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So excited for this! You can now back to get a custom character design into the game! *o*

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Rather than post the same thing twice, I’ll just link to the Kickstarter update. I’m considering three possible options for “Goth”!

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#indie gaming #game development #kickstarter

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Not all of the rewards are finished / at my home yet, but here’s a preview as to what they look like as of today! If you’re thinking of picking up the game, check out the Kickstarter that launches on Nov 14. You’ll get the game at a discounted price, help fund cut content, and pick up free merch ont he way too!

#video games #game dev #indie gaming #kickstarter

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Free DnD Module!

I love me some DnD- so to celebrate the game’s upcoming Kickstarter I made this neat little module! It’s free for everyone, so even if you’re not a big fan of the game I’d definitely give it a look. You can download the booklet here.

The original art was done by Caio- you can find them on Tumblr here! Give them a look, they did a fantastic job.

If you like it, consider signing up for the upcoming Kickstarter. There’s going to be some awesome merch available, and we’ll hopefully be able to fund some awesome cut features.

#gamedev #indie gaming #rpg #dnd #dnd homebrew

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And I’m Back

Sometime last year I decided to focus on just one social media platform, because spending a ton of time on different sites just wasn’t worth it. I had the largest following on Twitter, so that’s where I was.

Now Elon Musk is breaking it’s back, so I’ll be doing more here.

First- let me explain what this is! I’m a game developer working on Doomsday Paradise- which plays a little like Monster Prom x Mario Party x Slay the Spire. Weird hybrid- but let me explain!

The general premise is that you’ve moved into a beach side town right before the Apocalypse. Might as well die with a margarita in your hand, right? You spend your last few days traveling around town and meeting the locals and maybe trying to score a date. This all sounds pretty Monster Prom like.

Where it gets a little more hectic is that your choices aren’t just about getting the guy or girl. You also get stats, items, power ups that you use to battle monsters. Basically, instead of just a visual novel it’s a full RPG.

Depending on how you do you’ll unlock different endings- there are almost 50 in the demo up right now! The plan is to have 2-3x times that amount in the full game, easily.

The game’s also got a lot of different game modes. Competitive mode (compete for the most score), No Combat mode, etc., Lots of ways to mix things up! The game’s set to come out next year. Until then, you can try the demo on Steam. And in the off chance you’re seeing this right when it’s fresh- I’m doing a tiny Kickstarter to put some cut content back in. You can find that here.

#gamedev #indie dev #indie gaming #gaming #rpg

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Doomsday Paradise and this Tumblr

There’s been some HUGE changes since I last posted about this game- so I wanted to share! There’ve been massive updates to the art, the sound, the characters... basically the whole game has been rebuilt from the ground up- but better! I’ll attach some screenshots at the end of this note. If you’re interested in following casually you should check out my Twitter. If you’re interested in playtesting hop onto my Discord! I’d love to have you! As for this Tumblr, it’s hard for me to maintain a ton of social media accounts at the same time and easy for one to slip. I’ll aim for the occasional blog post, but this is really going to be a much more casual place for me to talk about games and movies and stuff. Anyway, here’s the screenshots I promised! There’s still lots of work to be done. The UI and minion system are slated for a visual upgrade for example- but you can really see the game coming along!

#gamedev #indie dev #indie gaming

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It’s been a few months- because I’ve been doing a complete asset overhaul for the game! New art, new sounds, new music, the whole shebang. I’m ramping closer to official announcement- and for that I need voice talent! If you’re interested please feel free to audition by Nov 10 2021.

#voiceover #gamedev #indie dev #indie gaming #voice acting

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Ring of Pain Thoughts/Review

