Dev Log For April 30th 2013

Look at EVE Online

I've heard stories about EVE Online, stories about crazy schemes and wars and how you could do anything, be anything, as long as you invested the time (and sometimes money) in it. This is all very interesting, of course, but trying the game myself was something I needed to do and I understand some of it after a weekend of playing it, but it's not for me, it's quite boring, to be frank, full of seemingly useless systems and confusing progression. Is EVE an MMO? Probably, but not a World of Warcraft style MMO. I'd rather play one of these, they have less freedom in them, but everything you might be able to do is easily understood.

Here's my character, Poik Doubleoseven, I didn't know you COULD have characters!

This is a bit confusing...
I'm quite surprised that the tutorials in EVE are functional as they are. They explain most of the basic stuff, warping around, shooting down enemies, using the UI, then quests will teach you how to mine, manufacture, scavenge, use your skills, hack, analyze, scan (using drones and a weird scanning mini-game where you place orbs in space to track specific things) and refine ores into materials. This is all fine and good and I've understood how to outfit my mining ship with a few lasers, drones, expanded cargo hold capacity and go asteroid hunting in 0.6 space to try and find things to sell.

I wish I could add 6 mining lasers on this baby

But that's it. I've made about 10 million ISKs in a few hours and that's not too bad (if you need about 500 000 000 to buy a 30-days game pass) but I have absolutely zero idea of what to do now. There is no comprehensible guide to professions that would be direly needed. What should I spend my money on right now? What's my next goal? Do I need to wait until I can afford a better mining laser? Mine away until one of my skills is at level 4? Get ship X, Y or Z? Should I sell my ore as-is or refine it to something else and then build things to sell them? I didn't have any kind of info like that, left to ask other players or browse the internet. For the sake of my own look at this game, I've decided not to.

All these windows are confusing

How I would fix this
Add more tutorials. I know that CCP wants this game to be a breathing, living, evolving game with player-ran economies and things like that, but better surfacing progression would help tons. Having a little box with recommended build paths for certain professions (even adding estimated money required to do it and the money you can make by using the suggested gear) would've helped me want to keep playing, because as of right now, I just didn't know what would be better, how much of an upgrade it would be, and what my end-game was.

...but very interesting
I have nothing against EVE, it's really an interesting game that exists since forever and I'm sure that being part of a large corporation working towards some goals (At this point I don't know what corporations can do in this game) and fighting in massive space battles can be amazing. I'm a solo player and I don't like fighting others, so these things maybe aren't for me and being a space miner/trucker sounded like a plan for me. Exploration was too risky and scouting would've been useless by myself. The skill system is well realized, with skills continuing to level even when you're offline (even tho I wish they would be more upfront with the uses of the skills) but without a clear goal in mind, I can't continue playing it.

Warp 10!

Travel is kind of a chore because you need to use jumpgates and warp everywhere and using autopilot kinda slows things down. I'm sure you can get faster ships (the little 327m/s I had was too slow for sub-warp travel) and upgrade your autopilot,, but for the part I've played, it was quite difficult to get from point A to B. Also the game is very annoying about containers and the things you put in them. You have to drag and drop your ore from your ship to the station before you can refine/use it even tho you're right there. Same thing with quest items and rewards, you need to put them into your ship because they're given to you in the station. The number of times I had to warp back somewhere because I forgot an item (because they gave it to me in the 'station' container, not in my ship). That could be done a little better, at least on the manufacturing/refining side of things.

All and all, EVE Online is not for everyone, it's very much a spreadsheet in space (even if the graphics are okay) and what you want to do in it determines how much time you'll have to spend. It is probably also a better game to play socially with help from pros and tutorials open left and right. That being said, it's not for me. Looking at MMOs can be too much sometimes and I don't have suggestions for many of the points I'm raising and that's because too much of this game hangs on so many systems that it becomes too much for me.

