I'm still working on games #2

The recent news at my job fill me with dread, because losing a large part of my income seems a bummer - even tho unemployment could sustain me for a while - but that would give me more time to work on games. On the other hand, staying at home isn't a good place to work on games, there's always some chore to do or some other distraction around, so I'm not sure if that could work either. I'll think about it, there's still a chance that I'm not unemployed yet so I can't make any good decisions right now.

I wonder if making dumb butt videogames works as an "upgrade" to my "skills"

I'm still working on game(s). Right now I have an additional project and a new idea just popped into my head, crazy no? Anyways, I worked maybe half an hour and now the enemies also attack you (to be frank right now there's a weird bug where the first enemy to act in a turn always moves outside of the screen). Maybe my problem is that I always have new ideas and I have to restrain myself from not doing them because otherwise I'd be cancelling and restarting even more projects than I am right now. I have to realize something, that being said.

Look out mage, you took five damage

I'm not going to be done making one game if I don't scope properly and choose something I want to finish
It's pretty obvious, but in no way in hell I'm going to finish my minigame based RPG during my potential unemployment because it's too ambitious for no reason. Maybe I could finish my other project (more on that later) but I feel like besides being a neat little side-project, I couldn't do anything with it. No selling it on appstores, no steam greenlights, no kickstarter... Okay, this isn't about making money, but I've successfully completed little text-based javascript/html games and they seem to me like the bottom of the barrel, not even good to pad your CV. Maybe I'm mistaken.

How did this folder become so huge?

So if I'm going to take some time to master my craft a bit more, I have to look at this with some specific goals in mind. Based on the time that I could give myself to make 'the game', what kind of game should it be?  These are good questions, but right now I can't really answer them, mostly because I'm not 100% sure what's going to happen with my job.

Anyways, videogames.
Like I have said above, I just fixed a really annoying bug that made my enemies not work properly and that took maybe two hours because I just code in a really bad fashion. It works but it's a mess of ifs, loops and functions, aaaanyways, it's not that bad, I just couldn't find why the bugs were going like they are. There are still a few problems here and there but now enemies attack and you can attack enemies, that's so basic tho, I don't feel like I've done much.

The next steps are to make the battle end when you kill everything, add a second and third battle, then start working on the minigame part of it. 

Someone suggested a good idea that I want to try to make and I decided that it was different enough in terms of what to do and the technology used, so I decided to give it a shot.

How the project got 'greenlit'

I feel like roguelikes are better when it's you against the cruel randomness of the world, so what does that leave me with? A game where you have to type words to accomplish goals. There are a few hurdles with that idea.

• You have to type real English words
• You can't type the same word over and over
• They have to make real English sentences
• Also I'm not too keen on plagiarism (having a text next to the game and simply typing it in)

Especially point number 3. Having it read by other people would be an easy way to make it work but if the game gets tons of players, it would be insane to staff that job. But I can't have that, so I have to make it parse-able by some script. That's my major hurdle. If I get over that, I have a laundry list of random ideas

• The game is going to take place in a 26-floors dungeon (get it.)
• At first you're only going to need to type sentences to get to the next floor.
• New rules will be added on the next floors such as vowels poisoning you or enemies that need you to write sentences about specific things or letters that switch places, places where you have to type really fast or really slow, 

Of course, being a roguelike, I'll also need some random loot and things, and crushingly hard difficulty levels where you die and restart over and over. Maybe.

Also the font color is going to be neon green.

iLook at Shufflepuck Cantina

Shufflepuck Cantina is a weird game, on one hand you have an interesting air hockey game with power-ups, special moves, and prizes to be won, on the other hand you have a deep achievement system, shops, different NPCs with stories and moves to master, quests and some gambling here and there.

This is the core of the game and also where I've spent the less time.

The music reminds me of the cantina theme from Star Wars
SC oozes style and personality, it's a great looking and sounding game that makes you interested in the small number of characters you can learn about and chat with. The game opens with the concept that you crashed your ship on this planet where people play air hockey to become rich and famous, so of course you're going to climb the ladder and become air hockey champion number one to leave the planet. You start with the bartender, M4rv1n, then ideally you would move to tougher opponents with crazy special moves and better AI, upgrading your puck and paddle along the way, gaining levels and using special moves yourself.

My character sheet, I have a long way to go.

Content, content, content!
There are tons of things in SC, if you like achievements and unlocking things and not having to buy anything for real money, you probably are going to enjoy this game. Air hockey is almost secondary to the whole thing because there's almost enough content to make a whole other game by itself. You talk to NPCs and do their quests, you buy pieces of their biographies and when you have everything, you can play as that NPC, learn their special moves and master it. You also have two kind of currencies (A recurring theme in free games), one is used to buy most things, pucks, upgrades, paddles, the other is used for 'gambling'. Basically it's a lottery system and you scratch cards and if you pick a skull, you lose everything you haven't cashed in already.

