The Legends of Owlia

The Legends of Owlia is our second release for the NES. If you wish to support us, cartridges are available at infiniteneslives.com.

ROM Download

The Legends of Owlia Trailer

Before and after dungeon exits video 2-16-14:
Dungeon Exits: Before and After

Intro and pre-alpha gameplay videos 12-30-13:
Intro
Dungeon gameplay
Boss fight

Hi everyone! We had so much fun making Nomolos we've started on a new title. This has been in progress for several months already as we're developing most things from the ground up. The tools we made for Nomolos have been a big help though! Here's a video of our in development title, The Legends of Owlia:

New Project: The Legends of Owlia

The germinal idea of this game was created when I was about 11. I attempted to create it when I was a teenager several times, but lacked the discipline to see it through. Now, I have both discipline and confidence built from one successful project, and this game will get finished unless I die first.

The central gameplay mechanic involves the main hero and her bird, an owl. The owl will learn new techniques throughout the game and may be able to do things like fetch keys, carry the hero across a ravine, etc. The first technique the owl has is to simply rush enemies and return to the hero. The hero's name is Adlanniel.

A RPG for NES? Nice, bro!

Visuals are ok, but music could use some improvements.

That looks like something I'd play.

One thing that's not clear, are there separate hit boxes on the player for flying enemies and ground-based enemies, so the player can get hit either in the head or the mid-section?

Looks very promising, great work!

Really? I thought the music was great. Also, if you have seen his other videos you would know that he is quite musically gifted.

I liked the music. Good luck with this next project.

Hehe, Guess I'm weirdo, then.
BTW: is this game gonna be released on carts, or free to play?

Thanks for the positive feedback guys. I haven't spent a ton of time on the demo song, no, but that song will probably appear in the game in some form (and possibly be more fleshed out), probably after the "idyllic starting village" area. It'll be on a cart just like Nomolos was. Strat: The hitbox system will be pretty simple, I have no intention of differentiating between ground and flying enemies at this time unless feedback from beta testing suggests it would be a dramatic improvement.
WhatULive4: you mean the ones on my non-gradual games channel? hehe, I like to keep these two "lives" kinda separate...but they will collide as I create this game

Regarding the music, I think the less-than-stellar aspect is due to the percussion having the same rhythm as the notes, which creates a kind of quiet-loud-quiet dynamic that isn't as pleasing as it could be. The percussion track is also seems too simple, mostly a regular interval, so it gets a little tiresome. That's the best I can do to put my finger on what about it wasn't that enjoyable.

Agreed. Listen to a track from Mega Man 2 to listen to see better percussion backing to music. Plus a little less volume probably won't work. IMO put the melody on the squares and play music/rhythm through that, and just use noise as a backing percussion channel, not a main music source. Otherwise it looks okay. It'd be nice IMO to see sprites disabled over the text box too.

I think the character animation for walking looks a little weak. I think it might look better if the character bobs up and down by a pixel on some frames when walking. Look at Mario, or the professor from Gyromite, or even the Battletoads. For a non-sideways example, Gizmo from Gremlins 2 bobs around a lot, or Willow, or even the guy from Startropics.

Attacking with the falcon owl looks really cool, I love that part.

This project looks really promising!

How is the music being done? Famitone, or original sound driver?

Good to see you are making another game! Good luck with this new project.

Banshaku: thanks man!
cak:
The music is my own custom sound driver. It is similar to famitone and I think a little easier to use (direct export of the music and all envelopes from famitracker, no manual tweaking of data required). Not too many people know about it but it actually exists in the famitracker repository. Since so few people have adopted it I haven't been maintaining the original version so only I have the latest updates to it at the moment. The most recent thing I added was the ability to load a separate set of envelopes for sound effects. In Nomolos, I had to do a bit of massaging of data to make sure all sound effects could be used over different songs each with their own sets of vol/pitch/duty envelopes. I still don't support DPCM, though.

others: thanks for the feedback, I will keep it all in mind. Sometimes we have to choose trade-offs to get everything we want such as: size of character, having a familiar, and leaving enough space for enemies so we don't just have a single tiny enemy in the currently loaded area.

OP also updated with the following videos of our progress. Please note all footage is pre-alpha.

