Rants Archives - Page 3 of 10

Gametrodon’s 4 Year Anniversary

It’s been four years since the first post on Gametrodon, and I have to say: Wow, how time flies when you’re distracting yourself from reality with digital and cardboard amusements.

Five years seems like as good a time as any for some retrospection. So let’s start at the very beginning.

The First Post

In our very first post, I talked about some games I saw at PAX that seemed cool. These included Lucifer Within Us, Knuckle Sandwich, and Genshin Impact.

I’d end up interviewing the Creative Director of Lucifer Within us, Jongwoo Kim, about the game. It was a really fun interview, and also demonstrated how much work interviews are.

2020

That first year of 2020 had the most total interviews I’ve ever managed to actually put up. I chatted with Max Seidman of Resonym about running Kickstarters and Surrealist Dinner Party. I talked with Jeremy Choo, the CEO of a Malaysian development studio about how their publisher stole their game, and how they tried to get it back.

Interviews, like RPG Module reviews, have not really become a regular feature of this blog. They’re a huge amount of work to do properly, and while I love talking to people, I don’t love transcribing and editing. The Secret of Shirakawa Castle has remained one of my favorite “tester” adventures in D&D though.

2021

There isn’t too much to say about 2021. The pandemic continued to ravage the earth, and it had some knock-on effects the world of gaming. Some standouts I want to draw attention to include Beglitched, Shovel Knight, Atomicrops, Disgaea 6, Luck be a Landlord.

Storybook Brawl was pretty good, but then they got bought by a crypto company. Then the CEO of the company committed an $11,000,000,000 fraud. So you can’t play that anymore.

Oh, and there was that whole Blizzard being a shitshow thing.

2022

2022 started with a bang: mostly me banging my head against a wall as “Gamers” continued to fail to understand how to read a shareholder letter.

But it’s okay, because I played Inscryption, and it was great. It would also see the continuation of Rants as a category of my posts. Even though none of my rants are particularly accurate or thoughtful except maybe this one about MetaZoo. That one I think I kinda nailed.

Nobody Saves the World was great. Pokemon Legends: Arceus ran like shit. Stacklands and Mad Rat Dead were good. CRIMESIGHT was unlike any other game ever made, and Konami killed it because they’re fuckers. Perfect Heist 2 was also great, but I’m not sure it still has a playerbase. I played a dating sim as a joke.

Oh! And Neon White came out! And Hazelnut Hex!

Finally, we had a Pour One Out, a semi-regular feature for all the games that died that year. Some years I do one of these, and some years I’m just not feeling it.

Honestly, 2022 was an incredible year for games.

Shame about the five year relationship I was in that ended near the end of 2022, and as a result would chipper-shred my productivity for uh…

Pretty much everything since then.

2023

I did manage to get out a review on Pokemon Scarlet. It has some fun drawings, something I haven’t really returned to since then. Pedigree Tactics also feels like it deserves a shout out for being a rare situation when I was able to give criticism that actually helped improve a game. I guess I did a Ludum Dare?

A lot of this year was just a fucking haze, if I’m being honest.

Deceive Inc was cool. I ranted a bit about Diablo 4. Lorcana was a thing. Clank! Legacy was good enough that I bought the sequel.

Oh! And Tiger and Dragon, a fantastic tile trick taker sort thing was probably the most played board game of my friend group in the last few years.

The year ended with a backlog cleanout of things I didn’t have the energy for a full writeup on, even though Pizza Tower and Inkbound absolutely deserved them.

2024

2024 was truly one of the years of all time. There were bangers, like Slay the Princess, Palworld, and Baldur’s Gate 3. And Tactical Breach Wizards,

There were non-bangers like Knuckle Sandwich and Legend of Mushroom.

There was X-Angels (NSFW!).

And there was Athenian Rhapsody. God, Athenian Rhapsody.

I think the Athenian Rhapsody writeup was rewritten more times than any single thing I’ve ever put on this blog, and involved perhaps the most… soul searching? Internal dissection and critique? Thinking? I dunno. Just… it was a huge amount of effort for a very minimal outcome.

Athenian Rhapsody is really difficult to discuss.

