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Apr 28, 2010 | 1:07 AM EDT

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Author Comments

there are bugs in it, I'm aware that it's not totally perfect. I'm here to take as many pies in the face as you can dish out, because i need feedback, including negative feedback.

I am gladly accepting more beta testers, especially if you have a lot of input or know a decent amount about AS. Please get ahold of me on AIM at GandoofTheWise.

Canthos is a showboating, thieving rogue who lives in a steam powered world in the clouds. This demo takes place right after the tutorial level, where he steals an artifact known only as the Compass of Fate and than makes his escape out of the city.

Control reference -
(you can hit esc in the game to bring up a menu to see the controls there as well)
RUN - left and right arrow keys
JUMP - Spacebar
GRAB / ATTACK - Ctrl. (you can grab cielings and walls using this button to reach otherwise unreachable locations)
DUCK - Down arrow - you can roll once ducked.
SLAM - Down + Jump

Interesting things to note:
I had been working on a game previous to this but I had no previous knowledge of coding and it got delayed big time. I started in on this thinking it'd be easier to make a platformer game rather than an RPG, oh how wrong i was.
This game is basically what taught me AS, and i'm even still learning. a lot of stuff in this feels like it's put together with crazy glue.
I've done all the art, coding, animation. Everything except the music, which hats off to Cazok for the fantastic job he's doing. I recommend all of you give this guy a listen, he does some good work!



Rated 5 / 5 stars

am i the only person who played the boss battle?

glitches a plenty... i can give you a list of about 20, hehe.

10 cause its pretty epic when you get into it... especially that boss battle, surprised noone mentioned it, EPIC!

i program in another language but understand game mechanics well so i can point out most all your problems and advise towards a solution. heres some noone noticed:

- hanging on a ceiling and climbing off an edge makes you horizontally climb on an "invisible" ceiling.
- i couldnt die on the boss? health went below 0 and i lived, not sure if this is the case in the platforming stage as i didnt get health down below 0 (just died from holes :/)
- i you slide down a wall whilst pressing diagonally away from the wall (e.g. down and right on a left wall), your animation will mirror, so your haning the wrong way, then if you jump, you jump straight up, you can use this to climb any wall (and i had to use it to get passed several parts?) wouldnt have seen the boss without it ;)

great work, see massive potential, keep it up

no complaints on the graphics, they are perfect thus far

People find this review helpful!
Xiphon responds:

yeah, you don't actually collide with what you see on screen, it's all set up through invisable walls, which allowed me to modify the collision of things a little more evenly, since there's a lot of detailing on the walls and floors.

yeah, I didn't have death be possible on the boss because I wasn't sure how hard he was. I've fought him so many times that I skate through without getting hit and it actually seems boring to me, but I was afraid he was to hard. I was gonna have an option to skip to him, but I got pushed by time constraints.

This thing about climbing up walls has me interested. I was aware of a bug when you hit more than one direction at once while sliding on a wall would put you inside of the wall, I didn't know it would skip you past stuff.

Either way i'm working on retooling a lot of the game physics anyway, and i'm taking all the help I can get.


Rated 5 / 5 stars


Yes it does glitch, but I still give it a 10! No way is this awesome storyline and game crap.


Rated 5 / 5 stars

Very nice

I killed the boss with 25 HP remaining. :)

You're right. Side scrollers are not easier than RPG's. They're actually one of the hardest game types to code. If you're looking for easy then go for point and click adventures.

I was expecting something totally crappy, but you've managed to dish out a pretty solid and incredibly ambitious game. The ceiling climbing and stuff makes it not just another platformer. Also I like steam punk.


Rated 5 / 5 stars

Nice game!

Somehow I got the first enemy to killl itself by crouching under it... good game anyways.


Rated 4 / 5 stars

Really cool!

Artwork was dazzling, I'll get that out of the way first. Animations were tweened, so they look not as organic as they could be, but the rest was fascinating. I congratulate you for creating a dynamic and fun world. It takes lots of skill and talent to make something engaging for the player.

Music was great as well, I don't know why the scores are so low though, many of those tracks are wonderful, done by the amazing Cazok... I even used the Canthos theme for my own game, hope it doesn't inflict anything on this, but it sounded so cool.

Gameplay is where there are a few issues. I won't rate you on it too much because it is obviously still in demo form, glitches are expected. Here are the glitches I encountered.

-Grappling is extremely glitchy, sometimes I was thrown around an entire object and other times I instantly died or was able to climb into infinite space.
-Combat is a bit dull with the main characters, you should add combo moves.
-When you roll under something and try jumping it messes up. I actually have a solution for this, for as I have the same kind of mechanic in my game and I used a method to fix it.

Go to your character code. Make a variable around the jumping actions,

//your code

Then, go to a part where you have to roll. Make an invisible movieclip box on that area and make hittests that disable the jumping variable when your player is touching them, but make an


command so that jumping is enabled once you out of the whole.

Anyway, onto the rest of the glitches.

-Menu should be mapped to P and arrow key navigation is recommended.
-If there was a ceiling that was walkable and i was underneath it, if I jumped, I hit it and then boosted up, looks a bit jaggy.
-Grappling to walking lines should be automatic instead of pressing CTRL, or at least have a command pop up over the characters head that says CTRL so it is more obvious.

Most of the glitches are found in the grappling move, though. Unless it's too late, I suggest scrapping it or taking away it's functionality of gripping to walls because it will be really hard to make it glitch free. Critics notice tiny little errors like this and go mad.

Otherwise, really cool project and I am behind it 100%!

Xiphon responds:

thanks for the review, I'm actually trying to find more beta testers that know something about code.
Once, some time ago, I was trying to find someone to just code it for me cause I didn't know what I was doing, unfortunately it didn't turn out many promising results, so I undertook the task myself.

The crouching thing, yeah, that's a bug that's there and I've had a plan to fix it and just always forget to when I open up the file.
The grapple is probably the biggest rediculous thing I've been trying to make work, And i dunno if i should bother with it.
Originally, you were supposed to be able to aim it in any direction, but I wasn't sure how to do that (at the time). I want to keep it in the game, I just need to find a way to make it work without throwing the character all over the place. And things get even worse when you try grappling to enemies off of walls and stuff like that...