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I hope I make a good game.
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Jul 5, 2017 19:22
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Doom Goon posted:Can't wait for those sweet Chinese Lou-ny Balloon-y ripoffs  Here you go.  It was a gift 
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Jul 8, 2017 03:21
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Smash Boys Actual footage: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yQeKgRss4wI Play it here: https://harold-krell.itch.io/the-smash-boys-vs-the-nerdy-boys 
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Aug 2, 2017 06:05
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My Very Personal Game Reviews For Block 1: Welcome Treasureman A fun, solid little Metroidvania. You go around collecting gems in a temple while you navigate around tricky enemies and obstacles. I think the level design is very good, especially for a Metroidvania game jam. There’s like two power ups that you can find, and there are pretty easy signifiers in some of the rooms that let you know this is a place worth backtracking (e.g. the breakable walls and the out-of-reach ledges). The game is small enough where it’s not too much of a chore to backtrack, and with a tiny bit of patience, it’s not too hard to complete. I think the number of lives you start off with is forgiving, though I agree with the stream that there should be some invincibility frames so you can’t be juggled to death by an enemy. Otherwise, the enemies in general are not to difficult to maneuver past and are pretty well designed. This game uses the “bootleg” theme in the sense that it’s really a homebrew NES game, which is actually pretty cool. The character controls similarly to some platformers on the NES like Ducktales or Megaman, and the controls themselves are very tight and easy to use. Overall, this game is very well-executed and is worth playing to completion. Red Planet IV A Gameboy-inspired shoot-’em-up. The overall gameplay is simple, but it is actually fun and challenging in the sense that it requires the player to constantly keep moving in order to avoid enemy shots. However, you will almost always keep you finger on the shoot key, as there is no reason to stop firing at enemies unless maybe you don’t want the screen to be cluttered with bullets? There are two big things that really kill this game though. First, every time you die you ALWAYS have to restart from the first level. That being said, there is an upgrade system in place that allows you to improve your ship to make dying less likely. However, the upgrades themselves are only accessible depending on the amount of enemies you’ve killed. This means you’ll find yourself constantly dying on the first level repeatedly until you earn enough kills to get enough decent upgrades to actually have a chance at winning. This is made worse by the second problem of this game: you have one hitpoint, at least initially. A single shot from an enemy at any time is enough to make you lose. Now, there is the upgrade system that allows you to gain some abilities to mitigate this; specifically, the shield and cloak. Shield essentially provides an extra hitpoint, up to three max. Cloak gives the ability to become invincible for a short period of time at the push of a button. The thing is though is that the cloak functions exactly the same way as the shield, only the player has to manually activate it, so you’ll always prefer taking shield upgrades over cloaking. The other two abilities are better projectiles and increased speed, which are pretty helpful as well. I was able to get to the third level before being overwhelmed with a bullet hell (and accidentally restarting). There are bosses at the end of each level, or at least the first two levels, and they’re pretty fun to fight against. They have more health than other enemies, but there are no other enemies on-screen, which make for a satisfying breather compared to the rest of the level. The game also features cutscenes between levels that have nice and apt pixel art, and I think the even the fade in/outs were in Gameboy-style, too. I never really pay attention to the story in most of these games, so it’s nice that they also added the ability to skip cutscenes. Finally, the music is really well-made and fits the aesthetic perfectly. Overall, on an aesthetic level, this game is really polished and feels like an actual Gameboy game. Though there are a few gameplay features that make it incredibly difficult to play, they shouldn’t be too difficult to correct and I’m sure once they’re fixed this game will really shine. BBA SLAM This game has a lot going on, though I’m pretty sure I beat it at some point. You play as a team of basketball players, and the goal of each level is to find the backboard and make a shot. The game starts off simple enough, but then each level after the first offers a zany challenge to overcome before you make a shot. The controls are simple enough once you learn them. I think the main things you have to know are how to shoot/pass the ball and how to switch teammates? Aside from the main premise(?) there are a lot of other things going on this game. Apparently there’s