zerofeedback

[zerofeedback]

Human Needs (Marek Kapolka)

"The idea was to reverse the social and commercial mechanics of The Sims. You send your character off to go to parties for 8 hours a day to gain social currency to buy friends, then you mingle and form friendships with household appliances." -- August 24, 2014

Noyb's remarks: "One thing about inverting The Sims' treatment of people and objects is that those life simulators already objectify people. Talking to a housemate or neighbor satisfies a character's need for social interaction the same way watching television satisfies their need for entertainment. Early Sims games lock out higher-paying careers until your Sim makes a certain number of friends, leading to the common behavior of packing neighboring houses with identical Sims you never intend to play, exclusively there for their financial utility to your main characters.

"Human Needs expands The Sims' Social Need into four separate metrics -- Violence, Sex, Humor, and Hope -- while compressing all other needs into a single Things meter. Letting any meter deplete prematurely ends the game, apart from Sex. (Prolonged abstinence only introduces a friendly onanistic fluid to the house.) The player buys friends according to what needs they fulfill and their efficiency at filling those needs, while furniture appears randomly in the house and a traditional love story with a leather chair plays out in the background. The writing exclusively refers to other people by their vocation, while most inanimate objects have both names and functions.

"The Violence Need takes this objectification to disturbing levels, regularly asking the player character to attack or kill their human houseguests, else risk ending the game. It reinforces the abusive, exploitative nature of the game's need-fulfillment mechanics by showing how easily it can model non-consensual violence. The game visibly tracks the player character's relationship level with every object, but not housemates. From the player character's flawed perspective, friends are interchangeable commodities. There is no relationship to harm."

[Play Online] [Download (HTML)]

[zerofeedback]

Four Shades of Gray (mcc)

"Floating blurry [psychedelic] cubes [...] Turn on your sound." -- August 22, 2013

Noyb's remarks: "A field of cubes float in an empty, white void. Clicking on a cube lets the player jump on top of it, so long as there's room above. As the player's traversing and mapping this abstract space, she spies something out of place. Another character. Red. Shaped like a pawn from a travel chess set or a solid formed by rotating an armless, skirt-wearing bathroom door icon. Clicking on their body or the block on which they rest results in unambiguous language asking the player to leave them alone. The player has invaded their space.

"This pattern of discovery and rebuke continues with different visual effects and structures until the last level, which blurs nearby cubes into an indistinct mess. Large swathes of gray with tiny splashes of color, only briefly coalescing into an intelligible image every five to ten seconds. This oscillating effect makes it challenging to understand the level geometry and find Red. And that's the point. Red does not want to talk. Red does not want to be found. The player's actions are selfish, predatory, and abusive."

[Download for Windows] [Download for Mac] [Download for Linux]

[zerofeedback]

The Lucid Dreamer (Luckylucanos)

"Tell me what you think about it" -- June 12, 2014

Noyb's remarks: "The Lucid Dreamer presents a series of puzzles taking place simultaneously in a small one-room apartment and a larger dreamscape. The player falls asleep to explore the dream world, and can wake up at any time to return to the apartment. Most of the puzzles involve taking actions in one world to affect the other, ultimately changing conditions in the dreamworld enough to open up a path to push some crates onto some marked tiles.

"The first puzzle is the only one with some fluidity to the solution: recognizing that pushing around a pile of clothes on your bedroom floor also moves special wall tiles you can't see until you fall asleep, supporting the cognitive challenge of connecting their movements. The second level -- feeding your cat to dispel images of hungry tigers in the dreamworld -- is trivial enough to solve before even falling asleep and understanding why this action was necessary. The third level -- passing objects between the two worlds by placing them in common containers -- also follows easily. The last level rests solely on a random binary trivia question.

"At the end of each level comes a standard multistep block-pushing puzzle, boring videogame nonsense that poorly serves a premise which should be limited only by the developer's imagination. They're simple enough to require almost no higher level strategies to solve, trivial for anyone who has played a Sokoban clone or variant. Apart from the first level, they don't overlap with the main puzzle interactions at all, serving only as tedious extra steps before the game recognizes the player's victory."

