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Praepotentia

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Author Comments

3/10/16 UPDATE 1.03: Fixed a trigger on last level that played wrong cutscene after you defeat the boss.

3/9/16 UPDATE 1.02: Minor Fix.

UPDATE 1.01: Fixed a bug that prevented from progressing beyond first screen because I forgot to remove a test variable.

NOTE: The game has some troubles when running on Chrome browser.

Praepotentia takes place in universe that was ravaged by
cataclysmic event called Great Chaos. Universe is recovering, but it's deep scars left by Great Chaos are still in effect.

Praepotentia is my biggest and most ambitious game ever. The amount of work that went onto this project was insane.

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I wanted to like this game. It has fantasy and RPG elements, and the graphics are not bad. I was starting to enjoy the gameplay. However. I saw one of the worst monsters in gaming, the lag monster. The slowdown is this game is just ridiculous. Once you correct the lag. this game will be better.

ahhh reminds me of the hours i put in final fantasy and also if u ever lose a SAVE FILE DO HAVE A SECOND SAVE FILE ALWAYS SAVE TWICE CUZZ IF U LOSE LIKE I DID I AT LEAST GOT A SECOND SAVE FILE PEOPLE FIND THIS HELPFULL :p

the core gameplay of the game was fun, but after lvl 4 there are no other customization or character growth, however i had a great time playing it gj 4.5/5.

I find it kind of funny that a flash game has more ways to customise the playable characters then most AAA games.

This is a realy fun game, but some stages felt a bit too long. The forest stage (stage 2) was just too long and after a while i got realy bored. But the rest of the game is solid.

Tupo26 responds:

The game's customization is comparable to AAA games? Whoa, that's a high praise. This game used have even more customization; There are dummied out equipment menu and couple accessories within game data.

Thanks for the review.

I love this genre, and my passion for it has gone largely unsatisfied for a long, long time. The story is present and as good as it needs to be, graphics are good enough, sounds are good enough. +1 presentation.

In addition to having done the beat-em-up right, your additions are solid. Characters are in good variety, each have ever-expanding options for their moveset. I like sequences instead of hotkeys, but hotkeys are in style, so whatever. I definitely haven't seen two-layer customization of special moves in a beat-em-up, if any game at all, so kudos. +1 design

The AI-controlled henchmen, each with dynamic skillset, means that your character and skill build can actually be customized to fit a party together in different ways. I'm actually having a hard time finding a party composition that just won't work without fiddling with the skill particulars. +1 design, +1 execution.

Would have been cool to see character attributes evolving or buy or find equips in secret rooms, but there is a lot of character building going on anyway.

Enemies were varied and original. They weren't all pulled directly from a Tolkien novel (or any of the bajillion games that have done so) so I didn't immediately know the best strategy for defeating them. Figuring out what they were and how to kill them was often over before I could finish the process of trial and error, but hey, at least I didn't see an isolated village of elves who don't care for the cave dwelling dwarves who reluctantly came together to help me fight orcs with axes, and ogres with blunt objects all the time. +1 design, +0.5 execution.

The game is a little fast-paced for me to really evaluate sidekick and enemy AI, but generally when I play the role I put together for my character within my party, I encountered the challenges I expected, won if I filled that role effectively, and lost if I didn't. Therefore, the sidekicks and enemies must have all known what they were doing. +1 execution,

I felt that the hitbox width and character reach were a little small; for reach, go ahead and make the attack animations a little more dramatic than a quick rotate arm/skew body, maybe make weapons a little longer. I can't even count how many times I whiffed repeatedly thinking surely I was in plane and within a sword's length. I did get used to it, though, so just -0.5 execution. For the fact that I often couldn't tell whether my character had actually done his or her skill animation or if instead I had slipped my finger and just attacked normally, I have to dock you -0.5 presentation too.

