2015-08-16 22:49:34

Paw Prints is a turn based strategy game, relying heavily on random events.  A disaster led to the crash of a huge airship, stranding injured people high up in the mountains.  Your job is to lead your people to safety, while battling cold, hunger, and various injuries.  The game takes place in the same story line as both Daytona and Castaways.

The game is still in beta stage, and menus are a little clunky.  Once you get used to how they are laid out, it isn't too bad, so I suggest people look at the "How to Play" section in the game's readme, because it explains what the different menus are for.  There might still be some bugs floating around in the code, but it seems to be running pretty well.  Before posting the game here I made a few testers play it for a few days to help me spot problems.

Enjoy!

Paw Prints
www.kaldobsky.com/audiogames/pawprints.zip
(25.3 MB v0.8b, last updated 3/3/2016 at 4:30 PM EST)

Changes from 0.8 to 0.8b

- Items being held by "undiscovered" people should no longer show up until the person is discovered.

Changes from 0.7 to 0.8

- Fixed a small bug that kept the summary menu from opening immediately when you selected it.
- Translations can now be made using the language.txt file.

Changes from 0.6e to 0.7

- Difficulty settings have been completely rewritten!  Boy oh boy it hurt me to do this, but based on a lot of player feedback, the game was too difficult even on easy.  In many ways, the new normal is the same as the old easiest setting.  In addition, the new easy and easiest settings slightly raise the temperature at the locations and give 10% more insulation to blankets, coats, and furs.
- The following positive traits have been added to the game.  Each of your people will be randomly given one of these:
  + Independent.  Gains morale when all alone at a location.
  + Focused.  Does not lose happiness from exposure to corpses, death, or injuries.
  + Nurturing.  Will gain more happiness if left with children, the injured or elderly.
  + Determined.  Will not become as tired from physical jobs.
  + Protective.  Will hold nothing back in a fight to protect everyone.
- The following negative traits have been added to the game.  Each of your people will be randomly given one of these:
  + Greedy.  Gets more unhappy if not given a full ration.
  + Entitled.  Will be more unhappy if someone has something (such as a blanket) they don't.
  + Complainer.  If unhappy, will reduce others happiness through they're complaints.
  + Clumsy.  Will be more likely to be injured doing hard physical jobs.
  + Cowardly.  Will not help if the group is attacked.
- The religion system has been adjusted to take advantage of the new traits system.
- Please be aware that any game saved before this version will no longer load.  The changes made in this version are no longer compatible with older save files.

Changes from 0.6d to 0.6e

- Added new sounds, which were provided by KeyIsFull.
- When moving to a new location in the menus, the previous location and fire sounds are stopped.  In the past it would just overlap the old and new sounds, creating a jumbled mess.

Changes from 0.6c to 0.6d

- Fixed a bug at the forest's edge, forest cave, river which caused building materials not to be taken away while doing one of the tasks.
- Pressing - or + will now adjust the volume for all in-game sounds.
- The Snowman fault has been adjusted.  In addition to having an extra person start out lost, any lost people have a lower chance of finding their way back to your group.
- The So Fuzzy perk has been adjusted.  You begin with 3 extra blankets instead of 4, but you forever have a higher chance of finding blankets.
- I may have fixed a bug that would sometimes add building materials instead of taking them away as you performed certain tasks.  This one has been tricky to reproduce so I'm not positive it is solved yet.
- The Home and End keys now quickly jump you to the beginning and end of a menu.

Changes from 0.6b to 0.6c

- New game sounds have been added.  These were provided by KeyIsFull.
- Fixed a bug that allowed you to set a person to travel further than the game allows.

Changes from 0.6 to 0.6b

- The weather and fire sound, for the selected location, will now loop.  There are not sounds yet for each weather type, so this feature won't work perfectly yet.
- Fixed up some code that may have been causing issues when dropping or picking up items.
- Animal furs are now listed as being used by a person to stay warm.
- Fixed a bug that prevented sounds from being turned back on, once they were disabled.
- Fixed a bug that prevented saved game from loading, based on a computer's regional settings.