[Play Online]

[zerofeedback]

Gray Desert (Pierre Chevalier)

"These are the things I'm interested in at the moment : randomly colliding stuff through various procedures and exploring how these procedures and randomization can be used to create some sort of meaning." -- July 26, 2014

Noyb's remarks: "Gray forms emerge from a black screen, monochrome splotches that quickly grow to suggest the contours of a vast desert. Photography processed into almost unrecognizable, unearthly shapes: cracked earth, rolling dunes, uneven horizons, hints of clouds and trees and heavenly orbs. Clicking or pressing the up arrow key fades the scene slightly and overlays another, muted shades of both old and new clashing or cohering into a new image. This action gives a strong sensation of motion, landmarks fading or reemerging with every player-made step. 

"Past images seem to remain in memory even after they visibly fade away, making the game struggle as the player continues, each new step taking a little longer than the last. This gives a sense of weight to the player's exploration of this space, an exhaustion that slows the player down until she eventually gives up and closes the game, implicitly choosing that screen to be her final resting spot.

"I didn't play much with the other available verbs. Pressing the down arrow undoes the latest movement, giving the player some small control over the screen's visual evolution, while the left and right arrow keys pan the topmost layer, marring the screen with prominent vertical lines at the image's boundaries. I feel some tension between my enjoyment of the journey's implicit narrative -- a design ethos foregrounded in the companion game The Wait with the inclusion of text, recognizable human figures and an explicit ending -- and actions that expose some of the drawing mechanics to the player, steps towards a McClure-like experience of facilitating the creation of compelling images through constrained exploration of a possibility space."

[Play Online]

[zerofeedback]

Ghostie Goes to School (kylerhoades)

"Ghostie Goes To School is the story of an innocent young Ghostie facing the challenges of school life and growing up." -- February 27, 2012

Noyb's remarks: "Ghostie Goes to School is spooky in its emptiness. The player takes on the role of Ghostie, a ghost pursuing education from 1st grade through college. While there appear to be living characters in the game world, there is no way to interact with them. At first, the only thing you can do is walk into one of three schools. Entering a school either instantly bumps you up a grade/semester or tells you you aren't the right age to attend. Time passes by in a flash with no real impact. Once Ghostie qualifies for high school, the game introduces the only interaction outside of studying: taking drugs. Explicitly, the game sets up education as a monotonous system, and drugs as something which disrupts that repetitive framework, the only actions which cause the narrator to mention Ghostie's emotions outside of empty congratulations every time they age up.

"The player can end the game, graduating from college and receiving a final grade, without touching the stuff. I couldn't discern any correlation between the player's actions and her final score, but the only way to lose the game is by taking drugs. Every time you do, there is a random chance of permanently losing one of your three hearts. Run out of hearts and Ghostie dies, which naturally leads to a dynamic of experimenting in youth and avoiding them after a few bad experiences, when it's clear you don't have many more chances. In the background, The Kooks sing, 'Control yourself / Take only what you need from it [...] I thought this wouldn't hurt a lot / I guess not.'"

[Download for Windows]

[zerofeedback]

A Knight of Faith (Juxt)

"In this five-minute game about Kierkegaard's philosophy, you make decisions and face a challenging test. Will you become the Knight of Faith?" -- March 8, 2012

Noyb's remarks: "A Knight of Faith attempts to be a moral parable in the form of a traditional role-playing game. A number of characters tell the player character that he will be tested, and the only way to prepare for this trial is to fight skeletons. A young girl tempts the player into helping her brother escape from a nearby cave instead of undergoing this training. Whatever the player decides -- running through the dungeon, leveling up, taking treasure, or helping a stranger -- she will always meet an old man who rattles on about Kierkegaard, concluding that the player is not a 'Knight of Faith' but instead either an 'aesthetic' (described by the game as basically a hedonist) or a 'Knight of Infinite Resignation' (described by the game as a 'mindless utilitarian drone [devoted] to the Universal, the laws of morality.') The proposed solution is to reject the offer to restart the trial, instead choosing to end the game, which then prompts the old man to call you a true Knight of Faith.

"(You can also break the game by dying in the dungeon or standing in the brother's escape route before talking to him, but those endings seem like bugs or oversights not explicitly acknowledged by the text.)

