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jranderson1mastery-blog · 8 years ago

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Individual Post-mortem for Gravity Guerrillas

Post Mortem: Gravity Guerillas via James Anderson

Introduction:

Gravity Guerillas was a class project with objective of building a functional prototype. You were start with the basic steps of developing a paper prototype, then evolved it into a proper digital version by class end. Each class member had a role to fulfill, and we were to find a commonality between each role to ensure that by the end of the class met full capacity. As we came up with an initial concept, we made sure that game had clear and concise goals:

· The game would have simple mechanics that allowed complex dynamics

· An aesthetically appealing setting with humorous elements present throughout the game

· Had a lot of replayability

Personally, I thought that game had a similar mechanic to that of games like Angry Birds: Star Wars and those of that ilk, which could be appealing to the casual audience. Although we created a good base, some goals and tasks fell short of what our initial goal was set to develop this prototype in the beginning phases of creation.

What I Felt was Good:

The team performed admirably in the progression of making the game become better and better as we transitioned to the end of class. There were moments of “ah-ha!” and “that makes sense” early and often in the brainstorming and early concept phase of the game. Everyone seemed heavily engaged in creating this game (for the most part), and contributed great ideas and first versions early on in development.

Since my role as game dev was to implement the Art Team’s assets as early and often as possible, constant communication was established. With their help, we created an aesthetically pleasing title and menu system, that wasn’t hard on the eyes.

Also, since I little experience performing programming for games, the rest of the dev team were encouraging enough to allow me to sit next to them, and perform as best I could. When needed, they gave the necessary tutoring to help make sure that the tasks I was performing were up the standards needed to create a solid game.

What I Felt Could Be Improved Upon:

My criticisms can be justified due to the weeklong event that occurred at school. This event caused a disruption in flow and communication due to mandatory involvement, as well as former grads that came and spoke about current happening in the industry. Had it not been for this, I believe the final prototype could’ve been that much better.

However, we, as a group, could not just blame the school’s schedule for our lack of drop-off in quality and development during that time. We should’ve took it upon ourselves to gather at least twice during that time to confirm current developments cycles and hurdles, and planned for future tasks a bit quicker.

Finally, lack of interest in the latter stages of development and design, hiccuped the small momentum we would’ve had going into that last week. Late submissions, low quality work, and downright cutoff in communication disrupted most of the final prototype’s development. Again, this could be attributed to multiple reasons, but as a team, we should’ve nipped it early on.

Conclusion:

As a team, we accomplished much throughout the month for our final prototype to be presented. I believe through our persistence, hard work, and ingenuity, we accomplished much in our development of the game. At the same time, we have much to learn, and that showed itself often as we were going through the development cycle. Now, as an individual and a team, we must build on these qualities (for better or worse) to reach even greater heights.

#mastery #game design #game development #prototyping

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sklurb · 7 years ago

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Cultist Simulator Review & Starter’s Guide ◥▶◀◤

______________________________________________

꧁ TL;DR: ꧂

Saturated with intrigue, this is an innovative & unique singleplayer roguelike card game w/ a steep learning curve. Highly replayable due to branching events & randomness. Non-existent tutorial, but community is helpful.

* Designed by the dev that created Fallen London & worked as creative director on Sunless Sea.

✂---✂---✂---✂---✂---✂---✂---✂---✂---

Recommendation:

☑ Content quality is a value at full price. ☑ Content quantity is a value at full price. ☐ Positive experience, but wait to buy when it's on sale. ☐ Negative experience. Wait for improvements before buying. ☐ Very negative experience. Save your money.

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What I like about Cultist Simulator:

+ Active pause. + Achievements. + 1920's setting. + Legacy system. + Alluring premise. + Very well-written. + High replayability. + Apocalyptic humor. + Fast forward option. + Simple & effective art. + Mouse zoom for tiny text. + 20-40 hours of gameplay. + Eye-pleasing color palette. + Very helpful & friendly community. + Music invokes a feeling of mystique. + Plays smoothly. No bugs that I ran into. + Study lore & discover forbidden secrets. + Authorities can be alerted to your "activities." + Subtle & blatant hints when clicking on icons & empty slots.

