New online Java RPG: Kelvin Kazoom

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#1

Kelvin Kazoom is a Java-based role playing game in the style of the popular 90ies 16x16 pixel tile RPGs (remember Ultima and Wasteland anyone?).

It’s a lightweight applet with a proprietary game engine featuring scripting, pluggable NPC behaviour, and animated tiles.

It can be found at

http://www.digitprop.com/kazoom/index.html

The story is not very developed as of now, but will be eventually. Also, the role-playing aspect is quite shallow at this time (no experience points, no skills) - let’s see about that when the story has progressed…

Enjoy,
Markus

#2

Nice graphics, interesting map layout and plenty fast enough :slight_smile:

But… mine eyes! The scrolling really hurts the eyes after a while. Hows about some smooth scrolling? Its a simple step from scrolling a tile at a time, and yet looks so much nicer :slight_smile:

#3

Very nice! In fact, excellent! I’ve completed it so far. That is one screwed up museum… But I like the book collection! :smiley:

It might be my imagination, but after talking with someone it seemed that each space bar you’d hit to step through the dialogue registered as one “pass turn” once the dialogue was dismissed? Or it seemed that other characters get a turn or two anyway. Might be my imagination though.

One annoyance - you can use the space bar instead of the enter key for examining things and talking to people, but if you use the space bar when trying to pick something up the game freezes. I think an invisible dialogue is appearing, or the effect of one happens anyway? If you hit escape the game starts responding again.

Very nice. Please update us when level three is open!

#4

Works fine on Mac OS X 10.2.8 Java 1.4.1 Update 1

Nice.

#5

Very nice :slight_smile:
Please add smooth scrolling.

Erik

#6

Further play:

[]The guards don’t fight back when you attack them.
[]If you attack the native on the bridge area, she calls for the guards but noone turns up. You’re free to slaughter her in peace.
[]Nobody complains if you kill the Elder, but it kind of screws up the plot…
[]For some reason you can’t enter the north-most house.
[*]You can’t examine the various things in the other houses.

I thought I was being really clever by killing the guard in the passage behind the Elder - I wanted to see what’s in the room back there. But even when I killed him I couldn’t get past. ;D

Suggestions:
[]Use the axe to chop down trees?
[]Make the empty crates in the museum destroyable.

Still a great game, still good fun.

#7

Thanks for the compliments. As for the eyes, what is it with you young sapless post-80ies players? If you want to know what pain is, play Pong on a B/W 5" TV set… :wink:

No, seriously now: You are absolutely right, the scrolling is not very pretty. However, smooth scrolling is not THAT simple: First of all, it needs some walking animation for the characters, as otherwise they seem to be just sliding tiles (which in fact they are, but with the block scrolling, it’s not that obvious).

Then, timing is more crucial with smooth scrolling, as even small timing issues are very noticeable.

So I thought I’d defer smooth scrolling to a time when the game and story are more developed. Still, I got your point and it’ well received. I will see what I can do…

#8

[quote]Further play:

[]The guards don’t fight back when you attack them.
[]If you attack the native on the bridge area, she calls for the guards but noone turns up. You’re free to slaughter her in peace.
[]Nobody complains if you kill the Elder, but it kind of screws up the plot…
[]For some reason you can’t enter the north-most house.
[*]You can’t examine the various things in the other houses.

I thought I was being really clever by killing the guard in the passage behind the Elder - I wanted to see what’s in the room back there. But even when I killed him I couldn’t get past. ;D

Suggestions:
[]Use the axe to chop down trees?
[]Make the empty crates in the museum destroyable.

Still a great game, still good fun.
[/quote]
Thanks to everybody for the valuable comments. I know that there are issues with key inputs, and also the smooth scrolling requests are well taken.

cfmdobbie: That’s the kind of testing I like. You have found some real gameplay issues, and I will see to it that they are taken care of until the next update.

About the axe: I intend to add a lot of more gamplay options outside of the actual story, like picking fruits, cooking them, making things, transforming things, etc. However this is a tedious process, as you have to check for side effects very thoroughly. In fact, as you probably noticed I haven’t been able to invest too much time in gameplay testing so far…

Killing the guard doesn’t work, as the room behind him is actually not finished yet, and therefore the field the guard stands on is flagged as being unwalkable. Well, that will change with the next update.

#9

The controls are awful. I like to be able to use the arrow keys and two other keys (like ctrl and alt) to emulate using a gamepad.