Intro and pre-alpha gameplay videos 12-30-13:


Intro
Dungeon gameplay
Boss fight

Looking great. Reminds me of StarTropics.

Thanks thefox. Glad you saw the Startropics influence...definitely one of the inspirations for this game. Not gonna do the grid jumping thing, though, heh. The owl does feel a bit like the yoyo. However---it'll do more than just that throughout the game. BTW, Streemerz is great---I've been playing it on the Action 53 multicart. I was very impressed with how much detail you put into the gameplay and animation of the main character. Great job!

Of course her owl is a barnowl named Tyto.

Uh, let's see ... Snowy, Barn, Great Horned, ?, Great Grey, Saw-whet.
That last one looks just like this picture on wikipedia, but it's hard to tell anything beyond "horned owl in winter plumage"

Yeah, this is awesome! Love the Startropics feel to the dungeons.

I had completely missed this until recently, it looks like an awesome project !

The only thing I don't like so far is the sound effects which are very weird. And it definitely looks very similar to Star Tropics.

How do you plan on doing the feelies? StarTropics included a letter that had to be dipped in water to reveal a code to unlock half the game. Metal Gear Solid for PS1 had a similar puzzle with a Codec frequency on the back of the box. Now that homebrew uses flash memory instead of mask ROM, you can actually have a different frequency for each cartridge.

[jab]
But so long as you don't do like Zoda's Revenge and make the sequel into product-placement for a famous video game whose designer is known for antipathy toward the open source community, it's fine.
[/jab]

The owls are gorgeous in the intro, you guys did a great job with them!

I like the idea of an owl for a weapon, very original.

Thanks for the additional comments and kind words, guys! Updated the OP with the following video:

Before and after dungeon exits video 2-16-14:
Dungeon Exits: Before and After

Updated OP with teaser trailer and demo rom link. Enjoy!

Reminds me of a cross between Crystalis and Startropics.

Beat demo. (Then went back and talked to all the townsfolk. How shameful.) Then noticed owl hooting outdoors...?

Preliminary note: It's your game! Isn't that great?

Comments:

• Unskippable copyright splash? Really? At least it's not like lately where there're twelve.
• And one-speed text.
• And pickup fade.
• And two meaningless digits of gold, because 100 is the smallest you pick up.
  
• Looks quite good...except for that Q being on a different level. (And the J, looking at the pattern table.)
• People might contrast a little TOO much with the background. It does make it easy to see everything 'active' though, which is nice.
• On contrast...key-locked doors are too similar to non-locked.
• "Use・health" requires some thinking to get. But only a little. (Stuff a tutorial into one of the townsfolk for it.)
  
  • On that note, you can't see your health on the pause screen at all!
• Standard rooms feel a little cramped.
• The sword is rather poor, particularly facing south. I expect this is by design (aside from the south bit).
  
  • On second attempt focusing on sword, it's not unusably bad...but it's obviously worse than the owl-rush.
  • The delay between actions makes it kind of pointless to try using some other owl command alongside the sword.
  • Still, it being stuck on one button with all these neat owl commands on the other...I'd rather be able to unassign the sword and just have Rush be on one button.
  • On owl command-switching, being able to pick only two (with "rush" being one that's pretty much not gonna ever be unselected) is a bit cramping. It reminds me of the difference between Wii and GC Twilight Princess-the third selectable item meant twice as much variety, because one was always going to be stuck on the dungeon item. (And here, it's Rush, because you really don't want to use that sword.)
• Chests are finicky and require pixel-correct alignment to open. If you're not aligned, it'll push you away from correct alignment, which makes it hard to open them.
• Dungeon door requiring gold...does not say how much gold is required. Or why, since it's an OWL blocking our path...?
• Fetch is too slow to get more than one thing from pickup fade unless you do it immediately.
• Bug? : Perhaps because it was embedded in a wall, fetch did not pick up a lantern.
  • (unable to replicate, even with "in-wall" items)
• The chest just south of town respawns, but for those that don't...make sure that opening it and leaving before Tyto returns with the loot doesn't count.

Obviously-partially-implemented features:

• Passwords
• Bombs
• Lanterns
• Money

oh gods is this just a huge Kaepora Gaebora/Awakening-owl thing (/joke)

Liked it a lot, great job!

