If you could tweak Munch's Oddysee?
 

What would you change?

To be sure: I'm talking about tweaks, not full blown changes. with the source we've got we can't start adding new levels or story elements, all we can do is change individual aspects of the gameplay. I'm not even sure at this point if I'm going to be able to change level geometry.

These are the changes I have on my list so far:

• Default 3rd person camera angle
• The "Boings"
• Reduce Abe's running and turning speed
• Reduce gravity (or just the speed of Abe's jump)

There is no guarantee that we will be able to change everything that we want to (we're not handling the MO code in house), but I will try to get to most painful issues sorted.

Final point, if there are any of you that really think Munch's Oddysee shouldn't be tweaked, let's hear from you too! :)

What do you mean by the 3rd person camera angle?

I'd do something to make platforming easier; for instance, in the level (I think it was Reservoir Row) where Abe needs to jump from one platform surrounded by water to the next, make it impossible to walk off it, only to jump off.

Other than that, it's been too long since I've played it to be able to give other suggestions.

Perhaps restrict some places Abe can walk on, such as the curved walls on the very first section of the game. From what I remember you could walk to the edge of it and you'd have Abe at a really awkward angle, sticking out of the wall. It's not really something game-breaking, but it does look a little silly. Other than that, maybe change some of the sound effects of creatures, though I think I heard somewhere that we'd no longer be getting Paramites that sound like pigs...

Oh, yeah, this. Very this.

Darker mise en scene so the atmosphere ties in a little closer with the older games. Just make it fell eerie.


Also the woods should have way more foilage beause everybody loves trees

The controls. Sorry I can't really elaborate as I haven't played the game in a few years, but an annoying memory is when you as Abe are trying to run along a narrow platform and unless you walk really slow you fall. Like Nate said, maybe make it so you can only go off if you jump.

If possible do away with the comical look of things. I assume most (if not all) textures are going to be changed anyway. Things like the pad Abe and Munch have to be on to complete a level, give those a makeover and you're on your way.

Fix the camera control (Can't get them working at all on my machine, only middle-mouse-click works)
Make Abe jump like a Mudokon, not like Sonic the Hedgehog.
Remove the leftover gamespeak sounds from AE, it doesn't match the new voices from MO.
Put back the F5/F6 Quicksave/Quickload hotkeys from AE. (Did anyone else but me knew they existed? :P)
Make the text added to the PC version match the visual style of the game. It looks like someone opened the screens in MS Paint and painted green and red texts on almost random locations.

As much as I'd like the gameplay to be closed to AO and AE, I know it's not realistic as it would require a redesign of most levels. :(

-Make Abe Roll again like in AO and AE.
-More refenences to AO and AE
-More Scrab and Paramite areas.
-lots more gamespeak but keep in the Abe's Exoddus ones just because. :)

It would be great if cranes were less pain in the arse to control. Make them faster, both moving and picking things up.

Consider making it impossible to lower the crane when it's not over anything. It's such a ball ache to wait several seconds because you sent the crane away when you've accidentally drifted a few pixels out of pickup range. Especially since there are sometimes 20+ egg crates to pick up at once. If fact, consider just lowering the number of egg crates.

Give Paramites and Scrabs their real sounds.

Wish you could change the geometry. The environments are so barren and boring, more props and decorators would help immensely. And there's one narrow beam you have to jump to and from that's literally floating in mid-air utterly unsupported.

Why? That would require new animations but add nothing.

No new levels, remember.

They aren't adding new levels? Well scrach my ideas then :P

Lol this. Just a bar connecting it to the nearby wall would rectify this.

Besides the important stuff listed above, I have some nit-picky atmospheric qualms.

- Make Vykkers' Labs feel more intimidating. Have muffled screams and the distant buzzing of bone saws in the background. Changing the soundtrack to feature lower, more ominous chords as opposed to that sleepy meditative hum that sounds like someone just laid their arm across a keyboard would also be a huge improvement.

- When the Interns are in their idle animation, jammin' out to whatever's playing on their headphones, it would be cool to hear some muffled rock or techno if you get close enough. This could also be a good opportunity for an easter egg; they could be listening to music from the other games.

- Maybe actually include Shock-Rockers this time?

I have more, but I forgot.

Turning the camera angle with the D-Pad on the Xbox version was so annoying.

