The Legends of Owlia

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Banshaku
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Re: The Legends of Owlia

Post by Banshaku »

I'm now at the 3rd boss. I like the game in general, the music and the visual. The only thing is some puzzle I was not really able to figure out at all (the thundra stage) so I had to check the FAQ.

Another thing that I noticed is I tend to use Tyto most of the time instead of the sword. I don't know if this is the normal way of playing or not but I felt the sword was not that strong anyway so I attack from a distance as much as possible.

As for the gold for continuing the stage, my opinion is instead of calling it gold, if it was "mana" or some kind of magical thing that you had to "accumulate" to be powerful enough then it would at felt better. It felt like "pay to play" to continue :lol: just joking but it was the first image I had when I undertsood was the gold was for.

Still, a very good game. Good work!

Edit:

Just beaten the third boss. Now I need to get gold to continue but enemies somehow just drop bombs. I think the game would have been just fine without the gold. It just breaks the pace. The game is already quite enjoyable without it.
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GradualGames
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Re: The Legends of Owlia

Post by GradualGames »

Banshaku wrote:I'm now at the 3rd boss. I like the game in general, the music and the visual. The only thing is some puzzle I was not really able to figure out at all (the thundra stage) so I had to check the FAQ.

Another thing that I noticed is I tend to use Tyto most of the time instead of the sword. I don't know if this is the normal way of playing or not but I felt the sword was not that strong anyway so I attack from a distance as much as possible.

As for the gold for continuing the stage, my opinion is instead of calling it gold, if it was "mana" or some kind of magical thing that you had to "accumulate" to be powerful enough then it would at felt better. It felt like "pay to play" to continue :lol: just joking but it was the first image I had when I undertsood was the gold was for.

Still, a very good game. Good work!

Edit:

Just beaten the third boss. Now I need to get gold to continue but enemies somehow just drop bombs. I think the game would have been just fine without the gold. It just breaks the pace. The game is already quite enjoyable without it.
Thanks Banshaku! If you beat the third boss, that should mean you're on to the beach area. Try fetching gold from the clams before destroying them.
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Banshaku
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Re: The Legends of Owlia

Post by Banshaku »

GradualGames wrote: Thanks Banshaku! If you beat the third boss, that should mean you're on to the beach area. Try fetching gold from the clams before destroying them.
So that was the trick :lol: I didn't think about that one. Will continue soon. The thing is, it just say that you don't have enough gold but there is no indicator that tells you how much you need (unless I'm mistaken). I took a small break from the game because of that. Will try it tomorrow then!

edit:

couldn't wait, tried the clam trick right way. It worked! I will be able to do the dungeon tomorrow. Thanks for the tip!
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GradualGames
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Re: The Legends of Owlia

Post by GradualGames »

Banshaku wrote:
GradualGames wrote: Thanks Banshaku! If you beat the third boss, that should mean you're on to the beach area. Try fetching gold from the clams before destroying them.
So that was the trick :lol: I didn't think about that one. Will continue soon. The thing is, it just say that you don't have enough gold but there is no indicator that tells you how much you need (unless I'm mistaken). I took a small break from the game because of that. Will try it tomorrow then!

edit:

couldn't wait, tried the clam trick right way. It worked! I will be able to do the dungeon tomorrow. Thanks for the tip!
Not knowing how much gold you need and the gold fetch quests on the overworlds are there intentionally to make you explore the overworld a bit. It's kind of cheap, but it was what I could come up with within the constraints of what me and my team were capable of at the time. The scope of this game COULD have been utterly enormous...I might still be working on it. :D
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gauauu
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Re: The Legends of Owlia

Post by gauauu »

The only place I felt the gold requirement was cumbersome was the islands, and that was only until you tipped me off about using fetch to steal the clams' gold. (I didn't realize that was a pile of gold inside them, so it never even occurred to me to steal it). The rest seemed pretty fair.
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olddb
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Re: The Legends of Owlia

Post by olddb »

Good job. :D :beer: :D
...
Erockbrox
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Re: The Legends of Owlia

Post by Erockbrox »

I just got done with Owlia revision B (the free rom version). I will now write up my personal review. The reason for doing this is to give feedback to the actual creators of the game. Feedback is always important and I really like the homebrew scene. I consider every new game an accomplishment in its own right even if I have some criticisms.


I have 4 videos of my play through, but I will have to post them later as they uploading and/or rendering.


- I like the idea of the game being owl themed. I can't think of any other game off the top of my head that is all based around owls.

- Fun fact. I actually rescued an owl in real life when I found one injured in my front yard. I called some people and gave it to them. Apparently its illegal in some states to own an actual owl.