Space is pretty

iLook at Nameless: The Hackers RPG

I feel like there's a trend with iOS games that I'm unsure about. The trend of having subpar core mechanics but really great fluff, random loot, leveling systems, skill trees and collectibles are added to games with weak gameplay loops. Nameless: The Hackers RPG is one of these games, I love everything around it but the main thing you do in it - fighting in turn-based battles - is poor. Also the anime style is not what I'd like in that kind of game but that's not relevant, design-wise.

Stealing energy is vital if you want to use your abilities

Let's jump right into it, the battle system is confusing
You control up to four characters and they can have up to six skills each, some with clear uses (stealing energy, healing, stunning enemies) some with overlap (basic attack skills with comparable costs and no different effects) and some are just plain obviously better (big damage attacks), it's not clear whether the game wants you to fight different enemy types in a different way but basically you can win most fight by stealing energy and using the strongest attacks you have.

Tons of numbers pop out and you're not sure if you're doing the right thing, but most battles can be won by stockpiling healing items and going all-out. You have some stats but they barely matter when some moves are plainly better at dealing damage than other, making them de-facto choices.

I would fix this by either adding cooldowns to the strongest moves and removing the concept of energy, or implementing some kind of rock-paper-scissor system where some types of moves are stronger against certain defenses and weaker against others and vice-versa, that would give you reasons to use different attacks instead of spamming that one with the huge numbers.

I leveled everything, just because

Leveling all of these skills is a bit underwhelming too
You start with some skills and can unlock more in the store, then you need to pay ByteCoins and research points to level them up, they get stronger, have more chances to work and sometimes cost more energy, like I said about the combat system, it feels a little weird to level them all, even tho that's the thing you probably should do. Leveling one attack skill over another is a trivial choice - both of them are going to be equally useful.

Besides skills, you can buy healing items that will help you win most fights and bonuses that last a few real-life minutes, they're useful, but not essential.

Cities will give you item, quests and flavor text

Moving around is boring
The way the world map is set up isn't the best, moving around to pick random fights and buy items would've been done from a menu. A list of fights and cities, with a big button for the shop would've worked perfectly. Instead what you have is a map where you can scroll around and zoom in/out for some reason (why zoom in? There are no details anywhere).

A list would make much more sense, have one button be the next story mission, another button be random fights, another button for the shop and another one to visit cities, no need to move around a world map for the little flavor it adds to the game.

One luck, that's right.

I really love the card system
For winning fights, completing quests and story missions and plainly available in the store, you get cards that increase some of your stats. Each card has some flavor text on it and you can get 4 rarities of cards, the rarer the card, the more stats on it. You can reroll the stats on these cards by spending BC or RP, and have a chance to get a better version of that card, you can also upgrade them after fights, and these cards are the better way this game offers to make your characters stronger.

All and all, N:THRPG is a neat little game with a few good ideas and some so-so execution. It also goes pretty quickly, so if you're a fan of turn-based RPGs, you might wanna check it out.

Pick a card, any card.

Look at Starcraft 2: Heart of the Swarm

I didn't review Starcraft 2 for two reasons, one is because I wasn't writing this blog when it came out and two because the review would have went like this: Starcraft 2 is an almost exact copy of the first starcraft game with better graphics (expected), a dumber story (expected) and almost no change at all because the game needs to be playable competitively by people who played Starcraft 1 for ages (also expected), I wouldn't have much more to say, you build SCVs, you gather minerals, you spawn marines and you shoot guys. Or you make zerglings, or you spawn more pylons. What about this new expansion then?

I think Blizzard is creatively bankrupt
And that's not true for 100% of the game but I have a really bad opinion on some parts of this RTS juggernaut. I won't comment on the story or on the scientist that's obviously a Mordin Solus ripoff, or on how predictable the story is, nor can I comment on the multiplayer, which I assume is almost identical to the original Starcraft 2, neither will I talk about how the story is cliched and ridiculous.