As for critique:
* Would be nice to be able to skip the dialogue, or at least speed it up. Mainly because you might talk to the same people multiple times by accident, or simply don't remember whether you have talked to some of them.
* I experienced the same problem with lining up to crates as Myask mentioned. I think the "push" feature is good in general, because it makes it easier to navigate without getting stuck in walls, but maybe it should be disabled for the crates.
* If possible, you might want to try to add a few more landmarks to the forest to make it easier to remember where you have been so far. Although I didn't have any major problems with it.

Thanks for the truly excellent and constructive feedback, Myask and thefox. Really appreciate it. A lot of the feedback corroborate my own feelings. Some things I'll be able to fix before release, other things I'm either okay with for other reasons or simply won't have time for...that's how it always goes! You learn by finishing projects.

One interesting comment is some of the features which appear partially implemented are actually fully implemented in the full version. Can't show off all of the game in the demo!

The two useless digits of GP as you correctly observed actually give me an extra level of validation for the password system. If the GP field is not a multiple of 100, the password is invalid. Prior to constraining GP to have this smallest increment, it was too easy to enter a random password and have it whisk you to some random part of the game!

We're getting really close to releasing this game. See the OP for cover art. Enjoy!

Thumbs up.

Didn't follow for a while and saw the trailer. Good job, looks great!

Did the demo rom changed since last time? Will give it a try again.

Thanks dougeff & Banshaku---demo has not changed.

Did I miss the release?

You haven't missed the release. There was a limited run auctioned on NA to help raise money for someone, but the general release has not happened yet.

I'm looking forward to it. This game looks incredible and I loved the demo.

I'm currently working on my own retro console game and I can say that its pretty much a miracle that hobby games even get finished. So good job with all your hard work.

This is looking great! Except Startropics, i get a strong Ys vibe from it, which is really nice. It captures the sense of adventure well, and i look forward to exploring the whole world. Well done!

A few things came to mind, though:
-The trigger area for the great owl to appear in the forest is kind of easy to miss. I think it needs to be expanded as this is the very beginning of the game and players may be unsure exactly what to do, despite hints in town.
-Monsters drop 'health seeds' so often that chests feel kind of redundant. A minor tweak may help, even if it raises difficulty a little. This side effect could be mitigated by longer invincibility after hit time, if needed.
-I'm not too sure about having to swap the owl's attack for utility, or having to swap utilities for the sake of keeping at least the basic rush. Could perhaps every other move involve a 'basic' rush instead?
-I agree with Bregalad, specifically in one case. The own sweeps have a lengthy sound effect, and so i think it needs a bit lower volume.
-Rooms that lock until enemies are defeated should IMO do this only once per dungeon visit. Then the room should be opened for the remainder of the time while being in the dungeon. You could probably fit every bit needed in a temporary byte, if manipulating level data isn't an option.

Thanks for the kind remarks, guys, and for the feedback. Unfortunately the game's already done! As mentioned above, there was an auction on NA for a LE and soon there will be an SE. I tend not to plug commercial selling of my games, here, though, as I don't think that's allowed. The game is done and you will be able to find out about it at my website, www.gradualgames.com, or gradualgames' Facebook or Twitter, when the SE is released.

Why wouldn't it be allowed? There are a lot of people here who would like to know when your game is released.

I'd like one. I had no idea that the NA auction was going on.

I'm sure people would get mad about ads and people selling random stuff unrelated to the forum topics. But NES stuff, homebrew games commercial or not, are totally relevant to the forum.

I'm really looking forward to Owlia.

It seems the overall zeitgeist of this forum has changed for the better in recent years; (with respect to selling games) that makes me happy. I'll announce the SE here when it comes out, as well as on NA.

And it's generally friendlier when it's your own game that you're selling, rather than a reproduction of some high-rarity commercial-era game.

The SE of Owlia is now available for purchase at InfiniteNesLives.com.

Yay! It's on the way!

Yay!! Congratulations on this feat!

Cheers, GG! I'm glad I came back to this thread on release day. Ordered and eagerly anticipating!

Congratulations for releasing your game!

Congratulations for the release.

I know it feels GREAT to have made your dreams come true (I know you've been envisioning this game since you were a boy). Congrats for that, as well.

Okay I feel like an idiot but what is the first thing you're supposed to do in this game? I read both bookcases. Am I missing something? The dang forest won't let me leave.