"I am not up on my Kierkegaard, but from a shaky read of Fear and Trembling, I don't think this game illustrates the two kinds of knights well. The old man seems to conflate Kierkegaard's notion of an 'ethical' man with that of a Knight of Infinite Resignation, someone who has thoroughly convinced themselves that a certain action or goal is impossible in such a way that nothing can occur that will call this belief into question. A Knight of Faith undergoes that same movement towards infinite resignation, but paradoxically also believes that through the divine or the absurd they will achieve their goals. Kierkegaard illustrates this in detail through multiple retellings of the Biblical story of Abraham, tempted by his God to sacrifice his only son, Isaac, taking him on a multi-day journey all while simultaneously, paradoxically believing both that Isaac must be slain and that God will spare Isaac's life. 

"The game deems the player a Knight of Faith for choosing to quit, but this action feels more like the movement of a Knight of Infinite Resignation. Without access to the source code, games are often black box machines, rules and systems only knowable in part through experimentation. As a player, I may suspect a challenge has no solution, but may not convince myself of that until I try out multiple approaches towards the problem. Even if I attempt every reasonable permutation of actions, there may still exist one obscure series of inputs that unlocks the desired outcome. It was in the process of trying out the obvious, signposted narrative branches that the game labeled me a Knight of Infinite Resignation. When I grew tired of experimenting and resigned myself that the game had no solution, it labeled me a Knight of Faith."

[Download for Windows]

[zerofeedback]

Ants on Plaid (SuperWes)

"I spent a month or two last year making a simple game inspired by the bit-generations games. I wanted to make something where the visuals and interface were simplistic and nonthreatening. [...] Whether you win or lose is more dependent on what level you're playing on than it is your skill, so I consider it a failed game. I could probably salvage it a bit, but I'm not sure it would be worth it. [...] The best thing to come out of it was the Random Plaid generator, which I really love." -- February 15, 2009

Noyb's remarks: "Each of those hundreds of specks is a single ant, crawling erratically over your screen. Every level is a plaid texture, a playing field of colorful, visually asymmetric rectangles. The player rests in a single cell and can immediately jump to any neighboring cell. Resting in place causes the current cell to flash, killing every ant within its borders. The goal: to exterminate at least half of the ants before time expires.

"For an abandoned prototype, it's not a bad start. This is a game about observation and navigation, the player prioritizing attacking cells that are both nearby and populous. This focus on embodying a space while remaining aware of enemy density reminds me a bit of Every Extend Extra, except trading chain reactions for controlled attacks of spatially limited impact.

"The developer is right to note the erratic difficulty curve, stemming from the disproportionate importance of larger grid spaces to killing ants. Get a pattern with lots of small, thin rectangles and each attack will hit less ants at once. Since every ant has the same effect, what you have is a degenerate strategy made more or less effective depending on the level layout, but applied against a win condition that remains invariant to the full scope of possible levels."

[Download for Windows (XNA)]

[zerofeedback]

Be the Best! (jackeloperson)

"Go around and be the best at everything!" -- May 23, 2013

Noyb's remarks: "This reminds me so much of one of my first games, a branching narrative made in QuickBasic, comprising a linear series of choices where each fork had only one correct decision. I was a kid at the time, dependent on my father to show me the logical and syntactic cruft necessary to display text, read and parse input, jump to a different part of the source code depending on what the player typed. It's even easier now for kids and newcomers to make a text-based game -- with Twine and Quest and Inform -- and that's a very good thing.

"Be the Best! presents the player with a series of scenarios and asks her to pick the one option the developer finds most awesome. Guess the wrong one and you're either taken back to an earlier passage or to one of five ending pages that collectively spell out the word "loser." In her analysis of the game Dream Zone, an early text adventure by teenagers who would go on to found Naughty Dog, Leigh Alexander notes the incongruity that a game developed by kids about an imaginative dreamscape includes a lengthy segment about dealing with an absurd corporate bureaucracy. So it is in Be the Best, where despite its open, imaginative premise things never spiral beyond a distorted reflection of adult life -- eating breakfast, driving to work, dressing up for a job interview -- attenuated by affected positive attitudes and playful gymnastics but always taking this basic structure as a given. The ending is a lot more subdued and sweet than I expected: finding a job that makes the player character happy and is a natural fit for their showmanship, even if it doesn't maximize their income."

