Steam, Tracks, Trouble & Riddles: Release of Chapter One

Discuss modifications and also recruit team members.

Steam, Tracks, Trouble & Riddles: Release of Chapter One

Postby peegee on Sat Sep 20, 2014 12:22 pm

Hi friends, :smt041

now is the time to play. I just uploaded the release file of the free game
project Steam, Tracks, Trouble & Riddles - Chapter One on moddb.com.

http://www.moddb.com/mods/steam-tracks- ... /downloads

After more than four years of development I like to say
THANK YOU VERY MUCH
for your support, your contribution, for your patience and you big help
to make this unique project possible.

In the past month we had an internal beta test. The result was promising,
but some glitches and oddities especially in the first riddle (the crane) caused
some headache. When this was fixed I presented it proudly to a good friend:

And even a bigger bug while a map transfer came up.
Bad thing: it wasn't reproducebable which is a nightmare for development.
But some guessing, analysing and some more testing could fixed it.
That explains the delay which was planned earlier this year.

The next steps will be to extract a vr-version for the Oculus Rift.
This gametype should work well, because you have not to hurry
very much and you are always in control of your motion. As
well you can explore the environment, which is the a key benefit
with this new device.

So if you have the time just download it and play it and keep up the good work! :smt023

peegee
"All things are difficult before they are easy." Thomas Fuller
User avatar
peegee
Regular
Regular
 
Joined: Fri Aug 28, 2009 10:54 am

Re: Steam, Tracks, Trouble & Riddles: Release of Chapter One

Postby Armageddon on Sun Sep 21, 2014 12:21 am

I can't believe you finished it. Congratulations, I'm going to play it as soon as possible.
User avatar
Armageddon
Forum Goer Elite™
Forum Goer Elite™
 
Joined: Sun Dec 14, 2008 5:53 am

Re: Steam, Tracks, Trouble & Riddles: Release of Chapter One

Postby Stormy on Mon Sep 22, 2014 3:50 pm

peegee wrote: just download it and play it


I'm going to do that riiiiight now
User avatar
Stormy
May Contain Skills
May Contain Skills
 
Joined: Sun Nov 28, 2010 6:03 am
Location: Cairns, QLD, AUS

Re: Steam, Tracks, Trouble & Riddles: Release of Chapter One

Postby Gambini on Mon Sep 22, 2014 11:45 pm

I downloaded and launched it. I was eager to give it a try since some time. To my surprise the crane controls were a pain in the ass and added to the fact that I didn´t understand the robot´s instructions, I gave up and quited after about 10 minutes of randomly pressing switches.

I suggest you to replace those controls with a game_ui. You can bind the movement keys to both horizontal crane movements and use mouse1 and 2 for dropping and raising the magnet. I´ve done that in an unfinished map i have and it´s much more cool to use. In case you want, i can give you instructions about how to do it. The outputs are as easy as onpressforward > crane1 >startforward, onunpressforward > crane1 >stop etc.
User avatar
Gambini
Sir Post-a-lot
Sir Post-a-lot
 
Joined: Mon Oct 20, 2008 1:52 am
Location: Buenos Aires, Argentina.

Re: Steam, Tracks, Trouble & Riddles: Release of Chapter One

Postby peegee on Tue Sep 23, 2014 5:29 pm

Thank you friends,
the last days showed that, let's say, this released version of the mod is kind of controversial.
Espsecially the crane part. And the level design. And the scripting. And the loong corridors, and.........

@Gambini:
I appreciate your suggestion and like to give it a try. Can you provide a simple exaple.vmf
and / or the instructions you mentioned?
That would be great!
Thank you again.
"All things are difficult before they are easy." Thomas Fuller
User avatar
peegee
Regular
Regular
 
Joined: Fri Aug 28, 2009 10:54 am

Re: Steam, Tracks, Trouble & Riddles: Release of Chapter One

Postby Major Banter on Tue Sep 23, 2014 5:36 pm

While I had no trouble figuring out how to use the crane, I found the controls inconsistent as hell. The 'reverse direction' switch occasionally doesn't work properly, and it's sooooo slow. I couldn't easily see what I needed to move to where, so I was noclipping in and out of the control room to check. On top of that, after a unique and interesting starting sequence, being lumbered with a 10 minute crawl waiting for that fucking crane to move around - well, you get my point. If it were my map, I would have considered cutting the crane entirely.

As Gambini says, those switches aren't the best choice. There's a really good game_ui crane VMF floating around somewhere that I could send over, if you don't fancy making one yourself.

