Author: MrBlueSky

Catch the Fox

Disclosure: I received a key for free on Lurkit.

Let it never be said that I’m a hack reviewer. Developers, if you give me a key to your game, rest assured I will play the entire thing before I review it. Even if that means I spend 93 minutes of my life on a generic repeatable task in an Unreal 5 demo map.

Don’t conflate that with me saying nice things about your game though. Instead, I’ve decided to title this review “Constructive Criticism.”

For the people reading this review who aren’t the developers of Catch the Fox, here’s a brief overview of the game. The player is placed into a large level populated by shrubberies, foxes, and powerups. The goal is to get close enough to touch the foxes. After touching enough foxes, the next level is unlocked. When you touch a fox, its fur gets redder, and then it moves faster.

Movement

The core of Catch the Fox’s gameplay is movement. It’s really the only thing you can do. Getting airborne gives you a speed boost on returning to the ground. This allows the player to skate merrily along. Or at least it would, if it wasn’t for a few issues.

The foxes you need to touch have a hitbox for collisions that’s only slightly smaller then the hitbox for “touching” them. And when you collide with them, you instantly lose all momentum. This absolutely kills any sense of pacing or chaining together multiple tags.

It’s like if every time I stomped a goomba, I had to fill out a death certificate, and inform their next of kin before moving on. In addition, the player’s jump is miserable, capable of clearing a small subset of environmental obstacles and absolutely nothing else. It’s not high enough to jump over foxes, or up to any interesting areas.

Environments and Level Design

Speaking of environmental obstacles, let’s talk about the levels. I have two problems with them. The levels themselves are not laid out in such as a way as to actually encourage use of the movement mechanics. One level, Fractal, while quite pretty, has literally no capacity to gain speed or momentum, and might as well be flat once you reach the bottom layer.

Visually appealing? Yes. Mechanically appealing? Absolutely not.

Secondly, the other levels have been populated with a frankly ridiculous amount of what I’d politely call “environmental chaff.” The game is about touching foxes, not trying to touch foxes and slamming my wooden head into a tree every five inches.

The strongest level had none of these at all. It’s a great big ocean of sand-dunes that form curving pits. This layout actually lets you leap around and gain speed. This level isn’t the most visually diverse, but that doesn’t matter, because this is a video game. It’s about the game mechanics, not the visuals.

Performance and Bugs

The game was actually fairly bug free, though I did once encounter invisible foxes that couldn’t be tagged. It was on the spooky level, so maybe it’s supposed to be like that? Still frustrating and annoying though.

Performance is frankly terrible. I’m running on a 1080, on low graphics, windowed, and I got like 30 FPS. Maybe it’s my setup, but given how much my frame rate goes up when I’m looking at the ground, or not looking at trees, I don’t think that’s the case here. For a fast paced game based around movement, that’s not acceptable.

The strongest level in the game. Is it because it’s not cluttered with trash? Quite possibly!

And while we’re on the subject of graphics: motion blur sucks. No one likes motion blur. Maybe smearing makes things look neat, but in a game, I want to actually be able to see stuff.

Conclusion – For the Devs

You’ve made a movement based game where every aspect of the gameplay plays counter to that. Your level design doesn’t play with the surf and speed gain systems you’ve developed. All clutter and environmental garbage appears to tank the frame rate. Your primary mechanic of tagging plays counter to that movement.

I liked the music, and there is a bit of zen feel to the game on levels like Ocean Outpost when I could get a flow going.

Conclusion – For Everyone Else

Catch the Fox is not currently worth buying. The most interesting thing I got out of playing it was doing this writeup, and reflecting on the interplay between level design and traversal mechanics. It’s actually something I’ve been thinking about a fair bit since the terrible game I made for Ludum Dare 53.

If for some reason you read all of this, and still want to buy it, Catch the Fox is $3 on Steam.

PS: All the screenshots in this review are from the Steam page. I’m not hugely interested in playing more of this game in its current state just for image captures.

Ludum Dare 53 – Retrospective

Ludum Dare 53

Ludum Dare 53 was this weekend, and I participated for the first time. For those who haven’t heard of Ludum Dare, it’s a game jam where participants can work with a team to make a game from scratch in a limited period of time. You can read more about it on the site, but I mostly want to talk about my experience, and some lessons learned.