I do not like this game. That’s actually why this review is so quick after Children of Morta- I played Ring of Pain for maybe six hours today, and I’ve come to the conclusion that I just don’t like it. So unlike most of my other reviews, this isn’t going to be as comprehensive. I’ve only encountered the final boss once, and didn’t beat it. This game likely does have more to it. But the game isn’t filled in the right places for me. First, let’s get into the things I like. The theming is great, the art is gorgeous (it seems like all indie games have gorgeous art nowadays), the music doesn’t get repetitive- all of the aesthetics are there. The game concept is also neat. It’s a game where you navigate around a ring of cards- defeating enemies, collecting loot, healing, etc., The loot comes in the form of slotted equipment that modifies your stats and sometimes has an extra ability, creating a lot of variety. In theory, that is. More on that later. Ring of Pain is a hard game. I died on the first room more than once. I’m sure I’m not the only one. The game is punishing, and there’s a higher than average skill floor to this game than most others. That can be fun for the more hardcore crowd, who isn’t as likely to give in to frustration. But let’s get into the stuff I didn’t like. The game is hard in the sense that it’s absurdly punishing. You’ll die for small mistakes, or even die if you didn’t even make a mistake just due to the room layout. Sometimes, picking up an item is even a mistake. I once picked up a “room shuffles on enemy explosion” and the exploding enemies chain jumped me around the room, dealing damage to me and landing me in front of an aggressive monster who attacked me on the spot. I was killed from full immediately. My mistake there, of course, was picking up that item. That’s not the only item that will just get you killed. Many early game items reduce defense... which will absolutely get you killed. Most of my progress in the game came from finding out when to say no- which was a lot of the time. Lots of the items aren’t just not helpful, they are active detriments. And many items happen to have stat penalties on top of the bonuses. But you can’t really try to min-max these, since you don’t have agency over what kind of items you’ll be seeing. You end up becoming a generalist more often than not, and because you’re a generalist you’re forced to continue being one- since you don’t have the hyper offense or hyper defense required to start dumping stats. Enemy designs are also very limiting here. Some enemies have insanely high defense, so doing special damage is your best bet. But special damage only comes from items, and often highly synergistic ones... in a game you can’t really build around easily. So it’s rare that runs actually feel super different. Enemies are different, sure, and sometimes you luck into a cool item combination- but most of the time it feels like you’re just doing the same thing over and over and hoping that enemy placements are different enough. The variety on the player side isn’t there. The difference between my runs was heavily impacted by RNG. That doesn’t mean there’s no skill involved whatsoever, but it’s not a great balance. Take Slay the Spire as an example. An experienced player will beat the base difficulty basically every single time. Most normal players won’t. There’s enough room for skill progression and player agency that a player can secure a win even though the artifacts, cards, and enemy orders are all random in that game. As you bump up the difficulty, this starts to drop off- but of the 20 difficulty modifiers top players only start losing consistency past about 15 of them. In other words, the skill ceiling allows for player agency to be the primary determining factor for player success in 15 out of 20 of these difficulty levels- again in a game with a huge amount of random variation! This happens in a game like that because players can strategize in advance (via the map) and because broad groups of cards fall under similar strategies- such as single target burst, AoE, defense, etc., so that a player can ensure they hit the tools they need when they need them. And if they fail to get those tools? They can course correct. The most random items, artifacts, offer bonuses and synergy opportunities and can certainly help a run, but don’t determine it most of the time. Ring of Pain lacks this agency. You can’t really determine what you need- most items come from chests which are sealed completely off. The ring like structure means you can’t plan a good route- and “go left” vs “go right” is usually a matter of “is there something super scary in the way” vs “what’s the shortest path.” Many of the item effects are useful only when you have very high values in a particular stat- but again, you end up being a generalist most of the time. There’s an item that grants you +10 speed, but reverses how turn order is determined- and you can get this early. Even grabbing it early, I was never able to build around it and forcefully lower my speed to make use of it. It ended up just being another trap item. Similarly “Activate X on parry” means I need a ton of defense- but of course I also need a way to actually kill monsters, forcing me to invest heavily in speed and hp if I don’t wan to bleed out all over the place. I found I could activate some of these towards the end of my run- but that’s just because all my stats were becoming outrageous so it didn’t matter. So unlike other roguelikes with lots of player variety, and high skill ceilings where players can navigate the world to victory consistently despite being given different tools and obstacles every time- Ring of Pain ends up being a test of frustration more than anything else, where the biggest obstacle of all is your luck with enemy types and placements. Unlike most of the other games I’ve reviewed, I would not recommend this game except to perhaps the most hardcore deckbuilding enthusiasts with lots of time and patience to burn.

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Children of Morta Thoughts/Review

