The Daily Click

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Author:	Silveraura	Submitted:	29th November, 2009	Favourites:	2
Genre:	Puzzle	Downloads:	160
Rated:

Edited By SiLVERFIRE on 11/29/2009

True Diamond is a unique puzzle/arcade game designed in Multimedia Fusion 2 using the Hardware Acceleration build. The object of the game is to destroy all the diamonds by moving the ball around left and right while it bounces up and down automatically. There are a variety of puzzle elements to the game, a lot of which involve changing the color of the ball, which adds to the difficulty.

Please keep in mind that this is a 10 level feedback demo. Some objects have been disabled from the otherwise fully functional level editor, to avoid instability.

I would love to hear what people have to say about the game, what I can add to it, what I should change, etc.

Please Note:
This game was designed to be a high definition, graphically intensive, hardware accelerated game. With that said, the following system recommendations should be taken into consideration before downloading such a big file.

1GB of RAM
DirectX 9
Windows XP or higher
GeForce 6200 equivalent, or better.

If you would like to download and play the game with lower system recommendations, I would love to hear how the game functions for you. The above are estimated and I would like to see how much further down I can push them.
After beating the demo, restart the game. This gets around a temporary glitch in the game which causes the level editor to not load properly.

Level Editor Tips:
+ Press H to hide the grid.
+ Use arrow keys to scroll.
+ For large levels, hold Shift to increase scroll speed.
+ Change the level name in the bottom right corner. This is the name the file saves as.
+ You can't play the level unless you have a Player. You can only place 1 Player.
+ Change the color of the object your placing, using the buttons at the bottom left.
+ As a quick reference, the "Free Look" reference icons are available at the bottom right corner, for the selected object.
+ In the final release, you will not be able to edit Main Game levels, however you will be able to create separate campaign modes for other players to play through.
+ Some objects such as Concrete, Wood, and Doors, have a variety of sizes you can place such as: full, vertical, horizontal, and small. You can change the size on the far right of the object bar. Not all sizes are available for all objects.

Do not delete the demo if you want to continue participating in feedback. I will be creating a project page soon. Updates regarding the games progress will frequently come with PATCHES to the main game, which will be significantly smaller than the full game itself.

70MB's may seem big for a demo. Most of the graphics and sounds of the full game are already in the demo, so the full game will not be much bigger.

New download host. Much faster download. (1MB/sec)

Review This Download

http://www.filedropper.com/tdiamonddemo (69.53 mkb )

Posted by Aden

29th November, 2009

jesus 70mb!

Posted by UrbanMonk

29th November, 2009

Rated :

Very impressive. I really enjoyed the gameplay as well.

Posted by Ski

30th November, 2009

I wont be downloading this at 70MB.

Posted by Silveraura

30th November, 2009

Good. Oh and thanks for commenting about it. I love hearing empty feedback.

Posted by Ski

30th November, 2009

Well for a start I fail to see why you made them and the screen so big? Considering how simple they are, and the fact that it's a puzzle game, you could have made it in a much smaller res.

The title screen has an awful lot of empty space, too.

Posted by Silveraura

30th November, 2009

With high speed internet today, 70MB is hardly a huge download. I accept the feedback and will work on compressing and optimizing things before release, but it was designed to be a high resolution game from the start. With that both in mind and in the description, I hardly see it as a major issue. At around 700KB/sec which seems to be the average connection speed I see amounts everyone I know online, it should take no more than a few minutes to download.

Again, thanks for the feedback. I don't think any more feedback regarding the size of the file, is necessary though.

Posted by UrbanMonk

30th November, 2009

Rated :

I really like this game, it reminds me of an old dos game I played when I was younger. I can't remember it's name, but it had the same type of gameplay.

The ball auto-bounced left/right instead of up/down though, and it had these "bars" that the ball could cling to to let you think about your next move. It was really fun.

Posted by OMC

30th November, 2009

Rather spiffy, I think. I seem to recall playing a past incarnation. Perhaps a non-HD version? At any rate, quite an interesting concept and some quality work put into this.

Posted by Robert Dowling

1st December, 2009

I only had a quick play (working on-site at the moment), and would like to comment on the graphics rather than gameplay, I hope you don't mind.
Individually most of your object graphics look great, but don't 'gel' together as well as they could.
The light backgrounds are nice but tend to draw my attention away from the darker foreground objects.

The jewels look good, but how do you feel about using a graphic closer to the jewel you have in the main menu screen? I think it would fit it much nicer. I do like the effect when they're bounced into.
The dark walls in and around the screen could do with perhaps a little brighting up, or give them a different material like a gloss so you can give them some bright highlights or detail in there. At the moment they look like negative space that you could really make some use of.
If you're going for the silhouette look that's popular at the moment, make them completely void of any details.