Nothing but the best

This is kinda Warcraft 3
Kerrigan is a Hero from Warcraft 3, she gets stat bonuses while leveling up, is stronger than most units, gets special abilities and you need her to accomplish most of the objectives when she's present. Maybe she's a bit too powerful, because there are a few missions here and there that I've beaten by defending my base with normal units and just destroying the opposition with Kerrigan alone. This breaks a little the RTS aspect of the game because then it plays like some bad action rpg and you get a message telling you that your base is under attack. My base was never defended well enough or built enough because all I needed was kerrigan and a handful of units.

Some of the upgrades had me raising an eyebrow too, most of Kerrigan's skills were classic tropes of the genre, attacks that hit multiple targets, having more HP and regeneration, being able to heal, jump on enemies, stun then... Then you get the weird base boosting skills, like Overlords spawning instantaneously and drones spawning in pairs, improved vespene extractors and the like... What does that have to do with Kerrigan? There's a whole section about upgrading your units, why not put these options there? Did they run out of ideas of things to add to Kerrigan?

It's like if Thrall had an ability to make Peons chop wood faster...

How I would fix this
Make Kerrigan either stronger or weaker. Making her weaker would mean that she's a unit (Like Jim Raynor often was) with better stats and some abilities, but not a skill tree and levels and things like that. Maybe you could keep everything and just lower her stats so she's better than everything you have, but not by a large margin and couldn't win in a 1v5 situation. Making her stronger would mean adding abilities that strenghten her instead of your base/army. Life draining on hit would work, being able to resist more damage would also be a nice ability, anything to improve her survivability a little would make her even more usable. That would change the way the game works even more, pushing more focus on how you use Kerrigan.

This is too much Diablo 3
Some parts of the game are just weird and toothgrindingly bad. I really don't want boss fights in my RTSes, and I want boss fights where you have to manually move your units around so they dodge attacks even less. Early on, there's a dropship boss that fires bombs in a line, then you fight three zerg bosses, one of which charges into walls (and there's a line to tell you where to dodge!) another boss breathes fire...

If I'm talking about a boss in a blizzard game that takes place in a huge C-shaped arena with the boss in the concave section of the C, that the boss has two main modes of attack, one of which is to slam his arms on the field with warning signs to help you dodge and that his other attack is a breath that he sweeps across the area, what does that make you think about?

Good guess.

Nope! It's some kind of zerg boss thing! You even get the life bar and the different attack patterns for the smash attack as the fight goes on! It's pretty terrible. At this point, I was ready to stop playing Heart of the Swarm because this is the same exact thing.

I wonder if there's a World of Warcraft boss like this

How I would fix this
Remove all of this boss fight nonsense. Bosses in Starcraft games have higher HP and attack and armor and maybe you have to defeat them on a timer and they might be able to bring reinforcements in or move around checkpoints and things like that but they're not dodge-based nor they should stay there, only showing warnings of where they're going to attack before slowly restarting their attack pattern. That's an action RPG thing, not a RTS thing, and it's lazy to use one in the other.

The actual real time strategy is okay even if it repeats too much
Otherwise, the changes they've made over the original Starcraft 2 are interesting. You get three choices of upgrade for your units with minor changes, such as attack speed, range, armor, and the like which you can always change between missions if you don't like what you've picked.

These upgrades are noticeable but in a minor way.

You also get maps where you experiment with two types of units (let's say, two kinds of zerglings) both of them with very different abilities, such as jumping around, slowing enemies on hit, splitting into two after exploding, burrowing and firing heavy attacks and other things like that. After you've completed the mission, you choose which evolution you take and the other is discarded.

The other kind of upgrade, makes a big difference but you can't roll them back.

And otherwise the gameplay is very similar to the old Starcraft 2 game and that's perfectly fine. However, I felt that this time around, there are way more missions with timers on them. You get new units almost each level but you don't have time to try them out because there's always something happening in five minutes that you have to stop and you just lose if it happens, one mission it's about doors closing, then gas, then nukes, then kerrigan dying for no good reason. I don't mind one or two missions with timers here and there, but not more than that, I don't like timers in my games in general.

Oh no Kerrigan is gonna die in 4 minutes or something!

