Galder beta version

[Fenris]

Finally, after almost two years of on-and-off work, Galder is ready for beta testing. In practice means that it is feature-complete. Coming up are sound effects, music by Taxxodium and a few graphics assets by Gatti.

http://galder.rusted.se/galdershot.png

Grab the universal binary from http://galder.rusted.se/galderbeta.dmg

Galder is a complete remake of my uDG 2k2 entry that has been vastly improved, built on top of my new engine, BlackEngine. Apart from a complete single-player puzzle game there is a hot-seat mode, two network modes (one real-time Haste mode) with LAN discovery, a (hitherto very underused) shader engine, online highscore list and everything else you would except from a new indie game.


If you want to try the online highscore ladder, register at http://galder.rusted.se/registeruser.php. Everyone who registers and provides some sort of constructive feedback above the level of "cool game lol" will get a proper licence upon release.
I'm not giving any instructions here, as I'm interested in seeing how the tutorial works for you guys. If you can't figure it out in four minutes, neither can the casual gamers.
The fullscreen switch is a bit subtle - it's the buggy button in the lower right corner of the screen. Try changing the fullscreen resolution in the preferences, too.
All the controls are the icons along the fourth quadrant of the circle. You can also open the preferences and highscore lists by clicking the yellow squares along the top and right sides of the screen.


Feedback I'm looking for:

Practically ALL of the graphics are placeholders. If there's a graphics glitch, I probably know about it. Comments are of course still welcome.
I would love it if someone could try the LAN play, or even remote play across the internet. There is no NAT punch-through yet, so if you want to try it, open ports 60666 and 60667. I hope to be able to run a NAT penetration server when the game actually releases. If you're feeling fancy, you can start two instances of the game on one machine (Terminal, cd into Galder.app/Contents/MacOS/ and run "./Galder &" twice) and then start one instance as the server and then have the other one connect to "localhost").
The Advisor (the question mark) should be able to help you figure out the netplay configuration window. Is it? Do you get what it's saying?
If you manage to connect, are the game modes any fun?
How does it hold up on multiple monitors? Does it end up on the screen where the window is?
There are keyboard controls, too. Cmd, arrows and space. Do they make sense - were you able to figure them out on your own?
People running 10.3 - does it run at all? It requires 10.3.9, but I haven't been able to test that for a year or so.

Apart from that, it should be fully working and stable, but ugly. I deliberately held off working on the visuals and polish in order to stay focused on getting all the features in.

Have a great time with it - i'm very interested in any comments and critisisms.

[lightbringer]

Nice!

-Issues-
- Clicking suggested move turns the advisory blank and doesn't allow you to close it

-Suggestions-
- I don't know how useful having multiple saved boards is, I'd think about removing that
- I don't like having the yellow tabs on the top and the right (or the fullscreen button in the corner), I'd rather see those as items in the main menu so you don't have to click around to figure out what these things are (or simply label them)

I'm going to enjoy the polishing stage ahead.

[macnib]

This is the first time I've run the Galder program. There is no webpage, so my initial understanding of what I'm about to experience is limited with the exception of the screenshot on this thread.

First impressions ... which can be illuminating ... here goes ... no hard feelings ...

Download. No problems. Click on galderbeta.dmg. Hmm, Galder icon looks real slick. Warm fuzzy feeling. Drag onto desktop. Double click...

Fullscreen mode with parchment background. Initially, I was a little confused but once I got to the point that you look up the same crystals and click then I got it -- little yellow window clued me into it. Sort of reminds me of stickies. Interesting. Font is rough. A bunch of crystals in circles. I like the little flash when the crystals disappear! I can rotate the crystals around in a circle and get them to match up. Interesting. Strange needles. Sort of reminds me of a compas point.

I have a Cinema HD display. On the left and right hand sides of the window, the background texture gets stretched -- the last pixels are stretched. Figured this might have to do with resolution. So, I tried to change resolution but I think I have to restart the program. I notice there is an odd icon in the lower right hand corner of the screen -- when I click it I go into window mode. Seems like this happened only the first time I played for some reason. The background texture looked fine on subsequent launches.

I found it a little difficult with the advisor window. Its helpful but the player really wants to start clicking on the crystals immediatly at the point they figure the basic thing out -- click on the similiar crystals in the inner circle. But I could not close the advisor window -- it was not intuitive. That is, there is a window directly over the main gameplay area that says "Suggest Move Netplay Guide Tutorial". I just wanna click. But the yellow window has no close box! Then I figured out I click on the ? symbol and it disappears but it took a few minutes to figure it out. Wait a minute, I can drag this window out of the way -- might want to put something that looks like a scroll bar in the window.

Suggest move shows an empty window.

Later on, for some reason, it was like my mouse movement was being restricted. I could not get my mouse over the ? icon or the preference icon under it. I'm using a wacom tablet with a mouse. Seemed to not be a problem initially. Hmm, its like my mouse is being restricted to a rectangle in the upper left portion of the window but its not matching the resolution. I wonder is the resolution initially set to something common like 1024x768?

Hmm, I'll remove the Galder preference file. Ah, now I can move my mouse again properly. I think there is a rect being saved but when I change resolution the old rect is being used.(?) Ya, problem is with my mouse restricted to the smaller rectangle, I can't get to preferences to fix the problem -- I have to quit with control q and delete the preferences file.