this HORSE mechanic where if you collect all the letters in a level, you get a special “lose” screen because I guess like in the actual game of HORSE, if you get all the letters you lose. There’s also a pretty difficult level in the game, and I don’t know if it’s exclusive to that one level, but the game cleverly allows you to skip it, so that’s pretty nice. The entire game climaxes at the end with a really bootleg-y final level that’s pretty entertaining to play through. Overall, this game does a lot of stuff, probably too much stuff than it really needs. It’s actually reminiscent of their previous game DDAFPST. It has these insanely interesting and entertaining ideas and the games themselves are incredibly eclectic and rife with non-sequiturs, but it can be pretty challenging to get a sense of what’s going on, kind of like a Jackson Pollock painting. I think there should be a little more direction as to what to exactly do in this game, but I also think that this shouldn’t overlook the fact that there is A LOT involved in this game. I’ve seen the funny little easter eggs just in the options menu alone, and there’s a lot of varied sound clips that play depending on your actions. Speaking of sound, this game has really nice sound design. The main theme is really nice and crisp with its (I want to say) Sega Genesis styled music. The voice clips themselves are modulated to have that old-school Genesis quality sound as well, which is pretty neat I think. A fun crazy game. Awful Runners An open-world game based on exploration and money-making(?). You play as a ship that travels from port to port selling and buying goods to (I assume) make a profit. I’ll start off by saying that this game has a really nice aesthetic going on. The game uses pretty simple 3d geometry and flat-shading and, intentional or not, is pretty easy on the eyes in terms of knowing where things are. The background music consists of ambient ocean music which contributes to the theme of sailing on the open seas. The game itself is pretty ambitious, but also pretty difficult because of this. I’d highly recommend starting in windowed mode since you’ll definitely need to reference the controls on the main page in order to know what to do. The seas are vast, which makes it very pretty-looking, but it also makes ports seem very sparse. It can take a while to sail from one port to another, and you’re pretty much blind trying to find another one. The game does have a map, but I don’t believe there was ever a marker indicating your current location, so you’ll end up having to guess destinations based on what port your currently at. Once you arrive at port, you have the ability to buy and sell goods. So the bootlegging theme comes in here, in that you can purchase alcohol as a good, but you run the risk of running into the naval police, where you may be subject to fines, imprisonment, and a game over to boot. Ironically, the best strategy is to probably buy and sell non-bootlegged goods in order avoid the police entirely. That being said, even trading legal goods is pretty difficult in this game as certain ports will only buy certain goods. You may end up buying sugar at one port and try to sell at another, but they’ll only accept corn and gin. I think the game would play better if ports bought all types of goods at any times, but vary the rates to make it more profitable to sell at certain ports. Sailing itself is pretty easy going once you understand the sails system. I’m not sure if this was a bug, but throughout my playthroughs, I always seem to be getting winds from the south (as indicated by the red line from the compass). This makes it difficult to sail north since the boat stays still when facing the wind directly, though the mechanics are pretty forgiving in that you just need to angle just a bit away from north to pick up speed. Overall, this game looks and sounds pretty nice. I think major improvement can be made by adding more content, maybe more ports. I also recall seeing some other ships at some point? But I think they were naval ships. Also, I found the day-night system really nice. It’d be really cool if there was some gameplay stuff revolving around that. Naked Bootleg A football play simulation game. The art direction and gameplay are pretty simple in this. That being said, this is incredibly well designed. There’s only 7 levels I think, but each one builds on the previous to teach the player the basics of getting past the defense for a touchdown. You barely need a rudimentary understanding of football in order to understand what to do, which is moot anyways because the game clearly states what you need to do for each play. The concept is pretty novel and the game executes it pretty perfectly. In fact, I just replayed it while I was writing this and confirmed that there are actually 9 levels, and I also just discovered that if you lose at a level enough times, the game gives you a hint on what you need to do, and that was really cool. I found that the puzzles are still really fun even after playing it before since you can pretty much make up any crazy play you want and you can see if it actually works. Overall, this is a really really good game that I would highly recommend people playing. Especially