How I would fix this

Well, remove some of the timed elements, add them to the optional parts of the levels or to achievements, but don't rush me, I want to build my base as big as I want and make 200 worth of mutalisks and then obliterate the enemies. Maybe removing some of the random attacks on your base, also (There's a strike squad coming to attack the hive cluster!!!) because if you give me a powerful unit to micromanage, I'm not going to care much about building defenses and spawning more overlords.

iLook at Super Stickman Golf 2

I don't have much of an opinion on golf games in general but I've heard good things about Super Stickman Golf 2, so I gave it a shot. It's a very quirky golf game where the stages are setup to make you use your powerups carefully to get good scores. The stuff around the core game - level up system, equipment, challenges - is also pretty neat and difficult and getting everything is taking quite some time.

Welcome to the world of Stickman Golf 2

Okay, the level up system and hats are mostly irrelevant
You get different golfers and they don't do anything besides cosmetic changes, you also get access to new courses, but that could be unlocked after you beat the previous ones. Why is there an exp system? You get experience when you beat levels, with bonuses baked in for getting gold stars and not using powerups and things like that, but all and all, it's pretty much useless.

Even the hats, most of them don't do anything useful, having blood water won't help anything and slower moving power meter will not matter much, at worst it'll be a nuisance.

I'm level 7! Okay? Also I have some hats.

How I would fix this?
Why not give meaning to the levels? You could have variable power levels depending of your level (starting with weak shots then being able to do stronger ones) also accuracy, number of power-up uses, strength of some power-ups, who knows! The list of potential stats that could get better are limitless.

Nothing pro with that.

Not sure why I would buy that
You can also buy a few things with real money, such as an experience doubler, but as you might know already, I fail to see why you would buy it for the low value of actual experience in the game. The other things are multiplayer matches and a little meter to show you how strong you hit the previous shot. Weird, that could've been part of the main package...

Why is there money in that machine?

Also, hats, you unlock them with a lottery system much like Super Smash Brother Brawl and the trophies, the more money you wager, the more chance you have to get a new hat. It's a neat carrot because the hats have at least, SOME uses.

You might have to do some tricky shots and lose a few strikes to get these dollars!

You get money for tons of things, achievements give you money, you can find money in the courses - and getting them all will give you a bonus - and some random challenges also appear to give you a few buxs. I usually try to do them because they are basically related to the number of shots you need to do to win the level.

This goal had me hit a birdie.

Otherwise, the game itself is pretty good
You move a line with virtual arrows then a power meter fills and drains until you hit the shot, then the ball flies around, hitting hazards, water, pits, sand and much more. You do that until you get to the green, then your only choice is to putt the ball very gently. Which means that if you wanted to do some tricky shot to get somewhere and fell on the green, too bad, you rarely can get out of it.

No way to get that dollar now. I'm stuck on the green.

Most levels have a recognizable design; there are a few ways to get to the hole, one of them will take few shots but is trickier to manage, the other is more easy but will take more hits. Sometimes you'll need special abilities (such as sticking to walls, freezing water) to navigate the shorter routes and sometimes you'll just need to aim good. And it's hard to know where and how far your shot will go, maybe some kind of pointer would've been nice?

The multiple routes way is very obvious here.

Look at Scribblenauts Unlimited

Scribblenauts Unlimited is fantastic, charming and very interesting. That makes for a very good review if you're into that kind of game but a poor way for me to look at it and suggest things that could be improved. I usually am very nitpicky when I look at games because my goal here is basically to play armchair game designer and say 'well maybe I would've tightened up the graphics on level 11!' but if the game is all fine and good, it's a bit hard to do.

This is my first scribblenauts experience and it's lovely
The game is quite simple, you go to different locales and help people with whatever they need by typing in words to create things. If someone needs a way to dispose of garbage, you can create a black hole, if someone wants to destroy an old building, you can create a bulldozer, or a bomb, or a nuke. A kid is sad, you can create a clown or give the kid a cake or what-have-you. It's all very charming.

I've fed a cannibal to another cannibal. He liked it.