Changes from 0.5b to 0.6

- I have rewritten how some of the saved game security works.  The old system had trouble dealing with certain computer regional settings.
- Paw Prints will now create a log, and update it at the end of each turn, that tells the summary of every day of your adventure.  The file is named totallog.txt, and it is overwritten after each turn so you should rename or copy the file right away if you intend to keep it.
- Game sounds have been provided by KeyIsFull, so there are several game events that will play sounds now.  I believe more sounds will come later.
- From the game's main menu you can disable all game sounds.  This is especially nice for players who prefer the original text-only gameplay.
- The game now supports custom sound packs.  Instead of replacing the various sounds, you can just put a new folder into the Paw Prints folder, and fill it with sounds just like the default "sounds" folder.  From the main menu you can select the new folder as your sound pack.  The game will try to play sounds from the selected folder instead of playing the files from the "sounds" folder.  If your custom folder is missing a needed sound, Paw Prints will automatically use the one from the "sounds" folder.  This means you can customize your own sound pack, send it easily to other players where it won't replace their default sounds, and you can choose to leave out any files that you don't want to change from the original.
- An assortment of shortcut keys have been added to hopefully make the menus a little faster to navigate:
  + "Spacebar" jumps you to the End Turn menu.
  + "F" jumps you to the campfire.
  + "T" jumps you to the jobs that are already spoken for, if you are in the location menu.
  + "A" jumps you to the available jobs for the location.
  + "T" jumps you to the assigned task, if you are in the task menu.
  + "R" jumps you to the food ration section, if you are in the person menu.
  + "T" jumps you to the person's task, if you are in the person menu.
  + "I" jumps you to the inventory, if you are in the person menu.
- The daily summary will now let you know if a person is suffering from exhaustion.

Changes from 0.5 to 0.5b

- Fixed the Smokey the bear fault, which was added in the last update but I forgot to actually list it in the menu as an option, hahaha!
- Wolf respawn rate has been adjusted.  It was already pretty low, but I've actually lowered it even more.
- Fixed a bug that was preventing the losing screen from coming up once your last person had died.
- Saved game files will now correctly save the summary from your previous day.  The summary was showing up blank after loading in a saved game.  Any files already saved before this was fixed, will still load with blank summaries.
- Fixed a bug that was sometimes affecting travelers, especially when multiple people were traveling together.  This bug was affecting their items and sometimes preventing them from actually traveling once the turn was ended.
- On normal, easy, and baby steps difficulty, you will start out with at least 1 knife and 1 lighter.  Hard and impossible difficulty will still start where you receive only 1 of them, at random.
- Added a new perk, Fruit fly, the double edged sword.  At the end of each night, there is a small chance a person will grow into the next age.  While this is a cool way to turn children into useful adults, there are some disadvantages too.
- Added the Homeless fault.  Each location offers fewer tasks for upgrading your camp.

Changes from 0.4g to 0.5

- Fixed a bug that caused unwanted behavior when users pressed the cancel button during file loading or saving.
- Low morale has a higher effect on teenagers than on adults, because teenagers are all about the drama.
- Low morale has a lower effect on seniors than on adults, because seniors have already lived through a lot.
- The warming effect of blankets ,coats, and animal furs has been increased by a small amount.
- Children and seniors have a higher risk of becoming exhausted.
- Teenagers have a lower risk of becoming exhausted.
- The odds of an adult becoming exhausted has been very slightly reduced.
- Bleeding from cuts and wounds increases the odds that a person will become exhausted, because of the tiring effect of blood loss.
- Added the Java man perk.  Reduces the odds of people becoming exhausted when over worked.  This perk also improves the chances of exhaustion wearing off after resting.
- The odds for exhaustion to wear off have been greatly increased.  Each additional day rested further increases the odds.
- Very slowly new wolves will show up to fill in ones that were killed.  This won't have much of an effect on most players, but I wanted to make sure the game will never permanently run out of wolves.
- A few of the fire messages were updated to make sure they include the name of the location they are at.
- Added the Smokey the bear fault.  There is a small chance that during the night your fire will suddenly go out.