Indifferent:

~/= Waiting for a critical card to turn up can be like waiting for the stars to align, but that's the nature of the game: to play the hand you've been given wisely. ~/= Default sound settings are way too low at 10%. Press ESC to adjust. ~/= Static screen hints default is too small. Go to Settings & switch to 100%+

Room for improvements:

- No tutorial. - Some grindiness. - Late game can be convoluted. - Timers try my patience ...at times. :P - Individual card expiration timers need an adjustment. - Automatically PAUSE gameplay upon returning to game. - Grammar could use a minor touch-up in places. (mine probably could too!) - Legacy selection window needs mouseover tooltips for what their corresponding cards do. - There are times that no matter how well you play, the randomness will just totally screw you. - I would prefer mouseover tooltips to having to click each icon or slot that I want to view the tooltip for.

Other thoughts:

Cultist Simulator is not a quick, pick-up-and-play card game, but it sure is devilishly entertaining once you understand how to play it. Be prepared to devote some time to learning its particulars and nuances, mainly because it is so different from most other card games that you may have played. Part of the challenge getting started is wrapping your head around all the combinations of how the cards interact with one another. Will adding a card to that Verb yield a favorable or unfavorable result? Will it be consumed? Would it just be a waste of time? What cards will it produce? Now apply that thought process to multiple Verbs and multiple cards that are running down their own individual timers. It can be daunting at first, but once you've dedicated some time to learning the game's functions and have a bit of a handle on it, it's smooth(er) sailing.

The Beginner's Guide by Tssha is a really good place to start, taking the author's advice step-by-step through the beginning of the game, while utilizing active pause. This is one of the best and quickest ways to get some of the basics down, while getting a visual flow of the game. I had first tried to figure it out on my own, and while I did Ok for a little bit, it became a convoluted process when a lot of Verbs and cards were in play with all those timers ticking. I appreciated the "training wheels" immensely.

I've added an additional starting tutorial below this section ("How to Begin Playing") with more detail and descriptions, as some portions of the Beginner's Guide were somewhat vague to a new player, but Tssha's guide is very important as it also digs into additional ways to make money, get established, and specifics for founding your cult, etc.

Further, once you begin needing a better understanding of some of the cards that appear later in the game, the Comprehensive Reference Guide (spoilers!) by Escapade84 is a handy compendium of cards, traits, assets, ephemera, grimoires, lore, rituals, locations, status, followers, societies, actions, time, random events, legacy, miscellaneous stuff, etc. Due to it being loaded with spoilers, you may want to hold off until you've soldiered through more of the content and made some discoveries for yourself.

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How to begin playing:

➥ My Cultist Simulator Starter Guide on Steam

(For best results, follow along w/ this starter's guide while playing & using active pause)

Cultist Simulator starts you off with a single Work Verb. This is a square-shaped icon on the game board which you will click on to reveal its empty card slots. Clicking on an empty slot will reveal what types of cards you can place there. You will see a description on the tooltip, with some Aspect icons at the base of it. Clicking on those icons will give you a description of the type of Aspect that can fill that card slot. In this case, your starting card, Menial Employment, fulfills the requirement as an "Aspect: Job" and may be added to the empty slot. This enables you to begin work as a miserable hospital porter.

Clicking and beginning to drag a card will highlight the Verbs in purple that the card can be used with.

To begin your job, now that you have added the Menial Employment card to the Work Verb, you can click START, and the Work Verb timer will begin. Once the timer has elapsed, open the Work Verb, and you will see two new cards: Funds and Health. Collect them all, and they will now appear down on the game board area. You will notice a new Sleep Verb has appeared on the game board with its own timer. Once that initial Sleep Verb timer elapses, you will see that another new Verb has appeared: Time Passes. Before adding any cards to the Sleep Verb, let the Time Passes Verb timer run down to initiate the next Verb: A Bequest Arrives.

For the purposes of getting started, I'm leaving the Dream Verb (& Contentment card) be, but it's helpful in discovering lore & recovering from negative statuses. Dreaming can also eventually cause you to go insane.

The mini magnet icon on a Verb means that it will automatically grab a card (like how the Time Passes Verb will grab the Funds card each cycle of its timer for example, whether you add it manually or not).

The Bequest Verb description delivers good news that the old man you dreamt of at the hospital named you in his will. Allowing the new Bequest Verb's counter to run down will award you with eight new Funds cards plus three others. Collect them, and at this point you will also see on the game board, a Bequest card, a Reason card, and a Passion card. This is a very good time to use active pause to stop the timers while you consider your next actions, because the Time Passes Verb has just grabbed one of your Funds cards (due to its mini magnet icon). This is your recurring expenses upkeep (every one minute on the Time Passes Verb timer). Keeping yourself stacked with Funds cards is extremely important as running out of them will eventually affect your hunger and ultimately your Health, setting you up to lose the game. Negative effects like hunger, illnesses, and injury cost Funds cards to remove. The late game will also introduce additional money sinks.