Oh, I also saw the eclipse. And there was a complex bit of board game inside baseball that I accidentally had front-row seats for. Finally, I covered the Indie Games Night Market.

The Present

And so we enter the fifth year of Gametrodon. I’m not famous, or even internet famous. I’ve created some great opportunities for myself to talk to folks in the industry. I still don’t have a press badge, the one thing I wanted when I started writing this site. My quantity of work is definitely down from the first two years, even if the quality is up. (Thanks in no small part to my nameless editor!)

Which does raise a question: Is it worth it to continue writing this blog?

I’m not sure.

There have been several projects over the last few years I’ve picked up, and then dropped or failed to finish. Fluffy rants and personal opinion pieces are easy enough to crank out. Taking a stab at something resembling journalism, or full interviews, is much harder, and often those don’t even result in usable drafts.

Running and writing Gametrodon is a hobby that sits on top of my other hobbies, and like most side things I do, how long it lasts is mostly dependent on vibes and habit. There was that point in time where I was streaming 3 times a week, and that other point in time where I was making TikToks.

Honestly, though, I kind of hate playing the meta when it comes to this stuff. I may switch back to making comics, because at least they amuse me. I may just keep doing weekly writeups.

I have no idea where I am going in life, and this blog is just a part of that.

Oh, one more thing.

A Small Favor

No, it’s not money.

Look, if you enjoy reading Gametrodon, do me a favor and retweet and like my stuff on Bluesky. Or whatever it’s called now since Twitter died in a fire.

Not for every article or writeup, but for the stuff you find interesting, or useful, or informed you about a game you wouldn’t have heard of before.

Retweet that stuff.

I still have my small hopes of reaching the point of being a micro-influencer at some point, but beyond that, I like people reading my stuff. I like talking about games.

But it does feel nice to not just feel like I’m flinging words into the void every now and then.

Is a Jigsaw Puzzle a Game?

Occasionally I see a take on the internet, and get real twitchy about it for a moment. This morning, it was a post about if puzzles are board games. Thus the twitching began.

The first thing I want to ask is, “Why are we asking this question?” That’s not superfluous, or being rude, it’s an important distinction.

The first response to the original question on Bluesky links to the Board Game Geek game criteria page. It is a very nice page, and I especially enjoy how it puts puzzles out of scope in one moment, and then puts escape rooms, a collection of puzzles, back in scope paragraphs later.

But the BGG page has a specific purpose. They want to limit and filter what sorts of products end up on their website, because they do not want to just have a list of everything. It’s a valid reason to define what a board game is, and to decide that a puzzle is not a board game for their purposes.

Let’s look at two others real quick. A friend asks you to bring something for board game night. You bring a 500 piece jigsaw puzzle. Are folks going to be happy?

Probably depends on the friend group. But I’m leaning towards, “No.”

What about sorting things for a store? Do puzzles go with the board games? In my experience, often the answer is, “Yes,” though that might have more to do with packaging and distributor than content. But the last few times I’ve been in a store, the puzzles sit right next to the copies of Cards Against Humanity.

So going back to the original question, what I want to ask is: Why does it matter if a puzzle is a board game? Are you stocking a store? Giving a gift? Setting up a web page? Because that context is going to change the answer.

Why am I being twitchy about this?

I don’t like it when people define words around art and art adjacent spaces in such a way as to exclude certain things from being in that category. To do that, there needs to be a good reason for it.

The usual reason for folks doing that is to exclude a category of other people from being in their in-group. The prime example of this is “gamers” claiming that The Sims and Animal Crossing aren’t “real games,” but I’m sure their are plenty others. That’s not a good reason, it’s just being a gatekeeping asshole. Now, I don’t think the original question on Bluesky was posted to gatekeep. But gatekeeping is why my brain decided to do the record scratch noise, and spend 40 minutes on this garbage writeup.

This year at PAX East, I got a chance to meet some of the folks doing Speed Puzzling. Presumably the speed part is what elevates it to the level of board game, but it was something fun and neat that I’d never heard of before. It’s also something that would never show up on BGG.

I’d rather that board game enthusiasts had space for weird stuff that does not in fact conform to neat tables of rules, or perfect definitions. I’d rather we had more In Memory Of sorts of things.