Children of Morta is a good game. It could, with some tweaking, even be a great game. But for the time being, it’s just a good game. If you’re considering this game because you want an APRG/roguelite hybrid with tons of playtime, I’d consider Heroes of Hammerwatch instead. Children of Morta does have more character, prettier art (wow the art), and a more narrative focus- so consider this game if you want something with some more bells and whistles. This is an interesting one. It’s a Diablo style ARPG, with some roguelite elements and a focus on story. Most of the other indies I’ve discussed in these posts don’t have a lot of sticking power- you beat the games and there’s little to no reason to come back. Children of Morta does have sticking power- but suffers from some design issues that make me want to really deep dive it. The gameplay loop is really satisfying and fun, but there are moments of frustration littered thoughout. The game has two primary modes. The main story- which is much more ARPG’ish, and Family Trials, which is more roguelite-ish. I’m going to tackle them separately, starting with the main story, as they’re very different experiences. For reference, I played on Nintendo Switch and on the game’s “hard” difficulty for the story, and “normal” for family trials. --Main Story-- You dive into dungeons, explore until you die, then spend your gold on additional stats and do it again. As your characters gain levels they transfer passive benefits to the rest of your characters, encouraging you to play the whole cast. In addition, if you play the same character over and over they’ll become fatigued- getting a health penalty until you switch off of them for a run or two. When you return from a dungeon, you’re greeted by the narrator who gives you some more information about the characters / the world, and then you do it again. While it’s neat that there’s a constantly evolving story, I have to say that I could sure have used less of it. The story is at it’s best when we’re watching the lovingly animated sprites interact with one another- they can be expressive and full of character. A great example of show, don’t tell. Unfortunately, most of the story does the opposite. For the most part, the story is quite literally told to us via the narrator. Some classic “Ben felt sad” kind of stuff. And that’s... fine? But I didn’t care about the story or the characters (who I didn’t really know) despite all the effort that went into the storytelling format. It’s a story driven game where the story feels tacked on at the end and isn’t all that exciting. It’s not bad but it’s not good either. It’s just kind of there, taking up game time that could be spent on the actual fun parts of the game. I think the big issue is that it doesn’t leverage the fact that it’s a video game to tell that story. It’s basically an audiobook. The moments that elicited the most emotional response to me where story events that occurred in dungeons where I needed to rescue an NPC character- where the narration was kept to a minimum and I could just focus on saving some cute critter that did the heartbreaking thing just a few seconds ago. Let’s move on from story for a second and talk about gameplay. Firstly, the gameplay loop, like I said above, is fun. This isn’t a surprise. Games that are part of a successful genre like this one are often fun, because they’re built on top of a really solid base. But the game suffers from some serious issues with its’ enemy attacks. An attack has a windup, to telegraph an action, an active component, and then a window of opportunity at the end. Pre-lag, action, post-lag. The enemies in this game have very short pre and post lags. This leaves enemies capable of quickly attacking without much time to respond, and not much opportunity to punish them. The players, on the other hand, have very long windups for whatever reason. Often, in games a windup for a player will be near instant to avoid an attack feeling laggy- see Hollow Knight for an example. Not in this game. This means that even if you start attacking in an enemy’s windup, you will almost certainly get hit and might not even hit them back because many enemies will immediately retreat after striking. And it’s not just that they have long windups on their attacks. Open a chest? Here’s a window of vulnerability. Activate an obelisk for a defense or attack buff? Window of vulnerability. Activate your rage bonus to enable your AoE to clear an oncoming mob? Here’s a big fat window of vulnerability. I found myself not using my rage bonus (effectively a super bar that buffs your character) at all because I would get overrun by any sizeable mob worth using it on in the time it would take to activate. It just turned into a boss killing tool. Unless, of course, I was ranged. And, let me remind you, this is a genre where there may be over a hundred enemies on a floor. So even though you may be able to compensate for the difference in frame data 1 v 1, you almost certainly cannot do it while swarmed. And you can’t always compensate either. There’s a midgame boss who is stationary- summoning enemies to fight with. If you sit in melee range and start dumping damage on them, they’ll raise their hand and then slash forward- doing about 1/2-1/4 of your health (depending on how much hp you’ve invested in) in a single blow. The melee units probably need to hit this guy like, a hundred times to kill him- for the record. The issue here is that the windup (raising the hand) doesn’t actually leave enough room to dodge away from it. At least, with my reaction time (which I have never had an issue with before.) The hitbox on the swipe is so large that if you try to “dodge” the move as you see the windup, you will dodge back... and still get hit. I found myself having to hit a couple times and then pre-emptively back up just in case, essentially having to predict a windup that wasn’t