The scratch card thing.

It's interesting but also entirely luck-based, which removes a bit of sense into doing it any other way than just picking the first square and hoping for the best. Also I never got anything good from it so you might need to play it a lot to have any hope of finding rare rewards.

I'll never get your 9 gold medals, sorry M4rv1n.

I can't get past the first guy
This game is horribly though for me. After playing it for maybe six hours, I can't beat anything else than the 'training' match m4rv1n offers. Anything tougher than that and I lose and more often than not I blame the way the game works, because I don't think that I have terrible eye-to-hand coordination. I also think that I understand air hockey, I know you don't have to physically drag your paddle and if you tap somewhere the paddle just teleports, but I feel like the control scheme isn't that great with a touch pad. I just lose, or get into matches where I can just barely keep the back-and-forth going, and that's why I'm not sure I can recommend Shufflepuck Cantina. It's got charm and neat mechanics, good design ideas and tons of content, but if I can't get anywhere in it, I can't see any of it! Maybe adding a difficulty toggle between normal and casual? If that's what it needs for me to see the ending...

I would spend top dollar for a way to be able to win at this game.

Look at Need For Speed: Most Wanted

Besides most Mario Kart games and TrackMania, I don't play racing games. Maybe it's because, like sports games, they emulate reality on a level that I don't find fun, maybe it's because I'm terrible at them, maybe it's because my gaming time isn't something I can just share between every game in existence, having tried NFS:MW, I think there is pretty good stuff in today's driving games, even tho I can't help but feel like they're missing part of their potential audience.

What a map! There seems to be lots of things to do here!

The extra stuff is great, except...
A big thing about these games nowadays is asynchronous multiplayer, your friends beat races, you see their records, if you beat them you get experience. You see stats for pretty much every challenge in the game and you're always reminded that so and so did great and you should challenge them. You also have plenty of little challenges such as driving against traffic for 7 km or drifting a lot, and they give you experience also, you need these points to be able to drive against tougher opponents and then become the Most Wanted. You also gain experience and gear (tires, chassis, boost) for completing races in certain rankings, which is a nice idea and would encourage replayability to get everything, beat your scores until you have the best ones and beat all of your friends in the process.

In previous games it was called AutoLog, now it's the SpeedWall

That being said, there are a few problems with that system, first of all, I don't have many friends on origin and even if this was on Steam, I wouldn't have that much people playing NFS in there, so my lists of challenges and times to beat would be really short, which removes some of the fun of driving these maps. Another thing I found weird is that the challenges the game throws your way for extra exp don't work all the time. After doing the driving against traffic one, my Internet connection went down and that somehow was enough to prevent me from getting more challenges, why is this on a server?

...so?

How I would fix this
If your friend list is too small, this should pull from global leaderboards. Show you the people around your times and make you motivated to beat them and go up in exp and rank. I don't care if I'm beating my internet friend's scores or the scores of complete strangers, I'll still try to master the race until I get better at it to get up a few ranks until I can't do it anymore. There's not going to be office rivalry over this, but I'm not sure if I care.

And for the online issue, ironically a bit like sim city, leave the challenges offline, no need for a server to select what random thing I can do to gain more experience, it's as doable offline.

The game doesn't help
I'm really bad at NFS:MW. I crash and crash and crash some more, I can't do turns, I bump into everything, I get busted by cops, I miss jumps, I get frustrated then I stop playing. After crashing for the tenth time during the second race and being dumped back to 8th place yet again, I called it quits. At no point did the game stop and ask me if I wanted a tutorial on the basic concepts of how to play it, all they said was "Right Trigger for gas, Left Trigger for brakes, here you go". Alright, I understand that racing games aren't rocket science and that driving is pretty straightforward, but if I can't do it, why not take me back a little and show me some tutorials? Am I driving too fast? Do I need to brake to turn? What about drifting? Is there a way to avoid crashes? I seriously don't know.

Also, why are there cops so soon? I'm trying to get my handle on how to play the game and boom, car chase, I crash a few times then get busted.

Like my hopes of beating this game.

How I would fix this
Simply add some guides, some tutorials here and there. I've heard about other games with lines on the road to show you the best path you should take with different colors to tell you if you're going too fast and things like that, it would've helped me in that case. I tried my best and yet, couldn't get it.

