Hey guys,

I didn't want to demo this until it was near completion, but as I'm using it as part of my applications to various games studios, I'd really appreciate it if you could test that it works on your machine (Windows XP / Vista). Please tell me if it runs smoothly, the fps, and whether or not the mouse feels ok.

Also, please give me your opinion of whether or not it'd make a decent demo.. or if you think it's a bit naff tell me why.

Thanks in advance.

Here's a screenie too:

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Download

Unable to start the exe. WinXP.

Screenshot looks very promising. Downloading right now, will try it first thing tomorrow morning ... even before my fourth cup of coffee.

Bugger.

Could you try replacing the exe with the one attached and see if that works? I'll also update the original attachment.

Aw man...I'm getting the same thing as Seppl. (WinXP, too)

Looks pretty!

It's now in windowed mode, maybe that will work. Does your monitor / graphics card support 1024x768?

Works great! Looks very nice and polished (love the little scroll in the castle menu, and the card movements for the battle scenes). I didn't have much of an idea of what was going on (just clicked around on stuff...), so a tutorial level or something like that would be nice (though purely as a portrayal of your abilities, it's great).

I wonder why it wouldn't work fullscreen... I run my desktop at 1600x1200x32, so I can't imagine that was the problem...

(also...was the world rotating after every turn?)

Hopefully I'll be able to offer more of an opinion of it as a game in a little while.

Oh, and I got nice fps (mid-sixties) on relatively low-end hardware.

It's amazing!! And it runs no problem, even as a 1024x768 window on a 1024x768 desktop (!) 32bpp.
Visually, it's stunning. I really like the details like the kind of smooth particles that give some animations to the atmosphere.
I'm getting 45 fps, down to 35 in the worst cases, and visually it scrolls much better than these figures could tell.
Still using a P3 600Mhz with an AGP 2x video card. Running Win98.

As for a demo, the only thing that slows down the good impression is that it takes quite a few tries to do anything. I managed to move a knight, but I couldn't pass a castle, and the crossed swords didn't seem to get into the fight I expected.
I opened the castles menus and saw the character portraits (recruitments probably), I swapped cards in the units "hand", I saw a battle where I choose which unit attacks which.

All these I would have seen much more quickly if there was for example a status bar that give info on what my mouse cursor is on, and the actions that will happen if I click either mouse buttons. Or, for a much smaller change: an "record/playback" feature that records your own mouse actions, and replays them as a tutorial.

It was too big to fit in this screen (not your fault) so all I can say is very nice and polished looking graphics.

who did the graphics?

Thanks for the feedback so far, I'm glad it's at least running now. I think it will work in full screen mode too, it was just that I had some AGL_REQUIRE parameters (multi-sampling etc) set. I'll leave it in windowed mode for the moment though.

Apart from the hero avatars, I did most of the graphics myself (well, my brother did a few pieces here and there).

Hi James, this game looks very nice. I cannot seem to run it though. The game reports
~40 fps, but my mouse isn't being updated that many times. Its like my mouse is running at 1 fps because it skips and only really changes once per second. I am running Windows XP 1024x768x16. It looks very promising though and the visuals are very well done.

Do you mind trying with your desktop at 32 bit colour please? - also, you've made me realise that it's reporting the wrong fps, so thanks for that.

You guys put my art work to shame.
I wouldnt even call my drawing artwork since they tend to suck hehe.

I need to find someone like you guys for my project.

It's looking very nice, but I had no idea:

• what I was supposed to do (i.e., what the goal is),

• or how I would go about that.

I was trying to click a few things, but ultimately, I was lost

If you were to distribute it without any comments on it, make sure you include at least a readme pointing out the core game mechanics and how the interface works

well, it wouldn't fit in my 1024x768 resolution and when I tried to move the mouse to the window title bar to move it further up it just scrolled about a mile into space.

In general: left-click is selection,right-click is action. To move a hero, select it, then right-click to select a location to move to, right click that location again to actually mover their. To attack another hero, right click it if it is in range.

I thought that would be obvious enough for the user to work out in 1 minute. It's far from being a playable game, it's just meant to give a couple of minutes of messing around. But you're right, for it to be a serious demo it should have some sort of tutorial.. I just don't have the time for that.

The game play and strategy is going to revolve around the fact that the world is constantly rotating - you need to plan the timing of your attacks to take advantage of this because trajectories and hero movement is affected by the slope of the landscape. There's not enough of a game in place to really see this yet, but maybe you can get a feeling of what it might be like... with a bit of imagination

Alright, there were a few things that I wanted to say before, but I figured I'd play it some more and include my little thoughts...but...there isn't really a whole lot for me to say. The game looks great, plays really nicely (once you figure out what's going on), and the 'rotating world' is a really interesting twist.

My little thoughts:

1. The little health gem/circle thing on the cards blends in with the cards...maybe a green tint? Or fading from green to red as their health is lowered? It took me a while to realize that they were relevant, and not just there for decoration. (that could definitely just be me though)

2. Lower-left minimap thing is awesome. Zooms in and out, right-click to drag the view around...I did encounter a weird bug with the camera, though. When switching from player two to player one, the view moved against the left wall of the bounding circle thing that's surrounding the world. (this'd be where I finally played with the minimap) I had to scroll back to where my people were, and every turn after that, the player one view would always start as far to the left as possible. I shut the game down, ran it again, and haven't been able to reproduce it since.

3. Soldiers that I defeated (I think...I destroyed all their cards) just seemed to stand there...dunno what's up with that...

Not really my kind of game, but I can say it's a good idea executed very well!

ok, now it works. And I'm very impressed. Yeah... Everything I could say is mentioned already.

67 fps
WinXP
Athlon XP 2400+
Radeon 9600pro

Thanks for the feedback.

I know it isn't exactly on topic but I feel it needs to be implied.
I won't be playing for obvious reasons.

66 fps
WinXP
AMD Athlon 64 X2 4600+
GeForce 8800 GT
2 gig RAM

(I have yet to try it under Wine)

It ran smoothly, mouse OK, ~20 - 23 fps, didn't know what to do otherwise.
Win XP SP2, Sempron64, Nvidia 5500FX, Via chipset, 1Gb memory.