Thanks guys! Guilty: Look for things that kind of stand off on their own and go up to them. Hope that helps

Congratulations on releasing the game.

This week I was able to play through The Legends of Owlia and the overall structure of the game actually felt a bit like Nomolos but with a top-down perspective instead of a side scrolling platformer. I hardly paid attention to the existence of money as I pretty much killed everything in sight to make sure I didn't miss a chest with a key. The one puzzle that took the longest for me to do was the snowball puzzle, and that was because I stubbornly didn't follow the advice of the guy in that area. For the last two dungeons, I kind of failed to find the puzzle clues, so I ended up brute forcing all the puzzles in those places. I found the hints for the last dungeon after second glance through all the areas.

I know reporting bugs are a bit late for a game in production like this, but while playing the game I did find what I think are 2 bugs. If you try to use your bomb while 2 bombs are on screen, your inventory still depletes despite no bomb being thrown (likewise with lanterns). In the switch room of Mermon's fortress, if you kill both enemies before pressing switches, the bottom right switch stops functioning. After that I reverse-engineered the password coding, and actually found a crashing bug with certain passwords that have invalid amounts of GP.

Thank you sir!

Played the demo and I'm definitely buying this soon! Congrats on the release !

Oh, right, this came out. *adds to to-buy list*

Replaying this, and I have to say the thing that stuck with me the most is the music. Especially the forest and tundra themes are my favorite tunes in the game. The small things in this game that are counter-intuitive really drive me insane, but if someone told me this was released when the NES was alive I'd believe them. It more than gets by on its merits, and it really is a joy to play.

I'm also a big fan of the puzzles. The very first puzzle with the anglerfish stands out to me as being really unique and fun.

As the website says it is inspired by Zelda II and Star Tropics which were two of my favorite NES titles! I know I am a bit late to the party but I am about to place with inl.com and glad I found this thread. I will definitely have to add this to my cart in addition to my other products.

There were two moment that I got really stuck, like figuring out to stand under the tree to summon the owl near the beginning.

So... after I finished it, I figured Owlia could use a GameFAQs:
http://www.gamefaqs.com/nes/194045-the-legends-of-owlia/faqs/73690

If I could tell my younger self: "Some day, you will make a game that will be so popular, somebody will make a GameFAQ for it." I would not believe it. Haha! I am honored.

The Legends of Owlia is now up on Steam Greenlight! Please give it an upvote! The Legends of Owlia Steam Page

Spill tech details here, since it's a tech forum?

Someone else's Steam NES port was a Unity remake, which is absolutely not what I'd do. From the comments you mention a VM?

Yeah, it is a virtual machine I wrote running my game ROM. It is not an emulator because it only works with my games. For instance it has no APU emulation, all sound engine calls are mapped to playing mp3 assets. There is no real PPU emulation either. Raster effects must be coded on a game specific basis, at a higher level possibly with shaders. There is a 6502 core. End result is I have 100% ownership of the code and need to exert only modest effort to adapt the VM to a specific game. It is written in Java using the libgdx framework, so it is deployable on Windows, Mac, Linux, android, iOS and web without modification.
It's also nice because I don't want to fully rewrite my games, I'd rather focus on new titles for the nes... I just like 6502 better than anything else in terms of pure coding enjoyment.

As a bonus, no logic is in place to simulate nes clock speed. So the CPU is way way over clocked. No slowdown or sprite scan line limit. Amusingly, the running rom must be very cleanly coded to work well. I had to fix a couple of bugs in nomolos which did not appear on the nes due to reliance on timing. I haven't found any such bugs in owlia yet so I guess I improved between the two games haha!

Thanks for the info. I guess your games had a lot of asm then?

Yeah, I code my games in pure asm with some macros of my own in ca65. I tried C for a few months and just don't enjoy using it. Nor does it seem to save time in the end.

The Legends of Owlia has been greenlit! Thanks to any fellow nesdevers who voted!

This game was lots of fun

Thanks!

Owlia's now available on Steam: http://store.steampowered.com/app/569590

The Legends of Owlia has been released as a Free ROM download. Op updated as well.

Nice!

Thanks for sharing!

So I wonder why you decided to make 2 of your nes games free. I'm assuming its free to download, but if you still want the cart you have to pay for it.

