The rise of Atlantis (PC computer game, /F, tentacles, bugs and other environment)

[Ilohnoh1]

The rise of Atlantis

- RELEASED! -
You can download it from my Artist Pad.


Okay, so I decided to give you an early preview of my upcoming game "The rise of Atlantis". The game is finished, just going through some final testing and bug fixing.

It is now 4 days before release and I'm planning to give you two introductions of this game before release. One today, and the next on Thursday.

- - - - -

Edit: It's a long read, but once you really start to play the game, having read over it may make your life a lot easier and save you some possible frustration.

Let's start by saying that this game is a mixture of two game types: ACTION on one side and ADVENTURE on the other side. These are intertwined (though separated from each other) and you have to test your skills in both areas to get anywhere.

Today I am taking the ADVENTURING part of the game under the magnifying glass and giving you a screen shot. On Thursday I will say some things about the action part.

The adventure part of the game is very alike to what you are used to from the games "Down the Bunny Hole" and "Nagas" which are also adventure games. You have several different locations which you can visit. Some are locked until you manage to find out how to unlock them and that's also the purpose of this part of the game. You will find objects and maybe even one or more persons to interact with and by solving the puzzles/dilemmas/situations you progress through the game.

All this is pretty standard, so I don't have to talk about much. In the adventuring part you will not see a whole lot of tickling, with the exception of the rewards at the end and one of the scenes (visually) somewhere halfway. MOST of the tickling action you will in fact find in the ACTION area of the game (and they are 2-frame animations) but I'll talk about that later.

The UI contains a few areas noteworthy:
- The Location. From here you can see where you are. In the screen shot you see that this is taken at a location called "The Water Wheel".
- A visualisation of the scene. There's a quite wide picture that gives you a bit of an overview of the location where you are. In it you don't generally see hints of what to do, but it's just helping putting you in the mood.
- Your inventory. This shows what items you are holding. You can hold up to 6 items at the time.
- The text at the bottom. This text is where you get most of your information. After giving commands like "look around" and "examine item" you get a text that describes what the area looks like, things you may be thinking or doing with items and what their result is.
- Two combo boxes and a button. This is where you give the commands.

In the upper combo box you see the main commands you can give. "Look around" is something that can be chosen by itself, the other ones require you to put something in the second combo box. The second combo box always contains items that you can use when something is selected in the top combo box. So in the screen shot when you select the option 'Drop' then from the lower combo box you can select one of the three items you are holding and press 'accept' to drop it.

Regarding these inventory items... you can only hold 6 items at the same time. Now this may sound fair, but there's a big catch which will make your inventory management a bit of a challenge. This catch is what you see at the top of your screen: STAMINA.

Now stamina itself doesn't play a part in the adventuring section of the game, except in the immediate beginning. When you are in the ACTION part of the game, you CAN lose stamina (if you're doing things right, you shouldn't, unless you get unlucky, but you can try to limit the damage even then). If you run low on stamina, travelling will get really tricky.

Luckily for you there's a very good remedy for a low stamina and that is eating. Already in the entry area of the game you will find berries. The other good news is that all food in the game is unlimited. You can hoard as often as you want and as much as you can carry... and that is where the inventory problems come around the corner again: You have only six slots (and food does not stack). One slot of food will replenish your stamina entirely however, so if you are just at 78% you may want to hold on to your food until it has dropped lower still. Of course (and that's your dilemma), you will need to carry other items around because you will need other items on different locations, so you can't always walk around with 6 slots of food either.

Not all areas have food. In fact, while they are spotted throughout the game, the areas without food by far outnumber the areas with food. The Water Wheel is the second place where you will find food by the way.

So what happens if you get stuck in an area without food, with an empty inventory and out of stamina? Well, there are two solutions:
- Waiting
- Loading an earlier saved game

If you wait in an area where you are, each real-time minute that passes you will get 2% of your stamina back. So you can take a coffee break, or tab to your browser and read some new posts on the Tickle Theater or something and then try again. This stamina regeneration won't work at the very start of the game (that's scripted but you'll find out), but it will work always after that.

