#the formatting is all weird in dash form tho what-

[builtinadaygames]

Scratch the itch: what I played last month #2

Hi, I'm Kevin Beissel and I make games under the name Built In A Day. I also lurk on Twitter @builtinadayKB and have a space shooter on itch.  This is the second itch game post I've done, you can read the first here.  I'm including this preamble from the first post since it lays out the ground rules:

The purpose of this post is to cover some of the free games on itch.io, from a developer and fan perspective.  I'd like to make it a recurring series, maybe a monthly breakdown but who knows.  Like Douglas Adams said, the best part of deadlines is the great WHOOSHING sound they make while flying by.

Before we get to the games, I just want to clarify why I'm doing this and what I hope it accomplishes.  So here's the what, why and how:

The WHAT

Discuss free games available on itch.io

I've got a list of profiles to check out, but please send along any recommendations.

There are no restrictions on genres.  The whole point of this is to be curious and ask questions.  So no dumb rules like "No walking sims" or "No puzzle platformers", which would prolly eliminate half of the available games anyways.

The WHY

I want to become a better developer and playing experimental/small/art/trash games could help.

Getting an audience is hard and getting constructive feedback is even harder.  I can't help the devs covered in these posts with the former but maybe I can with the latter.

The HOW

There is no rating system.

There is no alter ego here, these are not 'angry' reviews.

These aren't even really reviews.

The goal is to focus on the design choices that were made and discuss the reasoning behind them.

I don't really care about being right, I don't really care about sounding smart ("Yeah, no shit" the reader grumbles), I don't really care about agreeing with you.  I'm more interested in looking at the hierarchy of ideas (to borrow a phrase) that form game design.  By working at the ends and working in the middle we can find out more about it, right?

Enough with the formalities, let's get started.

Profile: Bedstuck (@bedstuck)

Game: White

Genre/Style: action, wave-based brawler, melee combat

I've been seeking out lots of action games lately and 'White' has a lot of the things I'm looking for in this genre.  You play through waves of enemies, with a black-and-white art style and fast-paced melee combat.

The visuals are immediately appealing, with great character design choices and fluid animations.  The art style manages to be simple but expressive (it was made for a jam in less than 17 hrs).  Looks like a cool ink based style, like a comic book.  One of my all time favorite movie fight scenes is from 'Book of Eli'.  The opening fight scene is under a bridge and shown only in silhouette, much like the style here.

Spoilers for 'Book of Eli' real quick, so skip to the next paragraph if you haven't seen it:  I saw that movie opening night and took a lady friend to it.  It was our first date together (sadly it was also the last) and she had wanted to see 'the Lovely Bones', that godawful looking Peter Jackson snoozefest, but I'm occasionally charming and persuasive so we saw 'Book of Eli' instead.  After the movie we're walking out to the car and I ask her: "Pretty crazy how his character was blind for the whole movie, huh?" and she goes "What do you mean?"  In her defense, she thought it was weird and boring, but it's still made explicitly clear at the end that the main character is blind, yet she somehow missed that.  None of this pertains to the game 'White', but that's what happens, man.

The combat is intuitive but challenging.  It is melee-based, so you have to get good at timing your jumps and slashing in the correct direction to get the airborne enemies.  There's a dash ability that is crucial for getting to wave spawners and taking them out quickly.  Using the jump and dash abilities in concert has so much potential, both offensively and defensively.

The enemy behavior is nicely varied between melee and ranged types.  There's some square enemies that shoot smaller squares.  At first I thought they might be targeting the player, but after watching them for awhile my guess is that they are based on some randomized pattern.  If they all targeted the player with each shot then even a small amount on screen would be deadly.  Not sure I'm right about this, but my first instinct would have been to target the player; based on what I'm seeing here, the random pattern is a better choice.

I was able to beat the easiest difficulty setting (health regens), but only got to wave five on normal (no health regen) and wave four on original (one hit kills you).  Of course balancing difficulty is a notoriously hard task and, while I hate a challenge in real life, a challenge in a video game is actually appealing.  The tiers of difficulty make sense here and ramp up nicely.  But don't get me started on the "tears" of difficulty, we've all been there.