The ball seems to look like it's a lower resolution to the other objects too. And since this is the major focus for the player you may want to swallow the extra processing power a higher res ball may need.
Also, how about a glow around the ball?

Concrete and wood objects are kind of dull. Surely you can think up some much more interesting materials that perform the same way.

Overall a nice polished looking game. I hope you find something above useful.

Posted by Silveraura

1st December, 2009

Excellent feedback. I will take it all into consideration.

Posted by Chrisbo

1st December, 2009

Whew..my laptop just makes it in the resolution, 1280*800. I'm interested to see how this plays!

Posted by Chrisbo

1st December, 2009

Well, I was kinda disappointed. It seemed like a lot of flashiness trying to make up for average gameplay... here are my thoughts:

Graphics were decent, but could be improved in a few areas. First, they are all too big. I think you could shrink them to be 2/3 the size and still be able to keep the detail. There isn't enough room to fit a good amount of the level. It's like playing a game made for people with vision problems.

I like the variation in the movement. Normally the Diamond clones stick with the straight up and down, but I liked the acceleration and the bouncy movement when you collide with stuff.

Some textures seemed way out of place, such as the wood panels that someone mentioned before. Doesn't look good with the rest of the theme of the game. Also, I second the recommendation to change the diamonds to the blue in the title screen

The ball seemed too cartoony compared to the rest of the graphics which seemed more raytraced. The ball trail is a nice touch.

Overall, it just wasn't that fun to play. Maybe I just didn't get far enough into it, but it would be cool to have powerups that affect gameplay or something of that sort. I didn't get that far in because I just wasn't interested in playing anymore. Smaller graphics to fit more of the level on the screen would probably be my one recommendation. Maybe some more puzzle oriented layouts. THen again, maybe you did that later on in the game and I just didn't get there.

Posted by Silveraura

1st December, 2009

The first few levels are all to get you used to the new movement and introduce you to some critical objects. After a few levels in, the real puzzle aspect of the game slowly starts to kick in. Each level introduces move and more puzzle elements which all start to combine and interweave with each other to create some unique puzzles. Especially whenever elements start to become a factor.

Posted by UrbanMonk

1st December, 2009

Rated :

I think you should drop that annoying tutorial screen with a hundred pages whenever you start a new game.

The game is simple enough to not need it anyhow.

I got stuck on the level with the green color changer right below a green zapper gate thing.

I couldn't change my color cause it would kill me immediately. Imma play it some more though and figure it out when I have more time.

EDIT: This Level: http://create-games.com/dcimg.asp?img=http://i36.photobucket.com/albums/e42/GoldenSonic3000/TDScreenshot6.jpg&ID=8009&n=5
Comment edited by UrbanMonk on 12/1/2009

Posted by Silveraura

1st December, 2009

That's where Free Look would become an added advantage because you can scroll around the level and find out what objects do what by clicking on them. In that level for example, you might want to take a close look at the right side of the level in Free Look.
These are 10 very simple introduction levels. They're defiently going to get harder and more puzzle based. I also plan to add a level pack creator incase people are interested in making a batch of levels for others to play through rather than sending a level over and opening it in the level editor.

Posted by UrbanMonk

1st December, 2009

Rated :

Oh, cool. I did not know that about free look mode.

Well instead of that tutorial screen that pops up how about making something that tells the user about free look mode? OR maybe it did, but all that extra text made me just skip it altogether.

Posted by Edron

1st December, 2009

there's no use of asking for feedback if you only defend your game. even a "this looks like crap" is useful feedback (although a reason why would be good). i wont download this either, but there are few games with 3d rendered graphics that don't look out of place. to me it seems like this is not one of those cases

Posted by OMC

1st December, 2009

Defending?

He's explaining things that haven't been explained since it's a demo.

Posted by Dr. James MD

1st December, 2009

Rated :

It will download in 15 minutes on my paltry 1mbps internet!
Gotta go fix many peoples Freeview boxes so I'll check the game later.

Posted by Dr. James MD

1st December, 2009

Rated :

That's not bad, makes me think of an XNA type game. There's not really much I can crit on - its a solid engine, the graphics work in motion. I think the colour switcher and destroyer beams look a little too similar though. There was also some short slowdown just after switching colour.

I ended up skipping through the wall of text tutorial and found my own way around pretty quickly. I don't think its needed, or at least in the detail it goes into.

It did seem a little slow paced, timed events or whatever would probably make it more exciting.

The resolution also messed up my monitor. It's a 1680x1050 Dell but for some reason it just added black borders and squashed the game out of ratio. Thats the only bug I cam across.

Posted by UrbanMonk

3rd December, 2009

Rated :

Ok, I finally beat it!

It just gets plain awesome after a while!

I loved the water ball, and tornado diamond!

Imma have to make some levels for this now!

Please finish this game! It's the best game you've made yet! Graphics are awesome, I loved all the effects, and the level design was perfect!

