Archive: 5 posts

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Sky Pirate Fantasypookachoo http://i221.photobucket.com/albums/dd191/saraharts/stuff/skypirate.jpgThis is actually a series,there are two chapters available now, and I would like feedback on either, or both (for both I will F4F twice). These levels are about exploration and using two vehicles which work together: An amphibious scooter, and oceanic airship. There are no bosses or enemies, as mastering the vehicles takes some skill. Ch 1 is single-path and teaches how to operate these vehicles. Ch 2 is multi-path, and after completing several missions you win the vehicles as a prize. I think it will become apparent that I was inspired by final fantasy, but these are not intended to be ff levels, that's just what made me want to do a sky pirate level. I've played most of the other community levels that are sky pirate themed, and I think mine have something different to offer. Originally these were to be one level, but there just wasn't enough room so I had to break it down. The first chapter is really all about learning to operate the vehicles. The scooter drives on land with moderate hills, and in the water, while the ship can sail in the water, and also fly. I think the scooter is pretty easy to ride, but I'd like to know if anyone has trouble with the airship controls and how they are explained. The thermometer isn't full on this level and it's not super long, so I'd also like to know if it seems like it needs more going on. The second chapter is quite large, but you can basically save your progress. You are given missions to collect 5 stickers, each activates a switch near the start, so if you leave the level and start again you just place all the stickers you've collected, and proceed from there. You have to place all 5 stickers to access the scoreboard and receive the completion prize, which is both vehicles. I'd like to know if anyone has difficulty finding any stickers, or navigating the airship. These are the vehicles, and thanks playing. http://i221.photobucket.com/albums/dd191/saraharts/stuff/airship.jpg

2010-10-15 00:41:00 Author: Pookachoo Posts: 838

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Hey played the first of your levels, I will hit up the second in a few. I laughed a little when you said it was not Final Fantasy...adn the first word that I saw was Kapooh! You may want to make your moogles smaller, it seems weird to have those things two times larger than the player.Your tutorial a bit wordy, as it needed to be, but you may want to set the speech bubbles a little further apart so they are not appearing at the same time, but that really doesn't matter, I just spent an hour once doing that on a level, and I think it made me think of that. The little roler car was nice adn worked well, but you may want to space the three grabs further apart, and then you could decorate the rocket too, seeing all those tools screamed LBP (hand grab switch, rockets and such. I noticed I could get kicked off really quickly when I hit a wall, but it was hard to time it fast enough to stop...you could put a little mag sensor on each side with a small dect area 30 degrees or such so it will pick up just one side, and then have lights with the speed setting so it will glow brighter as you near flat wall. The area below the first bit of water was nice to have bubbles, but the seam in the sand and dirt were right above each other, a foreground thin layer will hide that. The ship was really nicely done, but the anti grav appears in the middle with the anchos, that would be much better hidden, or glowing in the center ot a crystal that matches your anchor. The ship bay is nice, but a background thick layer so you can jump up out of the roller and back in would be really good (I think your bay was atleast 2 thick right) and I could see a dissolver in the center window right above where you park. I was not too sure about the sprung bolt in the center of the mast, the grabs up and down worked well, but the "Harvey" version of a moogle freaked me a bit there too (I don't trust big moogles because I got pwned by those big Cactors). The ship's steering worked welll for me, you could have a camera angle that activates depending on which direction you are going. All of the "R1" speech bubbles need to be a one time thing only or a sticker...they started blocking speech bubbles I wanted to read, adn just took away from the look of the ship. The sails looked good, but a thin layer over the sponge of the floaty may look better. Hide the emitter big time, it looks out of place, and the rockets in the sails may need to be hidden to give it a better overall look...also somethign liek a wooden beown sticker to cover the levers so they don't just llok like levers. I was not able to get the ship to glitch other than the grabbable to get tot he top hitting where you have that little bit of glass, you may want to eclose ti on both side to prevent that. It is a very nice vehicle level, I will play the other now. Hope this feedback helps, feedbackwise you can try my "OK Battle for Castle OK" or "OK Space Mach 4", they are kind of like your levels, or if you would rather another type I OK Choice Act 1 and 2 could use some feedback still.

