discovered that I can't go to fullscreen mode - the only thing that happens is that Firefox opens a new empty browser window. Is this a webplayer bug? Does anyone else have this problem?

 

try to make the rotate decelerate a lot faster, i dont mind it accelerating but its difficult to aim when it accelerates like that.