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At least I discovered this "Conway's Game of Life", never heard about it before. But once
curiosity is satisfied, there isn't a lot of space for "fun". According to me, what makes the
game not very charming is the "plan & watch" structure. Don't know if you can add another game
mode, where you are allowed to add cells on the fly... but not sure it would solve the problem.
Something like you have to drive your pixels creature in a track, and you can temporarly freeze
the time and add pixels making your creature "turn". But proabily this is out of your scope.
Then the game definitley need some music and sound effects following the pixels movements. |
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Sadly, I'm quite familiar with conway's game of life (which is an awesome invention.) The idea
of colouring the cells and making it an attempt to defeat the other army is neat, although I
imagine most players quickly learn a few formations that produce lots of cells, at which point
it's quite an easy task to use those to win every time. Overall, I don't think it's that
innovative though, it's certainly not showing me anything I haven't seen before. (I've seen
coloured conway implementations before, sadly!) ------------ In terms of Fun, when I
started this I thought "oh, this is just conway." and I was intending to give it quite a low score
for fun, but conway's game of life is rather addictive, and your implementation of it makes it
pretty easy to set up a bunch of patterns quickly - in that regard, it ended up eating half an hour
of my time as I messed around - so I gave it a better mark than I was expecting to. ------------ The
production is quite nice in some places. the pace of the simulation is good, the quick buttons
to place stuff in specific formations are nice. I like that you can place things down in
realtime in the experimenter (and I like that you included an experimenter, because it works
as a neat little conway program.) - menu is good too. Obviously, there's no sound or music, I
think sound is a bit pointless for this, but some non-intrusive music would be nice (with an
option to turn it off or on on the menu) - I'd like to see a fullscreen option in the menu too.
Still, the production is solid. What I'd really like to see, is a "2player" variant, where one
person builds an army, then the other person must try to beat it. If you allow the manual setting
of the number of cells each player gets, or even an automatic handicap system, then you could
have a fun if geeky little 2player puzzler here. Perhaps, if you really wanted to push this, you
could let people build formations of blue cells, then save them and export them, so you could
build specific puzzle levels for other people. I don't know how many people would be
interested in that though. ------ So yeah, you've made a very nice implementation of conway
here. I'll keep it around on my computer, and I'll probably even mess with it from time to time -
which is pretty good going. I just don't think Conway's game of life really appeals to the three
pyweek marking criteria. |
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Initially I launched the game before reading the read.me and didn't understand what was going
on at all. I was let down really. Would be nice to get some in-game instructions or an opening
demonstration. I feel that you couldn't play this game based purely on intuition... you need
to learn how to play. And I like that. It shows innovation which all game developers should
strive for. So, Bravo! Fun: Exceptional. I am guessing a lot of people are going to play this
game and not find it fun. I say that because it took me a while. Once you do spend a bit of time in
experimental mode you can create some of your own characters and patterns and learn to make
chain reactions to eventually dominate anything battle mode throws at you. The learning
curve is above 10-20 minutes though. I'd say that at first you're left clueless because lets
face it, everybody wants to jump into battle mode first, right? But once you have a few tricks up
your sleeve it's very easy to win. To make it more difficult you can add more blue virus, but with
the latest version you can't see how much more you've added because it's the same colour as the
original virus so I can't show off to my developer you see =] Innovation: Above average. I've
played a similar game to this a long time ago, I can't remember what it's called, or exactly how
it works but i do remember tactically placing things onto a grid which will absorb those around
it. Perhaps somebody else will pick up on that. That said, I don't think it's been done exactly
like this before. Certainly not so beautifully. I think your choice of cells are spot on and
were chosen wisely. Production: About average. Though I like the graphics, I don't think
they're inspiration by any stretch of the imagination. No sound and music is what brought
production rating down. This game will be finished when you make a difficulty setting and
sound effects. It will vastly improve your game. |