If you're stuck on any puzzle, extra hints appear after a while. The game isn't very hard, you can see the whole map with a different overlay that tells you where you need to go to solve more problems, you can travel everywhere pretty easily with the map (and a jetpack if you summon one!) and so far I haven't died much and even if you do, it's pretty inconsequential. This is a puzzle game so the ease of getting to the puzzles and the creativity you can use to solve them is commendable.

After you collect enough starlites you unlock more areas

You get starlite shards from beating little puzzles and complete starlites for longer multi-step puzzles (that are basically a bunch of little puzzles) and after you're done with an area, you move on to your map. Maybe I found it a bit easy to get enough starlites to unlock the next zone, but since I was going to beat 100% of the puzzles, it might be expected that I get much more than needed.

In any case, Scribblenauts Unlimited is a great game with very little flaws, and I'm going to talk about them briefly.

There are a bunch of little puzzles related to each other

However, it's not making me think much and it's stuck to its ideas
The puzzles aren't very difficult, that's true, and they have multiple solutions. In the Dinner Service one for instance, a guy wants food to make him grow bigger and stronger. I gave him spinach both times (when I played it originally, and when I came back to take that cannibal screenshot) and it worked both times, as it was a good answer. There are 'easy' answers for all puzzles, I feel like, and the game doesn't go out of it's way to make you be creative.

A flag?

How I would fix this
Add another kind of reward, call it meta-starlites or moonlites or what have you and give them when you redo puzzles you've done before by using different kind of words. I'm sure there are very clever answers for some of the things the designers created but they're not really important as it is right now. Why not have some special mode where you can take each puzzle individually and try to 'find' everything that would be a good answer?

Another thing is that the puzzles have predefined solutions and it's kind of a bummer sometimes when you solve the puzzle and it does something completely different. In the following example, I was told to help protect a student against balls for a dodge-ball match. Using my imagination, I wrote 'forcefield' to protect him, and it worked, but all I got in the end was the student wearing a helmet. I suppose that 'helmet' was also a good answer, but I wish they would've given my forcefield to the kid.

That's not what I've given you!

How I would fix this
I agree that it would take much work to make all solutions 'work' when they are correct, but the way Maxell (the main character) can wear pretty much everything and ride rideable objects should apply also to NPCs, so the kid would've been able to ride that forcefield, no?

I've made a game? GridDrill!

*****DOWNLOAD LINK HERE!*****

Hey there people! I've worked on this about... 30-40 hours? Six to eight hours a day for about five days? This sounds about right. It's not much and I've wasted some time here and there. Already I know what to criticize about this project, lack of direction and maybe lack of balance?

Don't worry it's not that bad I swear

Well I'm not sure about that, it's hard to know how to balance things without people to try it out, I could probably fine-tune it myself but I'd rather have people play it first to see how things go from there. Please do send me your feedback, please? poik007@gmail.com is an address you can write at! Or my platformers.net account, or my twitters!

All the upgrades are pretty self-explanatory except "Teleport", press up to use it, it costs oil.

I also know that the graphics aren't great and that the music and sound effects were stolen from other places, if I had more time/talent/knowledge I would probably remake the music and maybe think about a better style of graphics, in my head I had nice pixel art stuff but now this looks like random ms paint stuff, which it is!

This would probably work nicely as a phone game also, it's simple and in-app-purchases friendly!

FEATURE LIST

• Pretty casual gameplay, you try and drill down the grid to find the treasure
• 2 endings
• 130+ upgrades (some of which are useful)
• 100 missions (some of which are actually beatable)
• 80 levels procedurally generated that I can't 100% say they would work but there's not a big penalty for death so it's not a big deal right now

Also the music was stolen from

• Dig-Dug
• Super Mario World
• Earthbound
• Jurassic Park on the Gameboy
• Mass Effect
• Spelunker

Patch Notes

• V0.1 : Added a button to go back to the help screen because I guess it's helpful?
• V0.2 : Various balance changes! Now you have more oil when you view endings! You also lose less oil when drilling/moving sideways, upgrades are less costly and you get more money by completing missions!
• V0.3: Changed all the graphics!
• Now you need key(s) to unlock the last row and find the treasure!
• Added a description for all the skills!

