Just played through Specimen 134 and loved it! One of the most impressive game boy games I've ever seen! Was just wondering how many endings there are? I've found three (all very cool). Not sure if I've missed any. :)
how long is Specimen 134 roughly and how many endings? The Machine is one of my all time favourite GBC games so hoping for something of similar quality. Keep up the great work. Can we have The Machine 2? Or another sci fi interactive adventure, love the gameplay style so much
I find it really hard to estimate playtime because since I made the game when I play through it, I am kind of like a speed runner since I always know exactly what to do next. I don't want to spoil too much but Specimen is not as nonlinear as The Machine. It does have multiple endings though. If you want more games like that, buying my games would help sustain their development!
thanks, i played the demo and love the style, feels a bit like Simon Stalenhag does 8 bit with a Stranger Things vibe. I love all of it. Well ive purchased all of your physical releases to date so im happy to back this. Thanks again
Thanks so much! I will take your input into consideration when designing my future projects. Nonlinearity quickly gets out of hand so I find myself walking a tightrope between the art having to be very simple and the story being nonlinear. It's hard to have a huge branching plot alongside really developed art. The simplicity of the art was a huge advantage in The Machine.
The reward of the non linear path is that you end up with a game with a lot of replayability. I think thats a huge part of why The Machine is so popular. The most common complaint I see from other gamers who play a lot of homebrew games is that theyre too short. Art style and the mood that can afford a game is great, and your work is particularly great in that regard, but especially for those investing a pretty big whack sometimes in physical games find it hard to justify the price for games that are so short. I cant even begin to imagine how much work must go into creating a branching game like The Machine but it was 100% worth it. I was speaking to someone today who shared a picture of all his physical release homebrew games for GB, GBC and GBA. I asked him his top 5, he listed them but said “if you have to play one game play The Machine, its insane”. Out of about 50 games he physically owned that was his recommendation, I cant think of better praise to give than that. Its really something special.
That's awesome to hear! I think you're right and it's hard to imagine how much work it is to make. It's unique because of that but another one too soon might put me in the hospital before it's done anyway.
Hi ! Nice proposition as usual ! Do you use a plugin to set avatars in 32x32px instead of 16x16px or personnal code ? I wonder if I could pick that from you. As I can see, this work fine for GB 4.xx
Thanks for the advice. So you have to sacrify characters ... It's not the best in french, we use a lot of accents ... But the render is much better than the poor 16x16px !
There are a lot of extra characters in the ascii sheet and all you need to do is identify 9 tiles you can use. If you want to do more than one portrait, you can switch the font sheet so that the other portraits use the same 9 tiles.
In my humble opinion no one is making new Game Boy games to the level of character and quality that you do. Super looking forward to the new one. Thank you!
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Just played through Specimen 134 and loved it! One of the most impressive game boy games I've ever seen! Was just wondering how many endings there are? I've found three (all very cool). Not sure if I've missed any. :)
Thanks so much! There should be 3 endings like you discovered. There may be some variants of endings or um secrets for harder difficulties.
Awesome, thanks for the heads up! Had a blast with the game. Will get a video up soon. :)
awesome!
how long is Specimen 134 roughly and how many endings? The Machine is one of my all time favourite GBC games so hoping for something of similar quality. Keep up the great work. Can we have The Machine 2? Or another sci fi interactive adventure, love the gameplay style so much
I find it really hard to estimate playtime because since I made the game when I play through it, I am kind of like a speed runner since I always know exactly what to do next. I don't want to spoil too much but Specimen is not as nonlinear as The Machine. It does have multiple endings though. If you want more games like that, buying my games would help sustain their development!
thanks, i played the demo and love the style, feels a bit like Simon Stalenhag does 8 bit with a Stranger Things vibe. I love all of it. Well ive purchased all of your physical releases to date so im happy to back this. Thanks again
Thanks so much! I will take your input into consideration when designing my future projects. Nonlinearity quickly gets out of hand so I find myself walking a tightrope between the art having to be very simple and the story being nonlinear. It's hard to have a huge branching plot alongside really developed art. The simplicity of the art was a huge advantage in The Machine.
The reward of the non linear path is that you end up with a game with a lot of replayability. I think thats a huge part of why The Machine is so popular. The most common complaint I see from other gamers who play a lot of homebrew games is that theyre too short. Art style and the mood that can afford a game is great, and your work is particularly great in that regard, but especially for those investing a pretty big whack sometimes in physical games find it hard to justify the price for games that are so short. I cant even begin to imagine how much work must go into creating a branching game like The Machine but it was 100% worth it. I was speaking to someone today who shared a picture of all his physical release homebrew games for GB, GBC and GBA. I asked him his top 5, he listed them but said “if you have to play one game play The Machine, its insane”. Out of about 50 games he physically owned that was his recommendation, I cant think of better praise to give than that. Its really something special.
That's awesome to hear! I think you're right and it's hard to imagine how much work it is to make. It's unique because of that but another one too soon might put me in the hospital before it's done anyway.
Hi ! Nice proposition as usual ! Do you use a plugin to set avatars in 32x32px instead of 16x16px or personnal code ? I wonder if I could pick that from you. As I can see, this work fine for GB 4.xx
I used an old trick which is to just add the avatar tiles to your ascii sheet and then type in the characters that represent the avatar when inputting text. This is very helpful with that: https://gist.githubusercontent.com/RichardULZ/2920dca52989902dbb7225318256c545/r...
Thanks for the advice. So you have to sacrify characters ... It's not the best in french, we use a lot of accents ... But the render is much better than the poor 16x16px !
There are a lot of extra characters in the ascii sheet and all you need to do is identify 9 tiles you can use. If you want to do more than one portrait, you can switch the font sheet so that the other portraits use the same 9 tiles.
Okay, my bad, I just learned that the !F command can change the font right now !
That is perfect, a great thanks for the help with this trick !
In my humble opinion no one is making new Game Boy games to the level of character and quality that you do. Super looking forward to the new one. Thank you!
Thanks so much! There's a lot of great Gameboy devs I respect so that really means a lot.