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Pier Solar

Posted: Tue Sep 02, 2008 4:33 am
by TulioAdriano
It is a work of 4 years of Fonzie and I, and also, of all the members of team that joined us along the way. And it is out!

Our public beta has been finally released! Please take a look on our website: http://www.piersolar.com.

It is on the Media section. There's a readme explaining what will change on the future.

I hope you all enjoy playing as much as we have been enjoying doing this game.

Also, this game will show Tiido's TMSE engine in action.

Posted: Tue Sep 02, 2008 6:06 am
by Shiru
Without any doubts, that's great that such a big project reached at least playable demo stage. Graphics, sound and story is matter of taste, but overall it's all good.

Unfortunately, I have to say few bad things about it. Right from start there is four annoying things in very important parts of any RPG game:

- Tile-based movement (harder to walk, and this is RPG, where very much of walking)
- After-scroll (I began to feel dizzy after few minutes of game)
- Message skipping system (I understand why it can be useful, but generally it just slow down process) and blip when skipping messages (which reason to have it?)
- Monowidth font in messages (harder to read, and this is RPG, where very much of reading)

That almost enough to keep me from playing RPG game.

Minor note. For first look those tubes on first location in black area looks like graphical bugs.

Btw, I had problems with downloading of game - nothing happens when click on link. I tried few tens of times before download started.

Posted: Tue Sep 02, 2008 6:21 am
by HardWareMan
I hate those sites on heavy weight flash! And downloading problem still persist.

Posted: Tue Sep 02, 2008 9:08 am
by Chilly Willy
I had to enable pop-up windows for the site before it would download, but otherwise didn't have a problem. Works great on PicoDrive on the PSP. :D

Looking very good. What's the difference between the classic and posterity packs?

Posted: Tue Sep 02, 2008 1:27 pm
by Pascal
Chilly Willy wrote: Looking very good. What's the difference between the classic and posterity packs?
posterity, you got your name in the game credits and manual. you become like a VIP :p

Posted: Wed Sep 03, 2008 2:30 am
by Jorge Nuno
Umm Bashing time :D

The the character moving/camera scorlling is... bad, I think the pokemon games do it better, the camera follows the char movement with no delay.

The text speech appearance should be faster, like line-by-line, and I think the full white background is bad for the eyes... And worse with a 50Hz PAL TV (flickering more noticeable).

At the start the cursor overlaps the Team Credits

The walking animation should be faster, the char seems to be sliding on the ground and the walking itself, I think it should be faster (That sucked in the pokemon) :? Or maybe the char would walk inside buildings and run in the outdoors. :wink:

Sometimes when the char is walking, and hits a wall, it keeps walking in place forever.

Holding <A> the game animations (candles, walking...) run faster.

I think that the team members shouldn't be visible at all, just the leader, like in FF (at least in 7/8/10/10-2), they look like a train...

Enough for now...

Posted: Thu Sep 04, 2008 7:25 am
by ob1
Can't wait to test it.
And sure will purchase this game ;)

Posted: Thu Sep 04, 2008 10:04 am
by Fonzie
Its nice because many comments are already fixed (demo is from april) :D
Thx for the interest.

The the character moving/camera scorlling is... bad, I think the pokemon games do it better, the camera follows the char movement with no delay.
Do you mean, the camera follow the char movement with NOT ENOUGH delay?
In the demo, the camera is totally fixed to the walking sprite, one frame delay at max :P
Because the new camera is a lot more free, it just move when you clearly go in a direction.
So if you already find that the demo delay is too big... haha, u'll cry :D ;)
I think that the team members shouldn't be visible at all, just the leader, like in FF (at least in 7/8/10/10-2), they look like a train...
Tss tss :D train is so great !
The walking animation should be faster, the char seems to be sliding on the ground and the walking itself, I think it should be faster (That sucked in the pokemon) Confused Or maybe the char would walk inside buildings and run in the outdoors. Wink
I had some code that make the animation going faster if the sprite move fast... However, for static sprite that animate, its crazy too slow (since they have no walking speed)... So its something that will be decided for the overall game, sorry. I'll take a look again soon.

Thx all

Fonz

Posted: Mon Sep 08, 2008 8:55 am
by Eke
Well, I downloaded the beta and I liked it a lot, this have a very professional look, the musics are extremely well tuned (it reminded me the first time I played Secret of Mana, Tiido, I'm sure you could have worked on some genesis commercial games if we were back in the 90s) and some ideas (uncommon dialogs between characters, game over screen,...) make this game original upon classical RPG

however, I would like to point some default in my opinion:

1/ the way characters are moving is too sensitive and sometime disturbing: when you hit a wall, it automatically changes the direction. It could have been good if it weren't so sensitive, I found myself sometime turning in circle boucing from wall to wall :-)

2/ graphics are very detailled but some time too much: sprites and characters are quite limited in size but contain a lot of details and sometime it is diffult to distinguish them.

3/ battle scenes: once again, enemies & characters are relatively small, you could have reduced the battle window area a little more and put all status informations a little bigger outside the screen. Some informations are difficult to read and the field appears very large comparing to characters size.

I could not find anything else (I died at the first boss :) ), this is still extremely good for a homebrew game, I liked the "fullscreen" cutscene when introducing main characters, train is indeed great and the charcter design (à la sauce manga :wink:) even if it's not really my taste, suits quit well to the game

Posted: Mon Sep 08, 2008 2:08 pm
by TmEE co.(TM)
(I did not compose the music, I just wrote the sound engine, related tools and I did most of the SFX)