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Sequence |OT| Rhythm, Role-Playing, and Ronald Jenkees

Feep

Banned
fernoca said:
Hahaha, you didn't had to add me I was just joking. XD
Though the "you granting my wish" sounded better. There I sound so plain and arrogant. :p
No, I just literally missed your really nice post, for some reason. It deserves to be there.

Oh, and FlyinJ, you can definitely use the guitar controller. In fact, 8 out of my 11 testers preferred it (and all 11 tested all three control types).

DJ Hero and Drums are a no-go, though. Not enough buttons. = (
 

fernoca

Member
Hehe, thanks then. :p
You deserve the praise anyway. It is a great game and a great concept.

Posted it on my Facebook too, don't have a lot people there but maybe a few will see and spread the word and friends of friends, etc.

hlMU3.png
 

FlyinJ

Douchebag. Yes, me.
Feep said:
Oh, and FlyinJ, you can definitely use the guitar controller. In fact, 8 out of my 11 testers preferred it (and all 11 tested all three control types).

I haven't had time to play since I learned this, but- how do the controls work? Do you D-Pad between the three tracks, or toggle them using the spare fret button on the guitar? Even at medium difficulty, I feel I need to immediately select the left or right track at any time... if it's the guitar Dpad it's too far away from the strum, and having to press twice on the spare fret would seem a bit burdensome as well.

Do the prompts change when it recognizes a guitar is being used?
 
LocoMrPollock said:
Are you sure about that? I could swear it was upped to 15 shortly after launch. And I've even played 15 minute trials, I think.

But if that's the case, I apologize.
You're probably getting confused because when XBLIGs started, believe it or not, the time limit was only four minutes. So it was upped, but it was upped to eight minutes.

And Feep, that's ace. I'm glad my comments made past-future-past-something you happy, your work was worth it!
 
FlyinJ said:
I haven't had time to play since I learned this, but- how do the controls work? Do you D-Pad between the three tracks, or toggle them using the spare fret button on the guitar? Even at medium difficulty, I feel I need to immediately select the left or right track at any time... if it's the guitar Dpad it's too far away from the strum, and having to press twice on the spare fret would seem a bit burdensome as well.

Do the prompts change when it recognizes a guitar is being used?

Spare fret and strum. Strumming up gets you to the lane to your left and strumming down gets you to the lane to your right. It can take a small bit of getting used to, since most games don't make a distinction between strumming up and down, but I had the hang of it in 15 minutes.

EDIT: Here's an idea for making a drum kit work... the pedal can switch between lanes. Pedal + one of the drum strikes at the same time casts one of the four spells. Think it would work?
 

FlyinJ

Douchebag. Yes, me.
Amibguous Cad said:
Spare fret and strum. Strumming up gets you to the lane to your left and strumming down gets you to the lane to your right. It can take a small bit of getting used to, since most games don't make a distinction between strumming up and down, but I had the hang of it in 15 minutes.

EDIT: Here's an idea for making a drum kit work... the pedal can switch between lanes. Pedal + one of the drum strikes at the same time casts one of the four spells. Think it would work?

Oh I see... I assumed you had to hold the buttons required then strum when the arrows hit the bottom bar. I'll have to try it out.

It's hard enough for my brain right now to juggle the two inputs, keep an eye on 3 sequences and effectively remember the simple action of pressing left or right trigger to make the one I want to manipulate be active. I'm frightened about what may occur if the left/right input becomes an up/down instead.

I suppose I could hold the controller like an upright bass....

EDIT: I'm very happy that my improved D-Pad gray Xbox controller came in yesterday. It seems like this game would be borderline unplayable with the default Xbox D-Pad.
 

Feep

Banned
You cannot change controllers mid-game, because your profile (and thus, your save game) is locked to a controller. If you use another controller, you'll need to sign your profile out of its original controller, which will cause the game to kick you back to the Press Start screen. There was really no way around this. = P

The up/down left/right deal isn't so rough, I found, once you get used to it.