Changes from 0.4f to 0.4g

- Fixed a bug that prevented turns from being ended.

Changes from 0.4e to 0.4f

- The So Fuzzy perk has been improved.  You now start with 4 extra blankets instead of only 1.
- Fires produce more heat for the easy and baby steps difficulty settings.
- Children are able to help with firewood collecting tasks.

Changes from 0.4d to 0.4e

- Pressing PgUp and PgDn now adjusts the sapi rate.
- Fixed a bug that could cause the game to error if you choose load or save and press cancel before typing a file name.

- Aprone
Please try out my games and programs:
Aprone's software

2015-08-16 23:30:06

Hi aprone now i downloading a game. but is it game create on engine for castaways or this is different engine?

2015-08-16 23:38:02

It does not use any of Castaways code.

- Aprone
Please try out my games and programs:
Aprone's software

2015-08-17 00:10:07

Hello,
I've given the game a try, and I am still a little confused. If I try to pretty much fortify the crash sight, everyone is still cold even though I've got a raging fire. Would I be better off just leaving the crash sight alone, or perhaps just making it a camp, letting folks rest then moving on after a day or two?

2015-08-17 00:15:34

The further you travel from the crash site, the warmer the weather will be.  The crash site has plenty of building materials, plus you might have people injured and unable to move, but it is the coldest location because it is up in the snowy mountains.  Another help is blankets, if you have found any.

I personally find myself forming a few small teams.  One team stays with those too injured to move, and the other team travels forward to collect supplies.  Those supplies are brought back so that I can splint broken bones and move everyone forward.  I have no idea if it is the best strategy or not.

- Aprone
Please try out my games and programs:
Aprone's software

2015-08-17 00:34:02

Hello,
I'm wondering something. Is it just me, or you seem to only be able to travel if you've completed some tasks for a location, which is good, otherwize everyone will just travel toward the city constantly.

2015-08-17 01:28:29

Completing tasks isn't necessary before traveling, or at least it shouldn't be.  There are a number of things that would prevent someone from just running their people to the end, but I wouldn't want to spoil any surprises.  smile

- Aprone
Please try out my games and programs:
Aprone's software

2015-08-17 02:20:42

LPR pointed out a problem with the game if you went to the save/load game windows and hit cancel before typing a file name.  I've reposted a fixed version at the same download link.

Changes from 0.4d to 0.4e

- Pressing PgUp and PgDn now adjusts the sapi rate.
- Fixed a bug that could cause the game to error if you choose load or save and press cancel before typing a file name.

- Aprone
Please try out my games and programs:
Aprone's software

2015-08-17 02:47:02

Hello aprone,
Is it just me or what?
When I execute the game, it gives me an error message:
Component 'MSWINSCK.ocx' or one of its dependencies not correctly registered: a file is missing or invalid
Can you help me?

73 Wj3u

2015-08-17 03:00:24

Luis, run the checkup.exe file and it should solve that error.

- Aprone
Please try out my games and programs:
Aprone's software

2015-08-17 03:04:46

This sounds like a lot of fun.
I don't currently have time to check it out, but am looking forward to it.
Its great to see some new games Aprone, I'm glad you could get a bit of a break from Swamp.

2015-08-17 03:26:15

Me too John, and thanks.  I've been telling myself for a while, that I need to work on smaller projects just for my own sanity.  I really love doing little games like this, and it's been literally years since I was allowed to really do them.

- Aprone
Please try out my games and programs:
Aprone's software

2015-08-17 04:49:21

Hello Aprone.
Thank you so much for this game! I never get tired of your games.