Dev Log For April 12th 2013

Dev Log For April 11th 2013

Dev Log For April 10th 2013

iLook at Slayin

iOS games are very interesting because they can do microtransactions and try all kinds of business models to get things to the player and get money in return. Slayin is kind of squandering that opportunity even tho it would be very easy to implement hooks here and there so the player has the incentive to spend some money to get things in return. That being said, the gameplay loop is too simple and short as of right now for me.

Pretty simple game and kinda addictive too, if it wasn't that tough...

Everyday I'm slayin'
You have a huge virtual controller (I like it) and you move left and right, using the button to jump (if you're the knight or the knave) or turn into a tornado (if you're the mage). Basically, if enemies hit your body, you take damage, if you hit them with your weapon, they die in one-hit and the mage can turn into a tornado to defeat enemies. You get gold as you kill them and the gold heals you a little, you can use that to buy things at a shopkeeper that appears randomly, better weapons for the knight increase your range and attack speed, the mage gets spells that are cast after a while of not attacking and the knave gets more gold on kills.

As you kill enemies, you go up in levels and after ten levels, a boss appears, the boss fights are kinda sluggish and slow, during normal levels you just kill everything in sight and dodge left and right, during bosses (especially the first one which you have to wait for it to run at you and jump over and hit him, like 8 times) the style is slower, it breaks momentum.

The second boss is kinda bad too, the third and fourth one are a little better...

Then after a while because there's too much stuff on the screen, you die.

No glory nor fame
After dying, you get Fame that can be used to 'buy' 'new things'. I'm saying it like that because there's not much to buy. You have to unlock the mage and the knave (and the knave plays pretty much like the knight so it's kind of a bad deal) and everything else is more or less cosmetic.

I don't want to spend my fame on skins, also hello iOS volume control.

I know this might sound weird but I wish the game tried to sell me a fame doubler or even a coin doubler. As of right now, all you can buy with real money is fame and I don't buy consumables, especially if they serve almost no purpose. Fame could be used to buy upgrades for your characters, having them start with more powerful weapons or armor (the fighter's armor acts as another HP bar, the mage lets him cast spells faster and the knave gets more gold) or buy longer HP bars, anything to make the game easier. I don't know how many levels there are (There's a game mode that starts at level 80 so I never got close to the end) but there's no improving your character by playing more.

Missions to complete but for what end?
There are also missions that you can beat to get more fame and of course, I'm trying to beat them because that's what you do with missions, but the fame rewards aren't really compelling me to continue doing so. Maybe if there was more to do with fame, like I said before.

Too bad two of the characters play exactly the same.

Dev Log For April 9th 2013

Dev Log For April 8th 2013

Look at EvoLand

EvoLand is a small indie project that was greenlight to Steam talking about 'the story of the evolution of RPGs'. I liked the idea so I decided to take a look at it. I love games where you evolve through concepts by way of unlockables and I love RPGs, and EvoLand scratched both those itches with varying degrees of success.
Some important parts of the RPG history are skipped

If not for the weird one-dimensional field, this reminds me of Link's Awakening

The game opens up with a monochrome kind of one-dimensional system where you can only walk right to open a chest that unlocks the ability to walk left. Walking left unlocks 2d proper, but I was left a bit confused by that whole sequence. What RPG is there that you could only walk right? Or only walk left and right in a single line? Which part of the history of games is that supposed to cover? Even the old zelda game was 2d. The style shown here is the old gameboy style, but even then, I'm not sure what game this is supposed to make me think of.

I feel like the game has skipped something.

You then walk along, unlock various chests (most of them have mechanics and systems locked inside of them, the others have stars and cards (used to play a triple triad-like game)) and after less than ten minutes, you unlock 16-colors then 32. Like that. Without going over the NES area of RPGs, nor exploring the 16 colors world a bit more. You get a sword and it plays like the old zelda games, except that you die in one hit and are kicked back at the title screen until you unlock having hearts.

