Quote: "broke 2 of my fingers and on some kind of meds"
Oh WOW, that sucks. At least when I broke my leg I was able to code a lot. As someone who codes writes and draws, anything happening to my hands is like a worst nightmare for me. Is your whole hand immobilized? Which fingers?
You have my sympathies.
Anyways, It's nice to see this game again. I'll be flat out honest and say I was not impressed by this the first time around, mainly due to controls and level layout. But I really appreciated that Cowbox was trying for such a open worlded game, and it reminded me of N64 days, when fantastic cartoony landscape were acceptable. What I saw then and see now is the potential this game has with enough fine tuning. There is enough here that t could become a very interesting game, I think.
I'm about to try the new demo, I'll give my opinions afterwards.
Edit: ok, I've tried the demo, and got quite a few crit. I'd rather tell you in detail what I think wrong than leave you with something that might not make sense. That said, I'll be happy to explain anything in greater detail if you want.
First and foremost, even when I turned off the shadows and cartoon shading I only got 45 fps. I'm running on an ATI radeon 9800 which is a rather old card, but runs MUCH more graphically intensive DB games faster than this. Seriously, my game Dream made in DBC even when effect intensive like in a downpour with rising water runs better than this on my comp. So while I don't know what the issue with the game is, it seems to be in need of serious optimization. That said, the majority of people here are running on faster computers than mine (or at least have Nvidia cards) and have not noticed, but the original MtM ran much faster.
Next, the talk system is really unintuitive. Why is the talk button a mouse button that does nothing else? The mouse buttons are the most important buttons with relation to aiming in a game where you use the mouse for camera. Attacking is a lot more important than talking in this game, and also related to aiming. Then, why is the selection system put on the numbers, which are also used for nothing else? Why can't it use the mouse or the WASD keys and the space bar or something? It just feels awkward to me.
Then to go with that, not a major issue, but would really make the game feel intuitive. While I really like having this kind of WASD movement (albeit I have some suggestions for it), I don't think anything as sensitive as aiming should be mapped to it. Rather, why not have the wand shot where the mouse is aiming? It would be harder to animate and code, but would be well worth it. Most games today separate aiming and moving for a reason.
And since I just mentioned it, I'll give some suggestions for movement. Marvin moves pretty slow, like walking speed. So why can't he have a run button? This generally makes up for the lack of an analogue stick. Nothing is more annoying than falling off the difficult jumps to that plateau and having to spend a minute or so walking back. And if you don't want the run to be overused, you could have an energy bar that fills back up when you stop running.
Much more important (and which you said you will work on eventually), is the camera. I'll leave that one to you, and see what you come up with to change it before commenting. I'm very fikily about my own cameras, and would probably end up suggesting something extremely complex to code, as that's always what I go for.
Then there is enemy AI which you also mentioned you'd be working on, but I'll go and point out my issue with it anyways to be safe. First and foremost is that everything stands perfectly still until you get within a radius of it. Then when you get close enough enemies very slowly moves strait towards you, basically making combat holding down a button until they die. Not exactly intuitive. At least some of the enemies should move, and it would be nice if they didn't just run towards me or stop chasing once I was too far away. Then there is the fact that enemies can walk through obstacles, like fences. I got a nasty surprise once I got outside the fence and thought the cow couldn't reach me. If you do want complex enemy movement, I really do suggest adding that thing with mouse aiming though.
Then I'll go to world layout. The ground is mostly flat, and needs some improvement to the level design. While I'm not one to draw up whole level designs in my critiques over the internet, I will point you to Tinkergirls sticky thread in the Game Design Theory board, which has some incredible tips on level design. Even if you don't change this level, I highly recommend reading it. You did sya you would work on the first area as well though, so I'll be interested to see how that turns out.
Then last for now, sound effects. Not a whole lot wrong with them, I think they're kind of cute. You could just used more of them. You can actually make them yourself, it's really easy if your laptop has a built in microphone. That's what I do now (though I've gotten better sound equipment recently), and the most ordinary objects end up making the most interesting sounds. I'd recommend just recording tons of stuff, then picking out what sounds might work in game. Not a big issue though. Don't worry about this for a while, I'd say.
I have more, but I think I'll wait for the next demo. There is a charm to this game, you can go pretty far if you keep going with it. It's very encouraging to see it being picked up where most projects would die.
