Author
Ian StJohn

Link to website for the demo: http://www.deliverusfromevil.co.uk

Preface
After 5 months working on this, my first game, I now feel comfortable in releasing this two level demo which I'm hoping will raise the bar when it comes to showing what can be done with GameGuru if you put your mind to it. The only thing I am guilty of in this piece of work is that I have used the game assets for the entities but all the coding and music is my own.
This game is something I am very proud of and the gameplay is very different so I urge you to download the demo yourself as I think you will be quite astounded with what I have done here considering I have no coding experience! (note: intro video is only a mock up, there are a few aesthetic bugs and this is made with version 1.2)

Please feel free to offer any advice or constructive criticism and I would appreciate feedback on how this runs on your rig as I have adopted a 1 level at a time loading system to reduce draw calls.



Concept
Take a horror game, combine it with a game of strategy, flavour it with a  sprinkling of 3D PacMan and then glaze and cook for 5 months and what do you get?
The game ‘Deliver us from evil’, D.U.F.E, a title  so mixed up that its difficult to pigeon hole its genre. Putting a twist on the modern 3D horror genre mixed with a retro 2D gameplay how will you play?

The Story
Earth has been all but destroyed and humanity are on the brink of extinction. The Retentive came in 2018 and it was clear from the outset that they didn’t come in peace. Their aim was to harvest all human life-force to  fuel their desire to become fully sentient. These semi-sentient beings were not of organic form but of non-biological matter and their true form has never been seen. They often appear in spacesuits and it is thought that this image was taken from their initial contact with our space exploration projects.
All we do know is that the Retentive can extract a life-force by merely touching a human.  The human life-force, the very soul of a human, is the cognitive ingredient that the Retentive feel is missing from their species.
Whatever the reason, it is your mission to put an end to this.
What remains of the human race have put into place their final plan to infiltrate The Retentive mainframe hive located on a small moon not too far away from our own solar system. The top scientists have used all the technology available and have landed you with a crude ship in the containment area at the hive surface. Sadly weapons are truly limited and only basic handguns with limited ammunition can be teleported to approximate locations without interception by the mainframe.
However, you have one weapon in your arsenal like no other. You have Eve, the most advanced sentient Artificial Intelligence ever created by man and she exists on a chip implanted within your head.
She will guide you in your mission and provide you with Head up displays, Radars and local Intel – look after her and she will look after of you.


Features
o 20 individual levels each with its own set of exclusive rules
o A final Boss level where you take on The Retentive Mainframe in a level to end all boss-levels.
o Our revolutionary ‘Edge & Execution’ A.I algorithm is like nothing you have seen before. The Retentive will hunt you down
as a pack and they re-evaluate their tactics with your every move, they wait, they hide, they pounce.
o Linear storyline but with depth to keep you intrigued throughout the game.
o Fantastic soundtrack by dance act Celestial (that's me)
o Hours of recorded Audio from your A.I assistant Eve

Hope you enjoy playing it

Saint

Link to website for the demo: http://www.deliverusfromevil.co.uk

Updates
Wed 14 Dec 17 Have now put the game up for Greenlighting - you guys weren't kidding when you said that they are a hard crowd - jeesh
anyway votes are flying in and if you can help then give us a vote at
http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=723251206

Love the intro , still trying to get through the first level.Will have more time to play later,Got me sitting up in my seat though . The first time in ages .


Dave

Thanks Dave - I hope with your monster rig that you are getting a good FPS.

I've tried it and got a minimum of 50 fps on high, (lvl1) my spec amd fx 6300, graka; Nvidia gtx960 16gb ram.

My opinion, very good and fluent, hat's off for you

Thanks Eathling45 but in all fairness you have one hell of a machine there!

Okay here are my thoughts based on a fairly quick go (got to level 2).

Firstly performance is fine, I don't know what the fps was as Shadowplay doesn't seem to display it on GG games since it was updated and I haven't been bothered to find the fullscreen option I used to have to enable as yet. Still, I could tell it was running with no issues just by playing it, I'd guess near 50-60 minimum. It may suffer with bigger maps down the line possibly, but the first 2 levels run fine. Certainly no problem for my system, which is good as it is fairly low spec besides the video card these days, which is a 970 and no longer a 660. You could certainly afford to spruce up the area's around the maze a little with no real worries on speed I think. Smooth for me.