Finally (and this is all in the "controls" submenu in Settings), while you may change fields with the orange fret, I find it much easier to use the alternate method, which is holding down all four primary frets at once and strumming. This way your fingers never need to move.

As for the drum thing, using the same button for field switching + casting spells wouldn't be good, I think. Every time you cast a spell you would automatically switch fields, which would be INCREDIBLY annoying. Plus you could only switch in one direction. = (

And finally, almost zero chance on PSN. Sony has not contacted me and they have a closed development environment. I'd have to pay thousands for a dev kit, and that's only if they accepted me as a registered developer, which is highly unlikely. = P

(But Steam, man!)
 
Just wanted to update that I'm on Floor the Seventh. Anyone beat it yet? I spent the time to grind the Lightwave Sword (or something like that?) and it really made a huge difference. Also went back to Floor the Second to get some Bricks to make the Maelstrom Scroll as that mostly replaced Arclight for me, finally. What spells does everyone rely on the most? Now that I have all six slots I've been using Arclight, Maelstrom, Dimmer, and...the pink one, haha. What's it called? I also mix in the Burning/Blazing (whatever the strong dark red one is). And lastly I have a healing spell but I rarely ever have to use it. Dimmer and the pink DoT are definitely the most important to me as missing either really sucks. I swap between Maelstrom and Arclight to eat away at the HP and if it comes up I'll use the dark red direct damage one to either finish off the HP or if I simply have a bunch of mana and waiting on a lot of cooldowns.

I'll admit that I'm not going to grind my way to figure out the bonus item, especially since I currently only have one sixth of the first set of items and each has a crazy low percentage. I had enough trouble getting Dead Batteries with a 64% drop that something with 8% would lead me to murder. Any hints on what that would get me? Or just cover it in a spoiler?
 

djtiesto

is beloved, despite what anyone might say
Congrats for finally getting the game released!! I've been looking very forward to playing it, even though I'm not that good at rhythm games. But the art and production values look fantastic, and I have to support a fellow GAFfer. Will be buying later this afternoon.
 
Feep said:
You cannot change controllers mid-game, because your profile (and thus, your save game) is locked to a controller. If you use another controller, you'll need to sign your profile out of its original controller, which will cause the game to kick you back to the Press Start screen. There was really no way around this. = P

The up/down left/right deal isn't so rough, I found, once you get used to it.

Finally (and this is all in the "controls" submenu in Settings), while you may change fields with the orange fret, I find it much easier to use the alternate method, which is holding down all four primary frets at once and strumming. This way your fingers never need to move.

As for the drum thing, using the same button for field switching + casting spells wouldn't be good, I think. Every time you cast a spell you would automatically switch fields, which would be INCREDIBLY annoying. Plus you could only switch in one direction. = (

And finally, almost zero chance on PSN. Sony has not contacted me and they have a closed development environment. I'd have to pay thousands for a dev kit, and that's only if they accepted me as a registered developer, which is highly unlikely. = P

(But Steam, man!)

Is the drum kit capable of detecting simultaneous hits? What if we did this

-pedal does nothing on its own.
-pedal+two left drum pads simultaneously switches to left lane
-pedal+ two right drum pads simultaneously switches to right lane
-pedal+ one drum pad on its own casts a spell.

Would that work?
 

Feep

Banned
Amibguous Cad said:
Is the drum kit capable of detecting simultaneous hits? What if we did this

-pedal does nothing on its own.
-pedal+two left drum pads simultaneously switches to left lane
-pedal+ two right drum pads simultaneously switches to right lane
-pedal+ one drum pad on its own casts a spell.

Would that work?
No controller is capable of detecting "simultaneous hits", really. It's possible that the player could hit both drums in the same 1/60th second window, but this is actually pretty rare, which means that even one frame off, and the game would have to register the "single" drum hit as a spell cast, because it won't know the second hit is coming in just a moment. There would have to be an input lag of maybe 5-8 frames to "watch" for a second hit, which would feel sluggish to the player. Plus, how would you cast the fifth and sixth spells?