The interesting thing about this approach is that sometimes when people play your game and they like it then they might be more inclined to get a cart. I would get a cart if anyone of these games won my heart.

No matter what though, when you release your game for free, at least the rom, your game will get a lot more exposure. More people will be playing it.

Even though I've played some of your demos, now I can really get into the game.

I'm noticing this is "Rev-B". I'm curious how this is different from that one on my cartridge copy...

At least one cart sale happened from the ROM release.

Yes indeed! Was that you?



Just a few bugfixes. In particular, there was a bug on the password screen which would actually execute garbage code. A fellow on NA actually exploited this bug to mess up settings in RAM and get various cheatcodes out of it. I fixed the bug and all the passwords that guy shared are now properly invalidated and just beep with an error. The same passwords you wrote down will work with the previous revision just as well as this one, so it really only affects people who are trying to break the game lol.



Yes, I'm basically looking for more exposure. I'm happy with the money I made on the cartridges and after nearly 10 years I think I can safely say my lifestyle isn't going to suddenly turn into running all over the country trying to make a killing on this hobby, I'm happy with it being a hobby. Honestly what brings me the most joy is knowing other people are playing and enjoying the game. So going forward I'm probably going to release each game as a kickstarter with a ROM download as a lower tier, cartridge and CIB as higher tiers, and then release the rom for free roughly a year or so after the KS.

Thank you for sharing both of them. I can't wait to see how it is compared to the demo

Ever thought about releasing source code a few years after that, like Id used to with its FPS engines?

I suppose I could, I don't see why not actually. There are some rather horrific messes in both Nomolos and Owlia, which would have you and other programmers I respect headdesking and face palming all day long, but I wouldn't mind sharing, lol. I think I'll feel better about releasing the code to my new game, as I feel I'm doing a better/cleaner job overall. If anybody wants the code though now that the game's out in the wild I'd be happy to share it privately at the very least.

I think it's very cool of you (and na_th_an) to sort of give these games a second wave through free online distribution after a while. Thanks!

Free quality games may attract making their own games/code snippets/assets for the platform, who knows. I mean, i lurked nesdev a bit in '08, and i had battle kid 1 and 2, but it wasn't until i discovered and got inspired by the super bat puncher demo i decided to join, which wouldn't have happened if it wasn't downloadable.

On another note, it glitched out a plenty in fceux 2.2.2 right from the start - old and new ppu alike. Is this a known problem?

Yes, the problem is UnROM doesn't support 512kb. There was a special branch of fceux I had used, but then I think those changes were baked into the latest version as I'm pretty sure I'm using 2.2.3 at the moment.

I find it amusing some emulators are a bit more lenient about that sort of thing. Like if UnROM boards from the past only ever had say 8 or 16 PRG roms, but then a rom says I want mapper 2 but 32 PRG roms, some emulators are like: "Welp, don't know what board YOU were using but sure, why not?" (Like, Nestopia has always worked with this config for me)

Haha, reminds me of a teacher who once described MacOs as "snapping you on the nose for doing something 'the wrong way', but generally will allow you to do it anyway".

Looks like a great game, even though the graphics aren't anything exceptional. The idea to resolve around falconry is very innovative ! I'll have to see if I'm hooked once I feel in a mood to play story-driven games.

Thanks! I'd hesitate to say Owlia is truly story-driven. It's got "a" story, but it's not exactly deep as you will find out. It's more of a linear action-adventure than what you may be expecting. Originally I had been imagining a sprawling open world, but for a wide variety of reasons I wound up constraining it quite a bit. I'm in this for the long haul though so I very well may have a longer rpg/adventure like game in the future...(currently working on another platformer though)

Don't worry about that. I think all programmers experience that, and even worse in professional projects where you just want to get to the results. Honestly it doesn't matter how much spaghetti code you end up with, if the end result is good without obvious problems. In my world, programming isn't about following perfect patterns and creating ingenious algorithms, as much as it's about creating something from your imagination.

If you don't feel confident about your code, I don't think there's any reason to share it though. Personally I'm never comfortable sharing code that wasn't initially written as a part of a team project. It's not that it's embarassing, or I'm trying to protect any thing - it just feels personal to me.

Finished it. It was pretty fun, though I needed the walkthrough in places, same ones as people mentioned ages ago: getting out of the first forest, and in the tundra dungeon key rooms. Many puzzles were also not really discoverable, and I really wanted the text boxes sped up.