Be careful how you use your Health card(s) as they are critical to keeping yourself away from a losing scenario. In the early game, they can be added to the Work Verb with a chance to be turned into an Injury Card which costs Funds to turn back into a Health card.

You will notice, at this point, that the Bequest Verb has now changed into the Study Verb despite having the same light bulb icon. You also now have a Bequest card that you will add to the Study Verb. Notice also that while having the Study Verb open with the new Bequest card slotted in it, that it opens a new "Approach" card slot. Make a decision to add either your Reason or Passion card into this slot and click START. Remember, you can click on empty slots and on tooltip icons for additional hints and descriptions.

Now that your Study Verb has been slotted with the Bequest card and either the Reason or Passion card, it's time to unpause the game. Allow the Study Verb timer to run down to receive additional Text cards that you can add to the Study Verb when you wish. Most likely the Time Passes Verb timer also ran down by this point and grabbed another Funds card from your stash.

One of the best ways to keep money flowing is by climbing the corporate ladder of Glover & Glover. You can open this option up by adding the Reason Card to the Work Verb. Be aware, that your boss is a hardass and demands a perfectionistic work ethic...

You should now have a very basic understanding of how the game flows and can begin to experiment with how using different cards and combinations on various Verbs branch out the story and gameplay. As storylines unfold, your play area will fill up with cards and Verbs that will allow you to do a great many things like founding a cult, sending disciples out to on missions, reacting to encounters, summoning "things," etc. 😈

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Legacy Options (Pick one after defeat):

Physician Cards: Reason, Position at the Institute "As the patient descended into the final delirium, I made copious notes. In the buzzing heat of the night, I re-read those notes, and they began, at last, to make a kind of sense."

Bright Young Thing Cards: Health, This & That "Endowed from birth with wealth and talent. A life of ease, comfort and delight stretches ahead like an amber carpet."

Detective Cards: Reason, Health, Inspector's Position "I am an inspector in the capital's police, charged with the investigation of the most vile and wretched things that one human does to another."

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Helpful Links for Getting Started:

Community Discord: https://discord.gg/ub2tE6Y ➥ Beginner's Guide - by Tssha ➥ Reference Guide (w/ spoilers!) - by Escapade84 ➥ Cultist Simulator Wiki - by Curse Gamepedia

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I hope you enjoyed this and found it helpful! ◥▶◀◤

Check out my other reviews! ⤵ https://steamcommunity.com/id/sklurb/recommended/

▶ Devs & Publishers may e-mail me at sklurb [at] gmail [dot] com regarding inquiries & game promotions

#cultistsimulator

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symbianosgames · 8 years ago

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The following blog post, unless otherwise noted, was written by a member of Gamasutra’s community. The thoughts and opinions expressed are those of the writer and not Gamasutra or its parent company.

Welcome to the Meganoid(2017) post-mortem. This post-mortem goes into the details on the Meganoid figures and stats. Without context the stats are pretty much silly numbers, so please make sure to read all of this because there is more to the numbers than you might think.

So I'll keep this short, if you want to learn more about who I am, please check out my techblog and website. I've been a full-time (indie) developer since 2004. Mostly known for mobile games, but since 2015 also branching to PC games and even some consoles releases here and there (PS Vita and 3DS). I've never had hit games that made me millions, but I have been doing very decent for many years releasing games that have found a growing fan-base in a niche area. My biggest titles include the Gunslugs and Heroes of Loot series of games and Space Grunts.

The original Meganoid was released in 2010 on Android and iOS and was a very hard platformer with short levels that sometimes had you screaming if you didn't manage to reach the finish. For me it was a turning point in my games as I finally decided to just build games like that since those are the games I love the most. Luckily I found a niche that works for me and an audience that has been growing alongside me and my games. It also managed to reach close to a million downloads since.

Meganoid(2017) is a reboot of the franchise lifts a lot on the designs behind Spelunky, while still maintaining the difficulty of the original Meganoid game. I named it a "love child of Spelunky and Meat-boy in space", which is a very clear description of what the game is. It's not extremely original, but I'll get to that later on!

Oh, the game was also created in "just" two months, but I'll also get back to that if you keep reading..

So before Meganoid I was working on a game called Ashworld, which is a huge project for a one-man development team (which I am) and it's also an open-world game, a genre that I personally have no experience with because I often quit those games within a few hours of play-time. Simply put: Ashworld is a huge challenge for me, and I have been working on it since June 2016.