Looks like gameboy advance

Later on, the game becomes 3d but keeps 2d gameplay, even for the zelda segments, Zelda 64 was a big point in gaming history and it added important concepts such as Z-targeting so I would've loved to see it touched a bit.

Everything is in 3d, except the gameplay.

How I would fix this
Add a little interlude with final fantasy 1-style graphics and music, this is a distinct era of games where you could easily recognize things as such. Maybe a little nod to zelda 64 would've worked too, I know it's not that easy to make that kind of game but if you're going to pay an hommage to playstation 1 rpgs, I think nintendo 64 hits are fair game.

The fun of EvoLand is in the unlocking and the progression...
...not in the actual gameplay. You alternate between zelda-style adventure sections in which you have to solve puzzles by lighting torches and pushing things on switches and killing enemies. That part is okay even tho the swordplay is a bit clumsy and the dungeons can drag on too long. The really fun thing about the game is the chests that grant you new concepts such as having an inventory or NPCs to talk to, not really falling into a whole, dying, then having to restart a dungeon at the last save point.

Active time battle is the best system. Okay, maybe I like the LMB system better.

The RPG parts are a bit better but they are too slow, your mage character can heal forever (like Banon in Final Fantasy 6) so it's kinda difficult to die and the really high encounter rate against the same pack of enemies makes this bit of a chore. There are not tons of items to get for this part since they just increase your stats a bit and the gold is used to buy neat little things like a DVD player (to remove loading times between areas) and more cards to play with. But the battle system doesn't evolve, really. It goes from FF6 to FF7, but that's pretty much it. No appearance of completely turn-based systems nor different ideas like FF10 did.

This is a pretty good PS1-era battle system, I'll give you that.

Then the game goes into weird action-rpg mode where you hit things and numbers pop out and gold/loot drop around. I really enjoyed that part even tho after a while I realized that all the loot was kind of a joke, these items didn't do anything and they didn't make sense. The action-rpg segment lasted long enough and the boss was kind tough so I wished in some way that they did give items with some use.

Besides chuckles, none of these items slot will do anything.

How I would fix this
Add more things to unlock, maybe the battle system should've started turn-base and you had to unlock the active time component, add ways to avoid random encounter, shorten the dungeons a bit and the amount of grind there is to do while you're walking around on the world map. The whole action-rpg sequence could've used more unlocks too, from what I recall, there's a minimap and that's pretty much it. There are other tropes in the genre, like the blue mana orb, spells and actual loot.

I like EvoLand!
It's a really interesting idea and I love games that unlock gameplay systems as you go along like that flash shooter game, some of the systems could've been executed a little bit better but all and all, it was full of funny stabs at tropes and mechanics used in some RPGs that I've played.

There's someone named Sid in this city. Also airships

I'm still working on games #3

So it's a done deal, I'm not longer the technical lead at the start-up where I worked. It's not 100% sure yet but there's a high chance that the company is going to disappear, therefore I am not out of work. Just to clear things up beforehand; I think that I'm going to be fine, money-wise, for a period of months that could maybe range to a year if I really wanted to. Not too sure that I do, but at least I have some leeway to make choices on what I would be doing.

I think I could use that time to make a game. Yes, it would mean starting from scratch a new project and not simply working on my turn-based RPG nor my typing roguelike, but I have good reasons for that.

For the turn-based RPG, it's too big of a project, I would probably want to start it over completely and even then, I'm not sure it's doable in a few weeks-months.

For the roguelike, it's not really something I could publish somewhere (iOS, steam, etc) and besides being added to my portfolio, it wouldn't be that 'useful' to me. I think.