Now onto the game itself. Novel and strangely spooky. I was discussing quick easy game ideas with a friend just this weekend and he mentioned a Pac man style affair, which I immediately dismissed as not appealing. Weird to get a message off you with this only a few days after! Now, as you may imagine the game play isn't my bag, the reason I dismissed the idea this weekend. Not my cup of tea at all. I'd had enough of Pacman when it was out for the 2600 in honesty. I don't think it's a bad game though, far from it. It works well and people who enjoy this type of game will probably get really into it. Even I, with my hatred of maze games quite enjoyed it, so that must be a plus in it's favour!

A few points I would make. The loading killed it for me. I had my 3 lives, got to level 2, died and it said try again. I then had to reload up again from scratch (unless I hit the wrong key), only to die again and think, I've had enough. For this sort of game, I would recommend avoiding it at all costs. I'd give your player a whole bunch of lives, way more than will ever be used and then script the game to just carry on if you re-try. Then you would only have to load between levels once you have started. It would really suit the games style then, as quick retries of the level are massively important for this sort of game imo. Anything retro, that has patterns to learn, eg any old shooter, platformer, fighting game, let's face it most old school games need to be quick to get into over and over. If any had long loading screens they would become a chore very quickly. It's a point most Youtuber's stress when reviewing Game Guru games, the loading screens can take 5 minutes on some games! Although the loading is way better here as the levels aren't awash with trees and flora, it is still a little long for repeated play. People will be seeing that load screen a lot. You can get away with it with big long levels (to a degree), but for snappy quick ones, loading screens will be a demerit I can assure you in any review you get.

I liked the music, made it a bit different to many GG games I've tried and gave it a lively atmosphere. The intro video was pretty good, a bit low res for my liking, but still fairly decent. Not so sure about the AI voice though, a little too text to speech for me, but not really a big thing. I think it was a little loud, easing her volume down a bit would probably help.

Definitely a good start. If you do a little work scripting that load issue, it would really improve the games replay-ability

Oh, one last thing, your main screen, perhaps a picture of them in a maze setting would look more in keeping with the game and give a clear idea of where it's going.

Good luck with this.

Cheers DV really appreciate you taking time to give the feedback and I totally agree on the loading but I'm pretty stuck when it comes to restarting a level without reloading - I wish there was a restart level LUA command - any ideas how to get around this? _ I thought of respawning all the dynamic entities and resetting the lives back to three but the respawning would take a heck of a lot of coding me thinks.

It should be quite easy I should think. I'm not sure how you are handling the collectables at the minute. I would simply hide them when collected, rather than deleting them as the default pick up scripts do, then when you hit 3 lives, simply show them again and reset any other variables you have for them.

just add an automatic save at level start maybe, then you can load up the level you failed on.
i think it works fine with low lives but the 2nd level is quite tough if you don't approach it with a good path and the zombies get released while you still have orbs all over the place so maybe a few more easy levels in the finished game (try to teach people good routes with your level design) and you're good to go

i agree the voice is a bit too text to speech though, those things always skip spaces and it's very noticeable here too though the robot voice is fine, maybe just see if you can make her pause more between words.

the intro kinda crashed near the beginning of the video (weirdly it was playing for about 20-30s then crashed) but when i restarted it just skipped the intro completely and loaded the game so apart from a double loading time it was ok... did like the intro from what i saw though, not sure what it has to do with the actual game story (apart from the obvious part she said) but i hope you have plans for why we're here... i can see it being interesting.

the AI was actually pretty good - a few times they kinda stood and stared, but overall i was pleased with how dangerous they seemed (perfect size to stop you from simply walking past them and the walking speed was good too)
nice model and animations too, first time i was stuck i was wondering why i hadn't died yet and then he slowly lifts his hand and i'm realising you literally meant "touch"... very neat

the radar images seemed off for me in some cases, i got surprised by a few enemies around corners (it seems like they aren't always in the right lane? but i won't swear to it).

the gun doesn't fit the game at all, i know you tried to explain it by saying it's the only thing you can get past the security etc and i know it's likely just because you don't really have a great choice but i hope it's not final, you definitely need something more scifi.