The scrolling is hard on the eyes. Maybe decrease the tile size and put more game area on screen?

Smooth scrolling isn’t THAT hard; the timeing issues you mentioned can be solved using the timer thread class on the wiki.

EDIT: good job though and nice site design(didn’t mean to sound so negative)

#10

[quote]The controls are awful. I like to be able to use the arrow keys and two other keys (like ctrl and alt) to emulate using a gamepad.
[/quote]
Well, I will think about it. The best solution would probably be to make the control layout customizable.

I tried that, but with 16x16 pixel tiles, if you make them too small, they aren’t convincing anymore, as people are used to much more detail at high resolutions. Now, I could switch to larger tile sizes (e.g. 32x32 pixels), but that would require more work on each tile, and would impose 4x longer download times.

However, I wanted to keep things as simple as possible to be able to crank out game content fast. I strongly believe in independent game design by amateurs, which should be as simple and straightforward as possible.

[quote]Smooth scrolling isn’t THAT hard; the timeing issues you mentioned can be solved using the timer thread class on the wiki.
[/quote]
Thanks for the hint - I wasn’t aware of that class. I will check it out and see how it can be put to use…

Thanks for the edit. Don’t worry, though, where would this forum be without sincere criticism…? Thanks for commenting on the game!

#11

Damn, the game froze up when I tried to use the lab key to unlock the door. Just when I was starting to get into it :slight_smile:

Also, the navigation with the cursor keys is somewhat broken - it seems to jam up with certain key combinations. (eg, press and hold down, then press and release right. You end up with down still held but you come to a halt).

#12

[quote]Damn, the game froze up when I tried to use the lab key to unlock the door. Just when I was starting to get into it :slight_smile:

Also, the navigation with the cursor keys is somewhat broken - it seems to jam up with certain key combinations. (eg, press and hold down, then press and release right. You end up with down still held but you come to a halt).
[/quote]
About the freezing: What browser and OS did you use? You didn’t by any chance have a look at the Java console and noticed any exceptions, did you? Actually, although there are quite a lot things to work on, the game did never freeze on my system (Windows 2000, Mozilla, Sun’s JRE 1.4.1). Which is not to say that it couldn’t happen…

As for the keys, it’s acknowledged - I will work on it ASAP.

#13

hmm… I think the door unlocking suffers from the same invisible-dialog problem cfmdobbie mentioned with picking up items. Esc will let you continue and it works properly if you use enter not space.

Btw, whats the difference between enter and space? Other than the bug above I can’t see any logical separation between when you use one or the other :o

#14

Blah, the scrolling system is fine. :wink:

#15

I have been able to work on the game a little bit, and I am happy to say that I was able to address many of the issues you have raised.

As for the scrolling, I am currently working on it, and it is definitely the most time-consuming change I am making right now.

Implementing smooth scrolling isn’t that difficult by itself, but I first had to resolve some performance issues, to get enough free time from the animation loop to actually afford smooth scrolling (read: The FPS were too low). I am now at about 50 FPS on a not-so-new machine (600 MHz Pentium III), and am satisfied with it. I am currently updating the whole animation routines to work with the new system.

I expect smooth scrolling and the other updates to be published sometime next week (hopefully!).

Cheers,
Markus

#16

Your Dialog System is awesome, I wanted to do that on my RPG but couldn’t quite figure it out. Ant Chance giving some pointers?

#17

[quote]Your Dialog System is awesome, I wanted to do that on my RPG but couldn’t quite figure it out. Ant Chance giving some pointers?
[/quote]
Well, what do you want to know? I have put up a description at http://www.digitprop.com/p.php?page=blog&id=17, which I hope is helpful. However, if you want to know anything not covered there, please feel free to ask.

#18

Thanks for the reply it was helpful. However I already have an xml
driven dialog system. The problem I was having is that I would like to
have my dialogs wrap and be nicely formatted like yours and I can’t
seem to find a way to do it.

#19

[quote]Thanks for the reply it was helpful. However I already have an xml
driven dialog system. The problem I was having is that I would like to
have my dialogs wrap and be nicely formatted like yours and I can’t
seem to find a way to do it.
[/quote]
Sorry, I misunderstood you. I will try to go into more detail regarding the formatting and graphical output ASAP. However, I am very busy at the moment with completely different things, thus it will probably take until the weekend, or even next week. Still, I promise to come up with something!

#20

thanks :smiley: