Reviews
ldle on 2010/04/18 05:42
— edited on 2010/04/18 06:46
From testing all week, we got nothing but great 'fun' reviews from several participants and random people. Yet we only get a 2.8. Games like Ninja Tower with certainly a lack of theme involvement, or Blank Page with only a handful of minutes of gameplay, or even Blob Job witch practically repeats the first 5 seconds of gameplay for the entire 5 minutes of game there is, all beat out our entry.
Its just confusing and disappointing that we spent such a direct and real effort to pull off high production and the community couldn't vindicate us with the scores.
Pretty lame.
(log in to comment)
Comments
stycchio
ldle on
2010/04/18 17:49:
stycchio -- way to be a prick
Tee on
2010/04/18 19:19:
Replaying the game, I can see how much effort you put in polish, something I failed to notice before. In retrospect, I think I should've given a 4 in production instead of a 3, but I still think my score of 3 in production wasn't so unfair. Let me try to explain why, but remember this is just my opinion.
First, just to put this out of the way, in my case, I don't really care that much about splash screens. Maybe I should care more for rating purposes, but I don't think it adds much to the game itself (differently from an intro with a nice little story, which is something I find really nice - for example, Blank Page had a really nice one). Something similar is valid (at least for me) for the image of the score screen, though I guess in a lesser extent because the score screen is somewhat important.
The music is good and the sounds are nice, too. They're definitely a plus. And I admit having disregarded the highscores as bonus for polish (because for me they didn't matter much).
What made me give that rating were the graphical aspects of the game (since we're talking about production, which is graphics, sounds and polish). Take a screenshot of the game at any point in the middle of the game and ask someone how good that looks. He may say it's cool because of the visual effect and such. But, I might be wrong, I wouldn't think that person would think it's good looking. People said in your comments that they liked the backgrounds, but I would guess they meant they liked the concept and visual effect of the backgrounds (which indeed were very interesting), not the visual appearance itself. I might be wrong, but here's why I think they don't look so good.
The backgrounds seem to be of low resolution, "pixelated" not in a nice looking way. Take the first background, dempa.png. Those crosses look very weird and it's not pleasing to the eye (and not much because of the optical illusion effect, though, come to think of it, they probably did backfire, because optical illusions are inherently not appealing to the eye when you want to focus on something else). The same happens to most of the backgrounds. I think the game would have benefited very significantly if they were of higher resolution, because the player looks at them all the time. And about the color of the background: sorry, but, unless it fits the art style, grey is simply a bad color in most of the cases. It's unpleasant for me having to play the game looking at a grey screen.
Another factor is that the art of the game is a bit too abstract (not unlike my own game, which I expected to have a low production score for that same reason). Your blob being a group of circles with dots, there's really not much to look at, and it's not as nice as looking at something more elaborate and detailed. And simple red lines are also not very appealing. I can easily see that you didn't spend much time drawing. Even if you did, I think, though, that it's quite hard to make a visually appealing game using optical illusions as background, so it might still have not looked so good. Although I think some rebalancing of the colors should definitely help.
As for effects, I can see you spent some time in it, but I think they're not so helpful when the graphics don't look so good. Graphics are sort of a base for effects to work well. Though something nice I noticed only now is how you made the wobbliness of the jelly, but I have to say I thought it was merely an animation before. In fact, I don't think it would've made much difference from a simple animation, so I'm not sure implementing the wobbliness instead of just drawing an animation was worth the effort. The trail and hit effects are very nice, too.
Given this second thought, I would give you a 4 in production instead of a 3, since I saw now there was some nice effort in polish which went unnoticed before (highscores, wobbliness, effects), but I still think this game doesn't do well visually. Still, there are a lot of games to judge, so everyone gets the ratings from the first impression, not from the impression after you look at it more carefully.
About fun (same thing is valid, I'm just trying to explain why I gave you a rating of 3 for fun), I thought the gameplay was a bit shallow. The positive things are that it has an interesting feature for disorientation, it has some progression (blob gets slow, enemies become plenty) and overall it's pretty fun. But, besides that disorientation feature, nothing in particular stands out in terms of fun. Maybe this is partially due to the fact that I've already played many games of this type, but the gameplay is simple, you just have to move your character to avoid some enemies that only go back and forth. And it gets repetitive later on, it doesn't manage to keep my interest for too long. I think the progression could've been improved; maybe something like putting harder visual effects in later levels of the game (I think it'd be better if the game were divided in one level for each effect) - though I don't think that'd be enough. Had the optical illusions integrated better with the gameplay, it'd be definitely more fun. But the gameplay is too simple to keep my interest for long. I'd probably give the same fun rating if the backgrounds were generic images, because they didn't blend well with the gameplay in my opinion.
I hope this criticism was constructive and at least made you understand the reason for my ratings (by the way, if you're curious, I'm the one who commented about it making me feel dizzy). I really think the idea of using optical illusions in a game has potential. You just need to find a good way to use it.
cyhawk on
2010/04/18 09:35:
Perhaps it's that there are no in-game graphics to speak of. The opponents are small red lines. The hero is made up of a few black spots. The background is a slide-show. Also there is no setting or context, and the whole is a mishmash of random assets (what are we? why are we collecting stuff? who's shooting at us? why is the background trying to induce epilepsy? who's the slime guy on the high-score screen?).BTW in defense of Ninja Tower's connection to the theme English is not my first language and I had a pretty unclear idea of what is and isn't wibbly-wobbly. This image came up in the discussion about it and gave me the impression that an uneven tower would be wibbly-wobbly in the sense that it looks unstable.
I'm still not sure, but after looking at all the wibbly-wobbly games, the wibbly-wobbly in this cake may not be the shape but the material. Or that it is uneven in one specific way (it goes left and right along a wave?).
Sorry about that, but still thanks for the comments and good scores! I'm glad you had fun with it!