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A Review of ISLANDERS

Islanders is the gorgeous love child of Tetris and the city building genre. The game gives you buildings to place down, and rewards you with points based on the other buildings nearby. Some buildings add value, and others take value away. Analyzing the procedurally generated island you get, and figuring out the optimal strategy based on it and the buildings your given, and executing the strategy for a huge score creates an exciting loop of tension and release.

The game is very easy on the eyes, with a variety of island types with varying biomes and building types. One type of level is an archipelago of tiny islands that gives the player many water-plateaus, which let the player build a city-on-stilts in the water. Another is a snowy level that removes a few building types.

On the downside, each island type generally feels the same between individual islands as the procedural generation doesn't create much difference in between seeds. Content updates are also small due to the small team of devs working on the project.

Overall a fun and enticing game that Ive sunk many hours into trying to find the best way to earn points.

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A Review of Forager

Forager is a 2D crafting-based adventure in which you exploit the land for all that it’s worth. It revolves around earning coins, which can be done through a variety of means enabling a variety in playstyle and strategy. With these coins you can buy new land to explore and exploit, allowing you to earn more coins, and thus the cycle continues.

The game’s humour and simple cartoony art style make it an absolute joy to play. All the while i’ve found watching my setup grow and grow while earning me more and more coins to be endlessly enjoyable.

The game can feel like a little bit of a grind at the start but once you get going pacing is just fine. Fighting reminds you that the game was not built for it at all times. The derpy dodge roll and fast movement speed makes you character feel a little more out of control than it should.

However this should hardly deter the players this game is meant for. Those who enjoy titles like Stardew Valley and Minecraft will enjoy this cute spin on the crafting-survival genre.

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A Review of Apex Legends

Apex legends is Respawn Entertainment’s take on a fast paced battle royale game. Battle royale, for those under rocks, are a type of shooter that sets a large number of players or squads against each other with the challenge of being the last one alive. To help it stand out from the growing sea of titles in the genre, it comes with a few innovations and limitations.

First is it’s champion system. It features full characters instead of class loadouts or nothing at all. These champions have abilities tailored towards a certain playstyle and gameplay fantasy. For example the newest legend Octane is a thrill seeker armed with a speed boost and launchpad for diving into the heart of battle.

Next is the ping system. A helpful communication tool that allows player to mark a position on the map with little bits of information. This way teammates can quickly decide where to go or mark enemy locations.

Allowing teammates to communicate quickly and efficiently is essential as this game does not let players dive into the fray alone. Players are always placed into squads of three at the start of each game. Most players don’t have a microphone, and the ping system everyone  the ability to communicate the most essential pieces of information with one another.

The game is a blast, most of the time. Champion abilities add another level of strategy to the standard battle royale gameplay and the games blood-sport theme encourages players to be aggressive and seek out fights. However these very champions present another layer of balance issues for the  developers. They are challenged with presenting a diverse range of characters, whilst keeping their hitboxes and animations under control on top of ability tuning.

More importantly is the aggressive playstyle that most players have adopted. With everyone playing aggressive and seeking out fights, champions are drawn to gunfire like moths to a flame in the arena, with long encounters quickly evolving into a chaotic uncontrollable mess of several teams shooting at one another. Repeatedly getting caught in the middle of one of these free-for all can be deeply frustrating. So can running around for several minutes before getting in a fight with a team much better than your own and feeling like you never stood a chance.

One final issue is a lack of post launch content for Apex. In a gaming landscape dominated by Fortnite and others pumping out constant content rich updates, Respawn needs to keep up in order to compete in the long run. It looks like the launch of season two will provide players with the content boost they need to keep going for a little while longer.

Hopefully respawn can keep up the pace after season two’s launch, as the game brings solid gunplay, character, team composition and enhanced strategy to the battlefield.

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A Review of Astroneer

Astroneer brings exploration and base-building together in across 7 huge low poly planets. It’s lack of violent combat, toy-like visual appeal are sure to put one’s heart and mind at rest after a long day of work, or a tough session in another game.

Similar to Minecraft, the game will let you dig up and edit the world around you. However this game relies not on blocks but a more sculptural system in the terrain tool. For an explorer this tool allows you to bridge gaps and dig for buried resources. Meanwhile base-builders are given great flexibility to create structures in any shape.

The game plays from a third person perspective, which plays into its unique user-interface. Instead of a traditional inventory screen, this game takes the backpack off of the character model and brings is close to the camera, allowing you to pick up and move items to and from the player. The same is true for inspecting a machine’s settings. To select what item a printer will create, the player presses the interact key and a little decorated screen comes flying off of the machine again stopping just shy of the camera.