always there. You end up using all the heals the game supplies you to help with the mobs to restock after getting slapped almost unavoidably... or slowing down so much the fight drags on and it becomes much harder to win. And more deflating to lose. In the end, I lost for 45 minutes then just switched characters and cleared it effortlessly. But I shouldn’t have had to just “pick a different character” to one that wasn’t destined to get slapped. I should have been able to play around the windup. And this issue is not exclusive to this boss. The core problem is the same one the basic mobs have! In addition, your dash takes time to recharge- and characters only have 1 or 2. If you need to use a dash to close the gap, to say, hit a ranged unit- you’re left with limited options to evade enemies and their very fast attacks afterwards. If you’re out of dashes as a melee, you’re going to get hurt. This leads to a massive difference in melee vs ranged gameplay. There are two ranged characters, and they’re on an entirely different level than the melee ones. It’s not really comparable. A ranged unit only has to dash defensively, and both ranged units have skills that give them very strong kiting abilities allowing them to play significantly safer than their melee counterparts. And since they don’t have to close the gap, they have a higher damage uptime too- the ranged characters aren’t just safer but they do more damage. Melee characters end up needing way more stats in order to function because they will take damage. There’s no perfect play that’ll let you perfect clear a dungeon- your frame data is too much of a disadvantage for that to be true. So as a melee you need hp and dodge chance to survive, and damage in order to kill enemies quickly so they don’t run you over in your range. Ranged units, on the other hand, can invest purely into aggression. It was about the middle of the game until I got my second ranged unit. Remember what I said earlier about the game punishing you for spamming the same unit? Even if I’d only wanted to play ranged, I’d have been forced into a melee unit. In my specific case, I actually jumped around a lot and played mostly melee just to unlock the full skill trees- but the game really puts the heat on the player. Finally, lots of the melee kits just aren’t good without loads of stats or without all their abilities unlocked. This means that most characters you get will flat out suck until the midgame, because they don’t have the tools they need to succeed. The monk, for example, has the ability to dash-attack folks and suck people to him... but has such piddling damage output that if you reposition enemies early they’ll just slap you silly. It’s not until he has access to the AoE dash-jump and AoE knockback that you get the ability to deal lots of group damage, separate the enemies, and start picking foes off. Of course, by the time you have these skills, the game’s starting to end. Remember, melee characters become viable by basically gaining enough stats to ignore how bad their kits are in the context of the greater game. That means you start hitting a point where the difficulty of a dungeon is mostly due to how underleveled the character you’re playing with because you have the stats to brute force the game’s challenges. As the characters also pick up levels and you get access to more and more gold per run, the game becomes progressively easier until you find you’re very unlikely to die even in a brand new area. So in the end you’re left with a game with a fairly tough start that just gets progressively easier and then just kind of ends since you blow through the third act so quickly. You don’t even have time to unlock all your toys before the game is over. And even if you wanted to play another dungeon, there’s nothing that won’t just kind of buckle over- even with underleveled characters in endgame dungeons. There technically are roguelite elements to each dungeon run- but they’re fairly light. You get runes, which are random drops that buff an ability but they basically all amount to “you’re better now” and don’t change your playstyle. Some active abilities, of which you can collect two but who knows how many you’ll see or if there’s any real decision to make there, and some more passive abilities as well. Nothing that really varies your experience from run to run- even with these elements your runs will feel the same. The Main Story is overall still fun just due to the core gameplay, but it’s really just okay. --Family Trials-- Family trials is an extra game mode, where you play through 9 maps (with 2 bosses and 2 shops, and more maps during harder difficulties) as one of the main 7 characters with the skill tree gone and replaced with a starting set of skills. As you level up, you are granted 3 level up options to pick from- and you gain multiple artifacts and bonuses as you continue to craft your full build. In other words, it’s much heavier on roguelite elements, and has much more sticking power as a result of it. It amps up the roguelite elements that were weak in the main story- and can lead to some different feeling builds and more interesting decision making. I consider this a huge win, and it’s something I’ll definitely return to. The problem, however, is family trials also amps up the worst parts of the game. The characters in this mode are no longer snorting super stats, which means the family trials normal mode is significantly harder than the base game’s hard mode. 5 out of the 7 characters are just bad. I beat it once with the archer and once with the monk, and I have to say playing it as a melee was a struggle. It wasn’t strange for there to be 200 some enemies on a floor, with no safe rooms, and they all required something crazy like 5 hits each for me to kill. So my strategy ended up being relying on random equipment to kill things for me while I just dodged around. On runs