Re: Tower of Change
KavenBach just updated the game to
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, and... yeah. I think I'm done with this one for a while.
I'm not liking Kaven's attitude at all. He gave the game a relatively large graphical overall and added a bunch of levels in this new version, but for every step forward, he's taken eight steps back. To start, he's completely disabled the save states when everyone I've seen has been genuinely thankful for it and wouldn't have played the game for as long as they did if they didn't have it. It's just
gone, and he has no reason for it than just for the sake of randomly making an already broken game harder.
His "logic" is that it's now redundant to use GameMaker's own F5 save state feature because he's programmed an internal save file system. The first obvious problem right off the bat is you don't get to save your game until the sixth level, which was the final level in previous builds of the game. Do you see the fault in logic here? Kaven has disabled the Save Anywhere system people were
regularly using to progress through the first six levels because he says it's no longer necessary with a save system you don't get to use until
after the first six levels.
That completely misses the point!
Furthermore, the new built-in save system that's supposed replace the save states that never let me down
doesn't even work right. When you start the game, you're asked if you want to load an existing save from slots 1-3. If you've saved the game in version 004.0 previously, you'll need to press another button on the keyboard to bring up Level 6. From this point, your character is basically stuck in place because she spawns directly on the Level 6 save point, causing the save slot prompt to stay on-screen and effectively disable the game controls. Thanks entirely to the sloppy programming, you
can actually get around this by mashing the arrow keys and the 1 and 2 escape buttons to slowly float the character toward the medusa enemy that's behind a wall to the right of the save point and intentionally get yourself killed, allowing you to safely respawn with full control of the character on your next life. I've tried the save point three times already and observed the same horrible results each time.
Of course, one, this is a virtually inescapable game-breaking bug in the save system that never should have made it to the distributed build of the game, and, two, this means that loading your game
absolutely guarantees you're going to lose a life. If you make it to Level 6 with one life left, don't even bother using the save point. In other words, KavenBach isn't playtesting this crap himself and just throws his blatantly malfunctioning programming on other people.
Lastly, I'm not a fan of the design choices in these newer levels KavenBach is coming up with. The existing levels, while infested with buggy collision detection, at least
in theory had a strategic approach with timing jumps and avoiding manageable groups of enemies. Level 7 immediately starts with a series of climbing hallways populated by slime traps, poison spiders, and those lasers that will petrify you on impact. The spiders are placed so close together and the ceiling is so low that it's nearly impossible at times to vault over them while still taking into account the timing of the laser that shoots across the hallway. And it's not like you can time the spiders, since they have no set paths and simply turn left and right at random times. This plays directly into completely ridiculous situations where your jumping will be cut short by a spider and you'll land in a slime puddle for instant goo-girl-ification, or the spiders will unpredictably gang up on you and cocoon you when you're simply ducking one of the lasers. Basically it feels less like strategic platforming and more like purely luck-based gameplay in Level 7.
I got to Level 8 with about four lives left. It was much more open and returned to conventional platforming from what I remember, and there was a new gimmick where you could climb across grating on the ceiling, but I still died numerous times by landing directly in the path of a medusa on ground level after slipping off a platform I landed on perfectly. At that point I made up my mind and just called it quits. All of this would have been avoidable if the original save system were in place and I could play more cautiously.
On one hand, I feel like I'm coming down too hard on Kaven. On the other, some of this stuff is
impossible to miss if you allot yourself
any sort of self-testing procedure, and that just rubs off on everything else I have problems with in this game.
I'd say I've ranted enough. You guys can go do whatever now.