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Profile: Hempuli (@ESAdevlog, hempuli.com)

Game: Baba Is You

Genre/Style: Puzzle

If you grew up reading Roger Ebert movie reviews (you know, the ones that were scrawled across the cave walls), you're prolly familiar with the kind of review where he refused to talk about any plot points after the first act, so as not to spoil the joy of seeing it unfold for yourself.  He would go on about the atmosphere, the performances, latent/manifest content and other such things, but would not spoil the mechanics of it.  I'll have to use that format for 'Baba Is You', because you're better off finding out for yourself.

Each level has a set of obstacles and hazards that block the goal.  There are three-word phrases placed in the level as well, and the phrases can be rearranged to create new types of interaction.  For example, "wall is stop" could be changed to several things.  That's all I'll say, because the solutions and the mechanics of it all are so much fun that any more would spoil it.

If you enjoyed something like 'Stephen's Sausage Roll' or if you're a fan of NES/pre-NES visual styles then you should find something to like here.  Just a great concept, superb puzzle design, fun aesthetics, wonderful "eureka!" moments, a must play for puzzle fans.  Hmmm, can I do some more 'pull quotes' or is that enough?  It's a white-knuckle thriller, like nothing you've ever seen, if you play one puzzle game this year make it this one, a non-stop thrill ride, edge of your seat entertainment, breathtaking, gripping, an ending you won't see coming, Harrison Ford has never been better.

I guess you could describe this writing style as "talking to yourself", since this is clearly not written for an actual audience.  But it's important to differentiate between "talking WITH yourself" and "talking TO yourself".  There's a pretty big difference.  Who else am I supposed to talk to?  I'm the only one here, right?  Maybe this writing style is better known as "non-sequitur internet bullshit".  Hey, if Mark Prindle is retired, who else will keep the spirit alive other than yours truly?  Who else?  Maybe this giant peach over here, this giant peach that is wearing a top hat and a monocle, perhaps he can.

But yeah, please do check out 'Baba Is You'.  It communicates its ideas clearly, introduces new elements in a fair manner and controls easily (thank you for the 'undo' button).  I'm usually pretty harsh on puzzle games, put this is great work.

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Profile: Managore (@Managore, daniellinssen.net)

Game: Walkie Talkie

Genre/Style: side-scroller, level-builder, chat room

Every once and awhile you find something that really comes "off the top rope", so to speak, and conceptually 'Walkie Talkie' does just that.  It is side-scrolling level-building platformer presented as a chat room.  The levels are messages that users type in and most keyboard characters have preset behaviors.

So using the right set of symbols a user can create a solid platformer level, with ramps, moving platforms, turrets, bouncing boulders, disappearing platforms and other hazards.

The game's creator has gone through and marked some levels with a heart, and those are worth checking out for sure. But it's also fun to scroll through and look for random goodness, and some users are good at pointing out fun levels.

I'd recommended plugging in your X360 controller, since keyboard input was a bit tricky.  Even with a controller the movement gets a bit wonky, but two things: this was made for a jam and I'm unbelievably picky about platformer controls, so perhaps I'm overstating this.  And even if I'm not, this game is still worth playing for its conceptually audacity alone.

I was a day one fan of 'Mario Maker' and still enjoy it to this day.  But some of those levels are prone to cutesy bullshit, especially levels using names that scream "Hey, play this because its Pokemon themed!" and pointless levels based on Rube Goldberg-meets-auto-runner non-gameplay.  While 'Walkie Talkie' has plenty of useless entries, that's the result of having user generated content and not the result of authorial missteps.

And like David Mamet once said: "Everyone makes their own fun.  If you don't make it yourself, it isn't fun.  It's entertainment."  Of course, David Mamet has said a lot of things, many of which suck.  'Walkie Talkie' doesn't suck tho, far from it.  Unless you mean it sucks in all the praise, which is true, just really poorly worded.  

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