where I actually tried to invest in my character’s ability to kill, it simply wasn’t enough to clear a wave of mobs even with all my abilities hitting them for AoE meaning that I was pretty much always in danger of being swarmed by the 60 something units per room. I literally watched my equipment drones solo a boss while I just jumped around the room, because that was just way more effective than actually striking it myself. I was second fiddle to my drones. The final boss also gets a buff- the three times I fought him they were in floating purple crystals that would fire lasers towards each other in a grid, punishing you for stepping in them. They would also get more mobs. So basically, as a melee, you can easily get punished for approaching the boss at all- getting lasered, or pinned into a corner and surrounded by mobs with no way to escape. A ranged unit can keep their damage up during this time, killing either the oncoming mobs as they approach or the boss itself, but as a melee you just have to sit there and hope you don’t take too much damage. Overall it left a bad taste in my mouth. Sure, the game wants me to win once with or at least try all 7 characters- but why would I want that? The game’s just frustrating when playing with everything melee. With that said, it’s still super fun as one of the two ranged units. So if you treat it as a two character game instead, or play in coop with at least one ranged character (and the other character as a support), it can still be tons of fun. It’s not just me. I ran into numerous threads of folks who beat this on the hardest difficulty with ranged units, who couldn’t do it on normal with most of the melees. --Final Thoughts / Summary / Recommendations-- The game has a lot of potential. The upgrades are cool. Some of the kits are really unique and exciting. It feels good to power up and the core mechanics are really fun. The main story is fun enough, but doesn’t give me a reason to come back and the difficulty just collapses. I’d love a set of “postgame” dungeons on a file that just had ramped up difficulty. So essentially what NG+ is, but without requiring me to replay the whole thing over and over again. Something I didn’t mention before is the game does have some issues on switch. The end screen lags every time and once crashed on me, numerous audio bugs, etc., I’d prioritize PC for this one but it’s still mostly fine on the Nintendo console. The enemies need to be re-examined. The game could be made a lot less frustrating and close that melee/ranged gap drastically if they just re-did a lot of the enemy attack animations. For windups, you want the duration of the player’s escape + 0.25 seconds (average reaction time) + some buffer at a minimum. This means they should be at least half a second and often higher. The windows of opportunity need to be extended for ranged units and hit-and-run units. The hit-and-run units in particular cause melees to have to chase after them because they’re not even vulnerable for a full attack for most characters. Often you have to just leave them for last because you can’t feasibly chase after them in a crowd, like being in the thick of it wasn’t hard enough. Playable melee characters need shorter windups on their own attacks. If I use an AoE stun, it’s because I’m surrounded- giving me half a second to a second of lead time on the move just means I eat a bunch of free damage from the mob that the move is designed to help me against. This can be compensated by larger post-attack lag if necessary, but it’s ludicrous that you’ll lose most attack contests against basic enemies. Melee units in particular could probably benefit from a dash enhancement. There’s an ogre unit who walks up to a player and swings, and leaves only enough time for a single attack and dash back before they’ll land a second hit. And they’re in the first area. This means that you end up having to strike the ogre once, dash away, wait for your dash to recharge, get in range to trigger the attack so you can maneuver in, hit him once... then dash away. And then do that ten times. For a regular enemy. Perhaps rewarding aggressive dashing (partial dash refund on if you attack right after) can enable melees to dash aggressively to threatening units and still get out safely without having to sit around and wait for a cooldown to engage. In the ogre example, you could wait for a swing, dash to the other side, strike, then dash through him as he tried to club you again- giving you the ability to stay engaged without taking a long break to sit and think. They could probably use a bit of a stat buff in Family trials too. Specifically where damage is concerned- if I’m going to jump into fifty enemies and my attack has a full second of windup time I better be cleaving through these guys. Which I’m not right now, by the way. Instead I’m just running around laps activating relics and hoping they’ll do the work for me. But here’s the thing- these things are mostly fixable. There’s not going to be a change to the upgrade system for the main story, so its’ longevity is what it is. And the main story itself isn’t going to change, no matter how... just kind of there it is. But attack windups? Dash refunds? That’s all doable. And frankly a lot less work than the Family Trials mode was. The team did a good job, and I honestly mean that. I think mostly the game needed some stronger playtesting before launch. I am a bit saddened to see that in the year+ since the game’s release, and with the launch of Family Trials, that they missed the mark on the player experience for most of the cast though- given they’ve had plenty of time to collect feedback on it. My recommendation is- worth a play if you can get it on sale. If not, check to see if they’ve made any significant balance tweaks to melee vs ranged play. If they have- go for it! If not, maybe hold off until the next big Steam holiday.