Okay, but are puzzles board games?

A sandwich is a piece of meat between two slices of bread.

Is this a sandwich?

Which is to say: it doesn’t matter without additional context!

Someone who’s very hungry might be happy to have a hot dog after asking for a sandwich. Someone who catered a sandwich tray for a work event might be slightly less enthusiastic to receive sixty Costco hot dogs.

4th Place at The Fourth Place (Regional Championship Qualifier)

Ed Note: This article uses a few specific bits of terminology related playing limited Magic: The Gathering, mostly the acronym B.R.E.A.D. If you’re not familiar with the term/acronym, a brief read of this Stack overflow paragraph defines them well.

I participated in the first Regional Championship Qualifier at The Fourth Place over the weekend. As this is one of the more competitive events I’ve ever done, I thought I’d talk about the experience.

This was a Limited RCQ, starting with 5 rounds of sealed, and then cutting to Top 8 for a draft. The set for both was Foundations. But before I get into the event, let’s talk about prep!

Prep

I…. did not prep much. I prepped more than I have for most other sealed events I’ve done, but much less than I could have. I reviewed a fair number of sealed pools, I looked at some articles, and I did two drafts of the set prior. The first draft was on Arena, and I lost every single match quite badly. The second was a smaller in-person event where I won.

I do think the prep made a difference, but I also think especially in the draft, I could have done much better with my picks. More on that later.

Sealed

For the sealed portion of the event, this was the deck I ended up building.

After opening all my packs I was pretty confident I would end up in green. I had bombs in Scavenging Ooze, Mossborn Hydra, Sylvan Scavenging, and Ghalta, Primal Hunger. I also had removal in Bushwhack and Bite Down, and and a few giant growths.

My secondary color wasn’t as clear.

Looking at the rest of the pool, I scratched off white and blue as secondaries. They didn’t offer the bombs of red or black, and had limited amounts of mediocre removal.

Red had two big bombs in Shivan Dragon and Twinflame Tyrant, but it didn’t have any targeted removal before 5 mana, and even then, it wasn’t instant speed.

Black won out as a secondary color on the strength of its removal (Eaten Alive, and 2x Bake Into A Pie), and the fact that it still provided a very solid bomb in High-Society Hunter. My read at the time was that I had plenty of bombs in green, and more removal would serve me better in the sealed Environment.

Looking back at the pool now, I do think there was a strong argument for green/red, but that wasn’t choice I made at the time.

Deck
1 Ambush Wolf
1 Apothecary Stomper
2 Bake into a Pie
1 Beast-Kin Ranger
1 Bite Down
1 Burglar Rat
1 Bushwhack
1 Cackling Prowler
1 Campus Guide
1 Eaten Alive
3 Evolving Wilds
7 Forest
1 Ghalta, Primal Hunger
1 Giant Growth
1 High-Society Hunter
1 Mossborn Hydra
1 Revenge of the Rats
1 Scavenging Ooze
7 Swamp
1 Sylvan Scavenging
1 Tragic Banshee
1 Vampire Gourmand
1 Wary Thespian
1 Fake Your Own Death
1 Crypt Feaster

Sideboard
1 Crypt Feaster
1 Aegis Turtle
1 Armasaur Guide
2 Axgard Cavalry
1 Banishing Light
1 Blanchwood Armor
2 Brazen Scourge
1 Cat Collector
1 Claws Out
1 Clinquant Skymage
1 Crystal Barricade
1 Drake Hatcher
1 Dreadwing Scavenger
1 Dwynen, Gilt-Leaf Daen
1 Erudite Wizard
1 Essence Scatter
1 Exemplar of Light
1 Firebrand Archer
1 Fishing Pole
1 Fleeting Distraction
1 Fleeting Flight
1 Giant Growth
1 Gleaming Barrier
1 Goldvein Pick
1 Guarded Heir
1 Healer's Hawk
1 Imprisoned in the Moon
2 Incinerating Blast
2 Mocking Sprite
1 Needletooth Pack
1 Quick-Draw Katana
1 Refute
1 Rogue's Passage
1 Ruby, Daring Tracker
1 Seeker's Folly
2 Seismic Rupture
1 Self-Reflection
1 Shivan Dragon
1 Sower of Chaos
1 Spectral Sailor
1 Spitfire Lagac
1 Strix Lookout
1 Sun-Blessed Healer
1 Sure Strike
1 Think Twice
1 Twinflame Tyrant
1 Vanguard Seraph

Critiques of the Deck

I made two spicy decisions in the deckbuilding. The first was not splashing for Twinflame Tyrant, despite having a Campus Guide and three Evolving Wilds.