- On the intro the story text screens could have had a longer time on them. I can only read all of the text if I really try hard to read fast.

- I don't think the evil villain had enough back story. Mermon seems to just hate Owlia for just the sake of it. What is the reason for him capturing all of the owls and sending his army of fish bad guys onto the land?

- While many of the basic character controls worked well like the main characters walking movement there were many controls which seems very cryptic. For example when you press the start button it was very hard for me to understand how to use that menu. For example I couldn't select the "bombs" or "lanterns". Then when you get the ability to use bombs and lanterns you still don't get to select the word bombs or lanterns, but instead it is listed as a tech. It seemed like this whole menu could have been designed in a more intuitive way. It also seems as if somehow things are listed twice. There are the bombs, but then there is also the ability to use the bombs and they are two separate things. Why not simplify that into one thing?

- The menu when you press start feels so strange. Almost as if it was messed up or something. Like as if it was supposed to allow you access to select your cursor to anything on the menu, but instead something blocked you off and restricted you to only being able to select some things at the lower part of the screen. Almost like say you were a mountain climber and you were trying to climb a mountain, but then someone at the top kept throwing snow balls at you knocking you back down. I feel like I'm trying to climb to the top of something, but I never can.

- I actually realized (after beating the game) that there was a person in the village who teaches you about the controls in the game, but since he looked just like the other guy who is saw earlier I passed him up leaving me to figure out the logic of the controls of the game on my own.

- I finally realized that the select button allows you to equip two different techs. The problem is, I when I go to change to two new techs I forget which current tech is currently being used so that when I change the techs I don't know which tech I should then already be equipped with. For example, I currently have Attack and Fetch equipped with Fetch being the claw under my hearts container then I go and select Shield and Homing so then which tech is then the one that I have immediately? In other words what is now the icon under my hearts? And even if there is a logical answer for this its cumbersome because I have to pay attention to the icon under my hearts in the first place before I then change to my new tech abilities.

The best way I can think of to remedy this is to only allow 1 primary weapon (tech) and then have select switch over to the last tech that you used.

- Speaking of techs. You have a basic owl attack tech then a fetch tech. In my opinion there is no need to have different techs for this. Think Link's Boomerang in Zelda 3. His boomerang stuns enemies and also picks up keys and rupees. It is not two different abilities, but instead they merged both of those concepts into one item. Same for the owl, if I want the owl to get some key I should just be able to throw the owl at the key, not have to select the "fetch" ability to do this.

- I "love" the hint with the colors of the owls in the village. Honestly you totally trolled the players here. The text reads "colors of the owls can be RYPP or RPPY". One would only think that this means "RED, YELLOW, PURPLE, PURPLE". But at the end of the game you threw in a PURPLE and PINK owl which defeats the whole purpose of giving this hint in the first place. If you just say PP I have no idea if its PURPLE & PURPLE or PURPLE & PINK or PINK & PURPLE or PINK & PINK. It is literally a puzzle inside of another puzzle. LOL!!!!

- For the most part I could understand what the graphics represented, but there were a few times when I just couldn't understand what something was. For example the first chest. I didn't know what this was. I originally thought is was an injured owl on the ground upside down.

- The tile in the forest to advance the story. I think I literally played the game for an hour before I found this by accident. It's just a random tile to step on and if you don't step on this you don't advance the story. There is no incentive to look at the tree to trigger this tile. Maybe if there was an apple in the tree or something that would encourage people to take a closer look at it.

- I think its funny that you made the dungeon entrances have some type of gold requirement before you enter. Like....... why? You are trying to save the owls right? Then why is the owl statue blocking your path to save the owls unless you have enough gold? You would think the owl statue would say "screw the gold, get in here quick and save our owl friends".

- I liked the dungeon concept and the doors which are stone pillars which go down and back up. I think the doors going up and down effect is really cool.

- Some stuff in the dungeons though is really cryptic and I mean really really cryptic. For example with the angler fish enemy which shines his light on the key. If its just one fish then I understand this and okay it makes sense... cool gimmick. But when there are more than one fish enemy in a room and all of the fish have to shine their lights on the keys at the same time to get the key? This doesn't make any sense to me at all. If it only takes one fish to shine the light on the key to get the key in one room then why do I need two fish to do the same thing in another room? Just put one of these fishes in a room at a time for it to make any sense in my opinion.

- The reason why I don't like this whole light the key with the fish to get the key thing is because in one particular room all you needed was one fish with one light to get the key. But then in another room you needed 2 or 3 fish with their lights on the keys to get the key. So I deem this illogical because if you already were able to achieve a certain thing with only 1 fish why do you need more fish to achieve the same thing? For example, if I want to turn on my computer I press the power button, but then if I want to turn on my computer in another room I need to turn on ALL of my computers in that other room just to get my original computer to work also? Do you see what I mean?