Moving of items, interacting with machines and linking up parts of you base is enhanced by the game’s fantastic sound design. When linking together two powered objects, the player drags a cable out of one socket and into another. You can hear this lovely unwinding sound as the cable is dragged out, and a satisfying click when finishing the connection.

Unfortunately, for a game in part about base-building, the player is given no options for automation. It puts a soft limit on the bases players can aspire, which sucks for a player like me who wants to let resources gather and organize themselves while I go off exploring the rest that the game has to offer.

What the game offers outside of base building is a little limited too. Across the seven planets, there are few interesting features besides the teleporter systems and scattered debris. So while building a shuttle and reaching a new planet is always exciting, there’s only so many times you can do this before the biomes become known, and the surprises disappear.

Despite this I still recommend astroneer to explorers and engineers alike. It’s a charming and wonderful experience that provides a nice breath of fresh air from other games in the industry filled with violence, microtransactions or both.

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Prototype: The Sandwich Man

For our final game per week, we’ve been told to team up in pairs to combine our two favourite games. So a friend and i buddied up to do just that. Her favourite game was about making sandwiches. My favourite game was an alternate control scheme game where you spun the joysticks on a controller to rotate obstacles. So just what do you get when you combine these two disparate ideas?

A T-Posing chef that you spin with the joysticks to make sandwiches.

That’s it that’s the entire game.

The idea originally started out as a game about spinning blades to slice up bits of pepperoni onto a piece of bread, with you looking down through a slicing machine from above. The top down perspective was derived from my own game, and was the first thing to go. For the sake of clarity we wanted the bread to move down along a counter as more and more ingredients were added.

However now the idea of a machine slicing the food bears a problem, as it’d be tricky to show the player the blades and how fast they were moving. One way to make a gigantic set of blades that moved with the bread down the conveyor, however that was just weird. Instead of rejecting the idea we decide to play with the absurdity and so the great T-posing spinning chef was born!

I was responsible for the programming on this project and i thoroughly enjoyed this week.  Slicing the food proved to be a fun technical challenge. My solution was by far not the most realistic one but worked well enough for the context of this silly little game.

The slicing system works by tracking how many times the food is struck by the blades once it enters the tracking volume. The slicer component is notified each time a blade passes through a food object, and once the food leaves the tracking volume, all cuts are applied at once. Unfortunately the volume and blades were very thin which meant that despite the chef spinning at absurd speeds, only a few cuts would be registered. Even with the most ridiculous hitboxes.

To solve this i made the system lie. All great games are riddled with lies to keep the player happy so i thought it was time to start using my own. Each time a slice is registered, the slice count is not increased by one, it is instead doubled. This way the player can get satisfyingly thin slices of cucumber, even through they only cut the thing four times.

This week has been really fun and it’s been nice to collaborate and ‘not have everything go up in flames like it normally does. It’s been fun making dishonest yet satisfying systems all in the name of the silliest concept. I’d like to polish this project and put the finished game up on itch for everyone to enjoy at a later date.

Thanks for reading

~Sierra

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Prototype: In Harmony

This week’s theme was to create a game out of a given theme, and mine was “A turn based game about moving cities with the power of love”. It took a while for me to land upon an idea I was happy with, but in the end I settled with a civ-style game where the player arrives with one moving city in a brave new untouched world. They would be tasked with gathering resources to support their existing population, as well as expanding their population over time. To meet this end the player would be able to clear forests, mine and farm, alongside the construction of new cities, both static and moving. The twist would be that abuse of natural resources would anger the natural spirits of the world, causing conflict between the player and the forces of nature as it tries to reclaim what was taken.

What was supposed to be a clever Miyazakian prototype about resource management in harmony with nature has ended up as tiny strategy game about increasing your population as much as possible until you inevitably starve. The base for the actual concept exists, but it needs another few days to be truly realized. Like with many of my projects i intend to expand and test the idea more at a later date before fully abandoning it.

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Genre fusion: Haiku and parkour concept

This is a game about combining core aspects from two distinct genres: Action Adventure/Parkour, and Haiku. The player will be placed in a minimal boxy space and be tasked with finding pieces of a haiku by picking up japanese/chinese characters. There will only be one haiku to assemble at a time, and players will reach the characters with a moveset similar to in Mirror’s Edge.

The haiku being assembled will dictate the ways in which the player can move across the map and control the ambience of the world. For instance, a haiku that evokes an air of levity will cause gravity to weaken, making the player more floaty, while bubble particles rise from the ground. Contrastingly a haiku about a flash of lightning in a storm may cause the surfaces of the world to become slippery as they are drenched in a downpour of rain from the dark skies above.