Seeing as my games are actually my livelihood, money needs to come in on a semi-frequent basis. My business is still running fairly well, I have a huge back-log of games and they are all still bringing in money on a monthly base, but to keep it all running I do have some rules on how long game-projects can take. Ashworld is breaking those rules due to a challenging development phase where I've been learning open-world design and also searching where the actual fun in the game-design is. So the game isn't done, and still needs a few months of work.

Enter the stage: Meganoid.

In January I decided to just do some prototyping with the hopes that I would end up with something playable that could be extended into a game. For this to work, I needed a clear design idea and direction. A game that I could almost create on automatic-mode.

This "automatic-mode" does need some nuance here, I wrote a blog about it a few weeks ago and I think it painted a wrong picture. Some comments and replies I got thrown at me were along the line of "a quick money grab". My bad on writing the article and not being clear about things, so here's to rectifying it:

The game was made in "just 2 months; and 13 years of experience".

The key part being those 13 years experience, factual there are a lot more years of experience, but the 13 years is how long I've been doing this commercially. Meganoid at it's core is a platformer with rogue-like mechanics. I've created close to 60 commercial platform games, and I've been doing rogue-like elements in my last 5-6 games. I know what to expect code-wise, and I know how to program those things without having to think about it.

To put it in some more perspective, my game Heroes of Loot 2 is a huge RPG-adventure/twin-stick shooter, and it was made in little over 4 months. So I normally work really fast and very effective.

Now think what you like about the short-development cycle, I don't plan to change your mind about it, but from a business point of view: this made sense and still delivers a quality game.

To have this game make some profit I needed it to take just a couple of months work so it would be easier to recoup on the costs AND make money on the game.

The development-cycle was pretty short, but since I had some interesting stuff pretty early on I actually showed some screenshots and gifs in the first week of development on twitter,facebook,instagram and a couple of forums. Some of this got picked up pretty early by mobile-game sites, and Toucharcade showed the first couple of video's I released in the weeks after.

I started using reddit a bit more, and finally managed to post something there without it being taken down (actually on second try, the first did get taken down because I didn't disclose that the "pre-order discounts" was on a game I made, which obviously makes a big difference../sarcasm).

The two or so weeks before the launch I already had various mobile sites mailing me for some promocodes, which is the up-side of being "known" in a market. In contrast to that there is the PC scene, where I'm basically unknown and nobody talks about my games.

The launch week I started looking at youtube streamers for the PC version, so I basically searched for big youtubers that covered games like: Spelunky, Meat boy, and a few other more recent pixel-art indie games that fit the same category as Meganoid.

I mailed all of them, close to a 100, which at least one steam-key included (for some group-youtubers I included up to 5 keys) and this all resulted in an awesome 0 streams. I did a follow up email to a large portion of them a week later, and this resulted in 1 Streamer playing it, yay results!

It's still possible some streamers will pick up the game later, having full inboxes, managers that handle emails slowly, or just large backlogs of video's. But I don't hold my breath for any of it. Same goes for PC game-site reviews, so even tho I did everything "right" it basically ended up with fairly little returns on it. The emails were short, to the point, showed a GIF of the game, bullet points, youtube trailer, quick-links and a steam-key included with a link to the website/presskit for more info. All according to the average marketing-advise.

Basically, in my opinion and experience, you need to know people to get things done. But reaching out never hurts and is also the way to get to know more people, so yeah.

Okay, okay! that's what you guys came for, I get it!

Google Play's "Best new seller" list charting

Let me first start with this, Meganoid was so far:

Featured on App-store under "New games we loved" - worldwide

Featured on Google Play "Early Access"

Featured on Google Play "New and Updated"

Top-charted (top 25) in Google Play "Best new sellers" list

Game of the Week - on TouchArcade

"Best games of the week for iOS and Android" - Pocketgamer

Now, back to reality, for those who don't know, making money on games is HARD, on any given day there are 100-500 games released on various platforms. That's EVERY DAY! Standing out from those games is extremely hard, most games you will never see and they get like 5-10 downloads (depending on how many friends the developer has).

With my experience of doing this business for a long time, I set a fairly low but do-able goal for Meganoid: $6500 during the launch-period. I know it's a not a huge game, and it had fairly short marketing-visibility before release due to the fast development cycle.