I think this was the right choice. Twinflame is two red pips, and my deck has 8~ (more on this in a moment) double pip cards. It was much more important to fix my base so that I could drop my double pip bombs, than it was to enable a single additional bomb at the cost of less consistency.

The second decision was including Cackling Prowler over Dwynen, Gilt-Leaf Daen. This was a mistake, and it was a mistake that I would proceed to fix the entire night, swapping the two after pretty much every game 1. I thought that the ward 2 on Prowler was more important than reach on Dwynen. I was very wrong. There are a lot of flyers in this set, and something that can deal with the birds was more important than something that took an extra two mana to blow up.

Matches

Generally speaking, this is where I would talk about matches. Unfortunately, after playing 9 hours of magic in a row, I don’t remember my opponents’ decks, and I did not take notes.

So instead, here are a few fun moments!

One opponent got out Extravagant Replication. This didn’t worry me, until suddenly they had four copies of Spitfire Lagac.

In another game, I was forced to burn 3 cards in Ambush Wolf, Giant Growth, and Bushwhack and seven life just to deal with Sire of Seven Deaths. I still lost somehow. Maybe it was the 3 for 1 and 14 life differential. Who can say.

Finally, in my last set of games, despite mostly being deadweight every other match, Revenge of the Rats finally did some work, giving me enough fodder to sac into Vampire Gourmand to push through, and get enough cards to recover from an incredibly bad situations.

Ultimately, I finished with a record of 3 – 1 -2, which was enough to put me into the top 8.

Top 8 Draft

And now for the moment of truth.

Deck
1 Authority of the Consuls
1 Bake into a Pie
1 Day of Judgment
1 Exsanguinate
1 Felidar Savior
1 Healer's Hawk
1 Infestation Sage
1 Macabre Waltz
3 Make Your Move
2 Marauding Blight-Priest
2 Midnight Snack
9 Plains
1 Sanguine Syphoner
1 Skyknight Squire
1 Stromkirk Bloodthief
8 Swamp
1 Vampire Soulcaller
3 Vanguard Seraph
1 Youthful Valkyrie

Sideboard
2 Aegis Turtle
1 Archmage of Runes
1 Ashroot Animist
1 Bigfin Bouncer
1 Cackling Prowler
1 Consuming Aberration
1 Fleeting Distraction
1 Good-Fortune Unicorn
1 Grappling Kraken
1 Lightshell Duo
1 Mossborn Hydra
2 Run Away Together
1 Slumbering Cerberus
1 Sure Strike

If you are looking at this list with some level of confusion and profanity, I promise you. There is an explanation for why there is so much blue, when I am not even in the color. It is not a good explanation, because it was not made via good decisions. But there is an explanation, and it’s Consuming Aberration.

I have a bad habit, one that I may now be cured of purely as a result of how horrible this draft went. If the rare in the first pack looks like a bomb, I will take it. And then I will continue to try to pick into those colors, even if I really, really shouldn’t.

As a result, there are a lot of blue cards in this pool, instead of anything remotely useful or good.

There is a second card in this pack that tells a story, and it’s this.

This was not a first pick. It was a much later pick. And should probably have been a sign to me that not a single person at the table was going green/red. Did I listen to this sign? Did I pick the two Mossborn Hydras that were passed me to me, and the other strong red cards?

No. Of course I didn’t.

Instead, after, picking up a Day of Judgment and an Authority of Consuls, and proceeded to try to force Black/White as hard as possible in packs 2-3 to salvage the situation.

Top 8 Matches

I don’t know if the universe took pity on me, or if everyone at the table was having a rough time, but I did in fact manage to squeak through round one before being eliminated handily in round 2.