Loading an earlier saved game is another option. And since I don't expect the most of you to play this game from beginning to end in one session... yes, you can save, close the program and continue later.

Saving, as well as loading, can be done from the main option "SYSTEM" and there you'll also find "Exit game". You can only have one save-game at the same time, so when you save again you're overwriting the old save. Don't worry about getting completely stuck however, there are no 'dead ends'.

Saving the game shortly before winning it may be nice/useful to do as well, in case you don't get the SECOND REWARD PICTURE right away. Yes, this game has two (or actually three reward pictures, but I'll talk about the third one later) reward pictures and while one of them is immediately received when you win the game, the other has another condition (but you can still do that even if you have done everything but the very last step that leads to the "you win" screen. If you don't have it, you can find out what to do when you see the first reward picture.

Okay, I think I've talked long enough now. More on Thursday.

 

[Bashiku]

Hmmm... now I wonder who will and how will you manage to kill anymore character with most of them frozen, dead or dead impregnated...

 

[Journia]

Hmmm... now I wonder who will and how will you manage to kill anymore character with most of them frozen, dead or dead impregnated...

Kill...tha babies....

 

[Bashiku]

Kill...tha babies....

Did you just eat the baby? Did anyone know he will eat the baby?! Eating babies is not cool!

 

[Ilohnoh1]

Hmmm... now I wonder who will and how will you manage to kill anymore character with most of them frozen, dead or dead impregnated...

haha. How to kill even more than basically the whole world?
Naturally those who are frozen are in fact dead. If you freeze over, your heart stops, you die. And in these ice blocks aren't like the deep-freezers that you see in some space sci-fi series. So... dead is dead? You will find out.

Did you just eat the baby? Did anyone know he will eat the baby?! Eating babies is not cool!

I imagine the "Kill the baby" was a South Park comment.

No, not killing any babies.

Either way, all of this could or may not be related to "The rise of Atlantis".

 

[alphazion1]

Did you just eat the baby? Did anyone know he will eat the baby?! Eating babies is not cool!

Absolutely forbidden unless you are a dingo.

 

[Ilohnoh1]

No, not killing any babies.

Yeah, and no eating them either by the way.

 

[Bashiku]

I imagine the "Kill the baby" was a South Park comment.

No, not killing any babies.

Either way, all of this could or may not be related to "The rise of Atlantis".

Actually that is from Ben 10: Alien Force 'Con of Rath'. At the end of the episode those lines are in place and it was intended for Journia.

 

[Ilohnoh1]

Thursday Update

Okay, so here is the thursday update, to which I promised to tell you about the ACTION section of the game. It also contains one tickle screen shot. After some deliberation I decided to go ahead and post that as there will be plenty opportunities for tickling in the action section of the game.

Before that, the status of the game. I have finished testing it and played it through from start to finish. Did some tuning here and there (in the action section because some of it had a chance of becoming quite a little too hectic or mission impossible at times). And I fixed a graphic bug which has been there almost right from the start and I which for a long time I couldn't find the reason for. It's now all working as intended. Yay! All I need to do is pack it and upload it, but I'll do that on Saturday.

Another thing that I'm revealing in this update is the player character. Someone has already been wondering whether this would be Jen or Merja... and they were well on track. Yes, this is another game containing your heroine Jennifer McCrow.

This game takes place AFTER the Apocalypse, at the meltdown of the Ice Age. I will not give you a lot of details now, nor in the game itself (and once you start to play you'll find out real soon why!) but basically, during the Ice Age the world's plates have been shifting a little here and there, pulled some parts of continents under and... pushed Atlantis, the fabled 8th continent of the world. And along with it comes a series of secrets and riddles that have gone lost ages ago when the continent disappeared below the waves.

- - - - - - -

Okay, so the ACTION section. How did I mix action with adventuring? That's simple. Atlantis is a continent. It has a huge surface. The game itself will only be covering a very small area of this landmass, but even if it is less than 0.001%, that is still a large area and the places that Jen will be visiting are not necessarily all right next to each other. No, she will have to walk a little distance.

