Mainframe (and other personal projects discussion)

[MrChocodemon]

To be frank, I think the music is too intense.

That's my main point as well. Humans are very sound dependant. In the Youtube early days music quality was bound to visual quality, but they found out that people would rather watch low resolution videos with good sound than vice versa.
You should work on the music.

Another problem you might suffer (now). Is visual guidance. If I watch that video on a small screen 17" or in a window, then the coherence of ASCII symbols is give.... I can easily see what you want to display. But on my 24" or 50" screens the individual parts start to lose their (sorry) coherence. Sometime I have to think for a second or two what is shown befor me. Working with more levels of green could help.

 

[res7less]

I've gotta watch out that my 1. I get my audience right, and 2. I don't give them all heart attacks during the transition!

Yeah, watch out, the elderly people playing puzzle games have very weak hearts!

In the Youtube early days music quality was bound to visual quality, but they found out that people would rather watch low resolution videos with good sound than vice versa.

That is actually quite interesting, I didn't know that. Useful info.

 

[The G-Meister]

Another problem you might suffer (now). Is visual guidance.

This is something I'm sorta putting to one side at the moment, however I'm definitely thinking a lot about how I can make the game look passable on various scales. One thing I have planned is an interactive first-time setup that gets people to make the game a size such that they can comfortably and easily read both the normal letters and the letters made with letters. That circumvents any reading problem.

However I can't apply that first time setup to images and videos. Furthermore, YouTube compression absolutely kills the cleanliness of it. I know that one thing I will really have to hammer home to everyone that ever takes a screenshot or makes a video is that they either put a message somewhere saying to resize the content to a comfortable size, or they do the resizing themself.

When it comes to images though, everything will be tutorialised and explained as it is introduced, unless it's real obvious because it's huge I'm still undecided on how to display buttons though, and might seek an few artists' advice at some point.

That's my main point as well.

More opinions and unanimity of them is good

I think I'll wait until I get a timer working before I make any changes as I myself really cannot stand the stress of games like real time strategies, and normally go out of my way not to play them However by the sounds of it (excuse the pun) I may have to reserve this track for something special like a boss, or a certain level pack which focuses on really stressing people out.

 

[MrChocodemon]

how I can make the game look passable on various scales

It's not that it doesn't look good/passable. It is rather that the bigger the symbols are, the bigger are the gaps between each symbol. They start to lose their meaning/readibility when they are scaled to big.

 

[The G-Meister]

It is rather that the bigger the symbols are, the bigger are the gaps between each symbol.

Right, gotcha. I'm definitely also planning to add options for character size with respect to window size which should remedy that, but I guess I can have a look at resizing what I have now. Oh, and for clarity I'll probably add an option to make all characters bold too - when increasing the window scale the characters start to look really thin and pathetic.

 

[The G-Meister]

Look what I've done to Minesweeper guys! Working as intended!



Thought I'd share this masterpiece with you. That line of I's is the cursor and the game board is supposed to be 15x15. I'm halfway through a full code rebuild and was using Minesweeper as my test dummy. As soon as I didn't hit any errors (which was surprisingly quick compared for the amount of code I've written), this happens. Time to find my way out of this rabbit hole!

 

[The G-Meister]

Here's an interesting thing. I stuck a delay into my Minesweeper empty square detection algorithm. Looks kinda cool. There's more info in the description for any of you that're intrigued. Would highly advise opening in YouTube