Something I worked out with text to speech, if you want to add space in the text, instead of putting a full stop which is the natural thing to do, put a comma, for some reason T2S pauses longer after a comma than it does after a full stop.

Hey Smallg - thanks for the feedback - strange that the video crashed but I have it set so that it only ever plays the very 1st time you start up the game. Re the robotic voice I see where folk are coming with this from but the whole point is that E.V.E is artificial - Jury is out for me with that one.

Re the radar -I agree it is slightly out on LvL2 - needs an accurate graphic importing - you wont believe the coding I had to learn and apply to get the radar to scale to all screen sizes and I am with you on the gun.

@Belidos -Yeah I do use the comma technique and spell the words phonetically with the narrative reader but I think the video editor has chopped the narration up a bit to get the timing right.

Not sure why you had to change anything with the radar, it uses sprites which are scaled to a percentage of the screen, so no matter what size your screen it should scale.

Hey Belidos - it was to get the map on the radar albeit basic, the walls had to be scaled to suit - the map is just a sprite but it has to be positioned and scaled very accurately to represent the world - the player, enemies and objective sprites were, as you say, pretty straight forward.

Pretty sure that's already in. I auto started on level 2 when I died there. I still think it needs a faster way to restart myself. Games like this tend to work because you can keep trying quickly again and again. If you remove that with a loading screen, most people would lose interest. Imagine Candy Crush with a slow loading screen in-between each level! Now, I haven't played Candy Crush, so I may be wrong, but I really doubt it. I imagine once your in, it goes pretty fast. Also a big factor of why people play it is the competitive factor, which will be harder to replicate in GG.

Avoid loading screens whenever possible! It will improve your game. It improves (any) game

i would be tempted to try zoom out in f9 mode and look directly down at the map, take a screen of that and then edit it to get your map, that's how i did it for my map script and if you remove all the dynamic stuff (like enemies etc) first it will fit much more accurately - just a case of getting the positioning right (maybe something in the dead center to look directly down at will help).


yh, i thought you were referring to failing completely / reopening the game, not losing a life, i agree that a more instant respawn should be possible though, just the AI characters that might be a problem currently.

i would, i had good fun writing my map script
https://forum.game-guru.com/thread/207801?page=11#msg2535525
i would be tempted to try zoom out in f9 mode and look directly down at the map, take a screen of that and then edit it to get your map, that's how i did it for my map script and if you remove all the dynamic stuff (like enemies etc) first it will fit much more accurately - just a case of getting the positioning right (maybe something in the dead center to look directly down at will help).


yh, i thought you were referring to failing completely / reopening the game, not losing a life, i agree that a more instant respawn should be possible though, just the AI characters that might be a problem currently.

Your pretty good at putting a decent trailer together Looks good, I like it.

Thanks DV - my first attempt at it after the video production guy let me down - Just a shame the wonderful flamers on steam don't share your opinion.

OOOh the steam crowd arnt they lovely :/ just downloading the demo now m8 looks like a fun game, nothing wrong with your intros they look sweet and they arnt easy to do that much i can vouch for Edit: Lovely intro level one was pretty quick, level 2 had me shouting at the screen, im gonna have nightmares about spacemen pmsl. level 2 is actually quite tricky great sound effects very cleaver sainty love it.

Cheers Honkeyboy - you have reinstalled my faith in steam users (although Lee did warn me i'd be in for a hard time) - one guy actually flamed me on steam facebook and youtube with a pile of obscenities - some guys really need to get a life!

I think the general feedback is that I need to use my own bespoke assets and have consistency with them throughout the game so I will work on that - you hit it on the head - level 1 was meant to be easy and level 2 a killer - and if I had a pound for every person who has messaged me to say I knicked the Regenerator from Resident Evil I would have £42.

Ahh but Resident Evil didn't have zombie space dudes! and limited ammo lol

edited...