woogychuck, are you using IE8? Or is your computer particularly slow? Those things seem to interfere with the speed that Flash receives keypresses, but the game works fine in my browser (Chrome).
Mrhat613, you can *change the controls*. I spent a long time today adding a key configuration thing for people like you who are unsatisfied with the default controls.
I have fixed the 'dropping at the top of ladders' thing, and really, it wasn't much of a problem to begin with in the first place. There were a grand total of FOUR ladders which didn't touch the ceiling, which you'd fall off if trying to stand on them, so I just raised them to the roof instead of changing the mechanics. None of them were in hostile areas either...
Ragnaroc, either you have a shoddy computer or are using a browser like IE8 if you're having problems with delayed reactions to keypresses. This is not a fault of the game. Also, if you are not skilled enough for the higher difficulties, as you obviously are not, then play on Easy, where you have unlimited lives. Why on Earth do people try to challenge themselves more than they can cope with and then complain that the GAME is at fault when they fail?
I'm not so much bothered about what people say, but by the fact that they give 1/5 ratings for no good reason (I would assume that they don't realise that a real person with feelings is on the receiving end or something), and if the average rating is really low, then people will be less inclined to play the game at all. Which is a bothersome thought.
I'm trying to do all that I can to make it as enjoyable as possible, but it seems that people who don't like the genre rate poorly, which I don't think is fair.
What annoying and trivial factors people seem so casual to dismiss a developer's efforts based on... Hmm. "It's an obvious rip-off of a game you've never heard of! My computer is laggy! I have a sticky keyboard! My foot is cold!"
Anyway, I'm still in the process of adding a key configuration thing, but I'm having a problem with it at the moment that I'm desperately trying to solve as quickly as possible.
If you are dying too much, that is what the DIFFICULTY option is for. If you can't cope with the harder difficulties, then why didn't you decide to play on Easy mode? You never have to restart from the beginning on that setting.
I've never had any problems climbing on ladders using Up, and I've jumped on them in all kinds of ways, so that must be a lack of skill rather than a bug, probably (unless loads of other people report it too).
Why are people complaining so much about the controls? Don't you take a few moments to get used to the controls in basically every game that you play, or do you just dismiss them in a few seconds if you're not familiar with them before you begin?
I was trying to give the feeling of an old-style console joypad with the control scheme. No console platformer I've ever played has used Up for jumping, and whenever I see that in Flash games I hate it because it seems so very 'amateur' or something. A, S and D are part of the WASD usually used by most games, but since the arrows are used for movement here, I used that as the 'other side of the controller' for all actions.
I though that ASD was a common control scheme for games - I've read that before, anyway - so it is surprising that people are so bothered.
The save bugs came up with the release of Flash Player 10, a month ago at most. Saving worked fine before Flash Player decided to change how something it does works, but I have no idea WHY the saves aren't working, and it's more annoying for me than it is for any players, surely... I could repeat this like a million times though and people still wouldn't understand... MARDEK 3, when it's released (which should be soon), will include the first two chapters though and will have a working save system, so it might be best just to wait for that to come out.
I really wish people would read other comments before posting their own...
Also, if you only get a brown screen, you're not being patient enough to wait for it to fully load.
And, of course, people completely and utterly ignore my explanation of the problem there, I assume.
I wonder how other people would feel if they made a game which worked fine for months, then suddenly one day, by no action of their own, a crucial feature in it just stopped working... Due to Flash Player. Then people complained to them as if their game is crap for it and so on. Seems so... unfair or something. Especially since I have no idea what's causing this strange error since it DID and DOES work fine with Flash Player 9...
I'm not sure if I said this here before, but even if I did, it's been lost into the comment history now... There seems to be a strange issue with Flash Player 10 though which buggers up the saving system. I have no idea what it is or how to fix it, but saving works just fine for Flash Player 9. I don't know if it's a Flash Player bug or 'feature', but if anyone has any idea what's causing it, I'd be interested to hear what you have to say!
How very annoying! There are all these saving issues all of a sudden because of something that I had absolutely no control over... It makes no sense to me why the latest Flash player would make the saving code just suddenly stop working. I don't even know if there's anything I can do about it, especially since I no longer have easy access to the chapter 2 files (they're on another computer which is in a box somewhere, and the versions on this computer all include chapter 3 content...)
I'll certainly make sure to have chapter 3 compatible with the latest stupid Flash player, but all I can do for this chapter is hope that there's another newer Flash player soon that fixes the bugs the other one introduced...
I'm not going to respond in detail to comments at the moment, but I just want to say this: LONG COMMENTS ARE GOOD! I read every comment here and take everything into consideration, and I'm more of a fan of detail than brevity. As, uh, the dialogue in this game perhaps sort of hints at.
Hello! I'm still working on MARDEK 3... I've already talked about it on my userpage here and my own website, but I'm posting this here anyway for some reason.
It's been taking so long because I've been working on other projects AND recoding the engine (it works the same, but the code is neater for me to work with and less buggy). The delay between chapters won't always be this long.
I don't know when it'll be done, but I'm aiming for before Christmas...
You say that I "can't just apologise for bugs", but you think it's completely alright to leave an insulting and unhelpfully vague comment like that? How am I supposed to fix "bugs" that you don't even mention specifically?
If you encounter a bug, then EXPLAIN THE BUG and how it happened. That's the only way I can find it to fix it.
Currently, the bugs are few and rare, and only appear under certain obscure circumstances. The game itself is not horribly buggy, as most people don't notice any significant bugs at all.
I've never actually been able to reproduce most of the bugs that apparently still exist in the game, so I don't know HOW to fix them, unfortunately. Since I don't know what's making them happen at all. I obviously can't break my own game as well as some people can...
 "Raider: Episode 1")
 "MARDEK RPG: Chapter 2")