Now I still want to work on these projects and see how they go, but I also want to work full time on something else, which means about 7 hours per day, five days a week. The goal of that project will be the following:

• To quickly produce something playable that represents the basic ideas of the game and how the gameplay could look like in the final version.
• Get feedback quickly by any means possible (which right now seems to be posting on twitter, facebook, platformers.net, somethingawful maybe) to see what people think
• Learn what there is to learn, make changes, updates, tweak systems, go back to step 1.

I always take too much time before delivering, I actually never do! I'm stuck forever in a weird 'well... this isn't good enough yet... I'll wait until I'm at least X percent done' and then I never get to that point and nothing ever gets released. I feel like the best way for me to make a game is to have people play it the soonest they can so I'll know.

Now I'm not too sure about technologies (Unity or HTML5? I know I have an Android and iOS license for Unity) but I have a basic idea of what I'll do.

This blog might turn into a dev diary, I'm not sure if I should post daily updates or weekly ones but I'm going to post updates, that's for sure.

iLook at Nimble Quest

Nimble Quest is similar to the 'snake' game, you need to move a line that grows longer without touching anything, nor the walls, nor the other parts of your snake. In this case, you have a line of heroes that walk alongside arena-style maps where you have to defeat enough enemies before you can proceed to the next level. You start with one hero from a list of fifteen heroes or so (albeit they are but all locked at the beginning) each with their attack types and armor values and then you acquire more heroes by finding them randomly in the levels.

Here's a line of 6 heroes in the sewers! I love the mages.

I have a few problems with the resources involved with Nimble Quest. You have two resources types (stop me if you've heard this one), one which is easy to gather but gets useless as the game goes on (I haven't played THAT much already but I unlocked all of the upgrades you can get) and another type that's pretty useful, but you get very slowly and have to pay money to get it fast.

I've upgraded all of these things.

The upgrades are weird also, you just increase the duration of buffs you gather randomly by killing monsters. I wish there was more to it than just duration upgrades, such as upgrades to increase the chance of finding certain powerups, or even being able to activate the power-up during levels at the cost of gems (giving them another use), maybe other things such as adding range upgrade to the attack speed skill or increasing the radius of the magnets.

My main problem with the tokens is that they're almost necessary.

Tokens can be used for a few important things, skipping levels, adding party members, restarting when you die and buying buffs for that run. These buffs range from two-sided (increasing your movement speed is really important, but also makes it a bit more difficult to not run into things) to weirdly necessary (having 25% more attack speed is plainly better than not having it) so you just need the tokens for more difficult levels (and they do get tough) and they drop dreadfully rarely. I wish you could spend gems to get tokens, maybe 1000 gems for one token?

As a general rule, I never buy finite resources, but will throw a buck or two for permanent upgrades.

I was surprised that there is no exp/gem doubler in Nimble Quest, all you can buy that lasts 'forever' is an unlock for red gems that are worth 10 green ones. Otherwise you're stuck with blue/green gems, I suppose. Too bad there wasn't a way to buy exp doubling or gem doubling, or token doubling for that matter. Oh, what really surprised me was that this unlock was 4.99$ I'm not buying into the 'everything needs to be free or .99$' vision so I don't mind giving the Nimblebit guys my money, but I thought 5$ for that kind of upgrade was a bit weird.

GEMS!

The gems are fun to collect, you either fill you screen with them by completing a level or by opening a chest, it's even better when you have a magnet to get them all (I could say that it's the best in that case), otherwise if you don't have the speed boost buff (that costs 1 token), you're not going to get much, which is kinda sad and frustrating to see them all disappear about five seconds after they spawned. It's in these situations I really wished for a way to trigger the magnet myself.

I really like this.

Otherwise, the gameplay is great, you swipe in all four directions to change the way your 'snake' is going, and that works perfectly (but don't stay too close to the borders or near enemies because even if it works, it's not perfect and you might turn the wrong way a small - but frustrating - number of times) I really love the differences between characters and the way they can upgrade to become stronger - the little cosmetic changes as they level are neat - but then again, I wish some characters would get other upgrades such as being able to bounce into walls or double the range of the magnet or ignore slowdown from enemies. Little things to change how the game plays and that would really impact how you choose your leader.