There's a weird dichotomy with the style of game this is
As I see it, NFS:MW is a game where you do races multiple times to beat your friend's score, it's a game where crashes are not the end of the world - even tho I found them very frustrating - and it's a game where you constantly try to better yourself to get more exp, better gear from races and just beat the leaderboards.

Then why does everything take so much time? Why is the "crashed" animation unskippable? Why isn't there a way to quickly restart any race or event? I did try to beat a friend's score and there was nothing more annoying than having to go into a menu, select 'restart' then watch 5-10 seconds of loading before I could restart the race. Why not do it like TrackMania? You hit a button, the race starts anew. You hit a button, the 'crashed' animation ends and you're on the track again. Oh, I get it, the crashed animation is there to hide loading.

How I would fix this
Well, like I said... Give the players way to get back into driving, because I'm sure that if you're good at it, it's all you want to do.

I'm working on a game right now #1

Hello everyone, even though I have never successfully completed a big project, I'm always working on something in some capacity. Either my projects get scrapped because I stop caring or I get a better idea and start on that instead. Most of the time it's because of technical issues. Chronoscape, my big time-travel RPG I had to make to get my university degree, was mostly complete, engine-wise and feature-wise, but a huge number of bugs just discouraged me to continue working on it, ever. The kind of bug that comes seemingly out of nowhere and just crashes the game completly, I hate it, I wish I knew how to debug my code besides filling it with commands to write something to a console and figure out where it crashes. Buttman is also in this category, the game was probably half done but it was crippled with random errors.

Other projects such as G.R.I.N.D., my web grind-based RPG or my diablo clone I've started a few months back were scrapped because there was too much stuff I would have to do to make it work, I probably have trouble scaling my ideas for 1-man teams and inevitably, I hit walls that I can't reasonably clear alone, and decide to scrap that project.

I have completed some games, of course, a html5 tower defense, a little space shooter, 3d minesweeper, a chess rpg and a few card/board games, but they are very small projects. Of course, they're not without the 'quirks' that make my the kind of designer that I am. The tower defense game has classes and level-ups and skills, the space shooter has three skill trees, 3d minesweeper is a little thing I did in my spare time but basically it's minesweeper on a timer, each second is a different dimension of the grid, the chess RPG had weird ressource managemnt subsystems.

To say the least, I have a few core principles for my game ideas and I'll try to stick to them, whatever the game I'm making, be it a first person shooter, a card game or a casual facebook timesink, I would implement these two key concepts.

1 - Try to do something different, anything, have a mix of mechanics that you can't recall seeing.
All of my projects to this in some fashion. Generalpocalypse was going to be a mix of Fire Emblem, RISK and Advance Wars where you could produce and train individual units in small-scale battles to defeat opponents in specific scenarios. Chronoscape had 7 teams of 4 people in different time periods and you walked around in grid-based maps (that remind me of Etrian Odyssey's), fought enemies, solved puzzles, talked to people and changed things in other time periods depending on your actions. The battle system was kind of like dragon quest but you gained exp that you could place into your stats or skills to choose what to level. Also there was a difficulty system that improved enemy stats and AI.

The current game I'm working on is a turn-based RPG where you fight to get coins and use these coins to play minigames to upgrade your characters, later on you will be able to play other minigames to upgrade the minigames to upgrade your characters faster. I don't think I've seen that lately? I'm not too sure of the structure yet, so far my plan is for the minigames to be in a discrete menu, but maybe I'll just have them pop out randomly during battles like in wario ware.

2 - I love numbers, have all of the numbers, anything you can put numbers to, do it.
When I was a kid and played Link To The Past on the SNES, one of the first thing I did is create a table for damage values and imagined numbers would pop out whenever I hit enemies and grabbed hearts. I love numbers, stats, skills, achievements, progress bars, they're great. I try to have them everywhere. If I can think of a reason to have 6 different currencies in a game, I'll do it.

G.R.I.N.D. was all kind of numbers, you had these zones where you could fight enemies, after killing 10 enemies in one zone, you would be able to encounter 2 enemies at once, after 100 enemies, you could get 3 in the same fight, after killing an enemy 10 times, you'd get more info about it, same thing for 100, 1000, etc. That game also had a battle system such as the one in final fantasy 12 and each enemy could drop 10 different items, and you could get more drops by killing the enemy a lot.

I wouldn't be able to make a game without numbers or RPG elements. My space shooter had skill trees, my chess game had stats and level ups, I tried to make an endless runner and had to stop because there were too much content creeping in (you had to run over tiles to attack enemies). Even that one time where I tried to make a website, there were achievements you could get from browsing!