I’ve chosen to have only one haiku at a time to limit the potential complexity of the game. If i were to allow players to piece together any haiku they wanted, i’d have to ensure that all the piece they make lined up well, or punish players for creating bad haiku, and that’s not the kind of experience i want to make. Instead i wish to focus on capturing the ambience of the moment evoked by a single haiku at a time.

This project is intended to be showcased at a meetup, where people will drift from display to display. I intend to design for this space initially, so i will aim to create a ‘zen’-style game loop. The game loop will be infinite, the player(s) being tasked with finding haiku after haiku. This way people can walk up, and easily pick up and play, then leave without commitment after they’ve played enough.

If time allows, I aim to supplement this mode with a couple other. First will be a tutorial mode that explains the games mechanics, which players will be able to access from the pause menu at any time. Second will be a time-trial mode in which players race through a preset course, providing a more competitive experience and extending the game’s potential audience.

At its core however, it should be accessible and easy to pick up. I want this game to be an immersive and graceful experience of exploration and contemplation.

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Prototype: Descent

Descent has to be my favorite prototype to date. Inspired by 2014’s smash hit and this weeks theme, alternate control schemes, I've created a  endless style game where you rotate obstacles out of your path to survive. The twist is there’s no button pushing and/or timing. The only way to control the obstacles rushing at you is through rotating the left and right analog sticks on a gamepad, which rotates them out of the way. Obstacles to the left get highlighted orange, and to the right; blue.

It’s simple, elegant and easily extendible to a fully fledged game on my part.

It’s available here in itch.io, however you will need an Xbox 360 controller or an emulator to play. I came across a couple issues with using raw ds4 input, and opted to use ds4Windows - an Xbox 360 emulator - instead.

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Witch of Creation and Interlinked

These are two prototypes that have not turned out ideally. For both of these i was unable to complete the prototype to the level i wished in due time. I made a post a while back about the concept for witch of creation. Through poor choices in methodology I spent too long creating parts of the system by hand which should have been done procedurally through code. Specifically drawing links between each of the 30ish nodes that made up the game space. The end result is me being unable to implement the most meaningful parts of the prototype.

Interlinked was meant to be a concept similar to mini metro. An abstraction of people moving to and from place to place in a daily routine which would focus on managing traffic flow through links between each of these nodes. Through lack of critical thought in advance and once again, poor methodology i came across fundamental flaws in the concept’s design late in the creation process. This along with various bugs led to a prototype that fails to capture the essence of what i was trying to create in the first place.

I will endeavour to learn from my mistakes these past two weeks and come at future prototypes with a fleshed out concept and well thought out plan of attack.

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Prototype concept: Witch of Creation

Our theme this week is of ritual, and I wanted to make a game about a ritual of creation. I’ll focus on ideas around chemical circles and etchings to create a game where the player sets up and performs a creation spell.

Image spam ahead so I’ll keep it wrapped up under the cut.

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Prototype: The Hacker Simulator

This week brings us a great concept with middling execution and my end prototype lacks a few of the features i wanted to squeeze into it.

The concept is create a text-based game, as a command-line application based around hacking the world to create absurd scenarios. To evoke the feeling of a cliche movie hacker, I designed the input system require nothing other than random key-mashing, followed by a press of the enter key. The game translates those random keys into a pair of keywords, which the game runs as a command. These commands make thing happen across the world, allowing the player to do anything from starting a cult, beginning the zombie apocalypse and ordering maccas. The goal is to score as high as possible, by unleashing the most absurd scenarios.

In the end i’ve managed to make the concept work, however it needs a lot of work done on the writing side. For which i’ll need to create a tool that parses json, csv or raw text files, as editing the text from within the code is time consuming and tedious.

I plan to update and improve this in my spare time as i’m not fully content with the result, and feel like this concept deserves a little more time.

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Prototype: 10 SECOND ASCENSION

What’s the best way to get good at desgin? “Fail fast!” my lecturers cry without skipping a beat. So to facilitate this in our third year of university, we’ve been provided with the daunting-yet-exciting-experience of creating a game a week, for 8 weeks straight.

Today marks the completion of my first Disaster Prototype: “10 SECOND ASCENSION”.

It’s been a wild ride this week figuring out how best to manage my time squeeze the most into my project: and considering it’s my first time working on such a short time-span, I’m happy with what Ive made, regardless of the occasional bug here and there.

10 SECOND ASCENSION is a two-player game about tossing your buddy up to reach as high as possible before the time runs out. Upon testing the game with a friend Ive come to a couple of conclusions. One is that throwing your friends all over the place is really fun. The second is that 10 seconds is not enough time for this game! Perhaps a longer, yet still short time limit like 20 or 30 seconds would be more beneficial. I could also experiment with making the game a time trial race to the finish. However the later would likely undercut the hectic panic that i think is crucial to the experience.