#children of morta #roguelite #game review

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Moonlighter Thoughts/Review

This is a game I finished just last week- and the last game I played. I’ve got kind of a weird relationship with this one. First, a quick note, I played the Switch version which I believe comes with some DLC. Moonlighter’s a game that I think a lot of people would enjoy, but I don’t think would be anyone’s favorite game. It’s the kind of game that would rule Rotten Tomatoes, but maybe fall apart when given an IMDB score. Moonlighter’s an RPG where you traverse procedurally generated dungeons to gather loot and take back to your shop, where you later sell them for cash. You play the role of adventurer and shopkeeper all in one, which is a neat take on the dungeon diver formula. First, let me get through the things I liked. The art and presentation are solid. There’s very little story, and it pretty much just gets to the point and lets you play the game. The level design didn’t fall apart at the end, and in fact the DLC postgame dungeon is one of my favorites of the bunch. The core gameplay of entering a dungeon and fighting stuff for loot just kind of works. It’s a tried and true formula that just feels good. It also feels good to sell stuff and just get rich, and the game encourages you to sell as much as possible. But the combat can be pretty shallow. Every weapon has two moves- an attack and a special. Many weapons have a basic attack combo. You have a dodge roll. And that’s it. That’s all the combat mechanics. You can switch between two weapons inside of a dungeon, so that can give you some additional move options but the general combat feel is basic. You learn some simple enemy patterns, dodge the right moves, and attack. Enemies are simple enough that it doesn’t take long before any individual enemy is a nonissue and that’s kind of the end of that. So while it’s fun to collect cool things, the combat itself is really pretty barebones. There’s little to master, and little to make repeat playthroughs interesting. Because it’s so expensive to upgrade additional weapons, you can feel locked in to your first weapon choices and there’s little incentive to mess around. The shopkeeping also doesn’t feel that great either. You place items on display at a set price, gauge customer reactions to your prices, then collect your cash if they buy them. There’s little in the way of mastery, and once you’ve figured out where an item price “should be” there’s little to actually do but sit around and wait. As you upgrade your shop, thieves might enter and try to steal your items or from the register directly. Sometimes everything just stops because a bird flew in and the customers panic, until you catch it. These mini events are kind of cute, but more annoying than engaging or skillful. They can help break up the monotony of sitting around and waiting, but not in a way that feels particularly great. In addition, that bird event can sometimes trap an NPC between states- they see the bird mid-action and just don’t know what to do after. I had to reset the game twice in one sitting due to these kinds of shop bugs that prevented you from closing or exiting your shop. They just trapped you in there, unable to go to sleep and save or leave... forever. Speaking of bugs, the game is a bit buggy. You can sometimes roll through doorways and end up outside the map, or not trigger the location change, get trapped in your own shop, etc., It can be disappointing when this forces a reset, but the bugs are usually harmless. But what we’ve ended up with a game that has an addictive core loop and a fair bit of content, but the execution just feels shallow and minimalistic. Progression is mostly tied to your equipment power as well, the easiest way to advance is to upgrade a weapon. Armor can be useful after that, but can feel pretty optional when you’re just one or two shotting most enemies to begin with. It’s a neat loop, but there’s essentially no replay value or desire to go back into a dungeon after completing it since you now just kind of smoke everything. You upgrade equipment via a combination of items and gold. You can buy the items at a hefty markup, but most of the time the items will come from the current dungeon. This leads to a pattern where you hoard necessary resources until you can drop a weapon upgrade, and then now that you can suddenly afford to sell those rarer weapon upgrade items you’ll find yourself rolling in cash and completing the dungeon in 2-3 more runs because you’ve opened up an additional revenue stream and can more easily venture deeper where the good loot is. That kind of opening has some weird effects in terms of upgrades for your shop. You’ll eventually hit a point where money for everything but the fanciest upgrades is mostly just a joke, because the exponentially scaling gold returns from the dungeon outpace almost everything there is to buy to begin with. There’s a couple other mechanics that maybe weren’t super well thought out. You can buy access to a banker for an exorbitant amount and after completing a couple dungeons, who will allow you to invest some money on a Sunday and then cash it out on any day in the following week. Neat mechanic, except you can only invest once per week. There’s a time cycle for whatever reason, but locking up your money for a week is always a terrible idea. You either need the money for an upgrade, or you’re about to complete the dungeon level you’re at and that amount of money will be literally worthless once the new income levels at the next dungeon are established. And by the time you’re likely to get around to purchasing them, the game’s mostly over anyway. It’s a mechanic that’s neat on paper, but doesn’t fit the actual game’s pacing. It doesn’t really open up any new or interesting gameplay or decision making. It’s just kind of a non choice that makes itself hard to actually interact with anyway. And speaking of weird mechanics, the DLC introduces a slew of special materials you can only get through haggling. It also introduces haggling. The thing is, all of the new DLC scaled armor requires the same few resources- meaning they’re super valuable and hard to get. Meanwhile, your weapon trees only need a few depending on their line. So you end up needing a whole ton of some special stones / cloth because you need it everywhere and then maybe just... a little of this and that for the rest of the build. You end up finishing your weapons quickly while way behind in your armor, a fact that doesn’t matter because your armor doesn’t matter much. You end up with so much health you can basically face tank the final boss without anywhere near max HP, just relying on your fat health bar and potions to heal you. Why not give the body armor one set of items, the headpiece another, the boots another, etc.,? A whole bunch of new materials were introduced and almost none of them will actually matter to your experience, and they’re all locked behind a haggling system which... doesn’t offer any exciting gameplay either. You’ll learn a rule of thumb for haggling that always seems to work and that’ll be it. What I’d like to see from any future projects is a more polished game design- making sure that the systems you have in place really fit and enhance the game. I’d also like to see some deeper combat. I don’t care if there’s six weapons if they’re all shallow and if it’s hard to actually use and upgrade all six at once. It doesn’t have to be combat depth but depth in any of the game systems, which was lacking. Moonlighter is a lengthy, fun, but ultimately shallow experience. I enjoyed it, and it’s worth a play, but it falls short of greatness due to its weaker systems design. Which is a shame, because the potential really was there for something special. Pick it up if you’re looking for a fun turn your brain off kind of game and have a dozen or two hours you want to burn.

#Moonlighter #RPG #indie gaming #game review

[lemonadeflashbang]