First up though, let’s talk about the game I worked on. This event’s theme was “Delivery.” So I worked with my friends to create Demon Lord’s Catboy Pizza Delivery Service. Here’s a link to a playable version on itch.io.

My contributions were in three main areas, and those are the ones I’ll be focusing on for this retrospective.

Art

I did the art for the monsters you deliver pizza to, and also the hub zone, and the enemies. These were a lot of fun to draw. But we used a default tile set, and my art sticks out and doesn’t quite mesh with it. That said, they did get some positive feedback, so I’m glad people enjoyed looking at them.

I think there are two key things to recognize here. First off, I didn’t have a workflow set up to build pixel art, which meant my stuff didn’t match our pixel art tileset. Honestly, have no experience in pixel art at all.

Second, I want to keep improving my art to match themes and tones. I want to improve my abilities around color and palettes. I don’t have any plans of becoming a professional artist in the immediate future, so this will likely remain a hobby, but I want to provide stronger and more consistent art for the next time I do one of these with friends.

I also want to create more compelling and entertaining splash screens and covers, because I think that would drive more engagement. Right now our main screen and splash is fairly dull. It’s a small thing, but I think it’s important for getting more plays and feedback.

Background Swapping

The only system I wrote any large amount of code for was the background handling. My code dynamically swaps the background art based on hitting flags in the environment.

It was also an excellent demonstration to me that I haven’t written any code for a long time. My professional job is technical, but mostly demands a very specific non-code knowledge, along with a broad smattering of other technical knowledge. (Database structures, query languages, various endpoints)

Point being, if I need to actually design systems, I freeze up a bit. For the next jam, I think I need to prepare by writing more code and practicing in Godot prior to the event to have the knowledge base to contribute more effectively.

That said, I am happy that I just asked my friends how to do things instead of sitting and suffering and reading docs for hours. So at least my ability to prioritize in tight deadlines has improved slightly.

Level and World Design

I built out the world and level that’s present in the final game, as well as handled most of the enemy placement. There are two groups of lessons here for me: first the ones related to Godot itself, and second the ones related to just better game design practice.

First, Godot as a tool: we decided early on to do a single large world with multiple objectives. In retrospect, this may have been a mistake. Because of how Godot handles scene objects, this meant that having two people with branched copies of our full_world scene would need to resolve merge conflicts, and only one person in our team had the background knowledge of Godot to handle that.

The end result was a scramble of rebasing and not touching that scene to avoid those conflicts, and it sort of rushed things a bit near the end.

The second is the world design itself. I think there’s a lot of room for improvement in the world design, on multiple points. First up, navigation and linearity. DLCBPDS had a large open world, and the player starts right in the middle of it. The player is asked to select a quadrant of the world map, and then travel to a goal within that quadrant. The thing is, in order to keep people from getting too lost, each of the quadrants is separate from the others.

However, in playtests, I routinely saw players go into the wrong zone almost immediately, after which they would have to backtrack the entire way when they realized what happened. Or more often, after I told them.

Simply put, this was a bad design pattern on my part. It made it too easy to get lost, punished getting lost with a painful backtrack. If I was to build this again, I’d want to focus on a linear path, or adding more in-world indicators to really hammer home where the player is supposed to go.

The bigger issue, and the one I need to think about a bit more is level design in games in general. I came into this jam with an intention to make things “Fun.” While I do think the game succeeded in being fun, I’m not sure the fun arose from the world the player navigated. There are some sections people enjoyed, specifically the areas I have mentally labeled “Pit” and “Tower.” But this wasn’t the result of careful design on my part, and more due to trial and error of design. I threw a bunch of different patterns at the wall and saw what stuck.

There were four patterns I threw at the wall, and I want to talk about them briefly. Pit was a large hole that you climb down. Tower was a large hole you climb up. Dungeon was a series of caves with some enemies, and Outskirts was a large empty void I filled with rectangles.

Tower and Pit were the most popular from what I saw, and I think in that order. And that’s because they’re the areas where using the game’s core movement mechanics are the most enjoyable. These areas let the player use the grappling hook to pull themself up, use dash jumps and dodge around outcroppings as they plummet.

But I’d like it if I could make every area that enjoyable. For the next game jam, I think that means I need to study our intended core mechanics better prior to just building things, find the fun moments, and elaborate on them. At the same time, I’d also like to have a more exact understanding of those mechanics, for example exact jump height, exact dash distance. That sort of thing.