Editorial Note: Per Zero Feedback's criteria, this game received zero comments on the Interactive Fiction Database (IFDB), but it's arguable whether or not the developer strictly posted their own game. I've stretched this criteria in the past for IFDB games, in part because I didn't want to exclude one of the larger IF-focused communities from this project and because members of that community frequently post other people's games for critique, curation, or completeness. The person who posted Be the Best! on IFDB, though, happens to be a robot, an automated process triggered automatically between January 2013 and January 2014 when any developer posted their game on textadventures.co.uk, a separate development community with a markedly different demographic than IFDB. The presence of this bot led to a fascinating and horrifying discussion that touches on whether community members meant to share their games with the IFDB, what it means to be a creator or critic when the quantity of games is increasing at an ever-faster rate, how it feels when your releases go overlooked, whether IFDB's practical ethos align with its stated goal of being "a comprehensive catalog of IF," and a lot of gatekeeping language about what defines a finished game and whether a game's quality or adherence to IF tradition should exclude it from the site and in some cases whether they actually are games. It's an important read if you're at all interested in game-sharing platforms and curation.

[Play Online] [Download (Quest File)] [Download Quest Interpreter for Windows]

[zerofeedback]

Terrifying Drive (Juliette Porée)

"Not all that terrifying really." -- February 25, 2012

Noyb's remarks: "Short physics-based driving game where the player maneuvers a car over a bumpy, abstract, two-dimensional landscape. Unlike Elastomania, a motocross game with a similar setup, Terrifying Drive doesn't treat flipping over on your back as a failure state, nor does it provide any way to lean in midair to affect your momentum. Instead, halfway through the course the game tells the player she can use space to jump, which is precisely when everything breaks down in a glorious way. At first jumping seems like a way of correcting player error, but it's not long before the player discovers she can jump multiple times in midair, careening through the sky, jostling the car into nooks and crannies impossible to reach through careful driving alone.

"While I describe this as a joyous act of discovery, I'm reminded of my own underwhelmed reaction to Desert Golfing's occasional breaks from the minimalist framework it sets up early on, an emotional reaction upon finding something small but unexpected and the difficulty of conveying those feelings without shifting the very expectations which supported that delight. The initial discovery becomes a story to be enjoyed vicariously, only directly experienced by those players who know the game exists, heard enough to want to play it, but know nothing of the surprises that may await."

[Play Online] [Download for Windows]

[zerofeedback]

The Worm (Softwave)

"A flash game about a god-like worm made in a day. I might polish it a bit today." -- May 29, 2014

Noyb's remarks: "The Worm is a short, cute game with a few surprises. The platforming could be more responsive -- low acceleration means it takes a few frames after tapping left or right before the character moves, and there's no need to put grab and throw on separate buttons -- but it doesn't matter much to the experience since the game does not focus on precise execution. It centers on a single spiritual choice: the 'sacrifice self, sacrifice other, or sacrifice God' trinity of common interactions between a videogame character and a digital deity. Curiously, not all of these options may be possible in a given playthrough, since the number of trash can sacrifices and explosive TNT blocks vary randomly. Still, I enjoyed the moment the worm emerges, and some colorful effects when I angered it."

[Play Online]

[zerofeedback]

A Nameless Inheritance [Standalone Demo] (Blackmoth Entertainment)

"A Nameless Inheritance is a survival horror game I've been working on for quite a while, the gameplay is heavily inspired by games like Flashback, Another World, 1213 and such, though also combining combat and puzzle solving elements from classic survival horror games of the PS1 era." -- June 2, 2014

Noyb's remarks: "The platforming is a functional enough implementation of the pure tile-based mechanics of the games listed above -- with a focus on dramatic leaps, grabbing ledges, and lowering the player character safely down drops --  though the controls feel more cumbersome than necessary. There are two separate buttons dedicated to jumping: one for standing vertical jumps and another for jumping across gaps. These two situations are simple enough for a computer to differentiate based on how the player character is currently moving. Separating them into two discrete inputs offloads that cognitive problem onto the player, increasing the game's mechanical complexity. Interacting with objects while standing uses a separate key than picking up objects on the ground. Crouching also seems to arbitrarily disable your ability to talk with other characters or examine relevant background details.

"Weapon and item management imitates early Resident Evil games, asking the player to continually pause the game to dive into a menu and spend many keystrokes to equip weapons, reload guns, or select the obvious item to solve a puzzle.