I agree with giving paramites and scrabs their original voices. It's gonna be hard to get MO to appeal to todays consumers, that's why I believe MO needs a complete re-haul, not little tweaks. So to make it as best as possible, here's my thoughts:

-Paramites and Scrabs need their original voices.
-Less "cartoony"
-No "boing"s
-Although this probably won't be possible, but a return of Shrykull would kick ass.
-I also never got how Abe and Munch could fall off the highest of heights and still live.
- Could see more paramites and scrabs in the game, besides just two levels. Could have some in Vykkers Labs in cages or something.
- Normal Abe jump animation, instead of front flips..
- Possibly have Abe be able to grab and hang on ledges again....

I know alot of those probably aren't possible, but those are my thoughts on the game...

I would try:
1. Fixing Jumping
2. Classic Speed
3. Change a few animations, to seem a bit more normal, than just something all JUMPY. If you know what I mean.
4. Modify Controls a bit.

I agree that Abe should be able to hang from ledges. That's a big one for me.
I hated having to do precision jumping, especially when crossing water via those circular platforms. You could argue that it made it more of a challenge, but I didn't feel challenged so much as irked. I think the front flip style jump is fine, as long as it has more control.

An improved drowning animation for Abe would be killer. Instead of just flailing around in the water and then fading out of existence. Have his lifeless body sink to the bottom, or disperse into birds. The latter would be a good throwback to the old games.

On that note, having enemies fizzle away like the original games would also be a nice touch. I've never been a fan of corpses just vanishing into thin air. If you're going to remove the bodies, at least do something interesting with it. Stranger's Wrath had the right idea with the "rotting away" effect.

Allow for inter-species interaction between characters. I hated that when Munch tried to address the mudokons, they would just laugh at him. Record some sensible dialogue of the muds showing distrust, or saying they only parlay with Abe, or outright dismissing Munch.

Possessed sligs should be able to actually interact with other sligs beyond insulting them, and maybe even allow possessed sligs to interact with mudokons. I remember one of the early ad campaigns for MO featured some footage of a possessed slig addressing a mudokon, and he promptly responded with "Hey Abe!". That would be interesting, but would probably call for some of the puzzles to be redesigned for it to be utilized in any significant way.

Would it be possible to use snoozers to kill rather than just to knock people out? I don't know if that works with puzzles and continuity and all though.

Also yeh, old noises.

And try to add something to make it less childish, somehow you could change the atmosphere? Maybe with the new textures you could make the mudarchers and tomahakwers look less like ott native american wannabes.

All I can really think of right now for the game is to make the music a little louder and not as boring. I would say to make it like the music from the original games, but that music got old pretty quickly too; I think it's because the areas were so short before you got to the next area that didn't make them all that boring. I know that you can't do that, but maybe you could change the blue buttons, where right when you press them, it does whatever you're wanting it to do without being able to hold the blue buttons because I found a considerate amount of glitches with the ability to hold the blue buttons alone.

Wait... what?

1 million percent get rid of that crappy sonic jump, just make abe jump like his old self.

I defienetly agree that there needs to more stuff on screen the environments just feel baron an lifeless and really don't feel very oddworld. Another thing that really bugged me is the the fact factories are just randomly planted in the middle of forests , maybe make the surrounding areas much more industrial and have the water looking polluted or something.

I dunno how far along you are with the mudoken designs but it'd be good if you toned down thier designs, people aren't stupid and will still be able to differentiate between the different classes. I never really got why they got ray gun things either :-/ maybe change it so that they have catapults?

This is a good point. I think it's something OWI wanted to do - as was definitely reflected in the concept art - but simply didn't have the time/capacity. Now's a good chance to improve the atmosphere. Show signs of industry encroaching on nature the closer you get to one of the factories.

Dampen the lighting and darken the sky matte, have oily rainbow ripples in the water outside of Flub Fuels, unattended cutting equipment lying next to a barren field of tree stumps outside of Splinterz.

They're supposed to be crossbows. I don't remember if they were actually supposed to shoot arrows or if they shot some kind of spooce-based "energy". I think they're fine, though I'm all for dropping their machine gun sound effect.

This, and perhaps some better voice clips for sligs and the like.

Just changing some of the voice/sound in Munch would make a world of difference, really.

I'm glad our opinions are being asked, have some rep, Glitch!

Tweaks you say? Of course MO isn't worth doing anything to it that requires anything major, but here are my suggestions:

• Change the music to be more like Stranger, or even the old games, rather than that crappy techno stuff. It'd do wonders to its atmosphere.
  
• Increase the view distance (though I think you'll be doing that anyway)
  
• Am I the only one who got irritated by the whole Spooceshrub thing? However without changing the game entirely and removing/replacing the spooceshrub puzzles with something else (perhaps looking to the first games for inspiration), I'm not sure there's much that can be done about it.
  