I mean, I tried for a long time, but I figured I just had to give it up. = (

With regards to those low-percentage items...

1) You should have obtained after Floor the Sixth
Adelle's Tarot Cards, which increase the chances of items dropping significantly. This won't help much on the sixth and seventh floors, but it makes it a lot easier to pick up the earlier crystals.

2) They're used as part of a
bonus sidequest. Hmmm...
 

2th

Banned
played a little more last night while intoxicated. was fun but overall the game isnt my cup of tea. i mean it isnt a bad game at all and props to feep for it. definitely worth the $3 for the experiment.
 

Feep

Banned
Oh, if any Los Angeles GAF-folk are bored tonight, we're having a big launch party downtown this evening. PM me if you'd like details. Otherwise, I'll just post pics later! = D

The hot girl from the trailer will be there
 
Completely addicted to this game, got the hang of medium, already planning on giving it another playthrough on hard. Much like Puzzle Quest, I think this game is going to get overlooked in GOTY and top-10 discussions this year because it doesn't fit the profile of major AAA releases, undeservedly. I know this is up with Dragon Age 2 and Portal 2 for some of the best gaming I've had in the past few months.
 

wwm0nkey

Member
Feep said:
Oh, if any Los Angeles GAF-folk are bored tonight, we're having a big launch party downtown this evening. PM me if you'd like details. Otherwise, I'll just post pics later! = D

The hot girl from the trailer will be there
Tell her I say "whats up" :lol

Also still loving the game Feep :)
 
Wow, the game gets beastly hard after a certain point, namely the boss battle with
the private eye character
. And I'm playing on easy!

I could beat it if the timer didn't run out, but as is I'll need to grind out some items to do more damage.

I should stop being hesitant about cashing in the scrolls I have. The heavy XP cost plus my attention span of a ferret keeps me from doing all the accuracy challenges, even though I should experiment with my spell setup.

Still fun though, and utterly fantastic production values on game. Love the mysterious story, too.
 
Alright, it's beaten.

Also, formed the big fun recipes and got the secret ending. I like the last weapon a lot!

Found a little bug. If you press A to skip past the credits (did this upon beating a second time for the secret ending) the sound will continue from the credits into the secret ending itself. Which made it really hard to focus on the dialogue so I think I missed the meaning of it all because it made no sense. Oh wait...nevermind. I think I just figured it out? Maybe:
I'm assuming that's supposed to be the Ky and Naia that were taken into the machine that were Mir and Adelle? Except then it just gets into weird timeloop territory or something? Eh, whatever.
.

Anyhow, really enjoyed it all in the end. One thing that I really enjoyed that I hate when games completely miss is making me feel really powerful as I leveled up. So when I went back to even a floor right below to get an item I was able to easily blow through the enemies. Took away a lot of the frustration I was expecting in collecting the rarest items.

The ending to the story was fairly neat. I won't elaborate on it but some aspects weren't surprising but the motive wasn't quite what I was expecting out of it.

Loved the credits, heh. Good way to make it interesting. To get the secret ending I think I took around ten hours from start to finish. Probably around nine just to beat it. Beat the first time at Level 26 and was Level 27 in the very end. Did it all on Medium difficulty which felt right.
 

djtiesto

is beloved, despite what anyone might say
You should add a patch and allow it to support the DJ Hero turntable, if possible... I think that could actually work REAL well (use crossfader to switch between the Mana field, Defense field, etc)
 
djtiesto said:
You should add a patch and allow it to support the DJ Hero turntable, if possible... I think that could actually work REAL well (use crossfader to switch between the Mana field, Defense field, etc)
It'd be perfect if it had four buttons instead of three :(
 
I was very impressed by the production values while playing the trial version (twice, just to get through the tutorials). Decided to risk my measly three bucks, and now I'm on Floor 3. This is a really interesting game, and I'm already glad I bought it. Definitely going to be yakking it up on Radio Free Nintendo this week. At first I wasn't crazy about the music, but the Jenkees tunes that start showing up on Floor 2 are actually very cool. Now I want to try it with a guitar, though I can't see how the spell selection and other mechanics will work that way.
 