So yeah.
Would I love to finish Chronoscape? Generalpocalypse? Sure, I would, especially now that I'm using Unity, making games seems a bit easier, even tho I'm not an expert in C# yet. But right now I want to make that one game, I even have a design document for it! My problems right now is that I don't have much time to work on it, I should make more time. 

Also I have close to no artistic talent, maybe I can make art, maybe I can make music, but keep that in mind as I show some screenshots of my progress from week to week.

Imagine super mario rpg music playing over this

iLook at Ridiculous Fishing

Ridiculous fishing in a clamshell
You drop your line down the sea, you navigate carefully between fishes, you either hit fishes or go to the maximum depth you can go, then your line comes back up, during which you try to get as many fishes as you can, then they pop out of the sea and you hate to shoot them with guns to get money. You use that money to buy upgrades and you go to other maps with different fishes by catching different species. This is ridiculous fishing, and it's pretty good, almost perfect in the way that small games can be with their simplicity and amazing fun factor.

I love puns, and the fish-o-pedia is full of them

The style is great and the music is awesome, more notable is the lack of in app purchase, everything is already unlocked with no need to spend more money. You're going to spend time and effort to make the cash you need to progress but you always unlock new gear and new fishes to fish, it's always a little bit of a fun grind before the next thing.

You need to dodge fishes when you're going to the bottom of the sea.

I have some issue with the controls
I'm not a big fan of tilt controls when you want to carefully maneuver between obstacle and sometimes I feel like the control scheme of RF isn't the best it would've been. You need to tilt the ipad left and right to make the lure go down while you're dodging fish, then you need to tilt it again to go up while you're trying to get all of the fish (but not the jellyfish, it's true, they're worthless and will actively take money away from you) so it's a bit tricky at first. You get upgrades like a lure that drills down and electric items that kill stuff you bump into, but I've never felt like I could control carefully my lure as it went down and up. Some spots are easy enough but some are real mazes where jellyfishes form patterns that you have to avoid. Maybe a big left and right button on each side, you press on them to move in that direction?

Maybe if all sections were that easy I would have less trouble with the controls.

When you get all fishes above water, you have to shoot them, and they go flying in the sky and slowly fall down. If they hit the water, they're gone and won't give you any money. The screen will always focus on the fishes that are the closest to the sea so you can shoot them before they hit it. This becomes problematic when you have huge packs of fishes and a small number of heavier ones that will fall rapidly. Maybe they're worth nothing compared to the rest of your catch but the screen is going to focus on them and after a while everything else you've fished will follow in one big clump.

Like I said, get a bigger gun. Not a slow gun tho, they  are also frustrating then they miss.

Getting a bigger gun fixed this for me, but it doesn't occur every time, the fish composition needs to be a certain way for it to be a problem, so it's not a big deal, it's just frustrating when things go exactly the 'right' wrong way.

Trying to dodge jellyfishes but still get a huge batch of them is always ridiculous.

But these minor things aside, Ridiculous Fishing is ridiculous fun
The endless process of getting money to buy more things to get more money is something that fascinates me in video games and RF is really fun at doing what it does. Besides some minor weird story elements, the game is full of good style and ideas. Getting a screen full of pricey fishes zapped by a Tesla coil, shooting the catch of the day with dual miniguns, watching a flying fish go 800 meters in the sky, wearing a robe and a wizard hat, these are all things you can do in RF and I'll keep at it until I've catched them all.

Some of the items could have a more descriptive text blurb but they probably all do something.

Look at Sim City

At first it was a mess, game not unlocking for multiple hours, servers down, queues, weird error messages, being unable to play with friends, then they disabled the fastest speed and leaderboards/achievements, then a week passed... And now Sim City is playable, more or less free of server woes and other technical problems that have close to no bearing on core design discussions. Of course one could argue that the fact that Sim City needs to be always online is a core design problem but I think that by itself it wouldn't have been if the servers were on from the start with 0% errors and problems related to the technical issues.

This is the only time I'll show something related to technical issues, probably.

With that long intro paragraph about how the game itself is not playable and that technical problems shouldn't impact gameplay, what about the game then? Is Sim City fun? Yes. Is Sim City interesting? Also yes. Is it a good city simulation? Not at all.

They tried too hard to be two things: A toy and a simulation
How would I simulate employment for a city of 100.000 inhabitants in a videogame? I would take the number of jobs available and the number of people, if there are 100 000 jobs, it's all fine. Maybe add some complexity, like tiers of jobs and tiers of workers if you need it. How would I display that in a game? Probably not by showing all of those people go to their jobs because it would take insane resources to display all of that in a realistic fashion. Maybe it would be possible with 10 people, but Sim City tries to do everything I just talked about, no matter what you try to make as a city and it fails miserably. Everything tries to be simulated as a toy and it falls flat to do both.