"Fartress"

So, I'm stuck in a room with two weird creatures turning in circle and some kind of unreconizable object appearing only when a light ray coming from the mouth of both creatures simultaneously. I have no way to get that object through.

A while back I made a walkthrough after I played it:

https://www.gamefaqs.com/nes/194045-the-legends-of-owlia/faqs/73690

clue: interact




clue2: with them





clue3: timing is involved

Arrr, it be how pirates talk, aye? Ye be seekin' Mermon's FARtress.

Played through some of it - bumped into a game freezing bug appeared in the submarine. Or well, the counter at zp addr $40 is spinning, but everything else is dead; screen frozen. I think talking to the captain trigged it.

I'll leave the game running for the rest of the day in case you want me to look at anything in particular.

Ps - does anybody have a password for the docks?

Sure! This password is for the docks:

3SSKJLKWLG

Game seems to work okay for me in FCEUX 2.2.3 but if you are having trouble with the submarine this code is for Mermon's Fortress immediately after the submarine boss:

4QSKI1KX3F

I'm now at the 3rd boss. I like the game in general, the music and the visual. The only thing is some puzzle I was not really able to figure out at all (the thundra stage) so I had to check the FAQ.

Another thing that I noticed is I tend to use Tyto most of the time instead of the sword. I don't know if this is the normal way of playing or not but I felt the sword was not that strong anyway so I attack from a distance as much as possible.

As for the gold for continuing the stage, my opinion is instead of calling it gold, if it was "mana" or some kind of magical thing that you had to "accumulate" to be powerful enough then it would at felt better. It felt like "pay to play" to continue just joking but it was the first image I had when I undertsood was the gold was for.

Still, a very good game. Good work!

Edit:

Just beaten the third boss. Now I need to get gold to continue but enemies somehow just drop bombs. I think the game would have been just fine without the gold. It just breaks the pace. The game is already quite enjoyable without it.

Thanks Banshaku! If you beat the third boss, that should mean you're on to the beach area. Try fetching gold from the clams before destroying them.

So that was the trick I didn't think about that one. Will continue soon. The thing is, it just say that you don't have enough gold but there is no indicator that tells you how much you need (unless I'm mistaken). I took a small break from the game because of that. Will try it tomorrow then!

edit:

couldn't wait, tried the clam trick right way. It worked! I will be able to do the dungeon tomorrow. Thanks for the tip!

Not knowing how much gold you need and the gold fetch quests on the overworlds are there intentionally to make you explore the overworld a bit. It's kind of cheap, but it was what I could come up with within the constraints of what me and my team were capable of at the time. The scope of this game COULD have been utterly enormous...I might still be working on it.

The only place I felt the gold requirement was cumbersome was the islands, and that was only until you tipped me off about using fetch to steal the clams' gold. (I didn't realize that was a pile of gold inside them, so it never even occurred to me to steal it). The rest seemed pretty fair.

Good job.

I just got done with Owlia revision B (the free rom version). I will now write up my personal review. The reason for doing this is to give feedback to the actual creators of the game. Feedback is always important and I really like the homebrew scene. I consider every new game an accomplishment in its own right even if I have some criticisms.


I have 4 videos of my play through, but I will have to post them later as they uploading and/or rendering.


- I like the idea of the game being owl themed. I can't think of any other game off the top of my head that is all based around owls.

- Fun fact. I actually rescued an owl in real life when I found one injured in my front yard. I called some people and gave it to them. Apparently its illegal in some states to own an actual owl.

- On the intro the story text screens could have had a longer time on them. I can only read all of the text if I really try hard to read fast.

- I don't think the evil villain had enough back story. Mermon seems to just hate Owlia for just the sake of it. What is the reason for him capturing all of the owls and sending his army of fish bad guys onto the land?

- While many of the basic character controls worked well like the main characters walking movement there were many controls which seems very cryptic. For example when you press the start button it was very hard for me to understand how to use that menu. For example I couldn't select the "bombs" or "lanterns". Then when you get the ability to use bombs and lanterns you still don't get to select the word bombs or lanterns, but instead it is listed as a tech. It seemed like this whole menu could have been designed in a more intuitive way. It also seems as if somehow things are listed twice. There are the bombs, but then there is also the ability to use the bombs and they are two separate things. Why not simplify that into one thing?