For me a launch-period is the first month or so after releasing it. My goals is usually to make 80%-100% of the development costs back in this first period. I calculate development costs fairly rough by multiplying each development-month with $2000 and then add any outsourced work costs. Since I do code+design+game graphics that often leaves out-source costs to music and high-res marketing art.

The $2000 is very low-end of what my cost-of-living is each month (in the Netherlands, with mortgage, girlfriend and pets). It doesn't take into account taxes and extra cash-flow for "the future". But we're talking about launch-period here, so a game will live on for a few more years and with future sales and discounts you can often double the money a game made on launch.

So for this game I had 2 months of work, that's $4000 and since there was such a short dev-cycle and I used ambient sounds from my sound-libraries, there was no music cost and just a few hundred dollars for the awesome marketing art. So let's round it to $4500.

Now the point is to get extra cashflow to cover the longer development-cycle of Ashworld and we get to a $6500 minimum revenue that I was aiming for with Meganoid. Again this is all launch-period revenue, because obviously it's a low amount especially if Ashworld development still needs 2 or 3 months time. So I'll get to that in a few paragraphs below.

I released Meganoid on March 30 on iOS, Android and PC (steam/humble/itch, windows/osx/linux) and we're now at three weeks into the release and currently the revenue is just a little shy of the target at $6200. Which is not bad at all!

So let's dig into this $6200 launch-period amount. Where did most of it come from, and why! The biggest bulk of this comes from the iOS version, actually close to 50% of it: $3580. On iOS the game was priced $4.99 with a launch-discount the first week making the game $3.99. Meganoid was made Game of the week at Toucharcade which most certainly helped, one of the weeks best games for iOS and Android on Pocketgamer, but sadly it had no "games we play" feature for the first weekend.

For some reason the game only showed up in the "Games we play" on Monday/Tuesday for the USA App-store, at which point it spiked to slightly below the launch spike so effectively doubling the sales in the 3/4 days it had that front page feature. I'm pretty sure it would have done better if it did have that feature in the first-weekend (during the sale) but those things are pretty much out of my control and I'm glad it eventually did get a feature after-all (something I kind had planned for in setting my revenue targets).

Apple loved it - all over the world!

Second biggest seller was Android, now this was done a little different. I tried some beta stages on Android and this put my game into "Early Access" on Google Play a week before the launch at a $2.99 price. This price was mostly because I believe that the brave people who try out a beta shouldn't pay full price. The game got a nice Google feature in their "Early Access" list, which only has about 20 games listed, so that's a pretty good list to be in.

The possible down-side of this is that a lot of people don't seem to be clear of understanding what "Early access" means on Google Play, so there was a lot more buying going on than I had planned for, and that means I was pushing updates daily to work out some "obviously-beta" features. Early-access users can't leave reviews during that phase, so that might have been a positive thing, the down-side of that is that many people forget to leave a review once the game was released.. so not as many reviews as I normally have during the launch-period. Not sure if I would do that again on Android, but it's been an interesting experiment.

Finally we come to the PC revenue, in total that's $900 which is split over Steam, Itch and Humble. This is also my biggest pain-in-the-butt, obviously my games still don't make much waves amongst PC gamers. Especially since about 50% of that money comes through Itch.io where I ran a pre-order with 20% discount in the two weeks leading up to the launch. So these buyers are mostly people from my own social-circles and mailing-lists, people who in many cases also buy the mobile version and in a lot of cases people who tipped up to $10 (even tho the pre-order price was $3.99!) (THANKS!).

The humble-store sales were about 10% of that, so the rest is up to you to calculate :p

Side note: Besides this launch-period revenue, there is also the added advantage of extra money made on back-log sales. New gamers that see Meganoid will check out my other games and in some cases end up buying a few more of my games. On top of that a lot of subscriptions to my social-circles and mailing list have happened during and after the development of Meganoid, which are all potentially future fans of my next games.

Another important thing to read about, how are the ratings? Because let's face it, making a game in two months isn't interesting if it's a crappy game. On iOS the game has a strong 4/5 star rating from gamers, and on Android it's at 4.8/5 star rating. I'd say those are pretty good ratings (most of my games are around the 4.0 - 4.5 ratings)

On Steam there are only about 4 ratings of which only 2 ratings count since they bought the game on Steam and not through my website/Itch.io or Humble. But I think "all of them" are fairly positive!

