What engine it use?

[Coffee]

I wonder what engine it use, is it made suing flash like the original?

Thanks

[gimig]

Hello, yes it's flash.

[Coffee]

Does it's have any problem with the save? As many flash games on Steam, their save get flushed when you empty flash temp file directory.

[gimig]

I have some framerate issues but that's because I'm playing it through wine, no save problem here for me though.

[Tetsuo9999]

It's Flash, which is a bad thing because you'll get massive framerate drops for no reason, especially on the final boss. If you don't have problems with other Flash games on Steam like Binding of Isaac, check this game out. If you do, I'd advise staying away from it as the end of the game is borderline unplayable on my computer due to Flash lag. Unfortunately, I regret my purchase as a result since I can't see the ending.

[Bitmap Bureau]

We're looking in to a solution for the final boss battle which isn't so intensive, hoping to get it in there for the next update.

[Captain Mangles]

Since it uses Flash, are there options to change the quality from High, Med, or Low like in Binding of Isaac?

[Bitmap Bureau]

The game's quality setting is set to "low" by default as it uses pixel art, so setting it to "high" wouldn't make a difference - it only applies to games that use vector art really. We're currently redrawing the final boss so that we're not using any rotated imagery which *should* sort out the performance issues.

[Omega X]

The game also slows down the Steam overlay. I'm not sure if that's fixable.

[coolDisguise]

Originally posted by FuzzyBuddy:

You should never have to change your art because of poor design decisions.

^This. I mean if you're developing something in 3D on one of the latest engine and just throwing around too much awesomeness at once, well, maybe then that's an option. But we're talking 2D sidescroller here and I'm sure you almost could have developed it for an SNES without the problems, if you happened to be SNES devs at that time with proper understanding of the console and innovative ideas on how to overcome limitations (like Megaman's face in the NES games).

The sad thing is, that I was looking at your game and thought "that actually looks like a lot of fun" and still I'm not sure I'll bother to buy it, because it's made in Flash, which means the most reasonable method of playing this game (using a gamepad) isn't supported. I mean you CAN TRY to get around it using Joy2Key or whatnot, but that's actually not as good as native gamepad support, one of the reason being that your userbase has to make it work for themselves. I think I can somewhat understand why you used Flash in the first place, because it seems Flash is somewhat easy to come by, cheap to develop for and if I'm correct I read the game had been free in its former release (which didn't include as much as the new version), so it's seems at first you weren't even planning on selling the game through Steam until it became popular.

You might consider throwing out some well designed DLC, which will get you enough money to switch the engine simultaneously and thereby attracting new potential buyers and giving yourself a chance to even add some more fancy graphical effects where you think it's appropriate. You still have all the assets, just coding would have to be rewritten, so maybe you need someone new to do this and the person surely wants to get paid, so in the end designing DLC to accomplish this seems a reasonable idea to me. In the meantime I'll go check out the older version anyway.

[Bitmap Bureau]

I think a lot of people don't really understand how powerful Flash is now - sure we've got some slowdown issues with the last boss, but we should be able to sort that out. It's come a long way in the last few years and you will start to see amazing games developed with it in the near future.

The reason we went with Flash is because just about every PC on the planet has Flash installed on it and Adult Swim operate a Flash games portal who we develop games for - the decision to bring the game to Steam was made when the game was nearly complete, but we still would have gone with Flash even if we were developing only for Steam. As for native controller support, that's on the way and should be implemented in the next week or so - hopefully that will make everyone happy! ;)

[coolDisguise]

Wow, that was a quick answer. Glad to hear native controller is coming, that's a great move, thumbs up! :)

When I saw that flashgames nowadays have all that achievement, account and even savestate stuff and potentially some nice looking graphics too (don't get me wrong, I like the old-school style your game is going for!), some years ago, I realized that Flash had improved. Yet what troubled me - beside that gamepad support thing - was hearing you'll just redesign something, going back from your original vision of it due to slowdowns. Maybe I misunderstood, but it sounded not like you were trying some method to have it "look the same, but without slowdowns" but rather have it "look different, so there's no slowdowns". I'm sorry if I was mistaken.

[Bitmap Bureau]

Oh I see - what I meant was that we're aiming to redraw Abarghus differently; you guys wouldn't notice the difference as it would be a change to the way in which he's drawn (ie. in code) not the art itself. :)

[Mr. Stimpson]

Originally posted by coolDisguise:

Maybe I misunderstood, but it sounded not like you were trying some method to have it "look the same, but without slowdowns" but rather have it "look different, so there's no slowdowns". I'm sorry if I was mistaken.

That was my initial thought as well. My bad for misunderstanding.

My OP, that was deleted, wasn't meant to be offensive to the developers. It was just my own opinion on flash verses other programming languages and how I felt this game would have fared under the hypothetical situation that it was written in C++.

[Bitmap Bureau]

No worries, I think some parts of the development would have been a lot easier if we'd written the game in C++ (such as adding Steamworks and controller support), but it's not impossible in Flash. :) There's a lot of lazy Flash coders out there though and many games aren't optimised too well - I'm not a great coder, but I'm pretty happy with how SHODN runs generally, apart from the Abarghus fight of course! Just working on that now, trying to get the frame rate up. It looks like it's nothing to do with rotated bitmaps though, rather just large bitmaps with transparency...

[Tetsuo9999]

Yeah, I think I and other consumers assumed that the Steam version wasn't in Flash, but it runs great considering that. I have tons of problems getting Binding of Isaac to run properly, so this game only having one major problem spot is quite impressive. Waiting on the patch so it doesn't take ten minutes to kill Abarghus before I do any more serious attempts, though.