It's not a great simulation because the engine couldn't support 'real' interactions between sims and their jobs/education/services. You would need to have your sims actually live somewhere and actually want to go somewhere else they precisely have to, like work or school. Their solution is to have them go to the first available spot by the shortest route and come back to the first available house. It's not a good toy and it's not a good simulation either. It's not a good toy because you can't make your sims do anything logically (they'll get stuck in weird loops, take high-traffic roads when free ones are available, complain about things that won't make sense) and you can't simulate the town logically either, because if your police coverage extends to a part of your city and a crime occurs there, maybe your police won't be able to get there in time because the actual cop car will be stuck doing loops on the highway.

These busses are looping on this small stretch of road forever.

Even worse is when EVERYTHING is working within this framework, power, water, sewage... It means that a little blob of electricity needs to go to every house for them to have power, no matter if you have tons of surplus or if your grid is well designed, if someone lives at a weird place where the roads are 'too complicated' for the game, they might not get power at all.

Why are these two spots without power?

How I would fix this
This is tough nut to crack, either by removing the toy part or the simulation part, but that would mean reworking the game and rebranding it, potentially. Removing the toy part seems the easiest way for me, you remove the need for actual sims to go to places. You still do it for show in a random fashion but you stop pretending that it matters to anything. Electricity won't need to go to places to actually power them, water and sewage the same thing, as long as you're connected to the grid and there's enough power, you're fine.

Removing the simulation part would mean renaming the game to "Sim Town" or something and then scaling down the size of your cities even more but making the actual sims more intelligent and realistic. It could be a neat idea to have a little city where each and every person has their own job and money and goes shopping and you need to balance everything out so everyone is happy, but you can also focus on the personal happiness of individual people so they get better at what they're doing and it makes your city grow in quality. Or something. Both ideas are fine to me, the first one would be to 'fix' Sim City, the other to make an actual great game with the GlassBox Engine

The data is bad
"Crime has the upper hand!" claims the police tab of my city, build more car cops and police stations, it says. I look at the numbers and they look something like 0 crimes perpetrated, 5 out of 5 criminals arrested. The crime map shows me that there are certain zones in the industrial sector that are more risky but they are well-covered by my police station. After a while I notice certain abandoned buildings show me 'Too much crime' as the reason why people left.

I'm not sure this is worth protesting over.

Same thing with zoning, they always are asking for more residential or industrial (I've never seen requests for more commercial, personally), I build more residential zones and I still get the flashing icon to remind me that I need more workers. Do I? Is that the simulation side of the game that's trying to warn me or the toy side that's trying to work within its limitations and is breaking around the edges? Not being able to act upon the given data because you're not sure if it's reliable feels terrible, I've stopped caring when my health system warns me of impending doom because no sims died and my clinics aren't even full capacity yet.

My city is NOTHING BUT residential and industrial zones.

Another instance where the data is bad occurs when you're trying to lay down stops for your schools buses or public transit, even if you cover the whole map with little stops and your whole grid is lit with coverage, even if you have bought the maximum number of buses, people will complain about long wait times and inefficient transit. 90% of the time this will be because buses are stuck somewhere and not because you have planned your city wrong. Why show that data if it's not used?

Which one is it? Is the data available lying to me?

There's also talk about how some very basic data is also flawed, meaning that the population represented by the game isn't the actual real number, more like a value inflated by a factor of 8. I'm not sure why they did that because the 'fake' people can't really contribute to your city in any way since they don't go to work or to stores, no?

How I would fix this
Show accurate data. Don't show ideal pie-in-the-sky data like you do currently. In my transit system example, instead of showing the 'theorical' coverage of your bus stops, show the actual one, then you'd see that buses only go to 3 stops and then spin around your city for no reason. Same for your fire coverage and police coverage, if the cops only do a small loop around the station then come back and only arrest criminals in that radius, don't show the whole town as covered, show only that small zone, then the player would know that there's a problem.

As for the zoning and population issues, I'm not sure exactly how they impact the game yet and making any suggestions would be unwise.

Always online multiplayer
Games that play fine in single player shouldn't need to be always-online, that's for sure, and Sim City is a weird case to call a 'MMO' like some people in the dev team did. With the small size of the regions it's not really massive and the player interactions are asynchronous at best. The idea that one city can send water and power to another and that shoppers can move back and forth is nice. The idea that you can send money to other cities or materials is also neat, but it's not explained properly how it works. Sometimes you send things to other cities and it never gets there so it's a net loss for everyone. Whenever the server glitches, you stop receiving water and/or power so if you rely on your neighbors too much it might bite you back.