"The level design likes placing ledges at the very edge of your vision and sometimes asks the player to drop down onto platforms sight unseen. Combined with frequent instant-kill drops, the cognitive difficulty of learning all those controls, an unforgiving treatment of jumps made near edges and sparse save points early on, I tended to feel more frustration than tension whenever I died.

"The scenario hits generic horror notes -- friends exploring a cave, amnesia, humanoid monsters, tentacled beasts -- but the writing and atmosphere didn't elevate any character or scene beyond thinly-sketched cliches. I hope that the upcoming full version, which will tell a different story than the demo, finds a stronger voice."

[Download for Windows]

[zerofeedback]

soundmap i (Mark Wonnacott)

" I am playing at making audiogames (games where the only output is audio) [...] I would like feedback on how easy it is to understand the meaning of the audio output and how easy it is to visualise and learn the layout of the map each time." -- May 8, 2013

Noyb's remarks: "It's important for game developers to take the time to examine their designs and recognize what players, deliberately or not, they exclude by relying on broad assumptions of the visual, cognitive, aural, mechanical abilities their players possess.

"soundmap i prototypes a navigational scheme that relies on physical input, audio response in English, and a cognitive challenge of building a mental map of a virtual location. The screenshot above visualizes several input methods -- joystick, keyboard, and mouse -- but provides no information necessary to play the game.

"The player starts at a random location and is audibly tasked to find her way to a series of named landmarks. From each location, the player is fixed in place but able to look in any direction by moving the joystick. If a given direction leads to another location, the game audibly tells the player the location's name and she can press a button to travel instantly to it. Arriving at her target results in an audible reward and a new goal destination.

"So it's a game about navigating a space represented as a series of nodes connected with directional edges, similar to how most spaces in interactive fiction games work, with the added dimension of having to move a joystick in the proper direction before traveling. Text-to-speech-friendly interactive fiction interpreters exist as precedent, as do real-time games designed to accommodate blind players moving freely through a virtual space. I don't know enough about the full scope of accessibility design and research to know if soundmap i's navigational interface is novel, but I was able to form a rough mental map of the game's area, navigating with increasing comfort as the game progressed, associating locations with both their position relative to my current location and eventually an exact path from here to there.

"I did found the choice of continually repeating the current location's name while idle more annoying than useful, although I'd imagine in another prototype this could represent music or a soundscape specific to that area. I also found it initially confusing to mentally parse and retain my objective when this verbal repetition immediately follows the goal dialogue, saying things like, 'Go to river. Road. Road. Road. Road. Road. Road.'"

Note: Mac and Linux players will need to download the .love game file and the LÖVE application to run it.

[Download for Windows] [Download (.love)] 

[zerofeedback]

Happy Birthday Hennell + Happy Birthday Hennell: Puzzle Edition 2012 (Alan Hazelden)

"I didn't get my friend a birthday present, so I made him a game." -- February 28, 2010

"birthday" -- February 26, 2012

"Some games are designed for a large audience. Some for a small audience. Some for an audience of one. Some aren't designed to be played at all. Gaming as an artistic medium is broad enough to accommodate all of these approaches. There is nothing wrong with the existence of a game designed for someone who is not you. That said, it's also a valid approach to critique games from perspectives outside of the ideologies and expectations of a game's target audience.

"Happy Birthday Hennell [2010] and Happy Birthday Hennell 2012: Puzzle Edition are a pair of games presented as digital birthday gifts. (There are more games in this series, but they are beyond the scope of this site.) The first is a facile game of clicking on candles to blow them out. It starts with a single candle. Each level adds an extra flame until the player reaches Hennell's then-current age of 23, concluding with a short birthday wish and a final gag of decorating the cake with trick candles that relight after a short time. For most players, that's 276 discrete, monotonous clicks to unlock a message intended for someone else. The game has a low barrier to completion, but a long length relative to its content. I wonder if this was a deliberate design decision to subtly repel players without a personal interest in the game?

"The second game also involves blowing out candles on a cake, but this time it's a puzzle: draw five straight lines to overlap all twenty-five flames, each subsequent line segment beginning where the previous one ends. It's a nontrivial challenge with a failure state. With some perseverance anyone could win Happy Birthday Hennell [2010], but I could easily see a player walking away before the ending of Happy Birthday Hennell 2012. 