Since Atlantis has been below the waves, a lot of the structures have been destroyed or changed into ruins. Since it has resurfaced new plants and organisms have started growing on it again, some of which familiar, others by us unknown. In fact, in the thousands of years that have passed nature hasn't been exactly standing still.

So, to cut things short: Jen will have to do some (short) travelling whenever she wants to go from location to location. This is where the action scene kicks in because, well... there's no clean and cut roads that a government has been maintaining... it's a bit of a wilderness overgrown with plants, moss and who-knows-what. And maybe the worst thing (or the best, depending from which side you're looking at it) is that a number of these growing things are alive. And they have tentacles. And they like to grab something when it passes by.

What you see when you choose to travel (normally, with a few exceptions) is a 2 dimensional display where Jen is walking from left to right. Or if I want to say it right: Jen herself isn't moving on your screen, the background and everything else are moving.

This part of the game, I must say, isn't an idea of my own. I have taken the idea from a flash game called Demon Girl in case you have heard of it (BEWARE, IT'S HENTAI) and for quite a while I wanted to make a similar game like this involving tickling. So I ended up doing that now, included in an adventuring game at the same time. Mind you (if you know Demon Girl or try it out now), that my animations are neither as smooth, nor as good as in that game. In my game I have up to 6 different obstacles that can catch you and tickle you, but you have to get further in the game before you see some of them.

Okay, back to Atlantis.

So you (or Jen in fact) are walking from left to right and encounter obstacles such as plants, hanging tentacles, etc. Alike in the Demon Girl game, you have some clothing on (namely shoes, a simple skirt and top) and whenever you are hit in some location by one of these obstacles, they hit your clothes off that location, so you will continue barefooted, in your naked butt or with unsupported boobs. Or a combination. Or naked if you were hit in all three places.

The NEXT time you are hit in that location (where there's no longer clothing to protect your ticklish areas) the encounter will grab you and start tickling you. This is a 2-frame animation, so pretty simple, but yet at least something that moves.

When you are getting tickled, your stamina will start decreasing. This is presented in a bar on the top of the screen. Stamina is something I already talked a little about in the adventuring part of the game as well, so you know what you can do with it and now you know how it gets affected negatively. If you keep being tickled your stamina will fully deplete and you will lose. This is not a game-over situation, but you will not have reached your destination. You are being tickled like hell and return to the location from where you started... with very low stamina.

Allowing the stamina to run out is something you will want to see at least once anyway, because this is where the THIRD 'reward picture' comes around the corner. Yep. You get rewarded for losing! It's basically a full body tk picture involving the obstacles in the game which now have free play on Jen's stripped body which is drained of stamina.

To prevent this happening, you have to COUNTER the tickling. Break free from the obstacle, basically. While being tickled you see a circle with an arrow (or actually a triangle) on your screen, below the stamina bar. This represents one of the cursor keys. There's an arrow for Up, Down, Left and Right. These have also different colours (matching xbox directional buttons by the way, which I thought would be easy for those who are familiar with xbox). When you press the correct direction (cursor key) then you will see another one (with generally a different direction). There's about 3-5 of these coming up (depending on the level of difficulty of that trip) and when you succeed, if before your stamina runs out, you can continue.

This is new, and implemented during the testing phase, because it felt a bit harsh to get free out of a situation and then in half a second being grabbed by something that came right after, not really having had time to react. When you break free from a tickle situation you will be invulnerable for a brief period. You will see this by Jen blinking. This period is really short, but it should be enough to avoid being in trouble right away again without being too long, making half of the rest of the level too easy.

MOVEMENT

Now this is at least as important as everything before, and without this you won't likely get through a trip in one piece in the first place. The cursor keys are used for general movement.

Pressing UP: This will make you jump. Jen can't fly so she won't be in the air for a very long time. Making sure you have enough speed to be able to cross the obstacle is critical.