The region view. Note that the numbers of population and money in the upper-left are wrong.

The fact that cities are saved in the cloud is also a double-edged sword when you get an error message and need to restart your city completely. Or that the servers are down - and of course it keeps working - but this isn't about the always-online technical part of Sim City but rather about the sacrifices you have to make for the game to work that way. Smaller towns, the inability to build everything inside one single city that should theoretically be offset by the fact that you're playing with multiple people and they're all contributing to big projects such as airports and archologies.

It doesn't work because you can't easily see what it's supposed to do and it's frustrating because it's the only choice you have. There's no big 'Multiplayer' panel in the UI that shows you what you're getting and sending and the money you get from your friends, there's no 'project' panel that shows the progress your archology is making in real-time. It's also weird that power and water from other cities aren't bound to the same rules as power and water from your own city, they just spread magically everywhere, it's not a big glob coming from your highway or anything.

If that other french city needs shoppers, why is there an arrow showing shoppers coming from there to my city?

Also I have some more confusion related to those systems, can your people really leave to work in other cities and vice-versa? In that case, why am I always asked to zone more residential? Couldn't people from other cities come visit mine to work there? It should fill any unemployed spots in my town. Couldn't you make a town mostly of residential zones and a town of industrial zones and connect the two without having any pop-ups about poor city planning? The game is supposed to be a multiplayer one, have it work that way or think about the steps that brought you there.

How I would fix this
Add an offline mode, increase the basic size of the cities, add more UI options in multiplayer to get info on what's going on, region-wise. Show all of the available data regarding to the multiplayer and how it's helping you, maybe then players wouldn't be too mad to play this game online if they knew what it gave them.

At least they got the splines right.

Closing words
All and all, Sim City is a thing that I might play from time to time if they fix some glaring problems with it like the way the roal tool is broken, or airport or other small things that are rather technical. That being said, I don't think that I'm going to buy any DLC they release for it and I'll never see the new Sim City as a deep simulation game, more as a pretty toybox.

iLook at Pixel People

Pixel People is as casual as they go in term of iOS games, you have two resources, one of them can be paid for with real money and is used to save you the most time, the other grows slowly over time. The visual style is pretty neat and there one some very interesting game mechanics in there that made me bite the bullet and play tons of it, ultimately tho, it fails a bit short of what I wanted from it.

Surprise! This is actually my Sim City review

There are three great ideas behind Pixel People
First of all, you can 'beat' PP, there is an endgame, and the goal of the game is to obtain all jobs by cloning previous jobs you've got together. You start with a few options (Mayor for instance) and when you clone mayor with itself, it might give you another job such as secretary, when you clone mayor and secretary, you get another job, secretary + secretary might give you one too. Whenever you create a new job, either you get a new building type or you send that character to work in one of your buildings you already have, netting you more money per second.

Lots of little jokes in the jobs and the character's names. Hey is that Mario as the plumber?

Of course, you don't have an infinite amount of people to assign jobs you, they take about 15 minutes to spawn (you can speed that up by spending utopium) if you have enough houses, which take space, space being the most limiting factor in this game.

Now you know if all of your buildings are working at the same time.

The second great idea is that buildings can do things, things simple like telling you how much money you're earning per second to letting you pay a 1.99$ IAP to get double duration for your buildings, from telling you another clone mix you haven't figured out to letting you build roads and parks, it's interesting to see these new little features pop here and there when you place another building in your city.

Buildings produce money for fixed periods of time, by taping on them you restart that timer, this upgrades the timers to last twice as long.

The third thing is the fact that you can get utopium without paying money at a... let's say reasonable rate. You can plan trees that randomly give coins or utopium (but you have a 25u per day limit, no matter how many trees you have), you get utopium everyday from a mine, you get some from achievements, from looking at the credits and from random gifts your citizens give you when you fill hearts (more on that later), so it's possible to unlock utopium-related buildings and upgrades by never spending any money, which is fine.

However...
For all the thing this game does well, there are a few problems that make me less excited to boot up the game even now.

First and foremost, the building novelty wears off pretty quickly, your first few buildings have features attached to them and that's exciting, but then large chunks of what you're building is only used to make money and the feeling of joy you get from being able to build something new isn't there anymore. These buildings are boring, they take space and all they do is make money. I know it would've been a bit difficult to find a new use for all buildings but I'm sure it would be doable. And then I'd be happy to have new buildings to place.

Most of the buildings are like that, bland.