Other Bits

I have some other thoughts that aren’t specific to me, but I think are worth noting, and considering for next time.

Our file structure was kind of a mess. Agreeing beforehand on a general unified structure for objects would be a good idea, including things like locations for art assets.

Our coordination has room for improvement. There was a point early on where two people spent time working on the same thing, and someone’s work got thrown out. This was both a waste of time, and also felt shitty.

Repo structure. We tried to do a single main repo, with each person having a fork. This got abandoned almost immediately. I think a single repo that everyone pushes branches and requests to is the way to go for this project. Not as some sort of statement on version control, but because at least a few of us (me) are too incompetent with Git for much else to be worth it.

Builds. Our final build had issues, including crashing on scene changes in certain versions for no clear reason. We needed to build earlier, identify these sorts of things earlier, and either mitigate or be aware of them before there were only two hours left to turn in.

Controls and tutorials. If literally nothing else, we needed to include a tutorial level of some sort. Plastering the controls on every screen we could AND the pause menu wasn’t enough. It was really stupid of me to think that people would just naturally experiment and find the controls.

Conclusion

For a first time jam, I’m actually super proud. We made something, it has at least some fun moments. I wish my contribution was a bit higher effort, but I’m glad it was there at all to be honest. That said, there’s a lot of room for improvement and learning.

I’d also like to thank the folks I worked with for putting up with me and inviting me. It was really fun working with them. Kalloc and Slabity don’t have things I can shill. But Meptl has done some cool stuff, so I’m going to link that here.

So if you’d like to see some neat stuff, maybe check their projects out.

More game reviews at some point in the future, I promise. But most of my weekend was spent making games instead of playing them.

Pit People

Lets start this review by doing something fun. I’ll try to summarize my thoughts on Pit People while following the same general tone of Pit People’s writing.

“Ah, Pit People, like a great big… garbage, yes, hmm, a great big garbage pile of trash and waste, all ready to get picked up by the garbage man, and driven in his garbage truck to the garbage dump, because that’s where all the garbage goes.”

If it’s not obvious, I don’t like the game much.

Pit People Splash Image

Pit People is a turn based strategy game from The Behemoth. I think it’s worth noting that the Behemoth’s better known games, Castle Crashers and Battleblock Theater, were both action games. Castle Crashers was a side-scrolling brawler, and Battleblock Theater was a time attack platformer. They’re pretty good games! Which is why it surprises me that Pit People sucks as much as it does.

Anyway, Pit People. Its major twist on the turn based strategy genre is that instead of moving your units, and choosing who they attack, you only get to move them, and the units randomly decide who to hit. While this sounds annoying, it’s actually not something about the game that frustrated me. Battles take place on a hex grid, and you build a team of up to six units.

I say up to six because some of the more expensive and powerful units take up multiple slots. So instead of having 6 units, you might have 5, or 4, or even just 3. Units can have different equipment, and level up.

Pit People Team Building Screen
All these swords are the same, which is to say: worthless.

Leveling Up: Mostly Pointless!

You probably thought I was going to follow that up with saying something like “And equipment has different stats, and leveling up increases a units stats” but as far as I can tell: No. It actually doesn’t do that. Leveling up changes absolutely nothing about a unit as far as I can tell, except that if you level up in battle, you get full health. How helpful is this? Well, there’s no consumable items or anything, or any way to heal in combat outside of built-in passives, or including the dedicated healer unit. So it’s very helpful. And it would be nice if it wasn’t completely random.

Pit People Battle Screen
I stole this image from the steam page. I’m not playing any more of this game than I have to.

This lack of meaningful power curve or reason to get any equipment means that there’s also no reason to fight random encounters. If they don’t progress the main story quest, and equipment is worthless, why do them? Of course, you can fight them if you want to capture an enemy unit. Pit People has a recruitment mechanic where if any enemy is the last unit left, and you have a cage with you, you can capture them, bring them home, and turn them into a fighter for you.

And while this might seem similar to Pokémon for an instant, it’s only like Pokémon if there were only 17 Pokémon, and every single Pikachu was mechanically identical. Also, if you could only bring 8 Pokeballs with you every time you left town and went out into the overworld.

