Star Story Saga: Renaissance

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chunderbunny
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Star Story Saga: Renaissance

#1 Post by chunderbunny »

A month in the making. An epic tale across time and space.

Friendships are lost and found in the far-flung corners of the universe.

A tale of love.

A tale of loss.

A tale... of Rebirth.

MAB Studios are proud to present...

Star Story Saga: Renaissance

Our entry into the 2008 NaNoRenO challenge, SSS:R is a hybrid VN and shooter (although we've tried hard to make it easy enough that even a complete novice will be able to get most of the endings). The game features 6 endings and two main story paths in a cool and spicy space shooter melodrama.

Okay, to the nitty-gritty. We're using a completely new engine which Jake wrote which should work on Windows, OSX and Linux. Unfortunately we've only been able to test it under a limited set of systems so if it works/doesn't work then please let us know!

In order to play you will need the .Net2 and the SDL.net runtime environments installed. See the Readme.txt for more details.

MAC/LINUX USERS PLEASE NOTE:
There is currently a bug in Mono which means that on certain systems Saving/Loading will cause the game to crash. We suggest you try and save as soon as you start the game and if it crashes then don't use the save feature :(.

http://mab.eviscerate.net/

Enjoy!

David Capps (ficedula)
Jake Staines (Jake)
Jasper Thrussell (chunderbunny)

Edit: We just released version 1.1! This fixes several of the issues noted below. See the release notes for more details.
I would recommend v1.1 to pretty much anybody since I completely re-did stage 3 to be much more awesome.
Last edited by chunderbunny on Mon Apr 21, 2008 1:49 pm, edited 1 time in total.

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Re: Star Story Saga: Renaissance

#2 Post by Jake »

Here, have some screenshots:

ImageImage
ImageImage
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Re: Star Story Saga: Renaissance

#3 Post by Samu-kun »

Yosha! Congratulations on completing your NanoRenO! And awsome, it looks like it even has shmup segments. *downloads*

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Re: Star Story Saga: Renaissance

#4 Post by Kikered »

Congrats on the release! Unfortunately, I seem to be getting an error when running the game via .NET Framework 2.0...

Edit: I forgot the SDL.net runtime. Now I feel rather foolish... >_>
Last edited by Kikered on Mon Mar 31, 2008 10:41 pm, edited 1 time in total.
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Re: Star Story Saga: Renaissance

#5 Post by chronoluminaire »

Wow. This is clearly something out of the ordinary, just from the way it starts up. A very stylish logo, and a loading screen that sits there for... 5 minutes? 10 minutes? o.o

The music is extremely evocative, as is Anton's costume :D Slightly disorienting seeing the villager drawn in such a different art style to Anton.

However, on my poor old AMD 1.67GHz with 1 Gig of RAM, the game takes at least a second to respond to each keypress... I find myself really hoping it doesn't take that long in the shooter segments. But sadly it does - I get a framerate of about 1 per second. Then I try some things with the Microsoft dependency and get weird graphical glitches (in Firefox as well as Renaissance). Then I notice the bit about texture compression, which I think I ought to be using ^^;;; Looks like I'm going to have to try a reboot (which takes half an hour) and come back to this one on Wednesday.

But I definitely, definitely will, because this game has me thoroughly intrigued, even from the small glimpse I was able to get (at glacial rate). Any further tips for performance, other than the texture compression?
I released 3 VNs, many moons ago: Elven Relations (IntRenAiMo 2007), When I Rule The World (NaNoRenO 2005), and Cloud Fairy (the Cute Light & Fluffy Project, 2009).
More recently I designed the board game Steam Works (published in 2015), available from a local gaming store near you!