Game-site wise, well that's a mixed bag of thingies. As mentioned before, the game was made "game of the week" on Toucharcade, and it was part of the "best games for iOS and Android" that week on Pocketgamer. On the other side Toucharcade's review gave it just a 3.5/5 rating, and Pocketgamer managed to give it a 7/10. So that's the same two websites already making for mixed-reviews. Not sure what to think about it, and it's mostly the reason I focus on the average user-rating on app-stores since those people play the game even after a review.

PC game sites pretty much ignored the game completely, except for a few news-posts on one or two sites. But the whole game-review-site business is something for another topic. In short, those sites only talk about your game if people are already talking about your game, or if there's something controversial to be found, because that brings in readers and thus advertising-money.

Now there's always a part in a post mortem where people go say things that went right or wrong and how things could have gone different. BUT! Meganoid was just as much an experiment as it was a way to earn some extra cash.

For one, the price: $4.99. For a PC game that's a fairly cheap price-point, and it was something I wanted to try out. Normally my newly released PC games go between $7-$10 in the launch period because I honestly think that's what my games are worth for the amount of playtime and enjoyment you get. However, a game like Meganoid is perfect to try out new stuff and I've been wondering if maybe my games would sell better at $4.99. Haven't really compared it yet with my previous games, but my gut-feeling says I sell about as much copies at this price as I do at a more normal price of $7.99.

On mobile the $4.99 is actually on the high-end of things! More experimenting, normally I'm at max at $3.99 and often in the launch week it's at $2.99. I do believe this game could have done better at a $3.99 or $2.99. Possibly sold much more copies with the result being more revenue. Some people hinted I should have lowered the price when I got the iOS feature, but my golden rule is to not punish the instant-buying fans, which I would have done had I suddenly lowered the price within a week of it's release.

In general the gamers liked the game, which is the most important thing. One guy complained that he couldn't get past the first level so it was way to hard, another guy complained that the sound-effects sounded generic (he was a sound-designer offering to do sound effects.. that's business!). One mobile-game reviewer had a lot of problems with the touch-controls, which is ironic for a mobile-game reviewer in my opinion.

I've been pushing regular updates to Meganoid since the release, and I still have one bigger update planned. After that it will mostly complete the work on this game minus any required fixes or OS-updates.

I never create games as a service, all my games receive two or three bigger updates and then I move on. That's my business-model and that's how I stay in business.

As for the game itself, it now becomes a "back-log game". This means I'll be able to do sales and discounts with the game in the next few years. It's also possible to perhaps get it ported and released on consoles or other gadgets, and there are alternate sales-routes the game can take on platforms like Android or PC (different markets, bundles, etc).

On top of that the game engine is fairly straight-forward and easy to repurpose. So it could be possible to re-use the game, create a new game-world and content for it and release like a $1.99 game with it (in fact I already have a funny viking-style game running on the same engine, so who knows).

All those back-log options should be able to at-least double the game's revenue within a year, so let's say the game does $10.000 in total by March 2018. Set against the 2 month development cycle (and 13 years experience!) that's not a bad deal.

For now I got some breathing room again for working on Ashworld, so follow me on Twitter or Facebook if you want to stay updated on that one!

(Grab Meganoid here for Windows,MacOS, Linux, iOS or Android)

#IFTTT #Blogger

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darkarm66 · 8 years ago

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Final Fantasy XV review-Please drive off a cliff

10 years. From planning to execution, the journey for Final Fantasy XV to get here was turbulent, to say the least. But it was finally finished and released. And this is probably as nice I'll be about it. Game making is very hard work and it becomes probably 100 times more intense for one of the biggest franchises on the market. So I don't envy the task the FFXV dev team undertook getting this game out. I envy the people who ended up playing this because this game is just a damn mess. From story, combat, and pacing, there were some great ingredients to make a great game that just never mixed properly.

To be fair, its getting a lot of high praise because there's an open world. A huge, sprawling mix of deserts, hills, forests, mountains, rivers, motels, and small towns....that are barely populated with any sort of interactivity. There's actual work to actually find an enemy to fight or find someone to talk to. It makes you wonder why it needed to be as big as it is. And as big as it is, nothing stands out or has its own distinct look. As beautiful as this game can look, its baffling lack of visual diversity can make a person feel like they're retreading the same places over and over.

Ultimately, FFXV's foray into open world shows that they've got some ways to go. Navigation feels too constricting. You're forced to carry around this damn car that apparently goes fast enough. You have to use it because the world is just too damn big to walk through, which isn't a problem by itself but when controlling the car is so bad you're glad to let Ignis do it, this was a feature that could've been scrapped. Worse, this car is restricted to the road, so getting around means driving until a location is found and stopping on that road. There's no shortcuts, no hidden paths, just long, torturous scenic drives from point A to point B and back. Backtracking severely murders any joy you can have exploring these places.