For round 1, I had an incredible stroke of luck, getting Authority of Consuls early into a blue/white go-wide deck in both games. This was an incredible bit of bad fortune for them, as it pretty much single-handedly turned off their deck’s ability to flash in Resolute Reinforcements to stall me. It also allowed me to get extra turns of ping in, as even when they got their larger flyers, they came in tapped.

Round 2, however, was the buck finally stopped. My opponent was playing midrange Grixis, with a fair amount of threshold dependent cards, and I just got stomped. While the games were slogs, they managed to both get board presence with a bunch of fairly useful cards, and even Day of Judgement couldn’t save me from Sphinx of Forgotten Lore, and Kioara, the Rising Tide, resulting in me going down in two consecutive losses.

While I didn’t stick around to watch finals, it did look like both players were playing three color decks, something I thought was interesting.

Tone and Overall Thoughts

My goal for the event was to get into the Top 8. This might sound intimidating, until you realize it was capped at 20 entries, meaning it was really more of a “Finish in the top 40%”.

I made a lot of mistakes. By my count, I’d put it at something like 4-5 misplays, and that’s not even counting missed triggers. Arena has made me very good at spotting play options, and outs. But it’s made me very bad at keeping track of my own triggers, and asking to hold priority at turn end.

My prep did help. I don’t know how much, but it did make a difference in some of the deck building, and knowing that certain cards I would have otherwise written off were actually bombs.

My draft was terrible. I had exactly 23 cards in my colors, and no fixing.

Generally speaking, this was a pretty chill and polite event, and I hope even the more competitive events at The Fourth Place stay this way. There was no shouting, and no real issues/conflicts, with players generally being polite but firm on various rulings.

This was a good event, and I wish I was more excited about the top 4 finish, but as I’m me, anything other than complete victory will always feel like a bit of a wash. I do think I’d try another Sealed RCQ though, as long as the set was good.

PS.
The counts on this sealed pool look wonky at first, but this pool does not include 6 lands I opened, and the also the system doesn’t seem to like to count lands. But was 84 cards, as I’ve spent all morning double checking to make sure I got it right. It’s a similar case for the draft pool, as I didn’t include the lands.

Grab Bag – November 2024

I play a lot of things that don’t end up on the blog. Sometimes it’s because the game is too small, sometimes because the game is too big. In either case, I still want to talk about them briefly before PAX Unplugged happens, and they are swept into the great void.

Wilmot’s Warehouse

Wilmot’s Warehouse is fundamentally a game about organization. As such I feel a that something should be noted before I give my thoughts on it.

From where I am sitting writing this, if I turn my head to the left, I can see, on top of each other, the following:
1. A hammer
2. A large set of strength cables
3. A cardboard box for wallmounting, and a variety of other objects.

If I crane to the right, I can see sketchbooks, notebooks, self help books, and computers, all stacked together. Should I manage to owl, and do a full 180 degree turn, I would see a table that has on it trading cards, dice, more notebooks, and uncashed checks. In front of me, on my computer desk, in addition to my mouse and keyboard, I see duct tape, a key, business cards, and in-game reward codes that haven’t been redeemed.

All of which is to say, organizing things is not something I do well in real life. As a result, when it is a primary game mechanic, and I’m asked to do it VERY QUICKLY I do not experience what I would call joy. Instead, I experience a set of emotions I tend to associate with work meetings with clients, and performance reviews.

It’s a very clever little game, but it’s absolutely not for me. It’s a puzzle game where the first part of the puzzle is realizing that there is a puzzle.

Of the items on this list, Wilmot’s Warehosue is the probably the one that deserves its own writeup the most, but because it just isn’t for me, it’ll probably never get one.

UFO 50

Remember those old “200 games in 1” bootleg ass CD’s? Or maybe those Plug-N-Play machines with a bunch of random garbage on them?

UFO-50 is kind of like that, but if all the games were good. Or at least interesting.

I’d like to do a full writeup on the game at some point, but the reality of it is that it’s a huge pain to try to beat all of them. I’ve actually only beat like 5 of them, and with perfect clears on 4.

And frankly, while I don’t enjoy everything in UFO 50, I only feel like I had to find 6-7 I really liked for it to be worth it. Also, if 50 games feels overwhelming, here are a few of my favorites.