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Re: Star Story Saga: Renaissance

#6 Post by Samu-kun »

Ywoch. It's a no go on this end too. I didn't even get any error messages at all. When I unzipped it, I got some messages saying that the files in your game already exist and whether I want to overwrite them. (eh?) I pressed "yes to all," after which explorer crashed. As for what the program directory looked like after I unzipped everything, it looked like this.
directory.JPG
But all in honesty, it could just be that my laptop is crap. I'll try again on my desktop later. ^_^

Edit: if Chrono's desktop can't handle it, there's no way my laptop even has a ghost of a chance running it at a reasonable frame rate. I'll definately switch to my desktop before playing. ^_^

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Re: Star Story Saga: Renaissance

#7 Post by chunderbunny »

Hm. The slowest computer we tested on was a 1GHz Pentium Mobile Centrino TabletPC with 512MB RAM. If you have 1GB you definitely shouldn't need the texture compression, even when running under Mono on Linux or OSX (Mono uses a LOT more RAM).

chronoluminaire, I can only think that there is some other reason why your system is running slowly. If the music is stuttering then it might be a disk speed issue since music isn't pre-cached into memory. Other than that I don't think we have any more performance options.

Edit: Actually I just thought of one. Try using fullscreen mode (found in config.xml).

Samu-kun, you appear to be missing a lot of files, try downloading the zip archive again.

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Re: Star Story Saga: Renaissance

#8 Post by Jake »

chronoluminaire wrote:a loading screen that sits there for... 5 minutes? 10 minutes? o.o
Hmm...

The loading is, to be honest, the least-well-done part of the whole project; the engine was originally designed just as a shooter engine, which wouldn't need nearly so many high-res textures as a VN engine, so I just carelessly decided to pre-cache everything. But still, it shouldn't really take that long... it's fifteen seconds, on my development machines. The ancient tablet PC took notably longer (due to the much slower HDD, I presume), but I'm pretty sure it wasn't on the order of five or ten minutes. :/

What I really ought to do from a good-engineering perspective is alter the loading so that VN backgrounds and character sprites, at the very least, get loaded on-demand rather than all at the start of the app, and cleared down when they're no longer used. It'd mean lots of little pauses in the middle of the VN sections where it doesn't matter rather than a big up-front loading cost.
chronoluminaire wrote: Slightly disorienting seeing the villager drawn in such a different art style to Anton.
(The main difference is that originally, I accidentally drew the villager too small, and had to scale him up rather than down like the other character sprites; being just a bit part, I never got around to re-drawing him before NaNo was over. :/)
chronoluminaire wrote: However, on my poor old AMD 1.67GHz with 1 Gig of RAM, the game takes at least a second to respond to each keypress [...]
Any further tips for performance, other than the texture compression?
What are the rest of the details about your system? Are you running Windows or Linux, for example? Can you tell how big the VM size is for the Renaissance.exe application?
(Random other question, since it's one of the few things I changed after the testing on other OSes was done at least - do you have any joysticks plugged in? Joystick support was added rather late, and in a manner which feels rather hacky due to some shortcomings in what seemed to be the correct solution under SDL.Net.)


Samu-kun wrote:When I unzipped it, I got some messages saying that the files in your game already exist and whether I want to overwrite them. (eh?) I pressed "yes to all," after which explorer crashed. As for what the program directory looked like after I unzipped everything, it looked like this.
Ieh... yeah, there's certainly something gone wrong in your unzipping, there. There should be fourteen files in the game directory, for starters, including an executable! ;-) What did you use to unzip?

I'm kind of sceptical that re-downloading would help, mind; I tend to find that zips are either fine or corrupted beyond usability, myself. Can you see all the files (e.g. 'Renaissance.exe') in the zip itself?
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Re: Star Story Saga: Renaissance

#9 Post by chronoluminaire »

Jake wrote:What are the rest of the details about your system? Are you running Windows or Linux, for example? Can you tell how big the VM size is for the Renaissance.exe application?
(Random other question, since it's one of the few things I changed after the testing on other OSes was done at least - do you have any joysticks plugged in? Joystick support was added rather late, and in a manner which feels rather hacky due to some shortcomings in what seemed to be the correct solution under SDL.Net.)
The applications seemed to be consuming 230 megabytes, or so. But even in fullscreen mode, with compressed textures on, it ran extremely slowly (and in fact with major graphical glitches). I think my home system (it's Win XP) is just a bit b0rked in assorted ways. Don't worry too much about me.