- The menu when you press start feels so strange. Almost as if it was messed up or something. Like as if it was supposed to allow you access to select your cursor to anything on the menu, but instead something blocked you off and restricted you to only being able to select some things at the lower part of the screen. Almost like say you were a mountain climber and you were trying to climb a mountain, but then someone at the top kept throwing snow balls at you knocking you back down. I feel like I'm trying to climb to the top of something, but I never can.

- I actually realized (after beating the game) that there was a person in the village who teaches you about the controls in the game, but since he looked just like the other guy who is saw earlier I passed him up leaving me to figure out the logic of the controls of the game on my own.

- I finally realized that the select button allows you to equip two different techs. The problem is, I when I go to change to two new techs I forget which current tech is currently being used so that when I change the techs I don't know which tech I should then already be equipped with. For example, I currently have Attack and Fetch equipped with Fetch being the claw under my hearts container then I go and select Shield and Homing so then which tech is then the one that I have immediately? In other words what is now the icon under my hearts? And even if there is a logical answer for this its cumbersome because I have to pay attention to the icon under my hearts in the first place before I then change to my new tech abilities.

The best way I can think of to remedy this is to only allow 1 primary weapon (tech) and then have select switch over to the last tech that you used.

- Speaking of techs. You have a basic owl attack tech then a fetch tech. In my opinion there is no need to have different techs for this. Think Link's Boomerang in Zelda 3. His boomerang stuns enemies and also picks up keys and rupees. It is not two different abilities, but instead they merged both of those concepts into one item. Same for the owl, if I want the owl to get some key I should just be able to throw the owl at the key, not have to select the "fetch" ability to do this.

- I "love" the hint with the colors of the owls in the village. Honestly you totally trolled the players here. The text reads "colors of the owls can be RYPP or RPPY". One would only think that this means "RED, YELLOW, PURPLE, PURPLE". But at the end of the game you threw in a PURPLE and PINK owl which defeats the whole purpose of giving this hint in the first place. If you just say PP I have no idea if its PURPLE & PURPLE or PURPLE & PINK or PINK & PURPLE or PINK & PINK. It is literally a puzzle inside of another puzzle. LOL!!!!

- For the most part I could understand what the graphics represented, but there were a few times when I just couldn't understand what something was. For example the first chest. I didn't know what this was. I originally thought is was an injured owl on the ground upside down.

- The tile in the forest to advance the story. I think I literally played the game for an hour before I found this by accident. It's just a random tile to step on and if you don't step on this you don't advance the story. There is no incentive to look at the tree to trigger this tile. Maybe if there was an apple in the tree or something that would encourage people to take a closer look at it.

- I think its funny that you made the dungeon entrances have some type of gold requirement before you enter. Like....... why? You are trying to save the owls right? Then why is the owl statue blocking your path to save the owls unless you have enough gold? You would think the owl statue would say "screw the gold, get in here quick and save our owl friends".

- I liked the dungeon concept and the doors which are stone pillars which go down and back up. I think the doors going up and down effect is really cool.

- Some stuff in the dungeons though is really cryptic and I mean really really cryptic. For example with the angler fish enemy which shines his light on the key. If its just one fish then I understand this and okay it makes sense... cool gimmick. But when there are more than one fish enemy in a room and all of the fish have to shine their lights on the keys at the same time to get the key? This doesn't make any sense to me at all. If it only takes one fish to shine the light on the key to get the key in one room then why do I need two fish to do the same thing in another room? Just put one of these fishes in a room at a time for it to make any sense in my opinion.

- The reason why I don't like this whole light the key with the fish to get the key thing is because in one particular room all you needed was one fish with one light to get the key. But then in another room you needed 2 or 3 fish with their lights on the keys to get the key. So I deem this illogical because if you already were able to achieve a certain thing with only 1 fish why do you need more fish to achieve the same thing? For example, if I want to turn on my computer I press the power button, but then if I want to turn on my computer in another room I need to turn on ALL of my computers in that other room just to get my original computer to work also? Do you see what I mean?