"The puzzle itself isn't cognitively difficult -- with five lines and twenty-five candles, the player will need to hit an average of five candles per line, but the 5x5 grid means that the player will need to hit exactly five candles per turn, meaning the solution would need to be a zig-zag shape hitting each row or column in turn -- but has a high execution difficulty. The flames offer a smaller target to hit than their sprites imply. It's difficult to make minor changes to a solution. The player must draw all five lines in a single go, without an option to keep intermediate steps if they make a mistake partway through. The game forces the player to sit through a cute animation of an unseen character blowing out the candles, padding out the time between attempts. Most line endpoints will rest on the solid background in places with distant visual landmarks, making it difficult to accurately recreate previous attempts.

"After solving this puzzle, the game presents the player with a deliberately broken space partitioning puzzle as a way to introduce a mean joke and the final birthday wishes. (That is, it looks mean to my eyes, but I don't have the necessary context to understand if Hennell was meant to see it that way!)

"I find it fascinating that we have here a pair of games made by the same designer for the same player, but with such different design ethos. People, even game designers, change over time. Friendships change over time as people grow closer or apart, learn new things about each other. It's exhilarating how games made within the context of a long friendship, as a form of communication referencing a specific moment in time, could theoretically embody those changes."

Note: The first game contains flashing lights.

[Play Online (2010 Edition)] [Play Online (2012 Edition)]

[zerofeedback]

Before the End of the World (Lucas J.W. Johnson, Devin Vibert)

"The sky is tearing itself open. Fire rains from the heavens. And you've returned home to reflect on the person you fell in love with in your dreams." -- February 25, 2014

Noyb's remarks: "Before the End of the World is a game about hoping to find closure during the worst of circumstances, grasping onto old thoughts and what sense of familiarity remains in your ruined hometown. It's a love story told in retrospect, memories triggered by the smallest of objects, not all of them pleasant.

"The developer positions this game as an experiment in 'how minor differences in context can change one's actions.' Structural and narrative spoilers ahead: the game asks the player to specify the player character's gender identity -- male, female, or other -- before everything begins, but the text doesn't change a word in response to this choice. The narration always refers to the player character with second person pronouns, and the player character's ex remains male in each scenario. The implication here is that this is a work colored by the player's experiences, by the expectations they bring into the text about how their society treats straight women, gay men, and those who do not fit within the gender binary. Representation in games, like in other forms of media, exists within a broader context, not an apolitical vacuum. Gaming certainly needs more explicitly constructed characters of less commonly represented backgrounds, but there's also room for this looser approach, which provides a framework for subverting typical gender roles and the kinds of stories developers (and players) tell.

"The experiment also seems to test the impact of a story told in a different order to different players. All players see the same flashbacks, but some might hear of the ex's betrayal before learning that the player character forgave him, while others might learn these specifics immediately before the endgame. There's a school of thought that might reduce this game structure to 'linear,' since the order of actions has no effect on the game state past this information-gathering section, but I believe that overlooks the effect on players' differing first-time experiences engaging with the work.

"The developer promised a postmortem with results from this experiment, but never posted one. I wonder if they received any responses at all. If you have the time, do submit your feedback after playing."

[Play Online]

[zerofeedback]

Recursive Runner (Soupe au Caillou)

"I'd love feedback on... everything" -- November 29, 2012

Noyb's remarks: "Recursive Runner is a rare instance of a free mobile game that's actually freeware. No permissions. No ads. No downloadable content. No consumable goods purchasable with real currency. Free literally meaning free, the word's definition not stretched to subsume its antonym. Structurally, the major app stores categorize freeware alongside deceptively labeled 'free-to-play' games, making it difficult to even search for games like this without relying on alternative channels. I'd love to hear if there are any app review sites or marketplaces that make this distinction.

"Recursive Runner fits broadly in the same genre as Cyclic, asking the player to perform a task multiple times while dodging her past attempts, but this game does a much better job of forcing the player into conflict with these clones. The player automatically runs back and forth in a foggy park, and can tap to jump. The player earns points whenever she or a past life touches a stationary bulb. So the game sets up a situation where the player is always running directly at at least one clone, and under a score incentive to aim at the same targets, making it a satisfying challenge to remember the movement of her previous runs to avoid unwanted collisions.