Pressing DOWN: This will make Jen slide. She basically crouches down and her speed will take her forward. Also this is limited in duration so make sure you can pass your obstacle before standing up again.

Pressing LEFT and RIGHT: This changes your speed. You start each time with your slowest pace. By pressing RIGHT (or holding it down for a bit) you will go faster. By pressing/holding LEFT you will decrease your speed again. Speed is very important, because you can't jump or slide indefinitely and if you want to jump OVER something or slide UNDER something... doing that with too low speed will mean you'll crash into them after all.

Obstacles move, and not always at the same speed. It is very well possible that high and low obstacles come at the same time, but at different speed. Playing around with your OWN speed (using left, right) may give you extra time before they reach you, so there may be a gap in between of them that you can use to crouch and then quickly jump, or vise versa. The latter is not easy, maybe, but if you're skilled you can try it out.

Finally, obstacles come at THREE different heights. There's those on the ground, which you have to JUMP over to miss them. There's those hanging from the 'ceiling'... you can clear those by sliding under them. Finally there's those who are coming straight at your belly-button. Those can be cleared either by jumping OR sliding. It doesn't matter which you prefer (or which one is most useful seen the location and timings).

After you have walked the full distance, Jen will actually move to the right of the scene and walk off the screen. Then you've succeeded and you arrive in the next area of the adventuring part of the game.

PS: You will always start the action scene with a new set of clothing.


CHECK BACK ON SATURDAY FOR THE GAME'S RELEASE!

Ilo.

 

[Ilohnoh1]

A few hours earlier than planned, but that means you can start playing already.

Have fun, and don't be afraid to share your thoughts.


The rise of Atlantis

- RELEASED! -
You can download it from my Artist Pad.

Ilo.

 

[Ticklish_Dude1]

I gotta say I love your work Ilo, one problem though, recently somethings stopped me installing your games, I've installed several on this machine before, but now any attempts (even to install ones that already worked previous) are met with Run-Time Error '53' File Not Found. If you have any info that'd be great, I really want to try your new game!

 

[Xtreme09]

I'm getting Run-Time Error '480' "Cannot create AutoRedraw Image"

I think this happened with Tickle Black Jack 2 as well.

I have enough RAM since that's one of the problems. Are you doing anything on visual basic that's making it do that? Anything before Tickle Black Jack 2 worked fine.

 

[10 armed tkler]

Your best game yet. Iloh does it again. I have not finished yet, but the parts I have played so far has been enjoyable.

Only small complaint is somewhat laggy.

 

[Xtreme09]

Hmm... I wonder if it's because I use a vista.

 

[Ilohnoh1]

Okay, let's see if I can provide some help to people with problems.

I gotta say I love your work Ilo, one problem though, recently somethings stopped me installing your games, I've installed several on this machine before, but now any attempts (even to install ones that already worked previous) are met with Run-Time Error '53' File Not Found. If you have any info that'd be great, I really want to try your new game!

I don't know if this happened during installation... or are you getting the run-time error 53 when you try to start the game?

I will add the game without installer (just packed as-is) to this post, so you can try unrar these four rar files into one folder. The file "TRoA.exe" should appear directly at the root of that folder, all other files (74 in total) should appear inside a folder named "data" behind the program's root folder.

This does not include the extra VB libraries and drivers you need to play the game, but if you have previously installed any of my games successfully (and not uninstalled them) then you have all the needed VB libraries. There's one more thing and that's "msimg32.dll", a version of which I also included separately here (msimg32.rar). That one should go to the your operating system's system(32) folder.

I'm getting Run-Time Error '480' "Cannot create AutoRedraw Image"

I think this happened with Tickle Black Jack 2 as well.

I have enough RAM since that's one of the problems. Are you doing anything on visual basic that's making it do that? Anything before Tickle Black Jack 2 worked fine.

I tried to google the problem, as I didn't know what can cause that, but it does look like it might be a memory problem, but in the GDI Heap. Unfortunately I don't know how to solve this problem. I think the cause may be your graphics card but that's only a guess.

Your best game yet. Iloh does it again. I have not finished yet, but the parts I have played so far has been enjoyable.

