Comprehensible: Frostland Design Challenge

Published 01.03.2021 06:03

by Comprehensible

Total plays: 356

Here's my entry for Slay's Frostland Design Challenge! I usually make text-heavy games, so this time, I wanted to try and tell a story just with pictures. If you take a look at the sign in front of the house, something interesting might happen. I hope you enjoy!

  • shay slay

    I love the way you’ve done the characters! The lil dragon pet Walnut is too adorable – and using the fire-guys as light sources was so smart! Also, can we just talk about the day/night switch? Fantastic use of shadows! Awesome job, Comp – I really enjoyed exploring your level 🙂


  • Marby

    Hi Comp,
    Wow! This time I really learned something from you! The cute dragon pet is magnificent! I of course immediately had a look on how this can be done.
    What an amazing idea to use the move to enemy behavior with a deactivated bull rush as a “cute pet follows” behavior! This is very good! Thank you very much for showing us, that “NPC follows” is already possible.


  • Marby

    I tried it out. Unfortunately, this is tricky to use. If Wallnut and the hero e. g. are in a city, you’ve to turn every actor there to neutral or evil. Otherwise, they would be irresistable to Wallnut. Fighting against monsters while protecting Wallnut also is not possible, because enemys wouldn’t attack the little dragon if it’s also alligned to evil. So we still need a real follow behavior. That means deWiTTERS still has something to do.

    However, this is a fantastic workaround anyway and works already for multiple situations. I’m impressed. 🙂


      • Marby

        I like your honesty. 🙂
        Your “making the day to night by using shadows” also is another very great idea!

        Also I like RPGs pretty much and if we all understand more of such techniques, this would boost the quality of our games a lot and of course, would boost the fun, players have while playing RPGs on RPG Playground.

        When it was my first time on RPG Playground, I looked out for good tutorials but did not find anything suitable. Of course, there is deWiTTERS help site and some YouTube videos, but I like to dive deeper into the stuff. Fortunatelly, I’m a programmer and hadn’t a very hard time to find out all about the programming language of RPG Playground.

        However, with your game you posted here, you showe me I also can still learn pretty much from other members. I played your game by chance. If I hadn’t played it, I might have never seen these cool ideas. I think, we should gather such useful techniques as well as basic knowledge somewhere. This is the reason, why I keep writing tutorials in the forum. Unfortunately, deWiTTERS refused to create a main section in the forum for stuff like this. If not only I, but also other people would post tips and tricks as well as tutorials there, perhaps he could change his mind at some point. I’m pretty sure all of us would benefit of this.


        • Comprehensible

          That’s a great idea! I’ll bring it up.
          One of the things we’ve been throwing around is having a tutorial game with all of the basic functionality and how to use it. A learn-by-playing thing we could link new people to. Haven’t gotten around to it, but I do like the idea. There’s also a whole how-to manual as well, which I’ m sure you’ve found. That does need to be updated, too. But again, I’ll ask about making that forum topic!


          • Marby

            Yes, there are help sites deWiTTERS made. I guess you mean them. Meanwhile, I also wrote a complete RPG Playground programming tutorial for beginners last week. deWiTTERS is now looking for a place, where to publish it. A member asked me to teach her programming. Therefore, I finally made such a tutorial, sent it to her and it helped her out. Probably it also can help a lot of people to start with programming on RPG Playground, because it is not only a deep dive, but also understandable for beginners with tons of examples and explanations.


          • Marby

            The problem with a learning by playing game, would be the formatting of text. In programming this is very important because of the indentations. Even the html capabilities, the forum provides, I found insufficient for writing a proper tutorial. Therefore, I wrote it with a text processing program and exported it as a pdf file afterwards. Now it is a small book of about 20 pages.

            However, the idea of a tutorial game is good. Perhaps, we will have even better possibilities make stuff like this as soon as deWiTTERS implemented the “full programming powers” of his to-do list. 🙂


    • Comprehensible

      Hey IrishNick!
      For the lights, I actually made a whole other scene with shadows over it. When time is set to night, the hero warps to the same place they’re standing on the other map!
      The companion trick is something I learned from LikesWine! Basically, you make a hostile actor, but you turn off the attacks so it can’t do damage. So you have this evil thing that’s always chasing you but can’t do damage.
      Thank you!


  • IrishNick

    I’ve started on my fast travel bit. ( a bit like in fallout) I’ve re-looked the outside toilets to be transportation stations which can be either bought or won by doing missions.
    The shop bit is very tedious, but I think I’m on the right course 🙂