#9 Attactics – Real time unit placement.
#12 Avaianos – A 4X game with scythe action selection style upgrades. (IE, each turn you worship a god, which gives a set of actions, and you get to upgrade those actions each time you select a god.)
#46 Party House – A clever little roguelike bag builder.
#24 Caramel Caramel – Cute little Shmup that I’m really bad at.

Zenless Zone Zero

I actually wrote 60% of a post on Zenless Zone Zero, took a break figuring I could put it up in a few months, and in that time they apparently completely removed one of the core systems I’d described. This would have required me to go back and play more of the game to actually figure out what the current experience was like, something I didn’t feel like doing.

I’m going to put the opening here, because it captures my feeling on the game pretty sufficiently.

It was the best of games, it was the worst of games, it was a brilliant spectacle fighter RPG with puzzle elements, it was a high production slot machine, it was the future of free to play, it was the end of the live-service bubble, it offered joyful combat and a fun story, it offered obnoxious time gated farming – in short, the game was so much like Genshin Impact that the critic wondered if he should just link to that writeup instead.

I played like 40 hours, and honestly, the first 20-30 are pretty fun, but once I hit the end of that, I ended up in the typical “grind your dailies” portion of every F2P game that exists. Now, in ZZZ, the dailies/weeklies are boss fights against excavators fused with ghost devils, and rogue-like style dungeon crawls, but they’re still dailies.

So once it became clear that I’d finished the story that was available, and everything required a daily grind, I just moved on.

And while I’m talking about F2P games, friends of mine have been playing a bunch of The First Descendant, and Throne and Liberty. The First Descendant is pretty much just “What if Warframe was REALLY horny?” and Throne and Liberty is a pay2win Korean MMO, so I don’t actually care what the game play is like.

But hey, they’ve played like a billion hours of each, and had fun, so who am I to judge?

Chained Together

Rage games are an interesting genre, things like Getting Over It or Jump King. Chained Together is a rage game you play with your friends.

Fortunately, it also has checkpoints, or I would not have beaten it.

There isn’t a lot to say on this one. I think part of the reason that Sexy Hiking and Getting Over It were so well received is because they were doing something new, if nothing else. Jump King is sort of in a similar space, in that no one had make a game with quite those mechanics.

Getting Over It in particular seems to want to talk a lot about the nature of what the game itself is.

But something about 3D rage games has always felt a bit… cheap to me? They feel like they were cobbled together out of Unity store assets to make a quick buck, and get streamers to play them.

In either case, we beat it in about 5 hours. (With checkpoints) It’s a good enough game if you want to grab 3 friends to do something stupid on a Friday, and no one can decide if you want to play Jackbox or not.

Vagrant Song

I started a writeup on Vagrant Song, and it was mostly vitriol. I did not find this game worth playing, and after a bit, even it’s outwardly charming art started to piss me off. After all, what’s the point of rubber-hose style art, if it’s NOT MOVING?

I only played the first 3 fights, which took about 6-7 hours total, and during that time I found it a pretty mediocre multiplayer boss fight sort of thing.

I legitimately do not understand who Vagrantsong is for. Like, seriously. You want a replayable multiplayer roguelike based on positioning and combos? It’s called Inkbound. You want roleplaying and turn based combat? Play 5E. You want better turn based combat? Play Pathfinder.

You want a mediocre campaign game that takes too long to play, that feels like an extended GM-less boss rush with limited agency to accelerate the fight?

Good news!

I have a copy of Vagrantsong I’m looking to sell.

If anyone ever tells me that they love Vagrantsong, I am going to have to stifle a little voice inside my head that wants to respond by asking if they’ve played any other tabletop or video game in the last 20 years.

The Big Fight for Tiny Mouse City

I did Ludum Dare again! Ludum Dare 56 to be exact. The Big Battle for Tiny Mouse City was my entry, and I got it “finished” about an hour before the cutoff time.

It’s a short little RPG that takes less then 30 minutes to complete. You run around gathering party members, and grabbing weapons to fight the final boss. If I’m being honest, there’s not much here that hasn’t been done in a RPG before, and I’m sure another game has done the “Party of a dozen characters” gimmick before as well.