"I like how the game focuses on a score-attack without adding an explicit fail state. It's common for games in this genre to stop play entirely when the player touches one of her past selves. Here, though, the only penalty is to optimal scoring. The past self disappears, making the player lose out on all the points it could have earned in future rounds, but the player keeps running, never breaking flow.

"The precise scoring mechanics remain opaque, though. It's hard to tell if every lamp the player or a clone hits is worth the same or if there are some kind of multipliers at play. The score is only displayed diegetically on a banner in the center of a multi-screen-width field and offscreen clones can earn the player points, so it's difficult to attribute specific actions to specific point values."

[Download for Android]

[zerofeedback]

By the Void (Madball)

"I didn't find the original [version of the game], but I made an approximate screenshot of it. You can see it in my journal." -- December 1, 2013

Noyb's remarks: "The player individually controls a number of robots, each initially segregated in their own portion of a maze. Bumping into a glowing circle makes a new robot visible. Bumping into a switch permanently toggles one or more floor or wall tiles. So the moment-to-moment goal is to activate new robots, use them to reveal previously unseen parts of the maze, and hit switches to reconfigure the maze's structure to repeat this process. I like the level design concept of a number of different characters physically separated from each other, but still able to affect each other's progress.

"I didn't find the puzzles compelling. At any given time there is either only one way to proceed, or there are multiple possible actions whose outcomes the player cannot predict. The player cannot visually tell which tiles a switch will toggle, so there is no way to reason about your actions until after you've already done them. Hitting a switch might open a path and close another, telling the player she should have moved one of the other robots to a different tile beforehand, but there's no way to know this was the intended solution until after she already makes this reasonable mistake. The game lets the player undo moves freely, which thankfully limits the potential frustration. It still doesn't change that the game's overall design requires hitting dead ends to learn crucial information, and that the puzzles themselves become trivial upon learning this information.

"By the Void was made for a weekend game jam themed around remaking one of your first games. By definition, this theme excludes those who are just starting game development, but the thing about game jams is that such a limited time frame tends to favor experienced developers, ones familiar and comfortable with their tools. Every hour spent learning is one you could theoretically spend sleeping, coding, making content or polishing. Mechanics or systems that might have taken you months to implement for the first time will feel more natural each time you make something similar.

"Everyone starts somewhere and -- no matter what implicit or explicit rankings emerge from game jam culture and coverage -- there's no shame in that. Polished or unpolished, small or large, unique or derivative: first games are important."

[Play Online]

[zerofeedback]

ClaySHMUP! (Team Danger Falcon)

"This is probably [its] final form, since the 'codebase' I have for it seems messed up for reasons I'd don't really understand. I might make a remake/[sequel] later though." -- September 25, 2012

Noyb's remarks: "ClaySHMUP certainly isn't the only claymation or found object shoot-em-up out there, but it's always nice to see developers exploring less common art styles. The flapping player character and grinning enemies are cute! It's a shame how some of the visual effects clash, with highly pixelated dissolving animations and single-color bullet impact sprites.

"I didn't enjoy how the enemy design contributed to the game's focus on memorization. Pink flyers are fast, only staying onscreen for about a second. They take four shots to kill, meaning if you move into a row where one spawns you probably won't have enough time to either kill it or get out of the way, forcing you to take a hit. It's even less likely in a few scenarios where multiple flyers spawn at once, covering multiple rows. The intended player behavior is to kill it if it spawns in line with the player ship or avoid it otherwise, but it's not possible to predict where they spawn, making this a game which punishes the player until she memorizes the level. Two slower, grinning, pill-shaped enemies offer the player more leeway to dodge, though their high health also make it unlikely that the player can intentionally destroy them without encountering one in a narrow corridor or memorizing where they appear. The player only takes five hits before death, with no checkpoints or health items, so repetition is the only way to proceed.

"The level design guides the player around the screen through tunnels of various widths, alternating between high intensity periods of combat and low intensity periods without enemies. It's a valid design choice to leave spaces for the player to breathe, but I quickly grew frustrated with these periods of downtime upon each repeated play. Still, I played until the unfinished boss, a seemingly-invincible grinning orb with a small moon that jerkily teleports to a different point in its orbit just before firing."

[Download for Windows]