Hello everybody,
the time has come, "Bloodstone - The Journey Home" is now available for download:
I'm not going to talk much about whats going on in the game. Just go ahead, play it and tell us what you think about it.
Anyone who wants to see us in action, can visit us this Saturday, 7th of June, at the Cube Gallery in Manchester.
Eventhough this mod is meant for Episode 1, you can play it without owning Episode 1. Please check our Tutorial on how to do that.
We are proud of what we've produced and we hope you like it too,
your Greenhorn Productions Team
Bloodstone Website,
Greenhorn Productions.
Downloading right now. I plan on making an HD video of the game as I go through it.
Very polished even though im not even in the game yet. Box art, CD image? Autorun CD installer?? Very nice. I cant wait to finish installing.
Nice happy to be playing it already!
I'm going to make a big post here with alot of things to critique. There just my suggestions for what needs to be worked reviewed.
** General Gameplay **
* Running speed - I know you commented on some posts before saying that it was default Hl2 speed but I'd like to reiterate their concerns that the running speed is too much.
* Character turning, moving animations - I think one of the main things that needs to be worked on is the character animations and moving. Perhaps you don't have an animator? Thats very understandable. If you had blended movement animations as well as proper turning and backing up animations it would boost the games control feel significantly.
** User Interface and Controls **
* Dialogs, Notes - I like the RPGish interface but some things need some work. What I mean by that is the note that you first read as well as most dialogs should be easier to use. One of the most unfriendly interface elements were having to press space bar to close a dialog or note. Easy way to handle it is to add a link label at the bottom to close it or even let the user click on the note and or dialog itself to close it.
(continued)
* The Map - The overall interface needs control work. I the RPG-style but using it in general needs a bit of ease-of-use work done. The map was a huge thing. Having a real-time map is very important to an RPG. Finding my way around town was very unorthodox and even looking at the map gave me a headache since it didn't even resemble the town. I was hoping it would tell me where on the map I was currently but it was just a static picture.
* Doors, entering buildings - Perhaps a more simpler way to go through doors? While at the gate, I couldn't figure out how to get through the door to go outside of the town to talk to the quest NPC. Nothing that Should work such as F, or space bar worked unless it was unreactive. I think it would be easier if there was a much simpler and more reactive-feedback way of going through doors such as placing your cross hair over the door and having the name of the area that door goes to at the top of your screen in a little temporary transparent window or something.
I hope you can use my feedback, good luck.
Awesome post LaDouche, I'm sure a lot of developers would like detailed feedback like this.
but as a comment to a newspost?
Would have been better to post it on their forums or something.
No.
Yes.
Thanks to the limited time on the project We didnt have time to implement player animations properly. Animations were done by me (never done any animation before) but due to the game being created on an engine that is made for first person games, extra programming was need to get the animations working properly. Something that we were unable to get completed. Thanks for the feedback.
"* The Map - The overall interface needs control work. I the RPG-style but using it in general needs a bit of ease-of-use work done. The map was a huge thing. Having a real-time map is very important to an RPG. Finding my way around town was very unorthodox and even looking at the map gave me a headache since it didn't even resemble the town. I was hoping it would tell me where on the map I was currently but it was just a static picture.
* Doors, entering buildings - Perhaps a more simpler way to go through doors? While at the gate, I couldn't figure out how to get through the door to go outside of the town to talk to the quest NPC. Nothing that Should work such as F, or space bar worked unless it was unreactive. I think it would be easier if there was a much simpler and more reactive-feedback way of going through doors such as placing your cross hair over the door and having the name of the area that door goes to at the top of your screen in a little temporary transparent window or something."
Yup, thats exactly what I thought while playing. Other then that overall the game is well done.
@ run speed: As we said before, this is default HL2 running speed. We decided it would be higher priotity to get the actual game done then to fiddle with things like that, which could potentially create a big mess.
@ map: The Map resembles the town and it indicates your position too, (there is a red thingy, should maybe have gotten a different colour) as long as you're not towards one of the extremes of the map because then the indicator tends to drift off.
@ doors: There was a feature planned to make doors more obvious, but unfortunately it wasn't completed. Considering walking through doors, this has been explained in the Manual and the key E is a commonly used key for "USE", which also opens doors.
@dialogues: There are still a number of bugs with the dialogue box, that only occur on certain machines. And again, due to time issues we decided it would be more important to get the game done rather then fiddling with the dialogue boxes.
@animations: As Adam already explained, here we're looking at a mix of lacking experience and a high workload on the programming side as the problem. We would have liked to polish so many things on bloodstone more, but again, for an unexperienced team such as ours, the time it takes to finish certain things is just unbelievably hard to estimate up front.