The Overworld

Pit People’s Overworld is one of the most vestigial things I’ve encountered in a game. There are three things you can encounter in it. Quest start markers, random encounters, and visual gags. There are two types of terrain. Tiles you can walk over, and tiles you can’t. And because you can’t move and have your map open at the same time, and the map doesn’t actually show things in very much detail, it’s frustrating to traverse. Not challenging, just “Oh, I guess that path is a dead end, wish I knew before walking down it.”

Pit People Overworld Map
Hey, would you like to get treasure, or capture units? You can’t do both. Why? Because we said so, that’s why.

Anyway, back to item slots for a moment. You can carry 10 items. This includes the cages you need to capture units, and also any loot you might pick up. Except your inventory gets filled after doing a single quest. So every time you finish everything, you have to go back to the city, crossing the stupid frustrating map, and avoiding random encounters so you can drop off your loot.

Which as we’ve already talk about, doesn’t really have stats. It might have elemental alignments, but you never get “better” equipment. Everything is just a side grade, or has some small other ability, but every sword is just a visual reskin of another sword. Which means everything is effectively a cosmetic.

Pit People could redeem itself here with interesting combat. It doesn’t. The whole “you don’t get to pick which unit you attack” is an interesting idea, but doesn’t lead to interesting decisions. I saw a steam review noting that the game’s strategy never changes. Put tanks in front, put range in the back, and heal your guys. Repeat until you beat the game.

Or get bored, because battles take forever, and units feel incredibly bullet spongy. There’s also not option to speed up the game, so I hope you enjoy the incredibly long walking and attack animations. There is an auto-battler, but it’s got the brains of one of those small yappy dogs that think they can take on a mountain lion. So turning that on will lead to your units getting pulped as the AI prances them into melee range of the entire enemy team, and keeps them sitting under airstrikes.

The Plot: Doing Its Best

There’s one last place the game has to salvage its dismal reputation, and that’s the story. Unfortunately, it flubs it pretty hard here as well, and I have a guess as to why. Pit People was an early access game. I know because I bought in early access seven or so years ago, played like 15 hours, went “This is great, I’ll play more later.”

Then I came back last weekend, played through the whole game’s campaign in 8 hours, and went “This is trash. How did I ever willingly play more than 3 hours of this?” Anyway, the story. I suspect the story was added piecemeal over the game’s time in early access. The story is janky and disconnected. It randomly and unsatisfyingly opens and closes plot threads, and is also only 8 missions long. Some of these missions try to be interesting or have some unique gimmick, but many are just standard battles.

Also, quite a few do that thing I hate where the game goes “Oh, you beat the enemies? Well, now I’m going to spawn in an extra pack!” Tactics games are about use and allocation of resources to deal with a given problem. Going “Surprise, extra problem” after I’ve cleaned out all the enemies, and I’m struggling to catch my breath is aggravating normally, and it’s double frustrating here.

Some final complaints, and a conclusion

Rapid fire mode for complaints. What’s the point of the weapon “triangle” that’s just “helmets vs non-helmets?” Why can’t I see what debuffs are on a unit in game? Why can’t I see armor type or other special info? Why are a non-zero number of the campaign quest maps literally designed in such a way that I cannot use my super unit on it, but I’m still allowed to bring it into the fight? Why are there daily quests?

Pit People isn’t fun. It’s a joyless slog whose best selling point is an occasionally amusing story, albeit one with an incredibly inconsistent tone that concludes with a complete asspull. If you want a better tactics game, play literally any other tactics game on this blog. At least Pedigree Tactics is interesting.

Top 5 Games to Watch From PAX East 2023

Everyone loves listicles. Otherwise why would anyone write them? Because they’re easy content that can be ginned out at a moment’s notice, with little effort? Nonsense! It’s because they’re the glorious future of writing.

1. Mina the Hollower

Expected Release: 2024

Mina the Hollower was, simply put, the best video game at PAX East this year. It’s a brilliant combination of old school Zelda with some Soulslike influences. It’s being made by Yacht Club, who’ve proven their worth already with Shovel Knight. The 50 minutes I played made me wish I’d backed the Kickstarter. If the full game is as good as the one level I demoed, this will be my indie game of the year for 2024.