I played through floors 3 and 4, this time with the guitar. It works really well, although it took a while to get used to switching the fields. I wish there was an option to do so with a no-fret strum instead of the four-button strum. Mapping spells onto the whammy bar works surprisingly well. It almost feels like a different game on guitar, but still just as good.

Feep, did you mean for the story to be some kind of tribute to The World Ends With You? The premise reminds me strongly of that game, but the characters and writing in Sequence are much better.
 
God damn it Feep, stop telepathically stealing my ideas :(
Well I guess my RPG/DDR hybrid idea works differently enough that I can forgive you JUST THIS ONCE

But seriously this looks awesome and clever and original
YOU SHAMELESS MIND THIEF
and I'm always up for supporting fellow GAF indie devs! I'll have to work extra shifts on the street corner so I can afford this title, but I'm sure it'll be worth it.
 

Judderman

drawer by drawer
Judderman said:
Ronald Jenkees = Instabuy

I wasn't kidding when I said this. Bought it on Thursday, and just finished it about an hour or two ago. (It devoured the time that I would usually spend on the Gears 3 beta.)

I then did the fight on ???, got the Tomahawk Missile Bears (YES) and saw the secret ending which I'm still trying to wrap my head around. I'm still trying to beat the last 4 scroll challenges, which are really tough. So I guess I'm 99.6% done!

As someone who spent hours playing DDR on a controller after my dance pads had died, this is a godsend. The concept is amazing, and the package surrounding it (The art, music, story) had me hooked. Even the description for the items gave me a laugh. What an awesome game that I will surely keep on revisiting. Amazing job on this, Feep! Will be one of my GOTY's for sure.
 

Feep

Banned
Judderman said:
As someone who spent hours playing DDR on a controller after my dance pads had died, this is a godsend. The concept is amazing, and the package surrounding it (The art, music, story) had me hooked. Even the description for the items gave me a laugh. What an awesome game that I will surely keep on revisiting. Amazing job on this, Feep! Will be one of my GOTY's for sure.
^^
toythatkills said:
^____^

As a sidenote, Toy, you think anyone found the secret ARG stuff on Floor the Seventh yet? = D
 

Broseybrose

Member
Awesomeness. This will be the first time I get to buy a game made solely by one GAF-er. Well, once it hits Steam that is. Which I'm sure it will, the trailer makes it look really fun!
 

Judderman

drawer by drawer
Feep said:
^^

^____^

As a sidenote, Toy, you think anyone found the secret ARG stuff on Floor the Seventh yet? = D

toythatkills said:
I'm not convinced anyone will ever find it =P

Does it have anything to do with the Compact Discs you get on Floor 5/6? I never found a use for those.
 

Feep

Banned
Judderman said:
Does it have anything to do with the Compact Discs you get on Floor 5/6? I never found a use for those.
Nah, those are used for some recipe or another.

Practically every item in the game (excluding Key Items, like keys, inhibitors, and spell slots) have some kind of joke as an item description.

Save one...
 
Feep said:
You cannot change controllers mid-game, because your profile (and thus, your save game) is locked to a controller. If you use another controller, you'll need to sign your profile out of its original controller, which will cause the game to kick you back to the Press Start screen. There was really no way around this. = P

The up/down left/right deal isn't so rough, I found, once you get used to it.

Finally (and this is all in the "controls" submenu in Settings), while you may change fields with the orange fret, I find it much easier to use the alternate method, which is holding down all four primary frets at once and strumming. This way your fingers never need to move.

As for the drum thing, using the same button for field switching + casting spells wouldn't be good, I think. Every time you cast a spell you would automatically switch fields, which would be INCREDIBLY annoying. Plus you could only switch in one direction. = (

And finally, almost zero chance on PSN. Sony has not contacted me and they have a closed development environment. I'd have to pay thousands for a dev kit, and that's only if they accepted me as a registered developer, which is highly unlikely. = P

(But Steam, man!)