The Freelook mode helped out a lot in planning my moves, and in some ways this game reminds me of lemmings, I don't know why?

Just great! Pleeeease finish this!

EDIT: oh yeah! and I recognized that song DEADLOCK in game. One of my favorite mods!
Comment edited by UrbanMonk on 12/3/2009

Posted by Fordom

3rd December, 2009

Interesting. Try working on the filesize as you said. This is thorough work, i can tell it is.

Although it looks good, I think you need to polish up the graphics of the jewels and the backgrounds.
How about a background in very dark shades of gray?
The background as it looks now, is very distracting.

Posted by Dr. James MD

3rd December, 2009

Rated :

I agree on the backgrounds. If you're using HWA (which I imagine you are) try throwing a blur effect on the background just to bring the focal point to game layer.

Posted by Quadralien

3rd December, 2009

Well, I reached the end of the demo without needing to force myself to play - this series seems to be looking up at last!

Good to see the Free Look feature in there - much better for planning what to do rather than fumbling about finding where to go in the last entry. The ball locking to a grid of vertical lines is a nice touch as well, even if it does take a bit of getting used to.

That tutorial is a bit lengthy at the start - perhaps instead of it, it would be better to have multiple shorter tutorials for the first few levels explaining features as they appear? (Mind you, Free Look's descriptions help for that as well.)

There seems to be a bug in the level where the fuse blocks and explosives are introduced - occasionally (I think it might be two explosives go off simultaneously, but can't be sure) fuse blocks will turn red but never explode. It can be replicated by hitting the fuse block diagonally down and to the right of the top-left most explosive.

The level editor seems to be needing a bit more work - there doesn't seem to be a reliable way to delete a single object, as the drop-down lists of options have a tendency to effect all of a type of object.

The level batch creator would definitely be a good idea.

All in all, though, this game's coming along nicely - keep up the good work!

Posted by Silveraura

3rd December, 2009

Ah, sorry. I forgot to mention that the DELETE key actually deletes bricks. The drop-down list was actually something I forgot to remove.

Thanks for the feedback, everyone. I'm loving what everyone has to say, and hearing it all out loud and clear.

Posted by UrbanMonk

3rd December, 2009

Rated :

Can't you just use "right click" instead? Would be faster. IF you can add that I'll redownload it.

Posted by Silveraura

3rd December, 2009

That will defiantly be in the next patch. I completely forgot about right clicking whenever the game was bumped into HWA Fullscreen, which interface objects don't work. Hence the reason I had to make my own editor loading screen from scratch.

Posted by DMT

5th December, 2009

requires Joystick2.mfx. And I don't have Multimedia Fusion 2 on this computer. But my other computer is far too slow. What should I do?

Posted by Silveraura

5th December, 2009

Make sure you have the latest version of DirectX installed. Sorry about that, it will be fixed in the next patch.

Posted by 3kliksphilip

5th December, 2009

Damn... Adam, stop living in the 80's. You might like pixelated little games running at 320 x 240. You might even rate competitions based on how much like a 1980's computer game they are... but it's almost 2010 now and I for one would like the standards to be raised a bit. Downloading.

Posted by Ski

6th December, 2009

What a moronic thing to say, especially since the majority of my own game projects use photoshop graphics and not pixel art.

Posted by 3kliksphilip

7th December, 2009

I struggle to see why you refuse to download this game, then

Posted by Ricky

7th December, 2009

maybe because it's 70MB

Posted by Ricky

7th December, 2009

"around 700KB/sec which seems to be the average connection speed"

;__; my highest download speed is around 150KB/sec

Posted by UrbanMonk

7th December, 2009

Rated :

My download speed was 1200KB/sec.
I've got like the 2nd to fastest internet plan though.

I feel for you guys I really do.

Posted by Dr. James MD

7th December, 2009

Rated :

My download speed was 110kbps (1mb connection). It really is no time at all.
Forgot to rate!

Posted by OMC

7th December, 2009

Apparently Americans pay the most for the crappiest and slowest internet. Or so I've read. On the internet. And you know how the internet is. It started WWI.

Or so I've read.

Posted by Silveraura

7th December, 2009

I live in the US and I use Comcast which is reliable (for me) and gets me upwards around 3mbps.

Anyway, back to game feedback. I'll try to reduce the file size before release.

Posted by Ricky

7th December, 2009

I'll definitely download the finished version.

Posted by Ski

7th December, 2009

My download speed is pretty fast. I just think for such a file size you could make the graphics smaller and give them more character/charm.

At the moment they seem kinda lazy.

Posted by 3kliksphilip

8th December, 2009

But surely it would be foolish to judge it before actually playing it?

Posted by UrbanMonk

8th December, 2009

Rated :

He didn't judge it, he just said the file size is too big to download?

Posted by lembi2001

30th December, 2009