Guitarman.
What has been created in the laws of nature holds true in the laws of magic as well. Where there is light, there is darkness,  and where there is life, there is also death.
Aerodyne: first of the wizard order

2015-08-17 05:38:41

Imagine if Aprone works on an action game similar to the Japanese titles? It'd be the most amazing thing ever. I also wish he'd do a fighting game of sorts, I know there are many mainstream fighters, but many blind people won't play them because of the memorization and such. Like MKX for instance, been trying to fight blind people for a while, but only a few are stepping up. Kinda frustrating actually hahaha. Unfortunately some blind people will only play audiogames, which is a shame. I'm not much of a strategist, it just isn't my type of game, I personally would prefer platformers, sidescrollers, fighters, that kinda thing. I love swamp due to the action based features. There are so many awesome things Aprone can do when it comes to single player content, hopefully now he'll have time to work on something he'll really enjoy.

2015-08-17 07:52:45 (edited by keyIsFull 2015-08-17 07:54:13)

BTW Aprone, even if I set people to move from the first ridge back to the camp site, it doesn't work. Instead, they just sleep. I double checked that they were set to move. Is it because they are cold? If so, I had no clue that cold would stop them from moving. Also, even after I make an exhausted person not do a job for a day, he is still exhausted.
Edit: even when it's just super windy at the first ridge, people won't move toward or away from it, no matter what I do. People will move from the crash site to the first ridge without complaint, but they won't move from the first ridge.

I like to sleep, Sleep is good,
This is how I do it: Lie on a nice warm cozy bed, and dream dreams about how to rule the world!
Follow @TheGreatAthlon5 on twitter for humorous facts and game updates!
If you like my posts, thumb me up!

2015-08-17 08:26:01

Hi.
Wow, so great to finally see a new game from you Aprone. I look forward to try the game. Will it be multiplayer in the future?

Best regards SLJ.
Feel free to contact me privately if you have something in mind. If you do so, then please send me a mail instead of using the private message on the forum, since I don't check those very often.
Facebook: https://facebook.com/sorenjensen1988
Twitter: https://twitter.com/soerenjensen

2015-08-17 09:05:47

This sounds awesome! I'm at music school at the moment and literally will be  in vocal classes today from 8-30 to 6-30, with a concert to go to this evening, so much as this sounds all kinds of amazing, from me at least things will have to wait, indeed if Aprone himself or Bryan, Cae, Aaron or one of our other news posters wanted to write up some front of site news for this that would be very helpful, which actually goes for all new games, but this one especially sinse methinks the community  will love the idea of Aprone bringing out a new game.

With our dreaming and singing, Ceaseless and sorrowless we! The glory about us clinging Of the glorious futures we see,
Our souls with high music ringing; O men! It must ever be
That we dwell in our dreaming and singing, A little apart from ye. (Arthur O'Shaughnessy 1873.)

2015-08-17 10:35:59 (edited by Mayana 2015-08-17 11:12:30)

Hello,
In some ways I like this game even more than castaways. But I still can't fully understand it. I don't know how to help ingered people with broken legs or ancles, or how to help someone with frostbyte. It also seams like the fire doesn't make any big diference, but that's probably just my thinking.
So, yeah ... would be happy with some hints, or maybe even a walkthrough when this gets bigger. But from what I see, a verry nice game!
Edit: Well, figured how frostbyte goes away, heh.

Yes, I definitely left the forum. Mhm. Why would you have any doubt?
Code 7 tips: https://forum.audiogames.net/topic/4010 … or-code-7/
Don't forget to be awesome!

2015-08-17 11:33:37

Hi.

I think in the next update that sound afects should be added since they would make the game even better than it already is, in my opinion.

I'm gone for real :)

2015-08-17 14:54:00

I'm becoming better at this, I hope. One time everything was going perfect, but my people were freesing because I couldn't start a fire. So I selected the chain smokers perk. Only problem I'm having now is that I'm out of food, because my people don't have a knife, and I can't find one, eather. I understand the game, now all I need is some more luck, hahaha.
Thank you for this game, Aprone!