Also I found the robot's instructions very unclear - once I got in the trolley and moved forward, nothing happened. I messed around with the crane for another ten minutes before I gave up. I checked your solutions PDF, and it turns out all I needed to do was prove I could reverse it - something I never thought of. How many people did you get to playtest your mod, because I don't know if that's me being stupid or what.

I'm hoping to give it another crack and get to the other puzzles, and hopefully it'll pick up a bit. Shows a lot of promise.
ImageImageImage
Major Banter
Veteran
Veteran
 
Joined: Tue Apr 01, 2008 10:52 pm
Location: UK

Re: Steam, Tracks, Trouble & Riddles: Release of Chapter One

Postby Riomaki on Wed Sep 24, 2014 1:40 am

I ended up writing a rather negative review on this on PlanetPhillip. Sorry. I appreciate the amount of work that went into it, but it just wasn't fun.

Right from the start, the crane is a sluggish, unwieldy thing. There's no mystery to what the player has to do here - the problem is in the execution, and that's not a problem you want to have in a puzzle mod. You've probably lost the majority of players on this first puzzle alone.

I thought the robot NPC was neat, but his voice seemed very disinterested and bored. He reminded me a lot of the infamous Larry from The Citizen mod in terms of detachment. He isn't helpful either - I wanted to +use him to get hints or to make him repeat his directions, since they are so easy to miss and he'll never repeat them.

I didn't encounter another major issue until I reached the bit with the turntable and pipes. This puzzle made no sense to me. There's no feedback for whether or not I'm doing the right thing with the valves, or even how the valves relate to the turntable at all. Turned everything on. Turned everything off. Tried to mimic the diagram on the wall. Just didn't get it. Started turning random valves and stumbled into the solution. Still don't know what I did to accomplish this - not good.

The part with the exploding barrels was pretty cheap. I got the cart into a spot where I couldn't reverse it out without triggering the barrels, so I had to go back 3-4 autosaves.

The cart itself, as well as the scene where you have to jump between two moving carts - they all have weird clipping and momentum problems. The cart can never take a turn gracefully - it's always trying to push me off and I have to "fight it" around every corner. I feel you may have needed to enable the "HL1 Train" flag on the tracktrains to make this connection with the player more robust.

The train dodging sequence went on far too long. You could have easily cut 2-3 tracks without any impact. Again, much like the exploding barrels, the player is inevitably going to get killed the first time because there's no discernible strategy here. You either stop and wait, or you get killed. I think you even had the trains going back and forth on the same stretch of track as well, which didn't make any sense. Neither did the houses that moved up and down( :what: ) during that last, very long platforming segment.

As you can probably infer, throughout the mod, the punishment for failure is needlessly heavy-handed. There were also parts where I could see outside the world and encounter invisible walls, especially around the pipe puzzle.

I can easily see the time and effort you put into this. But, I think there were some relatively simple, practical things you could have done to improve this mod before releasing it. Hopefully, you'll listen to some of the feedback and make improvements.

You've put a lot of work into this - it's that last part that takes the longest to get right. I think it's easy to see that the moral of the story is that you needed to have people testing this way sooner in the process.
Riomaki
Regular
Regular
 
Joined: Sun Jul 14, 2013 12:28 am

Re: Steam, Tracks, Trouble & Riddles: Release of Chapter One

Postby Armageddon on Wed Sep 24, 2014 2:39 am

After sludging through that awful crane opening I absolutely adored the mod. The atmosphere was so tense and strange. The puzzles were quite well thought out without being too easy or hard. Really enjoyable. The story didn't go as dark as I was expecting though. I thought you were a human and as the story goes on you find out the robot guy has made you his slave and he wakes up a new human every time one dies to continue doing work until the earth is clean like The Matrix, but you pickup the crowbar and you have a robot arm so oh well.

Besides a few physics bugs on the train itself getting knocked off a lot I found it quite enjoyable.
User avatar
Armageddon
Forum Goer Elite™
Forum Goer Elite™
 
Joined: Sun Dec 14, 2008 5:53 am

Re: Steam, Tracks, Trouble & Riddles: Release of Chapter One

Postby Major Banter on Mon Sep 29, 2014 9:52 am

ImageImageImage
Major Banter
Veteran
Veteran
 
Joined: Tue Apr 01, 2008 10:52 pm
Location: UK

Return to Mod Talk

Who is online

Users browsing this forum: No registered users