Additionally, there's not much to do in the game. After a while of not playing, you start up the game and have to tap on all your buildings so they start making money again, then... Well, if you have trees, you can wait for those to be ready to harvest - why isn't there a building for auto-harvesting trees? - but mostly, you're going to fill hearts. I love how there's a building that reduces the number of hearts you need to fill to get a surprise and another building that allows you to pay 2.000.000 coins to get a surprise instantly. The process of getting these hearts is boring, you wait until there's a heart above one of your houses, you tap on that house then hold a button until a heart is filled. When you have 11 hearts, you get a surprise that can be a random animal, utopium or money.

Hold the love

Finally, things get out of hand way too fast. You need to buy more space using your coins but the costs increase in the tens of millions pretty fast, then you need to let the game run forever before you can upgrade your city size. And size is everything in Pixel People, you can't place new houses if you don't have space - houses can hold from 2 to 6 people and if you want houses that take less space, they cost utopium to build - you can't clone new jobs that require you to place buildings, you can't plan trees nor decorations.

The decorations themselves are cool because they raise 'Spirit' for your town which gives you discounts on building time and expansion costs, still they are insanely pricey and I'm at almost 40% discount. Building more decorations would take up more space and I'm not sure I would win time that way. Casual games are time sinks, I know, but I wish this one would've been a little more.

More land, more money, more problems indeed, Pixel People

Look at Defender's Quest

Defender's Quest: Valley of the forgotten is a tower defense with light RPG elements that intrigued me as soon as I saw the screenshots. I love tower defense games and I have sunk countless hours into classics such as Gemcraft and Defense Grid so I decided to try this one to see if it was any good. And it is! Not perfect, of course, but full of neat little ideas.

Apparently there's a new game+ in this. Maybe I'll go for it.

The basic concepts are solid

The flow of this game goes like this, you travel on a world map and pick a level. Then you select what difficulty you want to fight the level and see what kind of enemies you will face and what rewards you get. Usually you need to beat the level on casual or normal to get to the second level, then you have additional challenges like 'hard' and 'lunatic' where the waves are tougher, the enemies are different and you get more scrap (the currency), more experience and special items for beating the level.

Only beating the levels is not enough most of the time, you need to do it perfectly, which means that no enemy can hit your librarian at the end of the maze. It's challenging and you won't be able to beat the harder difficulty before you level up your party and get better gear, so there are good reasons to do levels multiple times when you've progressed a bit.

Here's the map, you see what levels you have perfected (gold stars) and finished imperfectly (blue stars)

The basic tower defense structure is there. You start with PSI energy which you can use to place units and cast spells. Different units have different costs (from 25 to 100) and can be upgraded four times each. You actually have a party that you upgrade and equip with different skills and items and you summon the actual units. It's not like you have an endless supply of archers or fighters, you have six of each class maximum and you can buy more at towns on the world map for increasing costs.

All of your characters gain experience individually to unlock new skills or improve them.

Then the waves start coming and all of the enemy types you're expecting are there, and there some. Armored enemies that can soak up huge amounts of damage unless their armor is destroyed, enemies cloaked in darkness that have 75% to dodge all attacks unless they are hit by light spells, enemies that split into more faster enemies, enemies that attack your characters in melee or ranged.

Because in DQ, your characters can die and have to be resummoned, that's why there's a healer class and armor for your party. Speaking of upgrades, it's important to level up your characters using the PSI you get from slain enemies because the abilities they can use is tied to their in-battle level. Let's say you have a level 25 character with five skills, he won't be able to use his second skill until you level him up to 2, same for his third skill and so forth, maybe that's a bit convoluted.

Some interesting skill trees for your characters here and there.

This being said, the per-character stuff feels too much
I would've been 100% for this game if the customisation and skills were per class and not per-character. Right now if you have 6 character classes and most classes have upwards of 6-10 skills. Each skill has a maximum level of 8 and some of them are used only to boost other skills or to passively boost your character. Additionally, if you don't use a class much (knights and dragons come to my mind) you simply won't buy more of them for your party and never see these skills in action.

Even if I could afford Brestor, I'm not sure I would buy him/her/it

More importantly, it gets hectic into battles. You have a clear view of your party and you can pause the game at any time - or slow it down to half speed - but I feel like I'm always using my highest-level characters first and my lowest-level units last, which means that if there's a skill that I only have on one of these low-level units, I'm not going to see it very often. It also means that most skills are difficult to judge. If I have my six archers out, which one is doing the most damage? Which one is piercing armor? Which one is poisoning enemies? It's especially important if you're trying to place units that can soak up damage first in line so enemies attack them.

More so in level with multiple lanes, you sometimes need to spread yourself thin and having to decide which lane gets which unit can sometimes be a process where you make mistakes because the knight you dropped on the lane with the armored enemies doesn't have any armor-piercing abilities but your other knight does.