2. Athenian Rhapsody

Expected Release: 2023

Athenian Rhapsody was my dark horse of the show. I had never heard of the game, developer, or publisher before I saw it for the first time. It sold me on the strength of its demo alone. I’m very curious to see the final product, and frankly, I have a mild sense of trepidation. This game’s either going to very, very good, or an unbelievable disaster and cringefest. Trying to emulate the tone of things like Earthbound and Undertale is hard, and I’ll applaud the effort either way. I just don’t know if I’ll be wincing while I do so.

3. Cobalt Core

Expected Release: 2023

I was going to put information about Cobalt Core here, but then I realized a friend made a meme about it that I could steal and use instead.

TLDR: Spaceship deck builder from the Crypt of the Necrodancer people. The demo I played was fun as well.

4. Disgaea 7: Vows of the Virtueless

Expected Release: 2023

This entry is technically cheating. I didn’t actually play it at the show, but NIS had a booth, and I saw an advertisement for it, so I’m going to say that counts. Disgaea 6 moved to a new engine, and was a somewhat weaker entry in the series, but still had a strong story and fun gameplay. I’m hopeful that 7 returns the franchise to a point of strength. Also I’m pandering so I can get a pre-release copy.

5. Galactic Getaway

Expected Release: Not listed at time of writing.

I’ve got Galactic Getaway on this list because it’s trying to do something I don’t think I’ve seen another game try to do: go toe to toe with Animal Crossing. And it’s being made by the developer of Nookazon. Which is to say, this isn’t someone trying to compete with Animal Crossing because they think there’s a load of money to be made, so much as they think the player base for that game is underserved.

Which you know. That’s fairly bold.



An Ode to Storybook Brawl

It was announced yesterday that Storybook Brawl will be shutting down at the end of the month. It’s interesting. Storybook Brawl wasn’t the game I thought I’d be writing a retrospective of today. I thought that would be Crimesight, which will shortly share a death day with Storybook Brawl.

This won’t be a writeup about the gameplay of Storybook Brawl. If you want that sort of information, perhaps because you’re engaged in some technical equivalent of an archaeological dig, I did a writeup on that here.

Instead, I think it’s worth looking at how we got here, and why. After all, it’s not like Storybook Brawl is an inherent failure. Steam charts show it as having a high of about 500 players a day. And I played the game! Storybook Brawl was fun. I’m going to ripping into another game later today that had less than 60 people play it yesterday. And it’s not going down in under a week.

Storybook Brawl is, like many other games, not going to go down because it was bad game. It was fun. It was fair. It wasn’t gacha oriented garbage. It didn’t sell skimpy bathing outfits for its characters. It likely died because it did one thing, and that one thing probably wasn’t even a bad choice at the time.

See, a while back, Storybook Brawl was sold to a small scrappy financial investments company run by an effective altruist you might have heard of. His name was Sam Bankman-Fried. And his company was called FTX. Well, at least FTX was one of the 50 or so he had set up. I don’t know which one actually bought or managed Storybook Brawl.

Then, as you might or might not know, the whole FTX thing lost 8 billion dollars (give or a take a bit), and stole its users’ money. And the aforementioned Sam might have committed a lot of financial crimes. Oh, and they were a cryptocurrency exchange. I don’t think I mentioned that bit.

When Storybook Brawl sold to FTX, with the implication that NFTs would somehow be added at some point, I was pretty unhappy. These days though, I have a more realistic view of indie game development. Frankly, I can’t blame them for taking the money, even if it might have been tainted. Or stolen. Probably stolen.

For all I know, the FTX deal is what kept Storybook Brawl alive for these last few years, up until this month. Maybe 500 daily active users, and 93% positive reviews isn’t good enough. Maybe making an interesting, novel, and fun game isn’t what you need to do to succeed.

Maybe you need anime girls in skimpy swimsuits distributed from slot machines and marketed to children. Maybe you need to take money from elaborate ponzi schemes, funded by stolen money and the inherent stupidity of crypto.

There was a woman demoing a physical version of a Storybook Brawl card game at PAX Unplugged last year. I have no idea what will happen to it. Maybe it will get a theme change, and shopped around. Maybe it’s as dead as the servers.

It’s hard to tell if Storybook Brawl was another casualty of FTX, or something else. Maybe it was less a victim than a slavering thrall, remaining animate by the money FTX pumped through its veins, and eventually killed by the death of its host.

But it was a good game.