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AoMH SD Adventure contest 2020: Eurotool
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Author |
File Description |
Eurotool |
Posted on 07/30/20 @ 11:34 AM (updated 08/15/20)
File Details |
Screenshot:
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Version: |
AoM: The Titans |
Eurotool's entry to the 2020 contest. The scenario is titled "Omens: Reprise" and is for AoM:TT.
This scenario is a 3rd person adventure playable with the mouse buttons or WASD.
Showcase soon to come.
Update 15/Aug/2020: Fixed level selection and various cinematic glitches. |
Author | Comments & Reviews ( All | Comments Only | Reviews Only ) |
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Lewonas |
Posted on 08/14/20 @ 01:48 PM
This unofficial review was written for the Mini Adventure competition.
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Adventure (8/10)
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This is without question the most hilarious and purely enjoyable adventure. If there was a category to score the ‘fun factor’, you would get 10/10 points there. The scenario offers a surprising amount of different settings and challenges throughout the scenario that all bring a nice and different adventurous aspect to the table. But one of things it lacked was a sense of accomplishment and closure by the end of the adventure. More on that in the Immersive section.
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Immersive storyline and experience (8/10)
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The scenario features some well-crafted, action-packed cinematics and some sweet voiced dialogues to add to the immersion. However, the jump from the city to the first gameplay area and the jumps between some of the levels were a bit too sudden and left me wondering how and why we ended up in those places. And although the ending was very entertaining gameplay-wise, it did not feel as a nice closure to the overall story/adventure. After all, wasn’t the whole story and objective about defeating the aliens? How did the invasion end?
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Atmosphere (8/10)
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Every level had some excellent complementary lighting and music to create a fitting atmosphere. For instance, the intro’s atmosphere felt exciting, the sewers’ felt eerie and mysterious, and the fortress’ felt dramatic. Also the sound design was very much on point, and especially so in what I consider to be my most favourite section of the scenario: the glorious alien massacre mayhem. It was beautiful and I couldn’t help but have the biggest grin on my face during the entire length of that section.
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Balance (6/10)
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This is unfortunately the category where you’ve lost most of the points for me. All of the levels simply were not challenging enough, which in turn did not motivate me to replay the scenario to see if I could perform better. The biggest challenge was getting used to the awkward controls with the movement being bound to your mouse’s scroll wheel. It added some artificial difficulty I was not a fan of. Especially so when you had to carefully navigate through the sewers and the fortress. The unit occasionally did not respond quickly enough to your inputs, or aom’s pathfinding system made the unit follow a different route leading towards death/capture.
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Map design (7/10)
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To be honest, when I first glanced over the map in the editor the map design did not look particularly impressive. You went for a pretty straight-forward approach by dividing the area into multiple gameplay sections and separating them with some very narrow borders. But you made it work by locking the camera on your unit so that you could not see past those borders which could have ruined the immersion. Well done. The only area I had a gripe with was my favourite alien massacre section. It had some invisible walls to block you from going to a different area where it seemed like you could go to. You could have made it more apparent (e.g. using other obstructing objects) that you cannot go there.
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Eyecandy (7/10)
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You decorated the areas just enough so it would be nice to look at. I was impressed by the sewers area, but all the other areas were pretty basic. But there’s nothing wrong with that and it is understandable because too much eyecandy could have been a hindrance to the kind of gameplay you were going for.
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Features (8/10)
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You offer some excellent variety in gameplay mechanics. You have action-packed skillful maneuvering sections, stealth sections, puzzle sections, and more. There is no mistake that there will be something for everyone to enjoy. Great job.
And finally, I unfortunately did experience some bugs/glitches. I’ll mention some of them: you can get caught in the fortress but still win when you’re close to the exit, the ending cinematic got stuck on the credits section (had to close the game with task manager), and skipping to another level with the hotkeys can break some levels.
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Final score: 52/70
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nottud
Staff |
Posted on 08/14/20 @ 06:14 PM
Playability: 3
Well I certainly got a nice surprise. I didn't think anyone would attempt to full well get a 3rd person adventure game to AOM! Gameplay is mouse controls to control the character with the left and right buttons rotating the character and the middle mouse button moving the character forwards. The game is a series of minigames the player has to complete. If a player fails a section they are immediately restarted which is a great feature allowing immediate retry. The gameplay is definitely very varied but is let down by a few major issues I encountered.
Firstly the control system. The controls themselves are strange but understandable given the game nature and the way that keys are read by the game. The main letdown for me is the pathing. Sometimes the character will spazz out or move strangely, in other cases the character will completely refuse to move. I suspect this is down to a pathing issue with the movement with objects blocking (E.g. I think it is shades doing the poison gas). A possible solution for this would be to remove collision detection for problematic objects - this can be done by changing type to Spy Eye and then transforming back which will keep the "ghost" behaviour. Other intermediate objects will work like Blood which have the "NotAlive" proto flag. As I am very found of the way the map works I am happy to spend some time investigating this and other possible solutions if you like to improve this.
Secondly I encountered on both playthroughs a near soft lock at the ballista section. When I died, I would restart and then immediately die again before I have chance to do anything. Then the respawning system would get out of sync with the camera, fades and positioning and would completely bug out. Finally after about 20 deaths it finally fixes itself. There is probably some bug in the triggers - perhaps an issue with some triggers firing others. Perhaps changing trigger priority to high might help.