A lot of folks have complained that there is a lot of frameskip type lag. I didn't see this as game-breakingly bad running FF on Win7, computer maybe 4-5 years old that was not at all top of the line at the time. -0.5 execution.

The lag is what I call frameskip because it appears that time elapses even though it is not being drawn or accepting input. That means some threads of your code maintaining the game state are performing fine, but some step limits the rate at which the state can be rendered. I don't know a thing about flash, but if I was writing this for HTML5, I would rule out any physics, collision, mechanics, and AI as optimizations and focus on graphics and layers close to it. The circumstances I saw where there was some lag involved having a lot of enemies running around (i.e. the necromancer before I realized he was summoning more mobs) or a lot of status effects or other special effects going on. Obviously you'll want to limit the number of active characters - I do hope that necromancer boss has some sort of limit, and if so I think you should turn it down. If you haven't been doing so, some of the enemies and some of their animations can be pre-rendered to make them draw faster. I don't recall if they did any really dynamic stuff like ragdolling, but you can rasterize and cache just about anything else. This will be especially helpful if your textures or sprites are getting scaled down or rotated all the time. As for special effects, you always have to watch out for a lot of dynamic transparencies - especially dynamic radial gradients. Remember that these can be rasterized too, and while composition will still cost you, at least you won't be doing so many square roots on every frame. When I did this for 5ong (RIP) there was no perceptible quality loss and a truly epic performance improvement.

Just two other bugs bring your total down from 5 stars to 4.5. At some point (I'm gonna guess after I lost a battle then tried it again) the "Game Over" screen started to fade in over the battlefield every time I paused to use an item or fiddle with skills. The game didn't end at that point, so no big deal, just weird, -0.25. Finally, I often had to cycle through my whole party - I think several cycles at least once! - at the beginning of each battle in order to be in control over the character I wanted AND have the correct skill bar displayed. Again, no big since there wasn't usually an immediate ambush, I got used to mashing F a few times at the start of each battle, -0.25.

Your final score of 4.5 means that you have made a great game with a few pesky flaws that will not prevent me from finishing it and having good fun doing so. Probably right now. So cheers!

Tupo26 responds:

Thanks for review

The henchman AI is overpowerd compared to standard enemy AI, since it reacts alot faster than enemy. There is delay on enemy block action, henchmen don't have that. I wanted henchmen take care themselves and not have player worry about them.

There is a dummied out equipment system with couple accessories. I cut it because the game was already huge.

Necromancer (I call him Collector since it's a contruct that builds, maintains and plants those walking corpses around the crypt and is the last line of defense between the player and the final room of the crypt) originally didn't have a minion limit, then I put 1000 minion limit, then 10 and finally 7 + 4 limit. Since the Collector is a guardian contruct that builds minions from corpses I wanted him to be very insane flunky boss. He was insane but I toned him more managable level.

When I started writing the story, I avoided using Tolkien as a primary inspiration. Very first rule I made: No elves, No dwarfs. Every fantasy cliche I hate got crushed in this story and cliches I love got in. The unwinnable battle at the beginning of the game sucked but it was necessary for story. The Fumus Empire (Hostile state that was mentioned here and there) originally had bigger presence on story but I cut it because I realized it didn't contribute much to the story. In hindsight it would have helped to flesh out universe more. My only regert in the story is the potrayal of goblins and ogres. Goblins and ogres are alot more civilized than this game shows. Also human world is full of empty towns and villages since the Great Chaos wiped out 2/3 of world population.

Also thanks for the tips on performance. I'm aware on performance hits on using gradient colors, rotations and tweening. This game's development started in the beginning of 2013 and I only recently learned about amazing program called Spriter which is for making spritesheet. Had I known about this program eariler, it would saved a lot of valuable performance budget.

I did definitely bite more than I could chew when making this game but I learn best when I doing things through hard way.

Credits & Info

Views
12,317
Faves:
24
Votes
278
Score
3.33 / 5.00

Uploaded
Mar 8, 2016
6:07 AM EST