- Then there is the unlock tech ability. O...M...G.... Really?........ Really........? You are telling me that you actually need a tech to unlock a door. Something that is literally an automatic process in other games and in this game it was programmed to be cryptic. If you don't believe me that this is cryptic then watch other game play videos on this. I watched 3 other videos and in each video each person had a hard time understanding how to unlock a basic door.

The truth is that the unlock tech ability doesn't even need to exist at all. Seriously. This is how it needs to be done. Once you get a key, if you stand in front of a door with a keyhole all you simply need to do is press the B button on the controller and the owl unlocks the door. That's it. That's all you need. There is nothing else to it. This is supposed to be a very easy process (unlocking a door), but in your game it was very hard to understand at the beginning. It was very counter intuitive. I mean in Zelda 3 all you have to do is touch a locked door and it will automatically unlock if you have a key.

- In the snow dungeon. It was very counter intuitive that the game wanted me to kill the moveable spikes. Usually in games there are killable enemies and non killable enemies. Usually spike blocks and other such things can hurt you, but you can't kill it. But in this dungeon you have to know that the moveable spikes can be killed to get a chest.

- Also in the snow dungeon there is the one room with two ice rocks that you can blow up with bombs. This was a very cryptic puzzle in my opinion. Not only do you have to blow them up, but you have to do it in a quick manner. As if time is a thing here??? If you don't blow them up fast enough then the game gives you the "bad" sound. But my problem with this is that when you run out of bombs you also get this same "bad" sound. So when I was playing the game I got the two confused and didn't understand that the game was giving me the "bad" sound when I didn't destroy the ice blocks fast enough. Honestly, it should just be kill the ice blocks and get the chest. There shouldn't even be a time element involved here.

- Speaking of bombs. You should increase the amount of bombs and lanterns that one can carry. Why limit this to 7? It just makes it inconvenient when you run out.

- In another dungeon there were these puzzles which switch buttons on them and if you walked on them they pressed down and then sometimes pressing one switch down made another one come up. These puzzles were okay, but I feel like they were never explained. A message tile on the wall that explained this would be nice.

- There were also a few cases where there were 4 pillars which needed to be picked in a particular order or combination. In one dungeon there were clues that someone told you, but in another dungeon there were no clues that I found. This means that I literally did a brute force method to solve this. I believe there are 24 = 4! possible outcomes.

- The owl being able to carry the main character over gaps was a cool idea and I liked this a lot!!

- Respawing enemies in room which have doors which will not open unless you kill all of the enemies sometimes gets annoying.

- The mini games where you paid to gamble was neat. Putting the rings on the bottles with the owl is sometimes tricky though. Like the owl will fly right over the bottle and NOT put the ring on it. He should have put a ring on it. \[beyonce]

- What is the point of the owl statues saying that they need gold, but then they never take it away from you. It cost like 60,000 to rent the submarine yet you never have to pay anyone to rent the submarine????

- Music was actually pretty decent. I was humming the tunes.

- Then in the last dungeon you see the colored owls. But remember at the start of the game they gave that clue about the colors right. Another problem besides having two colors which both start with the color P is the orientation of the owls. How do you know where to start or end? How do the color codes that were given correspond to their orientations in the game? I want to actually find out what are the exact odds of getting this right at random.

- The actual color combination solution is: First room with 4 owls in each corner: Top left RED, top right YELLOW, bottom left PURPLE, bottom right PINK. Other room with 4 owls close to each other: top RED, left PURPLE, bottom YELLOW, right PINK.


So that was my feedback and review of Owlia. It's not a bad game and once I got used to how all of the in-game mechanics worked it was okay, but the learning curve on how to learn how the game works was very steep. There were many parts of the game that were too cryptic for me to even understand and I had to consult other walkthroughs to progress. Many things were not intuitive at all and I would probably never figure them out on my own. I feel like some things could have been used more, for example the lanterns. When I beat the game I was actually a little disappointed, because I was ready to play a few more dungeons since I had all the badass techs!

It's not easy to make games period and this was definitely a substantial effort. The game engine that you created to make this game seems really cool and it seems like there is a lot more potential in the engine to make other types of games like this.

I will post videos in the next few days.
Erockbrox
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Re: The Legends of Owlia

Post by Erockbrox »

I finally got part 1 of my Owlia playthrough uploaded. I hope you enjoy. Also part of this is for feedback purposes.

Owlia NES Part 1

Owlia NES Part 2

Owlia NES Part 3

Owlia NES Part 4

That should be all of the videos.
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