What truly kills exploration is the fast travel. IT IS SHIT. SHITE. It is unbelievable how user unfriendly this fast travel system is. If you're in one place and you need to get to another, you just can't warp there, even in a game where the only avatar you can control has access to powerful weapons due to magic crystal, you cannot warp to the place you need to get to. You have to either go back to the car and select a spot to pay to go back to a spot you already discovered. It gets worse if you're in a dungeon, one of the few highlights of this game. You have to warp back to the entrance. Either the car or the last spot you rested, which could be on the complete opposite side of the map. AND YOU HAVE TO REPEAT THIS SHIT FOR NEARLY EVERY QUEST YOU DO.

And on the chance you find one of these hidden dungeons in plain sight, good luck playing them because the earlier ones you find aren't that bad. Then the high level dungeons really puts the screws to the player due to a horrible map, fussy door switches, and terrible platforming due to some design overkill. Some treks can take hours (and you can't save inside of them) because nothing in the design or UI gives any clue on what the player should do. Ironically, despite evidence that some content was cut, these dungeons can really feel like padding.

The quest themselves aren't all that bad: collect this or kill that. Which is pretty much standard RPG stuff. The exploration tedium, however, kicks back in doing hunts because you can only do one at a time, even when starting a new one leads you back to the same area you were just in! And this tedium bleeds into the other parts that are actually fun. Like combat. Sometimes in a game, you just want to see an enemy just get bludgeoned with a shiny weapon you have and this game delivers. But due to its day/night cycle, whereas you have to rest your characters and eat recipes to get temporary boosts, you can get caught into long, time consuming battles because you're scrambling to find a nearby place to rest or camp.

The combat system proves that FF13's hate was a bit unjustified. Each battle became about actually trying to find an enemy's weakness and actually exploit it. Here: you're just spazzing from enemy to enemy, hoping to avoid damaging, praying an attack can be blocked long enough to parry. in 13, you can actually see teammates not be loads and in 15: shit just happens when it comes to Linkstrikes and chains. there's nothing that actually triggers them but sheer luck. All you can hope is to find enough equipment to just overpower enemies. Except in boss battles and some monster hunts. Because the lack of depth and simplistic whack-whack-whack flow of combat can lead to some lengthy fights, mainly because you'll just whack away until a bar fills up to use a special technique for your partners to use a technique that can make it go faster. Battles are just purely attrition. What makes the combat more tedious is that your levels ultimately mean dick because you will still get into long fights, no matter how stronger your characters became. Towards the end, I was level 73 and yet, taking down level 20 trooper scrubs felt like it did at the beginning of the game. You and your party doesn't progress or grow. Fights are just....here.

A shame because the creature designs in here are exquisite. There's amazing detail and form to a lot of the monsters you get to fight. These are just exquisite creatures that you actually wanna gawk at.

I don’t wanna say too much about party because the game sure as hell didn't. They're just....there. Swap out two of the guys for one of the more pleasant female characters (Iris and Aranea, represent!), the story is told the same. At least with Aranea, she actually had some damn motivation. But the character development getting cut off at the knees is more to do with Square's insistence on taking a game's huge scope and chopping it up into smaller pieces and letting you put it together. Been that way for a while, especially in 13's case. Only one of them as an ability worth using, there's only one conversation worth giving a shit about, and during combat, you can't control them not to get killed, leaving you in the position of healer, even though one of them is a bodyguard. Like, how?!? Everyone in love with these characters love them for 'pretty' they are and think of the kissing they want to happen. There's zero depth to your party. And the moments that happen just feels thrown in. Like, they realized something needed to happen to these guys. You see cutscenes, brief snippets of the guys talking, but this is just a mirage.

Now for the camps: you actually have to rest to level up and earn AP. And you get to see photos, which highlights the biggest reason I hate this game in spite of wanting to love: I have to stop playing and enjoy the game presenting itself. You're not allowed to actually play this game because you have to see how pretty everything is. Allegedly, your party is supposed to bond over a road trip but that actually happens in cutscenes. The battle camera is so chaotic, you can't know how stylish the combat is until you see a photo of it. When going into a dungeon, you have to see the characters crouch and move cautiously through it. There's even a cutscene of them pumping gas! Who needs that?