I'll either give it a go on my work PC after hours, or wait until I get a new home PC (scheduled for May, as I'm getting fed up with the half-hour bootup time on this thing). This game has just increased my determination to upgrade soon :) (The only other thing I've found that just won't run at all is Plasma Pong. Although Warcraft 3 wasn't exactly lightning-quick. So SSS:R is now the single app I most plan to run on my new box when I get it :))
I released 3 VNs, many moons ago: Elven Relations (IntRenAiMo 2007), When I Rule The World (NaNoRenO 2005), and Cloud Fairy (the Cute Light & Fluffy Project, 2009).
More recently I designed the board game Steam Works (published in 2015), available from a local gaming store near you!

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Re: Star Story Saga: Renaissance

#10 Post by Wakuseino »

To be honest, I kind of wonder if there's some weird compatibility thing going on with the engine there, because while I'm not getting the graphical glitches other people have been recording, I'm definitely seeing the lag.

...This thing can run Touhou fine, but when we get to the shooting areas we have the immense lag and I can hear my PC screaming in pain...

...I'll do a more extensive review later, but for the time being, I simply have one thing to say:

"Ugh, I'm stuck with melee in a danmaku? ...This is some pretty pathetic damage for having to get in someone's face... Hopefully it's just a one-level thing and I never have to do it again..."

Edit #1:

I direct you to the following image.

http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v663/ ... petals.png

...You'll notice that the snowflakes didn't clear out. I'm not exactly sure how that happened, as they've been cleared all the other times, but for some reason didn't this time... Still, could be a bug.

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Re: Star Story Saga: Renaissance

#11 Post by Jake »

Wakuseino wrote:...This thing can run Touhou fine, but when we get to the shooting areas we have the immense lag and I can hear my PC screaming in pain...
First check, just to be sure - are you playing on 'very easy'? If you are, then there's a deliberate 'bullet-time' effect when shots get close which a couple of people have mistaken for 'lag'.

Secondly - what do you mean by 'lag'? The word originally refers to a networking slowdown, and since this isn't a networked game it could mean more than one thing. Is it running at a noticably low framerate? Is there a delay between you pressing a key and something happening? Have you tried turning on texture compression?

(I wonder if it's a graphics driver thing, particularly in Chrono's case with the glitches; Touhou games are all DirectX, while this uses OpenGL, so there's no necessary correspondence between how well they run.)

That said, I will be spending some time in the near future to try and make it less resource-hungry - the 1.0 release wasn't really optimised in the least, more effort was spent getting it out within the NaNo deadline than anything. It certainly will run at a low framerate if you're low on RAM, which is something I'm hoping to fix soon. I'm just concerned that due to known issues in Mono, my fix for Windows machines may make it use even more RAM on OSX and Linux boxes. :/
Wakuseino wrote: "Ugh, I'm stuck with melee in a danmaku? ...This is some pretty pathetic damage for having to get in someone's face... Hopefully it's just a one-level thing and I never have to do it again..."
Well, equally there are barely any bullets in that stage compared to a traditional danmaku game (or any of the other stages), either. It's hardly a purebred example of the genre! But yeah, it's a one-off thing, as I'm sure you've noticed by now. ;-)
Wakuseino wrote: ...You'll notice that the snowflakes didn't clear out. I'm not exactly sure how that happened
Yeah, that's a scripting bug. I know what happens, it's usually a one-in-a-few-hundred chance of occurring. I'll get it fixed in the first patch.
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Re: Star Story Saga: Renaissance

#12 Post by Wakuseino »

Ok, so. I just finished my first run through. For the record, I was playing on Medium, so no, it wasn't bullet-time slowdown, and after a while I stopped noticing things. The only real time when the keypress delay is noticeable is at the start, when... you know, you don't have a weapon that shoots just by holding things down?

Anyways, a few little things. Maybe it's just me, but I think the difficulty of things is a little skewed... Stage 3 was pathetically easy, and I don't know about anyone else, but I found that the only level tougher than Stage 1 was actually the Final Stage, which... ow. It'll be a long LONG time before I can hope to pull it off on any difficulty higher than medium.

I have to say though, my favorite stage overall was Stage 4. It was amazingly fun to do.
Also, the password was "Ninjas", wasn't it?
That being said, Stage 5 boss was probably my favorite. We need more Bomberman bosses! ...Seriously, about halfway through I forgot his name and just kept calling him Bomberman.