I'm not too sure what's going on!

How I would fix this
Lump all units of the same class together - still keeping the limits on how you can summon per map - have the units level a bit faster so they get more skill points and make the weapons/armors a bit weaker so you need better ones to outfit your six units. That way you know what your units do, each unit is similar in power and abilities. It removes a small layer of micro-management but I think it would speed up things a little.

All and all, I really enjoy Defender's Quest
I love unlocking things, I love leveling things, I love trying different strategies with my characters and my spell usage and I love having a battle on fast-forward go really well because my archers are shooting all kinds of arrows. If you like tower defense games, you should treat yourself to some Defender's Quest

Even when you thought you were done, there are special challenges that grant you tomes for your librarian with some special abilities.

iLook at King Cashing 2

Hey there people, starting today on Wednesdays I'll be taking a smaller look at iOS games because I actually play tons of these! They also have less mechanics than 'full' games so these looks might be shorter.

I was a big fan of King Cashing 1, the idea of random (and randomness-based) battles combined with some customisation and a little bit of grind here and there appealed to me, so when I heard that they were releasing a new one, I downloaded it and dove in. Three days later, I think I have a good idea of what I like, what I dislike and ultimately what design ideas make KC2 a game that I enjoyed very much.

All of the ideas from KC1 are back with a vengeance
Basically, you equip different units and weapons and bonuses then play a slot machine game until you defeat your opponent or run out of cherries (each spin costs 3 cherries), you need to match either a unit or a weapon with an enemy on a single line to deal damage, and each unit/weapon has some special attributes that helps you defeat your enemies. You then get gold, experience and random loot to progress, you use the experience to level and unlock new passive abilities and the gold is used to buy things and to fight (you need to pay a fee before you can fight an enemy, so sometimes you might need to grind lesser enemies to fight a big one)

Of course, enemies have also weaknesses and resistances and sometimes very annoying special abilities such as destroying your units/items when they hit or blocking damage. Some special enemies yield special rewards if you defeat them with items they're strong against, and some are special challenges.

I really liked how different units did different things, the gunner deals extra splash damage with guns, the potions deal various effects such as damage over time and adding more enemies to the reel, but my favorite class this time around is the necromancer with the ability to create more units whenever he hits, creating two more powerful ones when he critical hits enemies. Better than that, some of his units create copies of themselves whenever they hit! A great way to turn the odds in your favor. My strategy evolved as I progressed into the game.

Lots of customization with cool effects. I usually went for high hit rates more than damage personally.

I don't care much about the art style
The comic book style of this game is pretty neat but there's something that rubs me the wrong way about the design of certain characters, I'm not going to knock the game much for it because it doesn't affect great gameplay but there's just something that bothers me.

I don't know if it's the style as a whole or certain characters but they make me queasy.

A great game that I wish I could play more
Sadly, the game ends after three chapters right now, I wish there was more! I grinded a bit after I've defeated the last boss, but the 'coming soon' on chapter four is making me wish in a way that they would've waited to release the game so I would've continued playing it. What if I miss the next update? King Cashing 1 felt longer, even if I'm not sure it actually was. Maybe it was because of the way the game was presented, a long list of enemies to fight instead of a comic with story elements.

I would've waited another two months if I would've been able to just continue playing. Which is a good thing!

About the medals...
By winning fights, you get graded on how fast you killed the enemy and if you get silver medals in some pages of the comic book, you can fight a special enemy. You also get reduced costs to fight the same enemy if you get a better medal, making it free completely for gold ones. There is otherwise no incentive to get gold medals - besides bragging rights - and anything would have been a nice touch, maybe a special store where you spend gold medals to get special items? I'm not too sure.

You unlock secret fights by getting medals and usually they're pretty tough

Additionally, a small number to tell you how many turns you have left before you get graded a lower medal would've been neat, at the end of the game I could more or less guess it - usually when I'm down to 6 cherries it's going to switch to silver - but at the beginning when I was trying hard to get the gold medals, I would've appreciated it.

And finally, about the random luck that binds everything
I'm not sure if it's a 'right' way to play King Cashing 2, but I usually start the reels and then either close my eyes and press randomly or just mash the stop button to make it stop as soon as possible. Maybe there's a way to carefully stop each reel to perfectly do what you want with the game but for the number of times I spun that slot machine, it would have been madness to do it every time.

Just mashing randomly still wields interesting results with that many weapons in the second reel.

Some way to just randomly stop the reels after they've started would've been nice, maybe a toggle that you can set to 2-4 seconds or something, it wouldn't hinder the randomness of the game but make it go a bit faster.