Yes, I definitely left the forum. Mhm. Why would you have any doubt?
Code 7 tips: https://forum.audiogames.net/topic/4010 … or-code-7/
Don't forget to be awesome!

2015-08-17 15:16:08

Hey Aprone, I've been missing your little surprises. As always, you rock!
Best regards, Haramir.

The true blind is the one who refuses to see.

2015-08-17 15:31:08

KeyIsFull, I'm investigating that odd traveling behavior you've noticed.

SLJ, I don't think this game will end up being multiplayer, but I do have plans to make an online achievement system so players can have goals and see how others have done.

Mayana, haha, I can only imagine what you meant when you said you figured out how frostbite goes away!  ROFL!  Broken bones don't actually heal, but you can sort of fix them with a splint.  If your person has a splint, when you scroll down to their broken bone in the person menu, it will say you can press enter to put a splint on it.  A splint allows someone to travel and do things once again.  Bandages work the same way with the cuts and other types of wounds.
Exhaustion will go away after someone rests, but it is a percentage chance.  Because of this, it might only take 1 day of rest or it might take a few.  It will depend on the person and several other factors.
The fire does make a difference, but yeah, it doesn't completely solve all of the weather related problems.  Weather is one of your great enemies in the game, and it is difficult to overcome.  Until you can move your people out of the freezing mountains, much of the time you are just trying to slow down how much colder they are becoming.  Things start to turn around when you have fully upgraded your shelter, have a few more blankets for everyone, and have a nice fire... especially if all of that happens in a location warmer than the crash site.

Brad, I may end up adding some sounds.  The testing team and I were joking around, a lot actually, about only having a single sound that is used throughout the whole game.  I'm not sure if I want to turn that joke into a reality though.  hehe.

Mayana, yes luck is a huge part of this game! big_smile

- Aprone
Please try out my games and programs:
Aprone's software

2015-08-17 15:31:51 (edited by keyIsFull 2015-08-17 15:34:29)

hmm, even on the baby steps mode it is hard. I think the biggest problem is the exhaustion thing, the chance of them recovering should be increased a bit, I think. Right now I am often waiting 3 or 4 turns for them to recover, which seems excessive because I only have 9 or 10 people anyway, and there is no way that I have seen to get more, though there might be random people hiding out somewhere else. Though since you have only given us 10 keys to access the people, I doubt it.
Edit: I played a second game today and managed to get to the ice area, but by then, half of my people were dead so I gave up. And this was on the baby step level!

I like to sleep, Sleep is good,
This is how I do it: Lie on a nice warm cozy bed, and dream dreams about how to rule the world!
Follow @TheGreatAthlon5 on twitter for humorous facts and game updates!
If you like my posts, thumb me up!

2015-08-17 15:44:21 (edited by revan 2015-08-17 15:45:42)

i agree that,
do you planning do some action games,  wars fights whatever else?
i love do puzzles sometimes,
but that should be cool.
maybe you can future add action games  for us.
oh mainstream game i didn't play much
not too fuly accessible
that's why

2015-08-17 16:02:40

@Aprone ... heh, yes, my frazing was strange. I usually didn't play for that long so when they got frostbite, I never saw it go away, heh. About broken legs and ancles and arms ... I later once even managed to find a splint, too. So I guess I ask to menny stupid questions, hahaha.
Well then, I guess luck isn't on my side. If baby steps are so hard, then I'm not even thinking about going up a level. I think there should be a perk where you allways start with at least 1 knife and 1 lighter, but maybe that's just a stupid idea.

Yes, I definitely left the forum. Mhm. Why would you have any doubt?
Code 7 tips: https://forum.audiogames.net/topic/4010 … or-code-7/
Don't forget to be awesome!