Katana Zero Thoughts/Review

Almost two weeks ago I had the pleasure of playing through Katana Zero while conked out on my second shot. I waited before writing this post to fully digest what I actually thought of the game. It’s definitely a stylish game, and fits in quite well with other games published by Devolver, but I think it was likely held back a bit by its’ own ambition. For those who don’t know, Katana Zero is an action game where you play as a time controlling samurai who has to kill every enemy in an area before proceeding to the next room. Enemies die in one hit, but so do. The gameplay is twitchy and the concept is kind of anime as fuck, and when it works it works. There’s also a cool cyberpunk story, and for an indie it’s actually pretty well written. There’s a narrative system that allows you to pursue different dialogue paths, but you can also “get to the point” by spam pressing all the initial “rude” prompts. You can also choose to wait out a timer and reply with silence. Generally speaking though, even though I liked the story I felt like its’ focus was ultimately a detriment to the final game. The whole game is only a few hours long, and you probably spend at least half of that time navigating through dialogue. Tons of resources went into the writing and the cutscenes, many of which are lovingly animated, that I think might have been better served by being poured into the core gameplay loop. There’s a bit of a myth in gaming that games are the sum of their parts. For example, if you clone a game but improve the story, the game is objectively better. I believe that to be false. Take a Mario game, for example. Taking the quick “princess is kidnapped” story and replacing it with something epic- maybe from a JRPG or from something more western like Horizon Zero Dawn, wouldn’t result in a better game. And the reason is simple- the core gameplay of a Mario game is about the platforming. That’s the most fun part of the game. Even if you improve the story, so long as that story takes up more time you’ll find that your players will be having less fun on average simply because the story isn’t as good as the platforming segment, and now you’ve blown it out and made it more important. There’s a reason why these Nintendo games have such basic stories. Nintendo has no problems writing funny Mario RPG’s as any fan of Mario & Luigi or Paper Mario will tell you. They’re choosing not to so they can focus their energy on the most fun part of the game. Narrative and RPG games have a lot more room to play with long story segments, because story is part of the core value proposition for these genres. But that’s not true of all game types. So let’s loop back to Katana Zero. There are now half of your game sections that are about the narrative... but the narrative is short, raises more questions than answers, incomplete, and doesn’t give you time to get attached to most of the characters. And let me be clear- this isn’t because I think the devs did a bad job. But indie games are stretched thin, so creating content, especially cutscene and effects heavy narrative content that can’t be reused, is super time consuming. And at some point you just have to ask- are we going to be able to tell a story that’s as gripping and exciting as our gameplay? Does the story enhance the gameplay, like in a narrative or RPG game? Is the enhancement worth the time? I’d argue that it isn’t. Not that there isn’t a good story there, but that the story is way too big to fit comfortably in an indie package and get really attached to. Not without a genre shift, resource injection, or cutscene de-escelation. There’s a reason most RPG cutscenes look so donkus, even today. So in the end, you have a game where you spend half your playtime as a kickass time bending samurai, and the other half navigating dialogue trees that don’t result in alternate endings or secret levels or anything all that gameplay related, but tell the prologue to a story that may never have an ending. There’s a mismatch between your most fun thing, and the rest of the game, and the gap is big. Not because the story sucks, because the core gameplay is fun. Let’s talk more about the core gameplay though. Story isn’t the only place where I feel that ambition may have caused some problems. There’s a point in the game where you can play a single stage as a second character. Just the one. Why implement a character just for one stage? Why not bring them into more of the game? As an unlockable character choice to increase replayability, perhaps? There could be some level design constraints around that, but I don’t think it’d have been an issue with the alternate character that existed as it was. Finally, I feel like the level design starts to break down in the last third of the game or so.As you approach the last act, you lose freedom to express yourself in your approach and become more constrained by enemy reaction times and numbers. This isn’t necessarily a huge issue, but it also starts to force you to rub against the bits of randomness in the game. You might kick open a door only to get immediately shotgunned by the police officer across the hall, unable to deflect the bullets because the spread is random and two of them are too far apart to hit in one swing but close enough together to kill you during your attack’s cooldown. Maybe it’s not one shotgun blast but three or four pistol rounds, shot by enemies without friendly fire. Maybe they’re guarding a laser cannon with that will blast you unless you descend precisely from above. Maybe you retry a prior tactic, but it doesn’t work because when a level resets it doesn’t move enemies to a fixed position- and their different placements results in different AI behavior even when executing the exact same moves. Whatever the case, the game becomes significantly more punishing and less predictable. You may have to idle and wait for enemies to move into a good position again before retrying a tactic simply because it just won’t work in the current spawn position, which slows down the pacing of an otherwise fast game. Most importantly, the games difficulty increase has nothing to do with mechanics being harder- it’s just repeating the prior challenges but generally less forgiving. Increased mastery is good to aim for, however there’s a couple things you want to avoid. The first is shrinking the play space too much. If your increased mastery comes at the price of player freedom and flexibility, what will happen is levels devolve into rote memorization and the game loses replayability. It also starts to feel like farming, or a chore, even if it’s the first time you’re playing it. The second is you want to make sure that you maintain predictability- which is lost with the shotgun shell randomness and the variation in enemy starting placements. The game ends up feeling stale towards the end of its runtime, which is odd given how short it is. I think an extra mechanic or two to play with for the core gameplay could have taken it farther and let it keep its’ shine. The game was good, and is definitely a fun ride for an afternoon or so, but I can’t see myself wanting to go back to it- even with a DLC update. Generally speaking, I recommend it- but maybe on sale.