Overall difficulty levels, I would probably put things along the lines of Stages 3, 2, 4, 5, 1, 6, which is probably a little telling for me... I guess I was expecting it to play like a curtain fire, and Stage 1 really knocked me for a loop, but I still struggle with it quite a bit.

Oh, uh. The story, right? Well, my personal biggest disappointment was that
my attempts to pair Aris and Max together merely resulted in me only being able to get the Max end. I suppose I should have focussed on one of the girls more...
Otherwise, the story was about what I was expecting really. Though I have to admit that our main character's suspicion of the professor seems a bit inexplicable... I mean, sure, she doesn't like the guy, but it seems like she was trying to pin everything on him with no actual evidence to show for it... Mind you, it was in character, but it was something that bothered me a little.

Aside from that, the technical issues are the big thing. Woe be to anyone that has the misfortune of MSN Messenger active while playing this game, it locked up my computer for a good minute or two when someone I know logged on. And of course... The loading screen. Oh, the loading screen. Suggestion to anyone preparing to play this game, keep something like Sudoku on-hand, you'll be waiting a while for the thing to finish.

Overall, it was fairly fun. Everything past Stage 3 is worth playing the game for, and they're probably the most fun in the game. The real problem is that the game kind of gets off to a rather painful start, with Stage 1 and Stage 2 being surprisingly challenging.

...To be fair though, Stage 2 might have only been hard to my mind because the Stage 2 Boss used basically every ability I had trouble with in the early parts of Imperishable Night and Perfect Cherry Blossom. I swear, that boss is the lovechild of Mystia and Cirno...

...On that note, if I can make a bit of a suggestion? Maybe it's just me being out of practice, but I think that the Stage 2 boss's final attack set is just a little bit too fast... Again, it's probably just me being out of practice, though...

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Re: Star Story Saga: Renaissance

#13 Post by lordcloudx »

playing this one... up to stage 4 on hard with one continue down because of that stage 2 bi... witch's snowflakes.

The big fat pirate boss took down two more continues, so I'm replaying this another day.

some comments on the gameplay:

-The 1st stage was a pain. Those cockroach things move kinda randomly and I thought they were power-ups so they cost me one life. Also, it's hard to know if you're actually doing any damage with the sword.

-3rd stage boss was actually easier than stage 2. (at least that's how I felt.)

-4th stage .... for most of the level, there's actually a safe spot near the upper center of the screen.

Excellent game so far. (I hope I can actually finish this)
I'll replay this on very easy afterwards to read the VN portions which I totally skipped.
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Re: Star Story Saga: Renaissance

#14 Post by chunderbunny »

Heh, thanks for the feedback guys.

As the main level designer let me just say that if you ever design your own shooter, do NOT underestimate how long it takes to balance the difficulty of a level! I seriously spent 75% of my time adjusting the difficulty in various ways of the various levels/bosses.

What was particularly challenging was finding a way of making it still fun on easy mode but making it so easy that even a novice could beat the game without dying too often.

A small word of warning though, I'm not actually that great at shooters... so difficulties above medium aren't as well tested/balanced. I don't think anyone has played very hard mode at all, one of the testers (who is pretty good at danmaku games by all accounts) took a look at the levels and declared them as "probably possible, by a Japanese person".

If you just want to play the shooter stages and skip all the VN stuff then you can edit the "actiononly" setting in config.xml to "true". It'll still do a high-score calculation but you won't get any of the endings.

If anyone needs any tips, let me know. ;)

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Re: Star Story Saga: Renaissance

#15 Post by mikey »

lordcloudx wrote:I'll replay this on very easy afterwards to read the VN portions which I totally skipped.
I'm also totally ambivalent about this game, in terms of playing - I hate to admit it, but I (yes, *ME*), I have skipped the VN parts!

I don't know why or how, I just wanted to shoot things, knowing that I had no chance of avoiding them (too bad there was no VN-only option). I guess the prospect of shooting made me so nervous that I wanted to just play it directly as a shooter, rather than reading the VN parts and fearing the fights.

So anyway, the shooting (wussy setting for me) was really nicely done - I loved the slowdown, it was a very cool and practical effect. Since I don't play any topdown shooters, everything seemed to be very innovative, and new - ornamented explosions, deadly snowflakes...

A really nice game, but I'll need to play it for the story at some point as well. :P

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