Aren't there other alternatives to Steam, in case they reject it?

Great job, btw. Though I'd be lying if I said I wasn't envious. Barely graduated from engineering, and am still nowhere in voiceover.
 

Judderman

drawer by drawer
Feep said:
Nah, those are used for some recipe or another.

Practically every item in the game (excluding Key Items, like keys, inhibitors, and spell slots) have some kind of joke as an item description.

Save one...

tnlug.exe is the thing that unlocks the secret ending, right?
 

Judderman

drawer by drawer
Feep said:
That and Iridium are considered Key Items.

Ah okay, well I found it! There comes a gunslinger. Found the Malignant Cancer, now I'm stuck. Tried beating Aaron and Mir again with it equipped to see if anything changes but no luck. Who is this Iris person?
 

Feep

Banned
Judderman said:
Ah okay, well I found it! There comes a gunslinger. Found the Malignant Cancer, now I'm stuck. Tried beating Aaron and Mir again with it equipped to see if anything changes but no luck. Who is this Iris person?
Who indeed...
 
Found a new bug, it seems. I'll just describe the exact steps...

On my profile, continued my game. I've beaten it and seen the secret ending. I'm showing the game to my friend so I just fight a Mysterious Orb on Floor the Seventh. I then exit to main menu after beating it, log out from my profile and she logs into hers. She selects new game. Gets to the second tutorial and in that tutorial when Naia disables your defensive abilities the first arrow drops does 41 damage and kills her (since she only has 40 health) and boots her from the tutorial. She can do the third tutorial and then continue on and even did the next two fights but I had to explain the rest to her since that second tutorial continually did 41 damage to her. She tried three or four times.

So did it somehow have the offensive damage stored from when I fought the Mysterious Orb due to having not cleared that value and the tutorial not loading up a new enemy? That's my only guess. If you'd like I can start the game with her profile loaded up from the start and see if the same thing happens on a fresh boot. But still, just thought I'd let you know.
 

Feep

Banned
Wibblewozzer said:
Found a new bug, it seems. I'll just describe the exact steps...

On my profile, continued my game. I've beaten it and seen the secret ending. I'm showing the game to my friend so I just fight a Mysterious Orb on Floor the Seventh. I then exit to main menu after beating it, log out from my profile and she logs into hers. She selects new game. Gets to the second tutorial and in that tutorial when Naia disables your defensive abilities the first arrow drops does 41 damage and kills her (since she only has 40 health) and boots her from the tutorial. She can do the third tutorial and then continue on and even did the next two fights but I had to explain the rest to her since that second tutorial continually did 41 damage to her. She tried three or four times.

So did it somehow have the offensive damage stored from when I fought the Mysterious Orb due to having not cleared that value and the tutorial not loading up a new enemy? That's my only guess. If you'd like I can start the game with her profile loaded up from the start and see if the same thing happens on a fresh boot. But still, just thought I'd let you know.
Yep, just caught it. (It will not happen on a fresh boot.) The internal variable "currentEnemy" is set up on bootUp to 0, and otherwise, from either the monster select screen or a cutscene, will be set to the appropriate value. But the tutorial menu does not set it; I was improperly relying on the bootUp initial value, forgetting that the player could change save slots without rebooting by switching profiles. So, the internal value showed that she was fighting a Mysterious Orb.

Fixed, in any case. The first patch (with all sorts of lovely bug fixes, and lefty-flip guitar mode!) will be submitted to Peer Review on the 12th. Thanks, and sorry about that one.
 
No worries, it was just amusing because she couldn't figure out what she was doing wrong. While the game wasn't quite her cup of tea I think I successfully got at least two coworkers to buy it now. Working on more.

Lastly, in regards to the spoiler stuff discussed a little earlier:
Any chance the item with the non-joke description can be sold? Because I'm worred I de-synthed it. It sounds like it's something that's equipped. Extract was the next closest and I ran the binary through text converters online and none of them seemed to be able to translate it into anything intelligible.
 
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