#katana zero #game review

[lemonadeflashbang]

Steamworld Dig 2 Thoughts/Review

I actually played this a few weeks back, but am only now coming back and writing my thoughts post on it. This game is special in that it addressed almost all of my issues with the first Steamworld Dig. That’s commendable, it’s incredibly rare for any game, but especially an indie, to make such drastic formula changes in their sequel offering. Aesthetically it’s definitely a step up- really beautiful game. But the upgrades aren’t purely visual- the upgrades are generally more impactful, there are more platforming sections where the game shines the most, and it leans into the metroidvania genre for its map design. The game doesn’t overstay its’ welcome and is packed with content. They’ve introduced a couple new systems, such as item upgrading, but for the most part they’ve just refined the base gameplay. This game has a lot less “digging” involved. You still dig to collect and sell minerals, but where the first game was “dig first platform second” this one reverses it. The bulk of your time is spent in challenge rooms or otherwise navigating the overworld or town hubs via platforming challenges- and even the mines can often have a pltatforming centric feel to them. The second area you unlock in particular is very platforming heavy in its’ base design, and makes the styles of gameplay feel more natural. In addition, the platforming is polished up. I didn’t feel the lack of coyote time like I did in the last game for example and everything just feels more responsive. With that said, while I think the game is stellar and would definitely recommend it, it does have some flaws that keep it from being one of my absolute favorites. Firstly, there are a few upgrades / mechanics that feel... pointless. There’s one optional upgrade that I don’t think I ever used, and I collected basically everything there was to collect in the game. And that upgrade had another follow up upgrade to boot! The lamp also feels pointless- it’s needlessly limiting like in the first game, but you get the option to essentially “upgrade it away.” Those are relatively minor nitpicks that don’t affect the relative game quality to a large degree. However, my next issue is with the level design itself- something that definitely is impactful. There’s a couple really awesome upgrades you get towards the end of the game that essentially, when combined, give you infinite mobility. Other, cool upgrades (shooting some projectiles upwards) are locked away behind these and are effectively pointless. Shooting up is not more impactful than infinite mobility. This isn’t necessarily a design flaw. Being able to do whatever and breeze through challenges might just be a deliberate choice. But I don’t think I resonate with that design framework, at least when applied to this type of game. In a really tightly designed platformer / metroidvania, your abilities build off one another but don’t obsolete each other. Hollow Knight’s path of pain is an excellent “challenge area” where you have all your powers, but having all your powers isn’t actually a problem because they don’t nuke the level design. In Dig 2, on the other hand, the upgrades are so game warping that the level design falls apart, and the post game “challenge area” has to start turning upgrades off in order to retain challenge. In other words, the developers thought there wasn’t enough design space to create a challenging platforming framework with the player tools given, and decided to take them away instead. Mind you- taking away certain abilities can be fine. Mario Sunshine has some more hardcore FLUDDless stages to it. Turning off a single upgrade for a brief duration to enable an alternate set of design challenges can be neat and interesting when done right. But as the culmination to all of your progress? Instead of being a celebration of the game’s mechanics it asks you to essentially play a much worse, more frustrating game for a brief period of time instead of simply offering a higher challenge. With that said, don’t take the difference between my pro/con sections to mean I thought the game was more bad than good. Quite the opposite. Steamworld Dig 2 is an absolute treat, a total joy of a game that only starts to show it’s flaws in the last half of the final act. The rest of the game is beautifully rendered, well polished, and essentially obsoletes the first game. It’s absolutely one of the best indie games I’ve ever played.

#steamworld #steamworld dig #game review

[lemonadeflashbang]

Meet Ed- the town doctor. Friendly, neighborly, and polite, he’s the perfect friend! Know someone who could draw him better? I’m looking for artists! Paid, of course.

#hiring artist #hiring #gamedev #visual novel #game development #rpg #multiplayer #digital aritst

[lemonadeflashbang]

The great archmage’s magic gives him the power to fly, eternal youth, and the ability to transform into a bat. Meet Vando, the party wizard! Have a better design for the concept, or just a good artist interested in some character design? I’m looking for artists!

#vampire #monsterboy #wizard #multiplayer #rpg #visual novel #game development #indie gaming #looking for artist #hiringnow #hiring

[lemonadeflashbang]

Trick or treat? Meet Echidna, a monster who escapes the dungeon every Halloween to collect candy. Only problem is... she doesn’t know when Halloween is! Have a better design, or think you can draw her better? I’m still looking for artists!

#indie gaming #visual novel #visualdesign #monster girls #halloween #multiplayer #boardgames #art #hiring artist

[lemonadeflashbang]

A legendary hero who’s just bored of saving the world- meet Anath! She’s a hardcore board gamer, genius tactician, and fantastic drill sergeant. From battle scarred veterans to toddlers just learning to walk, she’ll make sure they don’t just know how to kill, but that they’re good at it! Think you can improve her design? Think you can draw her better? I’m hiring!

#original art #oc #indie gaming #indie dev #gamedev #godot #game development #hiring #looking for artist