• If geometry can't be changed, maybe you can improve the textures and add a few more props/foliage to make levels less bland
  
• Agreed with the people who suggested changing the paramites and scrabs back to sounding how they did in the original games
  
• Overhauling the sounds anyway may be worth it as people already suggested, making them less childish, doing away with the "boings", making footsteps more subtle
  
• Changing the voices when characters are idle - Even having them actually talk to each other with dialogue instead of having Sims-like nonsensical speech would be a huge improvement. Maybe look at the outlaws in Stranger for inspiration.
  
• Overhauling animations to be a little more realistic, like the first platformers - Why does Abe roll into a ball while jumping?
  
• Maybe making fuzzles more feral and less "cute" in gameplay, like their appearance in Stranger

That's about all I can think of for the time being.

Forgive me on that one, I was masturbating as I was making that comment, so I wasn't really thinking all that much about what I was typing (I'll try not to be too specific about my problems after this post :?). I was basically referring to the blue spots on the menu screens where it'll make a green, or orange if highlighted, A when you highlight it, and I've found several bugs in the past that can occur when you hold the A button and remove the controller at the same time. Again, sorry about that distorted post, I'll be sure to proofread my posts for now on!

Give each Mudokon a different voice pitch, like in AE.

This. Precision jumping in AO worked well because after awhile you knew exactly how far to stand away. In MO, however, you don't seem to pick up that skill. I especially hated one of those earlier Munch levels where you have to swim through those corridors of water in Vykkers' Labs and you had to jump over little walls; if you miss-aimed your jump you would hit a mine and explode.

I don't remember that. Do you have a screenshot?

Anybody remember that really difficult jump in "The Loading Dock?"

You would have to cross this jump multiple times using Abe and you had to get the jump EXACTLY right otherwise you would fall into water.

I remember that jump always infuriating me. In fact I remember hating that entire level!

Here's a clear video of the beam here (thanks Metroixer).

As you can see, there are two gaps in the beam that you have to jump over. These gaps break the beam into three pieces, but the center piece is being suspended by nothing.

Ok, I gotta admit that almost noone here understands what the "tweak" means... forgive them :) (It's just making minor changes to scripts etc., NOT adding any ANIMATIONS, MUSIC or whatever)

Ok, here's what I think would be cool if you do:

• Camera: It'd be cool if the angle was more like in modern games...
  Before:
  http://img694.imageshack.us/img694/5574/88805225.th.jpg
  After:
  http://img259.imageshack.us/img259/2042/39065267.th.jpg
  
  But if you do that, you must be aware that if you rotate it [and move/rotate munch] like that it might cause some camera collision issues, like rendering parts from outside of the map:
  http://img545.imageshack.us/img545/6787/36006956.th.jpg
  So do it only if youre 101% sure there won't be anything like that :)
  
  
  ...oh, and could you zoom the camera in a little? On most open areas abe/munch is too small to enjoy all HD details (and it's hard to immerse or something...)
• The "Boings".... they're freakin' annoying, remove 'em... i haven't met a single person who honestly said he/she likes it... other "funneh" sounds aren't cool either
• Jumps... there's nothing you can tweak here, really - if you change the gravity, it would look like he's on the moon, you can't change the height of jumps (to normal mudokon values) without changing level geometry...
• No point of changing running speed without changing jumping speed
• As DarkHoodness said, increasing draw distance would be nice
• TBH replacing scrab/paramites sounds to "normal" AO/AE sounds is a must-do... "making footsteps more subtle" is a good idea too, if you happen to have an appropriate sound file
• "Put back the F5/F6 Quicksave/Quickload hotkeys from AE. (Did anyone else but me knew they existed? :P)" I didn't know and begged for them on steam forums : o
• "Make the text added to the PC version match the visual style of the game. It looks like someone opened the screens in MS Paint and painted green and red texts on almost random locations." - sooooooo true. And answer me, who needs stupid, ugly-looking text "Use arrows to select buttons" in main menu? We're not dumb. Plz delete it :(
• Rethink default keyboard controls - they're awful. Mouse control is really bad (despite of being useless anyway). I changed controls immediately to scheme similar to AO/AE and it worked.
• The crane control on PC version was bad because it had no shadow, and a player had no idea if it's at the right position (red-green lights are helpful, but not as helpful as the shadow).. maybe change camera angle to be more vertical

PS: That's not exactly a tweak (more like a minor...change...yeah), but I agree with - It's not so hard/time-consuming to code, and the effect is great
PS2: A (long) while ago I made a buglist for MO PC port at steam forums - it contains some minor problems, could you look at it and tweak the game a little to repair some (the least important ones) of them? ( http://forums.steampowered.com/forum....php?t=1696244 )

Thank you a lot :D