with football season around the corner, it’d be really cool to see this game made into an a actual app. This is definitely something you could make good money off of. Headphone Hero A Megaman-inspired game leaning heavily on the bootleg theme. It looks like there are two playable levels each having unique settings and bosses. I think the idea here was that you play an original character who is fighting against bootlegs versions of other characters, as well as themselves? This game plays very similar to the NES Megaman games. Some of the enemies are difficult to get hit by, but this was also true for the original Megaman, and like Megaman, enemy attacks don’t do too much damage by themselves and it’s very easy to regain health in the game. The weapon has an upgrade system similar to the one in Cave Story where the more enemies you successfully kill, the better your weapon is upgraded, but if you get attacked, your weapon loses upgrades. The enemies are pretty funny and well-designed. You have knock-off versions of Pikachu, Mario, Sonic, Spongebob, and Simba(?), so there’s a lot of variety. Movement works pretty much works the same way as the old megaman games. I think the works very slightly different(?) but it’s definitely not as bad as was mentioned on stream. Overall, the game is essentially a solid Megaman remake (or demake). I also really liked the animations on the enemies and I remember the music and sound effects being really on point as well. BOOTLEGS A scoring game where the objective is to go as much of a distance as possible. Like Naked Bootleg, it’s a really simple game that’s executed very very well. You play as a spider-thing that uses its 8 legs to navigate a desert-y terrain filled with terrible obstacles like cacti and a snake in my boot (I think it the boot was even designed to look like Woody’s boot from Toy Story, but when I looked up references on youtube, I only got lovely memes). You lose a leg whenever one of them hits an obstacle, and once you lose all 8, it’s game over. The art and music are completely apt for this game; it’s another game that I could easily see doing well in the App Store. This is another game I had to play again to get a better feel for. So, it looks like a level is randomly generated with certain sets of blocks, so even though each playthrough is different, you’ll end up seeing similar sets of obstacles the longer you play. This means there is a degree of randomness in terms of how far you’ll potentially got through a level. It’s possible to get a bunch of easy blocks where it’s just ground or maybe a few bridges over some enemies, but then you’ll come across blocks like the one with the hopping armadillo on a hill that will require you to sacrifice a few legs to get by. The game also gets more difficult the more legs you lose. You technically have a smaller hitbox when you have less legs, but your movement also gets restricted, making it harder to overcome even the easier obstacles. Therefore, you almost always want to keep all your legs with you and prey you get a good level layout for your run. With that said, it’s a really fun and addictive game. The music, I recall, is really easy going and nice to listen to, so it’s really nice to play for while without getting bored. I haven’t played the 2-player portion of this game, but the single-player version would definitely make for a nice game to put on the market, even if it just made money from ad revenue. Block 1 was pretty solid as a whole. I was able to beat through most of the games, and the ones I couldn’t only needed a few changes to make them more playable. I would say Naked Bootleg and BOOTLEGS were the best of this block. One really good things these games shared, and I’ll bring up later on if/when I review the other blocks, is a low level of entry. These were games you could pick up right away and now exactly what to all the time, which is really important when you’re creating something for a game jam, especially for the Gong Show. There were a few games in this and past jams that could seem fun to play, but because you needed to know so much before going in, most people stop playing without even knowing how to play it. Awful Runners is a good example of this. When you start playing, you have to have the instructions up at the same time to get a sense of what you’re doing. Also, it was weird to have a lot of the actions set as hotkeys, but not have UI for it in game. Like, hotkeys are a useful shortcut IF you know where they are. Anyways, I hope people got something out of these reviews. Maybe I’ll do some for block 2 later tonight. Who knows! EDIT: Another thing I wanted to add about this block is that a lot of these games, as well as some in the other blocks, had really excellent music and sound design. It's weird that this jam kind of underplays the importance of music in these games, what with people making music not being technically being counted as members, though it's always appreciated, and having nice (or really any) music can really step up the quality of a game. Harold Krell fucked around with this message at 20:19 on Aug 5, 2017 |
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Aug 5, 2017 20:10
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