2010-10-15 02:55:00 Author: celsus Posts: 822

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Hey pookachoo! Thank you for all your great advice on my level. I played both your sky pirate levels (you helped me enough with my 1 level that it seemed to deserve my reviewing 2 levels for you). Warning: My post is very long, mainly because I see a ton of potential with your airship, but also a lot of room for improvement. GOOD STUFF: -The levels themselves are very good. I especially like that you went to the effort of making the second one multi-path. I find multi-path levels are more fun in general, and I know from experience that they are harder to design and build. -The tutorial stuff is VERY well-done. Absolutely everything is explained, and creating those multi-message tutorials is, IMHO, really going the extra mile to help the player use your vehicles. -The scooter is great. I'm terrible at creating vehicles, but I tried to do a very similar one when I first played LBP and eventually gave up in frustration. Congrats on getting the balance so perfect. You can do a lot more with that vehicle, especially if you make versions that can move faster. -The airship is very cool-looking. It's obvious a lot of effort went into its appearance--really looks like what I would imagine a "sky pirate" would fly. -The scenery is also very cool-looking. You've taken the time to add lots of little extra "pure scenery" stuff, something I especially admire because (as you know from playing my level) it's something I really need improvement in. BAD STUFF: AIRSHIP PROBLEMS This needs to be said first and foremost: the airship still needs a lot of work. I'm saying this because I can tell from what you've got already that a lot of work has ALREADY gone into it, so I think it would be worth your time to put even more effort into perfecting it. Here are the problems I see: -First, having two separate levels for navigation is EXTREMELY frustrating and clunky. The Sky Anchor makes it workable--because I can activate it before I start the airship going up or down, then come back down and deactivate it to move left and right. But even this feels like an unnecessarily tedious process, especially since, with LBP's auto-layer-movement, it can be awkward getting from the top level back down to the middle. What you've got really only works well with at least 2 players--and that's fine, but if that's the way you want to have it than you need to say at the beginning that this level is strictly for 2 (or more) players, and then make sure that the whole level works in multiplayer. If you want to do this in single player, I would put all the navigation controls (including balloon stuff) on one level. -Second, the top of the airship breaks very easily. If it were just the balloons it wouldn't be a problem, since you have thoughtfully provided a way for the player to generate new balloons. However, what usually breaks for me is the entire balloon apparatus, including the controls attached to them and the emitter that creates new ones--and when this happens, the airship becomes completely unusable. This happened to me multiple times in both levels--as a result, in fact, in both cases I eventually gave up on completing the level because no matter how delicate I tried to be, the airship eventually broke. -Third, visibility is terrible when on the airship. I feel like I can't see where I'm going at all. The problem, I think, is that the ship is just so big. You might be able to remedy the problem with on-board cameras, but I have a hunch that you're still going to have trouble with this until you shrink the airship. If you compress the top 2 levels like I've suggested, it will help some, but it would still be a good idea to shorten it (on the left-right axis) as well. In fact, you may even have to get rid of the scooter bay in favor of some kind of smaller vehicle bay instead. If you do ALL of those things, I think the visibility problem can be remedied. A FEW NON-AIRSHIP SUGGESTIONS Keep in mind that these may be just my own opinions: -I would drop the "Final Fantasy" references. As you said--and I agree--these are not FF levels. There's nothing wrong with recreating Final Fantasy in LBP--but that's really not what you've done here. What you've done is create something original that deserves to stand on its own merits. So I would change the moogles to something original, rename the Tiny Bronco to something not from Final Fantasy, and get rid of references to things like magicite. Remember that airships are not unique to Final Fantasy, so this doesn't have to be a FF-tribute level to have one. -Sometimes the scooter, cool as it is, seems unnecessary--maybe it's just an optical illusion but to me, it seems rather slow. Perhaps if it moved faster, or if I needed it to get over dangerous material or something, it would make more sense to me. Overall I really like the levels, but my frustrations with the airship eventually killed the experience for me. PLEASE don't misunderstand me--I think you SHOULD keep at it with the airship, and with airship-based levels. You've already done a far better job making a LBP airship than I ever did (and yes, I have tried--my effort was crap compared to yours). I think it still has some serious flaws, but I'm only bothering to point them out because I think there's a TON of potential there already--if I didn't, I would just tell you to forget the airship idea instead of pointing out all the places for improvement. I've never seen a well-done airship in LBP but I'm convinced after seeing your efforts that if anyone can do it, you can. You just haven't done it YET.

2010-10-15 03:58:00 Author: StoopidSnake Posts: 33

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I just finished your second level...I think it clocked in at about an hour of attempts. The tutorial the ship worked fine because you did not need to rely on it, but in this version I destroyed the bottom twice, lost the roller off the top of the castle once, snapped the ship in half using the anchor. Like the post above said this is a good idea, try and stear clear of FF and work on the ship because you have spent some good time on it thus far. The massive amount of grabbables makes the shipvery difficult to operate in a pinch. The top lever of the ballons is blocked by the floaty mast behind it, most every time even once while I was using the lever, I auto selected back to the mast and fell down one level, meaning I had to go another to get the grab to go back up. Any grabbable material has to be away from switches...and your mast and the steering wheel both fight each other, the rollers jagged edges make it a bit hard to jump onto from inside the ship or is you get knocked off, more slopes would make it much better. The mine and the sand has several visible seams in the layers, use the corner editing tool and thin front layers to hide seams. I could see below your mine, and it just looked unfinished, you need jagged points below it and possibly hovering material to get across the point it is floating. Mission wise I had no clue how to the castle, and the auto stop rising on the boat made getting up to the top near impossible, I kept hitting something and bouncing back down. All the speech bubbles on the ship blocked the person from telling me where to go. You need to find a good way to ditect a person where to go so they don't just fully give up. You also may need an option to use the stickers for better endings or more points, because it sucked loosing my score every time the ship glitched and I had to restart. You can also have both the roller and ship as emitted items to prevent this issue in the future. If you do have them both emitted makes sure that if the ship is reset then the roller auto terminates otherwise the number of rollers in the level grow and start to cause thermo issues. The last thing is the final ride up to the score board was just a little short and the music in the mines seemed a little off. All in all a great undertaking, I know what it is like having to split up levels. Just get that ship working better, move away from FF, and use way better cameras. I had and still have some of the issues on my OK Space Mach 4 level, but the ship works on pistons and has cameras and everything under the sun I could think of to fix the camera view...you may want to try some of those same things. Anyhow I hope that helped, and I could use some feedback on a couple of my levels, I will let you choose, again OK Choice could use it the most because I am trying to get them as good as I can.

2010-10-15 04:35:00 Author: celsus Posts: 822

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Thanks for all the input! celsus, I'll play your levels, maybe not today, but soon.

2010-10-16 20:03:00 Author: Pookachoo Posts: 838

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