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AudioGames.net Forum → General Game Discussion → Daytona and the Book of Gold - by Aprone
OK, so let me guess this right.. Sorry for this, but I just want to make sure I got it.
I completely understand down and to the right, but down and curve to the right, I think that means you go straight down, and then just move to the right, correct? It's actually not as hard as I'm making it out to be? lol
drg, I think you'll be much happier once you're using a mouse. 
Staindaddict, you are making it harder than it actually is lol. I think the new update will help you a whole lot! I'm actually tempted to wait and see if the new version answers your questions, just so I know if it is an improvement.
The new version is posted everyone! There are some people's suggestions that I still haven't added, but most are in. Sizes are now more stable, the game is more lenient about the angles of the lines, you can substitute a series of lines in place of the curves, and the new sound map mode should help everyone learn the shapes. When in the book practice area, you can press A to switch over to sound map mode. Sound map mode will disable the beacon and attempt to teach you the shape by using musical notes. Each time you press A you will hear the series of musical notes that is for the current shape. When you begin to draw you will hear the same notes depending on which of the 8 directions you are moving. North, South, East, West, North-east, South-east, North-west, and South-west. Tap A to quickly hear the correct note whenever you need it, and attempt to replicate it with your own movements. You do not have to match the speed of the example musical notes, only the order is important!
Between the sound map, beacon, voice instructions, and written instructions in the read me, I am hoping to start seeing people blasting through levels in this game finally. Yay! Please let me know if this new method helps, and if it doesn't, I will be happy to work on some other teaching method. Sooner or later I'll wind up with something that works lol.
COOL, CONGRATS ON GETTING THE NEW VERSION OUT OF THE DOOR. I DO VERY MUCH LOOK FORWARD TO TRYING IT ON MONDAY.
I love your note system.
Let's improve it even more: why not to take true notes, i.e.
north = C5
north-east = D#5
east = G5
South-east = A#5
South = C4
South-west = D#4
West = G4
North-west = A#4
... so that:
* The notes are going up by making a clockwise circle
* A direction and its 180° opposite have a once octave difference
* A direction and its 90° neighbours have an half-octave difference
It would be even easier that way.
It would be interesting to activate the notes during the game, so that one can correct oneself even in the game.
I took a look at most of the shapes you have. Here is what I think: Claw is difinitely one of the hardest ones. Retreen and shoulter are not so ahrd, and slash is the easiest one. ARrow can in fact be harder than retreen.
While tryiing to do the srank, I made the racer, before I look at that shape !
I didn't tried loop and brave, they sounds like very hard.
So you should carefully organize level design of the game.
Hey Aprone,
When you press A to hear the musical notes, you're not able to right click again to hear the spoken directions. Is this supposed to be that way? I like to listen to them both, but I can't do the voice after I've done the music.
I did arrow like nothing again, off to try claw!
hi aprone, i just downloaded and tried the new version. it totaly rocks, these sounds helps
a lot, i managed to do claw more than 10 times now. i just have 2 bugs to report. onse ou
press a in the training it doesn't allow you to ress right mouse key,
i think it's a bug, and they already reported, just to confirm
that it's also happening here.
also, when using the normal mode to train(with the beacon)
i think you should use the normal sounds from the game when drawing the shapes
and not the musical notes, only use then when you're in the musical notes training.
i don't know if you understood.
also a way to pause the game would be good, peraps the p key, or some other.
and is there a way to save the current game?
thank you very much for this work, it's more and more impressive.
Aminiel, that's a good idea I just didn't have access to any musical note sfx or synthesizers at the time. If you happen to know of a good place to get the notes I'll make the change. I agree that the shapes probably aren't in the best order, but I don't think it necessarily fits your order either. From person to person different shapes will be easy or hard, so you might feel claw is one of the hardest but I, for example, can get it 99% of the time while I have trouble with others you might find easy. This makes it very hard to put them into a good order that will seem natural to everyone. I think no matter how they are arranged, someone will be convinced harder ones are showing up before easy ones. 
Staindaddict, at the moment there is no way to jump back to voice after you switch to sound map mode unless you press escape and go back using the menu. I didn't know if the sound map was going to be beneficial so I wanted to release it for everyone to test before I spent too much time fine tuning it. If people seem to like using it, I will make sure you can switch back and forth plus I will make sure you can use it during the real game.
Hmm, maybe you'll do a difficulty levels, easy will be with easier shapes, and if diffaculty will be decreasing, the shapes will be more challenging? um, it's a small idea.