But all in all great feedback, I hope you can understand our reasons for certain decisions though.
Thanks for the feedback so far guys, I'm glad to see that you are enjoying it, for the most part.
Since I've not posted much, you probably don't know, I'm the programmer.
I feel I should apologise for not polishing this further. My plan was to spend a few weeks, from when it was feature complete until now, polishing it, fixing bugs, improving stuff. The only reason I didn't is because I got a job as a software engineer practically a week or so after the game was finished. I would have liked to work more on this but right now I don't have the time.
Please do keep the feedback coming though, it's nice to know what you guys think of our work, and maybe one day I can sit down and fix a lot of stuff.
I completely understand, I work at a software shop as well. ;) Don't take my comments as all negative though. I think if you guys keep chugging along at this pace your going to make fantastic progress and an awesome finished Mod.
Perhaps use Trac, Bugzilla, or some other method of bug tracking and find some closed testers? I think if you had more of an idea from a users side what "feels right" then you might have a good idea of what needs changing. Of course you could already have all of that and 10000 bug reports in your email. ;)
We do have bugtracking means, but as mentioned before, our time was very limited for the size of the project and now there won't be much time to fix everything. Maybe a number of smaller or a few critical, but definitely not all the bugs.
Great!! I'll download :D
This is an awesome mod! I know there are some kinks that needs to be worked on that were previously mentioned but I have to hand it to you guys for an rpg mod! A whole lot of mods in development never gets the chance to have a release. Congrats.
nice work! just keep it on
I want a video!
Your mod profile is only complete (to me) when you have a pretty trailer in place.
Looks good, not rushed at all; even though that seems to be what you are saying. I still think it's better to have a game out than to keep bug fixing, until nobody wants to play it any more. Thumbs up!
Since this was made for a University course, does this mean that you are done (i.e., no more revisions/bug fixes)?
No major revisions or extensions, no... Possibly some bug fixes, but thats up to how much time our programmer has next to his job.
A pity. Nothing personal, but that's one reason why I tend to avoid trying out university projects (the creators lack intrinsic motivation). I wish you the best of luck in your future field, however.
:( this mod requires episode 1. Meh, I was looking forward to this mod for about a month and I just noticed this. Oh well. Have fun everybody that has ep 1.
Please check here for a tutorial on how to play the mod without Ep1: Bloodstone-thejourneyhome.com
looks good :)
I just started playing it -- and it's great...
What I like is that it has its own style, so despite the few bugs lingering around (unfortunately the save system is a little unstable -- causing me to have to restart once) It has a pretty cool concept...
Bugs Encountered:
When attacking and running at the same time, the animation will freeze on the moving part -- and just play the attack animation instead by itself...
I had gone pretty far, and when I was just about to exit the Sewers, during the loading screen -- it crashed with an error...and ever since, when I tried to reload, it only loaded my game with my same character, within the menu background itself -- just a little wierd...
Finally, just some minor ragdoll freezes on death...
Nothing much more...
Great job, keep up the great work!
I've been playing and watched lots of people play the game on the machine at the show at the Cube Gallery in Manchester this week. And so far there were only sparse crashes as long as the players kept playing the game the way it is supposed to be played. As long as people keep their inventory empty and don't try to test the games stability, it it at least playable.
If it does crash, all you need to do is restart the game and press F7. If it does crash in the loadingscreen, this might be a problem because that's where the game is saved but the only reason for a loading screen crash that i've witnessed so far is when the player had a full inventory. That should be avoided at the moment.
You can backup the savedata.dat in the main bloodstone folder while not in the game to keep a safety backup.
Considering the look of the game. Unfortunately the Village and the Wilderness were the first levels we did. You will see this, once you enter the Valley. We have learned a lot from the mistakes we made in the first levels and the Valley levels do look a lot better and a lot more polished.
But that is just one of the lessons you learn producing a game of this magnitude(16 levels) and complexity(RPG) on the Source engine. Nobody can realistically expect Crysis-like graphics in outdoor levels on the source engine, that is just not possible.
For some reason, i have like 8str and lopw stats in the begining, i cant equip the sword Im given and takes me like 20 fireballs to kill deer... normal?
Not at all. Quit the game and delete your savedata.dat in the main bloodstone folder. See if that solves your problem.
nice work guys! but i have problem. i can't save my game anyway because when i press F7 in game or in menu , it quit the game to windows !
F7 is for loading. The game saves your progress automatically on every level change, so if you already had a level change, F7 should load your latest savegame.