- Then there is the unlock tech ability. O...M...G.... Really?........ Really........? You are telling me that you actually need a tech to unlock a door. Something that is literally an automatic process in other games and in this game it was programmed to be cryptic. If you don't believe me that this is cryptic then watch other game play videos on this. I watched 3 other videos and in each video each person had a hard time understanding how to unlock a basic door.

The truth is that the unlock tech ability doesn't even need to exist at all. Seriously. This is how it needs to be done. Once you get a key, if you stand in front of a door with a keyhole all you simply need to do is press the B button on the controller and the owl unlocks the door. That's it. That's all you need. There is nothing else to it. This is supposed to be a very easy process (unlocking a door), but in your game it was very hard to understand at the beginning. It was very counter intuitive. I mean in Zelda 3 all you have to do is touch a locked door and it will automatically unlock if you have a key.

- In the snow dungeon. It was very counter intuitive that the game wanted me to kill the moveable spikes. Usually in games there are killable enemies and non killable enemies. Usually spike blocks and other such things can hurt you, but you can't kill it. But in this dungeon you have to know that the moveable spikes can be killed to get a chest.

- Also in the snow dungeon there is the one room with two ice rocks that you can blow up with bombs. This was a very cryptic puzzle in my opinion. Not only do you have to blow them up, but you have to do it in a quick manner. As if time is a thing here??? If you don't blow them up fast enough then the game gives you the "bad" sound. But my problem with this is that when you run out of bombs you also get this same "bad" sound. So when I was playing the game I got the two confused and didn't understand that the game was giving me the "bad" sound when I didn't destroy the ice blocks fast enough. Honestly, it should just be kill the ice blocks and get the chest. There shouldn't even be a time element involved here.

- Speaking of bombs. You should increase the amount of bombs and lanterns that one can carry. Why limit this to 7? It just makes it inconvenient when you run out.

- In another dungeon there were these puzzles which switch buttons on them and if you walked on them they pressed down and then sometimes pressing one switch down made another one come up. These puzzles were okay, but I feel like they were never explained. A message tile on the wall that explained this would be nice.

- There were also a few cases where there were 4 pillars which needed to be picked in a particular order or combination. In one dungeon there were clues that someone told you, but in another dungeon there were no clues that I found. This means that I literally did a brute force method to solve this. I believe there are 24 = 4! possible outcomes.

- The owl being able to carry the main character over gaps was a cool idea and I liked this a lot!!

- Respawing enemies in room which have doors which will not open unless you kill all of the enemies sometimes gets annoying.

- The mini games where you paid to gamble was neat. Putting the rings on the bottles with the owl is sometimes tricky though. Like the owl will fly right over the bottle and NOT put the ring on it. He should have put a ring on it. \[beyonce]

- What is the point of the owl statues saying that they need gold, but then they never take it away from you. It cost like 60,000 to rent the submarine yet you never have to pay anyone to rent the submarine????

- Music was actually pretty decent. I was humming the tunes.

- Then in the last dungeon you see the colored owls. But remember at the start of the game they gave that clue about the colors right. Another problem besides having two colors which both start with the color P is the orientation of the owls. How do you know where to start or end? How do the color codes that were given correspond to their orientations in the game? I want to actually find out what are the exact odds of getting this right at random.

- The actual color combination solution is: First room with 4 owls in each corner: Top left RED, top right YELLOW, bottom left PURPLE, bottom right PINK. Other room with 4 owls close to each other: top RED, left PURPLE, bottom YELLOW, right PINK.


So that was my feedback and review of Owlia. It's not a bad game and once I got used to how all of the in-game mechanics worked it was okay, but the learning curve on how to learn how the game works was very steep. There were many parts of the game that were too cryptic for me to even understand and I had to consult other walkthroughs to progress. Many things were not intuitive at all and I would probably never figure them out on my own. I feel like some things could have been used more, for example the lanterns. When I beat the game I was actually a little disappointed, because I was ready to play a few more dungeons since I had all the badass techs!

It's not easy to make games period and this was definitely a substantial effort. The game engine that you created to make this game seems really cool and it seems like there is a lot more potential in the engine to make other types of games like this.

I will post videos in the next few days.

I finally got part 1 of my Owlia playthrough uploaded. I hope you enjoy. Also part of this is for feedback purposes.

Owlia NES Part 1

Owlia NES Part 2

Owlia NES Part 3

Owlia NES Part 4

That should be all of the videos.