Wow, what a world of difference. lol I have done like five or six shapes already with the help of the musical notes. I have noticed a bug though:
When going back into training mode from the levels, the music will sometimes play when you're trying to train. The music from the levels that is.
I finally did Claw, and quite a few of the other ones. I'm stuck on Shelter. Sounds easy, but it's not. lol
Nice job man! Keep it up!
Oh, I forgot.. I'm definitely with Matheus here; a save game feature would be awesome.
Seal, I'm brainstorming ways of using different game difficulties as an excuse to use actual letters as shapes. I'm still not sure how I'd want to handle that, but as some people have suggested, maybe I can have an easier game mode where Daytona is writing in a journal or something and is therefore being required to draw letters.
Staindaddict, I'm glad the sound mode is helping! I don't know what you mean with a save game feature. When you play through the actual game it permanently unlocks levels as you reach them so next time you can skip directly to the level you left off at. I would think this is the same function as a save game feature, but please let me know if I'm not understanding you correctly.
I've uploaded another update that has a few small changes. Now when you press A and SHIFT it will turn the sound mode back off. Now when you turn on the sound mode during the actual game you will hear the notes as you draw. When you are in the training area you can simply use the Left and Right arrow keys to jump to other shapes, rather than having to go back to the menu to pick a new one. And lastly I have added a bit more to the read me file although I must admit I keep forgetting to work on that. Code is more fun than writing out shape descriptions lol!
Have people started playing the actual game yet? I'd love to know what level people have gotten to.
I'm deffinately looking forward to trying this. Actually it sounds like you could have a really great game concept there, and perhaps include some other spells or scenarios. For instance, bating magical creatures with specific spells, say drawing a flame shape for a fireball, a strike for a lightning bolt, a jaggid diamond for an ice blast etc.
I also like the magical letters idea, though describing the shapes of capital letters could be interesting.
It just sounds like you've got such a unique concept, it could be made into several crazy ideas and situations.
you could also increase difficulty by having a colour or element change, so that one shape required drawing lines of a different element.
So for instance, lefft mouse button scrolled forward betwene ice, fire earth and lightning elements, and drawing the mouse produced a line of that element.
shapes with multiple lines of different element types would be especially hard to do sinse you'd need to remember to switch your drawing element in the middle.
Btw, as an interesting fact, mages in the steampunk magic podcast novel The gearheart found here actually do! draw shapes in the air to cast spells.
Dark you are reading my mind I think. I don't want to toss in any story spoilers but I've been working on ways to expand the game to go deeper in to the story and to show us the negative affects this book as on Daytona's life. I know it makes far more sense to keep it all together in the same game, but there are a few reasons I'm considering releasing the next sections as sequels. Basically each game would be like a chapter in the overall story, and its not like people have to wait a year for the sequel lol!
Do you guys think it would be stupid for me to have multiple Daytona games or would it be neat to see this turn in to a small series of games? A clear downside for separating them is that it keeps each game kinda small. The plus side is that I will have more freedom to make major code changes between each game and not have to worry about it breaking the parts that were already working.
I think one game with all daytona's stories will be the best choice. Now, i managed to do corectly claw and arrow shapes, but claw is hard for now lol
Going to practice it more.
Aminiel, that's a good idea I just didn't have access to any musical note sfx or synthesizers at the time. If you happen to know of a good place to get
the notes I'll make the change.
Since you are using simple sine beeps, you would just have to change their frequencies.
C4 is 261.7 Hz
D#4 is 311.1 Hz
G4 is 349.0 Hz
A#4 is 466.2 Hz
C5, D#5, G5 and A#5 are twice those above.
I agree that the shapes probably aren't in the best order, but I don't think it necessarily fits your order either. From
person to person different shapes will be easy or hard, so you might feel claw is one of the hardest but I, for example, can get it 99% of the time while
I have trouble with others you might find easy. This makes it very hard to put them into a good order that will seem natural to everyone. I think no matter how they are arranged, someone will be convinced harder ones are showing up before easy ones.
I think y are only partially right.
Admit that 3 or 4 straight lines are easier than cuvres
I personally like the idea of multiple daytona games. Each can be it's own series of indidivudal challenges, but with a similar theme, and other elements introduced over time through the series.
Something similar was in fact done with the game emerald mine on the amigarwhich had different versions of the same engine each with some slightly different elements.