Only small complaint is somewhat laggy.

Thanks for the feedback, TD! It is not laggy on my computer, but it is very valuable to me to know this. The common thing in my later games is that I'm using a different way to draw sprites (which is the cause some people have problems) but in this game I'm using fairly BIG sprites. So if your system can't handle this fast enough, yes, you may get a bit of lag. However I must say that Jen is not supposed to walk fluently, they are 4-frame animations with regular pauses between them so that she's not racing across the screen. But no doubt it is possible that the sprite sizes are the problem because the boxes are rather big.

Hmm... I wonder if it's because I use a vista.

Have you tried to run the game in XP MODE? because you should. I hope you know how to do this.

 

[Ticklish_Dude1]

It was during installation the problem arose, but the unpacked version's working fine, thanks for the files, now I just need to fix it for your other games xD

Thanks much though!

 

[Xtreme09]

Yeah I tried XP Mode. And running as Admin and even removing processes for RAM but still cannot run the program.

 

[Ilohnoh1]

It was during installation the problem arose, but the unpacked version's working fine, thanks for the files, now I just need to fix it for your other games xD

Thanks much though!

Strange. I don't know why the installation program is failing for you. What other games can you not install? I may (temporarily) upload their files too in the same way so you can at least play them.

Yeah I tried XP Mode. And running as Admin and even removing processes for RAM but still cannot run the program.

Okay. XP mode should be used anyway. But I think in this case the problem may be your video card. How much video ram does it have?

 

[pool2341]

I'm getting Run-Time Error '480' "Cannot create AutoRedraw Image"

I think this happened with Tickle Black Jack 2 as well.

I have enough RAM since that's one of the problems. Are you doing anything on visual basic that's making it do that? Anything before Tickle Black Jack 2 worked fine.

I've had that problem before too. Restarting your computer should do the trick.
Looking good so far Il, thanks again for your work

 

[Ticklish_Dude1]

It appears to be any of your games, I tried to look into it once before and ended up installing an updated framework thinking it was a compatibility issue but no such luck, though I'm certain the issue's to do with file handling during installation as opposed to your games themselves

To give a clearer view of the games not working, I've tried to install Nagas, TRoJ, the original TK Black Jack and TK Hangman

 

[Silentone]

I gave this game a try the other day. Very nicely made, the reward pictures were pretty good. The action phases got on my nerves sometimes, but still not bad (especially with Jen losing her clothes). The puzzles were pretty easy too, in my opinion. Overall, well done Ilohnoh.

 

[Xtreme09]

I've had that problem before too. Restarting your computer should do the trick.
Looking good so far Il, thanks again for your work

That did it. Thanks.

I played through and finished the game.

 

[Ilohnoh1]

It appears to be any of your games, I tried to look into it once before and ended up installing an updated framework thinking it was a compatibility issue but no such luck, though I'm certain the issue's to do with file handling during installation as opposed to your games themselves

To give a clearer view of the games not working, I've tried to install Nagas, TRoJ, the original TK Black Jack and TK Hangman

Hm. You must be missing some file on your computer I'd guess... a library that the setup package is calling or so. But I don't know which. The best recommendation I can give right now is that if you have another computer where you can install it... to install it there, then just copy (or zip/rar) the game files as they are to a memory stick, cd-rom or over the network and then put them on your computer. They should then work.

If you don't have a possibility to do that, I can try to see if I can upload some of the games (but please let me know which you're most interested in) like that... I don't have all of them on my hard disk right now so it takes a bit of time and effort on my side to get that done.

PS: Good to know that rebooting the computer fixes the other error.

 

[Ticklish_Dude1]

Don't worry about it, I'd rather not be a hassle, thanks for the help with RoA though

 

[10 armed tkler]

Always your game provides some form of frustration Iloh and this one is no exception. I am stuck in the place with the pedistal. I am suppose to insert something into a hole and I guess I do not have it. I have checked all the places I was before and came up with nothing...what am I suppose to use...damn your fun games Iloh!