The vague plot wastes the amazing soundtrack, forcing the music to create the emotional resonance this game just doesn't earn. It wants you to feel the emotions the characters go through, yet doesn't do any build up or reconciliation. It's just moments.

Which is why I don't mind they stop cutting the pretense and just made everything linear as fuck towards the end. They're gonna make you enjoy their visuals and cutscenes and anguish, playability be damned! This isn't just hand-holding to guide the player through, this game is a crazy ass aunt dragging you through the store when you already know what you want to buy. Yet, in its conclusion I just had one question: why they did I stay in that godawful, empty ass country if nothing I did there matter? Nothing, no theme, plot or character detail is told through gameplay? No sidequest I did made anything better for that world I spent hours in. Not even the conclusion gives a rat's ass about the world that was saved yet it made sure that it was saved. This divide in priorities is heartbreaking considering how much this game comes alive when the player is left to their own devices and actually making choices about how to proceed. And the end game content, frustratingly kept behind the final boss, is proof that if they built this game around some gameplay and made a world to actually exploit that, this could've been a belter.

And for all that was cut out of the game, what they left in was just baffling. Chapter 13 is just excessively boring and painful to look at. That stealth sequence in that building is just wasted geometry. My time would've been better off if Noctis just sat in a chair while text showed me what happened. The vague plot wastes the amazing soundtrack, forcing the music to create the emotional resonance this game just doesn't earn. It wants you to feel the emotions the characters go through, yet doesn't do any build up or reconciliation. It's just moments.

Add in some wonky AI and the fact you can't save in certain places, I'm shocked that critics were barely that critical of it. But shout out to y'all claiming this is better than 13 because the reverse happened: a long open world segment with a linear conclusion vs a linear progression and brief open world part that didn't throw away all the shit you learned hours earlier. People who liked the combat in XV are just bellends who just love to play shit simplistically. In spite of all this, I did put 80 hours into this. And that's not even counting the post-game content, including the new dungeons and that flying car (don’t use it). But most of that time was spent getting to a place, doing a quest and coming back to complete it.

So, for all the high points, there are some severe low points. Even the things that work on its own barely qualifies as functional. It's shit as an open world game, it's horsefuck as a story, the combat is montonous, this is exhausted mouthdrool as an RPG. Had this been an other RPG, maybe I'm not as harsh. The much ballyhooed lengthy dev time and rebrand from Versus XIII to XV has long been publicized. And yet there didn't seem to be an actual cohesive vision present in the game. It's all in the different movies and anime shorts. Problem with this approach is that you're well exhausted beyond the point of caring if you invest in these. And even then, nothing is concluded, wasting your time in the process.

This game will delight fans of pretty boys and running around. It will infuriate fans of well thought out game design. So it's definitely a Final Fantasy game after all.

#review ffxv

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symbianosgames · 8 years ago

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Oh, the game was also created in "just" two months, but I'll also get back to that if you keep reading..

Enter the stage: Meganoid.

The game was made in "just 2 months; and 13 years of experience".

To put it in some more perspective, my game Heroes of Loot 2 is a huge RPG-adventure/twin-stick shooter, and it was made in little over 4 months. So I normally work really fast and very effective.

Now think what you like about the short-development cycle, I don't plan to change your mind about it, but from a business point of view: this made sense and still delivers a quality game.

To have this game make some profit I needed it to take just a couple of months work so it would be easier to recoup on the costs AND make money on the game.

Basically, in my opinion and experience, you need to know people to get things done. But reaching out never hurts and is also the way to get to know more people, so yeah.

Okay, okay! that's what you guys came for, I get it!

Google Play's "Best new seller" list charting

Let me first start with this, Meganoid was so far:

Featured on App-store under "New games we loved" - worldwide

Featured on Google Play "Early Access"

Featured on Google Play "New and Updated"

Top-charted (top 25) in Google Play "Best new sellers" list

Game of the Week - on TouchArcade

"Best games of the week for iOS and Android" - Pocketgamer

Apple loved it - all over the world!

The humble-store sales were about 10% of that, so the rest is up to you to calculate :p

On Steam there are only about 4 ratings of which only 2 ratings count since they bought the game on Steam and not through my website/Itch.io or Humble. But I think "all of them" are fairly positive!

I never create games as a service, all my games receive two or three bigger updates and then I move on. That's my business-model and that's how I stay in business.

For now I got some breathing room again for working on Ashworld, so follow me on Twitter or Facebook if you want to stay updated on that one!

(Grab Meganoid here for Windows,MacOS, Linux, iOS or Android)

#IFTTT #Blogger

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