[LibertySpike]

[ iNFESTATiON ]
LibertySpike's MZX journal

:: DoZ - Winter 2010

i apologize for the incompleteness of my entry (#79530). my time was severely mismanaged and i paid the price.
it was intentional for the game to take place in one room; in fact, if it ever gets expanded to its original intended design,
the player being permanently stuck in there is meant as an immersion-boosting effect.

wildweasel said something in his review which is the entire point of this game: making you feel hopeless.

WildWeasel said:

"Then again, maybe I’m looking at this entirely the wrong way – maybe death is truly the only way out."

thank you for taking notice. i feel a little.. insulted by reaching an 11th place/F grade, but it gives me inspiration to pick
it up and go further.

another criticism was the typing input engine. i spent 6+ hours trying to figure out input codes and file access commands
in order for that one brief section of the game to function (very true to the poor time handling i mentioned earlier.)
i was being stubborn and felt that small piece was necessary for the correct mood/gameplay to exist. on a positive note,
the struggling involved with coding it taught me a lot about robotic. oh well..

as smaller notes, the drugs were honestly rushed. an entire "quest" featuring the lone NPC was planned at the last minute,
but required way too much work to include before the DoZ ended. truthfully, the drug cabinet is a placeholder element.

going back to the PC scene: if i had more time, the game would be much more dialog inclusive. i just feel inadequate at
writing realistic-sounding scripts. there are supposed to be more "self reflection" type comments made by chrome for
the player's benefit; both for influencing the overall mood and giving hints. so, short summary: the "polished" version of
#79530 (tentatively named "Linger" at the moment) will not leave the player on such glaring "figure it out yourself" moments.

..and as for the entire player injury problem: the basic intentions of that is to create a sense of urgency. even though the
engine covering it seems to contain a bug (for creating a situation of -9% blood loss,) the point is immersing the player
in the survival mindset. the shoddily done drugs were also meant as a temporary "cure" for the bleeding.

i can't think of much more, but thanks for honestly judging; pyro1588, asgromo, and wildweasel.
the feedback will do a lot to propel my ambitions, especially with this game.

This post has been edited by LibertySpike: 12 January 2010 - 04:02 AM

[Pyro1588]

i'm really glad to see you picking this one up again. i liked the general feel of it and i think without the time constraints that you can turn it into a great game. let us know if you need any help!

[weasel]

I actually think this could be a really good game if you could expand upon it a bit and fix up some of the little issues. Don't feel bad about your low ranking; it's rare that anybody goes really well on their first DoZ, and I suppose it's a learning experience.

[ThDPro]

weasel, on Jan 24 2010, 11:13 PM, said:

I actually think this could be a really good game if you could expand upon it a bit and fix up some of the little issues. Don't feel bad about your low ranking; it's rare that anybody goes really well on their first DoZ, and I suppose it's a learning experience.

This was my first doz, and I expected entirely to get last.

[djtiesto]

weasel, on Jan 25 2010, 08:13 AM, said:

I actually think this could be a really good game if you could expand upon it a bit and fix up some of the little issues. Don't feel bad about your low ranking; it's rare that anybody goes really well on their first DoZ, and I suppose it's a learning experience.

First DOZ I ever competed in, I came in 2nd place... every subsequent one I've been DQed tho

[KKairos]

You seem to wear that as much more a badge of honor than it was ever intended to be...

[Old-Sckool]

I have a ton of issues with your game that you should take a look at.

LibertySpike, on Jan 11 2010, 10:56 PM, said:

another criticism was the typing input engine. i spent 6+ hours trying to figure out input codes and file access commands
in order for that one brief section of the game to function (very true to the poor time handling i mentioned earlier.)
i was being stubborn and felt that small piece was necessary for the correct mood/gameplay to exist. on a positive note,
the struggling involved with coding it taught me a lot about robotic. oh well..

Taking a peek at your typing engine, you made a huge mistake in using key_code over key_pressed. Key_pressed returns the lower case char value of the key being pressed, which makes input handling incredibly easy (so if you press a, you get 97, 0 you get 48, space you get 32 etc...). Then it's just a matter of using the string functions to add the result to the end of the string. You can easily achieve this with

set "$string.('$string.length')" "('key_pressed')"

$string.n allows you to set a char value to the string at position n. If n is greater than the string length, the string length will become n+1, and any unfilled spaces will be filled with space chars (char 32).
and $string.length is obviously the length of the string

you can see this at work with this.

: "q"
* "~f&$test&"
wait for 1
if "(('key_pressed'=0)o('key_pressed'>122))" = 1 then "q"
set "$test.('$test.length')" to "('key_pressed')"
goto "q"

Quote

..and as for the entire player injury problem: the basic intentions of that is to create a sense of urgency. even though the
engine covering it seems to contain a bug (for creating a situation of -9% blood loss,) the point is immersing the player
in the survival mindset. the shoddily done drugs were also meant as a temporary "cure" for the bleeding.

There are two reasons you're encountering this issue. First of all, your test for game over only checks for one condition...

if "player-life" = 12 then "finalthoughts"

You should really test if "player-life" <= 12, on the off chance that the player-life dips below your kill point. The other reason is that the bleed bot on your computer screen doesn't test for a death condition, but still causes the player to bleed out.

Now to address some serious issues with your coding practices. Your robots are riddled with busyloops. Just take a look at your bleed out loop.

: "bleed"
inc "local" by 1
if "local" = "bleed-severity" then "injure"
goto "bleed"

By not having your code eventually flow to a cycle ending command like wait 1 or end, you're basically telling the robot to loop 1000 times (the value of bleed-severity) within one cycle (which at speed 4 is roughly 1/20th of a second) before branching to injure. The reason that it isn't actually processed this fast though, is that by default megazeux caps the number of commands per cycle per robot to 40. If you want to make more complex robots, you're absolutely have to increase this limit by setting the built-in COMMANDS counter to a larger number. You should set "commands" to "(40000)" or so as you start out, so that if you accidentally make a mistake, MZX won't hang, but will take up a larger percent of the processor. The code below will set commands to the maximum possible value, but like i said, MZX will hang if you screw up.

I'm pretty sure that once commands is increased, and you start using wait 1s to end your robot's cycle, the bug where your typing engine will not register a key every so often will disappear.

set "commands" (-1>>1)

There's a lot more i could point out, but imma leave it at here for now.