If you were releasing the games commercially I'd be less certain of this stratogy unless the games were extremely cheap, ---- ie, in the five to ten usd range, sinse if you were charging 15 dollars for each successive chapter of a similar game it would feel rather as if you were milking things.
if however the games remain free, or have a very low pricetag, i think it's a great idea, reminds me of some of the old data disk ideas you got back on the comador amigar, like "oh no more lemmings!" and "yet moe! lemmings!" and "christmas lemmings!" after the initial lemmings game which only had a few differences from the original, ---- such as the deadly exploding santa hats in Christmas lemmings ;d.
Aminiel, thanks for the frequencies, I'll work on changing the sounds. I suppose someone could argue that lines are easier than curves but I still believe that is a matter of opinion. I naturally have no problem making the curving shapes but at first I struggled to make the completely straight lines.
If you asked random people which was easier, walking in a straight line or walking in a big circle you wouldn't get everyone to agree. I've walked behind plenty of people who are too unbalanced to walk in a straight line. They slowly weave back and forth on the path. We all move a little differently and this game is based on hand and arm movements.
If I see people agreeing on a new shape arrangement I'll gladly move things around, but I'd want it to be based on a group choice rather than just 1 or 2 people.
Dark, I believe that's the direction I'm going to go with the game. We've been driving around all day and I've had time to plan out what I want to do next with the game. To continue the storyline I will have to add styles of game play that are different enough they would run the risk of messing up what's already in the game. It can be done, of course, but it would be far easier and faster for me to just separate them into different games. As you all know, I prefer making a game as fast as humanly possible and this will help me do that.
The other game I talked about making will be pushed aside since I never got you guys excited about it yet. Now I'm glad I was keeping the details a secret! Instead of that other game I will work on...
Daytona 2: Death of the Archive
This game will center around the english alphabet so that it can double as an educational title. I'm also waiting to see if I should add more levels to the current game to make it longer. I suppose I'll wait and see how quickly people finish the game.
Aprone,
When you're on the first level, the sounds do not play correctly. For example, if it says arrow, arrow, arrow, when I press A to enter sound mode, it plays the sound of the Claw.
Another thing is when the game starts, and you press control to skip the intro speech, the game freezes with a runtime error subscript out of range. This also happens randomly after intro speech is finished, and when you press either left or right mouse button.
o man, thi is so much better!
i can get the arrow every time now though, still having trouble with claw though, probably because of the fact i'm using a trackpad, but ah well
i think that 10 levels are more than enough, if you manage
to find these bugs i think that this game is complete.
i didn't even finished the first level.
can't wait to see daytona 2!
the bugs are only:
*the sound that still plays during the training, and sometimes i think that the game
continues even when you're training, i think that it thinks
that the game wasn't finished and continues.
when you enter the training and are still in the first normal mode and trying to draw
the shapes the sound of it playing still is the one used in the alternative
training of the musical notes, i think that it should be the same sounds in the real
game, only changing then to musical notes when you're in the proper training mode.
hope you understand.
thanks!
OK, what do I need to do to complete a level? I keep doing the instructed shapes over and over again, and I don't see the music changing or anything. I spent like 20 minutes on level one today, and I didn't get to unlock level 2. Is it just me, or what's going on?
Staindaddict, the important thing to remember about the game mode is speed. Hopefully you saw the bucket of water example I wrote earlier and also put in the read me file. Each correct shape brings you closer to leveling up but the longer you wait between correct shapes, your progress slowly drains away. I suppose this is a good place to put an option for Easy Normal and Hard difficulties! Changing the shapes based on difficulty didn't seem like a good plan, but I could always adjust how fast the points drain away. Hmm, I think I'll add that in soon so we can give people more choices on how they want to play. If you played that long and never got anywhere, it means you were going too slow to build up points. I hope this doesn't discourage you and I'll try to have difficulty settings in soon so you can make it easier if you wish.
I also want to thank you guys for pointing out those bugs. I've written them down and I will look for them tomorrow.
I like the difficulty idea based on chances to miss sinse it means playing on hard will require more precision and a good knolidge of shapes. Say on easy you get 4 misses before losing points, on normal 2 or 3, and on hard only one.
I can't be exactly certain on the frequency, not having played the game yet, but hopefully you get the idea.
Only one miner question. If you are going to increase the number of difficulty levels, do we get different ending messages? that would give people something extra to work for.
hi aprone. i think that levels unlocked
should be based in the difficulties you've choose,
for example, if you unlocked level 2 on easy you will have it unlocked only
for easy difficulty. this will adds even more to replay value.
thanks
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