[FINISHED] Wake Up Call

[juno]

That was captivating. Very nice work.

[MZ|One]

Thank you! I'm glad you liked it.

[stripwax]

This is great - I especially liked the part early on where you get the photos to resolve in clarity - I imagine that 'cubist' effect was offline and the game is really just interpolating between the images but the effect is impressive nonetheless.

With the ladder - on my netbook I was getting only about 8 fps there. I could not tell if I was going up or down, or whether I was making progress or not, and as a result I could not get past that section. Eventually the orbs stopped flying past but I still could not see if I was moving or not. Is that intentional or is there a performance problem? (should I just persevere? :-)

[chute]

I enjoyed this game far more than some commercial games that I've paid for. Thank you!

[MZ|One]

Thank you both, that's excellent that you like it. Yeah, in the 'cubist' memory recollection, it is exactly as you say, there are simply about 6-8 precalculated and progressively more and more distorted steps saved in the installation. At each given moment, I draw two of them transparently over each other, with their alphas interpolated.

About the ladder: Thanks for letting me know. I know that the ladder scene is very hardware demanding (I usually run ~500 FPS, but only about 50 in the ladder), though I don't understand why only several hundreds/thousands particles can slow the render down so much. I already scaled the particle count down from what it was, in order to make it run on slower machines, but it still doesn't seem to run everywhere.

I'm sorry you couldn't finish the game. It seems I'll still have to tweak this. I think I'll make the particle count scale down automatically when the FPS drops too low, so that it won't look so nice, but at least would be playable. Worst case, I'll replace them with sprites if the FPS would still be too low. I'll let you know when I'll have this version up.

[MZ|One]

UPDATE: The OP now links to the new minor update version with some performance optimisations. I think the ladder scene should run as smoothly as all the other scenes now.

@stripwax: Can you please tell me if it runs OK on your netbook?
(You can hit F4 in this version to jump to the ladder scene immediately.)

[stripwax]

mz1 - Great! Yes, the ladder scene seems much more performant now!

some things still don't seem right to me (although I don't have a comparison reference point, so apologies if this is intentional): Of course, I think no small part of that disorientation is intentional - but wanted to report in case it's indicates further compatibility/performance problems

here we go:
initially, one of the orbs/particles is kinda yellow, the others are white;
after a few seconds or so, the particle effects disappear completely, leaving just the circle sprites on their own without the particle effects;
it seems possible to get into a state where no progress is being made, still climbing animation but not actually going up, and no orbs are flying past at all any more. - however I reset the level with F4 and was able to complete it on a second go;
the mouse-click action doesn't seem to work consistently, at one point it seemed to fire small orbs upwards (immediately knocking me back down again), at another point it fired small orbs downwards instead, and at another point after that it seemed to just making me fall down and not fire any orbs at all.

I'd say the ladder section was the most confusing + disorienting.

The rest, and the overall experience, was incredibly satisfying and really nicely done.

[retrotails]

I absolutely loved this game, as short as it is. Let me know if you want some warm, digital ambient music/sfx, I might be able to make something fitting. Also, 40 MB would be no big deal at all, I'd almost prefer it had lossless PNGs.
The ladder part was, in my opinion, the best and most creative part. A bit hard, but very fun. That red line thing was absolutely brilliant.

[MZ|One]

@stripwax: Thanks, I'm glad it runs now. It's OK that the particles disappear - that's because when you run too low FPS, the game now disables the particles and draws very simple circles instead to boost the performance. That is also why you only saw the first orb as yellow: normally all the orbs are slightly colorised, so this is how the scene started, but then the game detected your low FPS and switched to drawing circles, which are all simple white. I've made the circles colorised as well in the new version.

As for the mouse click action, thanks for catching that! There's actually supposed to be no mouse click action .) That's just a development trick that I've forgotten to comment out. It is disabled it now. I don't know what was the thing that made you reset the level, but I hope it may have been connected to this. I'm glad you like the game, overall!

@retrotails: Thanks! There's really no quality loss due to the JPEGs, I've used high enough quality that I actually cannot tell the PNGs and the JPEGs apart. Thanks for the offer about the SFX/music too, and even though I don't think I'll need them in this one, I really appreciate it!

[Nsmurf]

It locks up for me, right when the text "Wake up call" appears.

I'm on a windows 7 desktop PC.

sounds like a cool idea though.