I notice when I do get info on the program icon there is no version.

Dual 2 GHz PPC G5 1 gig ram. ATI 9800

[Fenris]

First off, I fixed a glitch with the user registration. Should work good now.

@lightbringer: seems the "suggested move" is broken. Thanks for the heads-up, both to you and Macnib. About the "board selector", that would be a very radical "Kill your darlings". I'll see what people are saying going forward. Thanks for the feedback.

@macnib: whoa, thanks a lot for that "first impressions" post. Illuminating indeed. I've had a couple of comments about the advisor window being in the way - I'll see if I can find a better place to put it. It is draggable, but I guess that's not very obvious with the current graphics set. I'm also interested in the problem to move the mouse - haven't seen that before. It should play nice with all resolutions, and gracefully handing widescreens and so on. When you say that you couldn't move the mouse, does that mean that the cursor stops moving, or that it just doesn't detect clicks in that area?

Thanks for the feedback, I assure you than I'm hard at work going down my list. ;)

[Najdorf]

Hey hey, cool, but needs to be more dynamic some way imo:

One idea i was thinking is this: notice how the board looks like a cone? 3d-ize it! Say the inner circle in the middle is further away from the view, while the outer circle closer. This could be interpreted like a cone pointing downwards and seen from the above, or even a tube in perspective. From the above so you can interpret pieces going towards the center as falling down (by gravity)

Also, how about pieces that keep dropping from the exterior circle (a la tetris)? This way the player will have to keep clicking to avoid the pieces piling up eccessively on one column. One nifty way of doing this is having pieces falling in a circular way all around the outer circle one at a time. so you would have to "smooth" the columns height, so rotating the circles might be more useful (to lower a column that stands out and will make you lose soon [i.e. when a piece is dropped over it]).

I hope I was clear enough :)

EDIT: ooh, another idea: what about if in the middle there is a spaceship that shoots! :)

[macnib]

The mouse bug is repeatable. I can move the mouse and I see the mouse cursor.

The problem is the mouse movement is being restricted to a rectangle that is smaller than the viewable area. The rectangle starts in the upper left corner of the screen to a point just above the "?" icon. Also, the rectangle ends just to the right of the icons and I cannot move the mouse over to the icon in the lower left portion of the window ( cannot get to window mode icon ). So, I cannot move my mouse down to the "?" icon or preferences icon. My typical monitor setting is 1344x840. Though, it can go up to 1920x1200.

The mouse cursor is really small too.

Is the viewport being reset after I change resolution?

[macnib]

Was surfing the net ... viola! A news story about Galder on maccentral. :)

Anyhow, downloaded the dmg file.

Much better than what I tested before. I like the animated crystals flying on the screen. The new sounds add much to the game. I see the background graphics are there. The breaking crystals are cool too.

I did run into two issues.

I got to the end of my first game. It sort of hung. I was running the game in window mode. For some reason, I could not get the Galdar finder menu to work properly. But if I clicked on the desktop that would work. Command Q did not work either. So, I had to force quit. When I played another game a winners score list was shown. Seemed like something in the event loop was hung up -- network connection?

When I went into fullscreen mode, I still have that rectangle/mouse issue. So, I could not get my mouse over any of the icons on the lower right. Its like the mouse is only allowed to move in a smaller rectangle about 70% of the size of the full screen window. And the resolution of the mouse icon is extremely small. I typically run in 1344 x 840. Fortunately, I could command Q in the case -- if I could not of done command Q then I would of had to reboot.

Also, around the end of the game only the inner circle had crystals. The game would prompt me with a dialog explaining the situation. This is helpful. But this seems to happen for every game. Maybe it should only tell me that once or twice?

Otherwise, much improvement from the last time I played Galder.

[lightbringer]

Any updates?

[Fenris]

Hi everyone,
Sorry about the lack of updates in this thread, but work is coming along nicely. I've managed to rack up a publishing deal with FastForward Software, and in the air of their name, they've postulated a release date in very early October. So, you can understand that I'm spending my time fixing bugs and polishing... ;)

Work is going very well – there has been a slew of bugs fixed. Still, said software seems to shape up to some sort of sellable state.

Macnib: I'm still not sure if I've been able to fix your mouse problem – I'll send you a PM about it, if you could please try it out for me.

Stay tuned, there's bound to be stuff happening over the next two weeks. ;)

[Fenris]

Just wanted to post a little progress note here: release in approximately one week, so I'm pretty much living in front of my iMac at the moment. Still, I passed one very important milestone today: ripping up my to-do list (http://idevgames.com/forum/showthread.php?t=14118) after declaring it pretty much checked-off.

A quick screenshot to outline where I'm at the moment:
http://galder.rusted.se/galder2.png

Seven very harsh days in front of me, but there should be a near-final build up here any day now. I'd really, really appreciate some testing help when that happens, wink, wink, nudge nudge.

[EvolPenguin]

Congrats Ivan, can't wait to see it in its final form.

Alex

[Najdorf]

Allright, let us know when you got your release candidate.

Not sure if it's still like that but the first time I played this it defaulted to fullscreen, while this is the kind of game that should default to windowed.

Some kind of rating at the end of a game could be interesting, so if the player sucked tell him "Not too impressive: remember that in order to achieve a high score you need to destroy as many jevels as possible at once" or something llike that, just so that he realizes the game is about achieving a high score, not clicking fast.