Third I unfortunately encountered a full soft lock on reaching the car stage. Somehow I triggered the camera to go crazy zooming out and then the game went completely black and I just played the music. I was unable to recover from this and was forced to completely restart. I think somehow I caused camera to unlock - I think possibly clicking when I shouldn't when the car cinematic started.
Balance: 5
The challenges were difficult but part of that I attribute to the bugs and movement control issues, the actual games themselves seemed fair otherwise. Things were definitely helped greatly by the instant restart feature making failure much less frustrating and more forgiving. As a result I felt the balance was good - I made consistent progress throughout the game.
Creativity: 5
The map was consistently creative through both with the story and the puzzles. I never knew what was coming next. The immersion was also great - I felt immersed in the game throughout which was definitely helped by the third person camera system - it didn't feel like I was playing Age of Mythology. The gameplay was a good mix between puzzles and adventuring, it is a shame the map was restricted to be so small, I would love a larger version where you are out properly adventuring.
Map Design: 5
The game felt very atmospheric. I particularly liked the look of the poison area with the green smoke (I think from shades?) and the green water. However I did also like the bright and cheerful surroundings of the tutorial level. The highlight though had got to be the very cleverly designed light stage with the lampades acting as lights.
Story/Instructions: 4
Great engaging story throughout, and a nice idea of branching off the main campaign! My only complaint was it ended very suddenly and I was screaming noooooo in my head. I wanted more! The instructions were clearly told with nice voice acting from Athena.
Additional Comments:
More more more! As mentioned in the review I am happy to provide assistance for improving the path finding. It would also be good to see a port to EE - especially as some new triggers in patch 2.8 may help with some of the issues in the map. The only difficulty might be performance. |
Eurotool
File Author |
Posted on 08/15/20 @ 11:40 PM
@nottud
First off I cannot thank you enough for your descriptive review.
The controls were undoubtedly the cornerstone of this scenario. The spazzes are the last problem for which I was unable to find a solution. The original story was actually a 3D platform using the Anubite jump mechanism: as you can guess, it was scrapped due to AoM's way of handling unit movement.
About the ballista soft lock: I could foresee some timing issues in the scenario due to the difference in PC speeds. Ran the shootout level about a hundred times on my not particularly fast laptop without any issue -- will look into it some more.
About you wanting more at the end: I wholeheartedly feel you. Unfortunately I have some regrets about having spent that much time on this scenario.
And finally I appreciate your offer of assistance. If porting this scenario to EE is a trivial and easy task, then that's all I could really ask for. |
Zenophobia |
Posted on 08/16/20 @ 04:27 PM
Playability: 4
The controls were incredibly smooth and I'm impressed by how you managed to pull off such smooth first-person gameplay with just the mouse. However, while this may not be an issue for others, I had a really difficult time controlling the character with the middle mouse wheel, probably because of my mouse itself. I ended up pressing the right and left mouse buttons with my right hand while my left hand hovered over the mouse wheel for movement, which felt a little clunky. At the very least, running over monsters was quite fun. :D
There did seem to be a bug at the ending, where the car kill counter kept going up and up, which cut into the rest of the cinematics, and the scenario never ended for me.
Balance: 4
I think you nailed it for the most part here. It was really easy to die, but the punishment for death wasn't very severe, since every episode was small in scale. Had you made the player restart from the beginning, I most certainly would have lowered the score here. In addition, it felt rather pointless that there were three 'levels' to the padlock puzzle, since it's technically the same puzzle all three times. You can get from any possible board state in that puzzle to any other possible board state with the right moves. So changing the starting state of the board did very little to enhancing the difficulty of the puzzle. I was also a little confused as to what was the right 'orientation' for the UI Range Indicators. Was Norse correct or Atlantean correct? In the end, I just guessed that Norse was right and I got lucky.
Creativity: 5
I was honestly blown away with all the cool and unique gameplay you threw in. Although it was a little awkward, you really executed well on the first-person perspective given the constraints of AoM. Using the mousedown and mouseup events to simulate smooth turning while the mouse buttons were held down was absolutely genius! I especially enjoyed the effects of the padlock puzzle, and the experience of running over monsters in a car.
Map Design: 4
While there wasn't much in terms of eyecandy, you made up for it by making pathways and gameplay areas clear to the user. My only complaint here would have been that I died to the poison gas the very first time because it just wasn't visible enough against the green waters, and had I been lucky enough to walk right through them, I wouldn't have ever noticed them in the first place.
Story/Instructions: 4
I was confused at first because I thought I had loaded up a campaign cinematic, but the reveal moments later was all the more impactful because of it. The whole experience was very engaging and fun, although we weren't given much detail about the enemy we were facing or the situation Kastor was thrown in. The ending felt a little rushed but was spectacular nonetheless.
Additional Comments:
This was a really fun and unique scenario, offering a completely new and exciting experience for the player. I loved the vindicative car ride and the very well-made dance gameplay at the end. |
HGDL v0.8.2 |
Rating |
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4.3 | Breakdown |
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Playability | 4.0 | Balance | 4.0 | Creativity | 5.0 | Map Design | 4.3 | Story/Instructions | 4.0 |
Statistics |
Downloads: | 441 |
Favorites: [] | 0 |
Size: | 55.78 MB |
Added: | 07/30/20 |
Updated: | 08/15/20 |
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