This writeup covers my thoughts on the experience, where things went well, where they didn’t, and what I’d do differently if I could.

If you want more context, I suggest you play The Big Battle For Tiny Mouse City first.

The Design

This was my first time doing a game jam solo. As a result, I decided to use RPG Maker MV. The RPG Maker “engine” is a weird one. It’s been used to develop some cult classics, including To The Moon, and Fear & Hunger. It’s also mostly javascript, the editor crashes more than anyone could want, and I have a hard time trying to get it to do anything complex.

For a game jam, though, it offered huge advantages. It comes with a complete structure for making a classic RPG, has placeholder art and assets, and there are a large number of community-developed plugins. It also made it very easy to create a web-hostable build.

So with engine decided, and the theme of “Tiny Creatures,” I decided I wanted to do a classic RPG. The twist was that instead of leveling up, you just get a massive party of characters. In my mind, this was gonna be like 20 characters in a party. After a reality check on the level of effort per party member, I cut it down to 12.

My loop was going to be simple: run around and talk to people to add them to your party, find weapons and equip them, and then fight through a few enemies on a quest to get to the final boss.

So around 12:00 on Saturday, this was my design document.

This was it. This was the entire design.

The Implementation

And here’s the finished product. As you can see, it’s actually pretty similar. My initial idea was that the game would have two “halves”, separated by a mid-boss, and then a final boss at the end. In between, the player would recruit new members into their party, pick up weapons, and fight a few trash mobs.

That said, quite a few things changed between the initial idea, my incredible design document, and the final game.

The first big thing was the starting room, or Tutorial Room.

After I continually failed to equip weapons when playtesting, I realized that players would also mess it up. This is important, because it is impossible for any character to deal damage without a weapon equipped. So I made a room that forces the player to find a sword and equip the sword to leave it. This opening has the subtlety and grace of truck nuts, but from the comments I’ve seen on the game, I think it worked.

It also has a little bit of info about where the player can find a special party member. It’s a small clue, but hopefully it helped someone.

Once the player exits the room, they’re immediately greeted with a path that leads to an enemy encounter. After the enemy encounter, they reach a NPC that joins their party. Again, mallet over the head. But given the short length of the game, I wanted players to immediately understand the recruitment mechanic, since all but one of the mouse characters on the map will join the player once talked to.

Side Note: Initially the friendly mouse next to the fight was actually off to the side, but a friend of mine walked by them in play-testing, so I decided to force the player to interact with them.

One of the big things I really want to talk about is the tan path.

I added the path in passing, but it ended up being perfect. The path leads to 3 things: two special mice, the Healer and Alchemist, and the game’s mid and final bosses. The path grounded the game, which otherwise was just a bunch of square green rooms. If the player follows it down a route they haven’t gone, they will find something new.

That said, I wanted the player to explore a bit, so there’s a bunch of weapon chests and recruitable NPC’s just off the path. There are also a few very direct instructions to look for things off the path, and places where the player can see something off the path from further away. The most obvious was the sign above.

Still, it does bring me to my biggest failure in the game: the mid boss.

Conceptually, I wanted to have a big mean rat that gives a speech in the middle of the town, with their acolytes flocking around. I wanted a whole little cutscene, and build up, to keep the player interested.

Oh mid boss, I failed you. I failed you so hard.

But I didn’t get the time. Even his battle and world sprite are pretty last minute.

This is a problem. From a player retention standpoint, the mid boss is the first “big” exciting thing the player sees after the start the game. It should be a moment that encourages them to keep playing. But as it stands, it’s pretty dull. There aren’t really any “Big” moments after him, just a few more fights, and some treasure.

So what should have been a “Oh, I can’t wait to see what happens next” moment, turned into a “I’ve seen enough, time to rate the game” moment.

That said, I’m much more pleased with the final boss.

Catmagedon has their own theme music. They have their own big scary overworld sprite. They have a little tiny cutscene before the fight, and I pumped their damage high enough that they actually feel scary to fight.

I’m actually on the fence about their battle sprite. I think I needed to remove the battleback, and simplify it a bit, because like… yeah, that don’t look like no cat.

They’re probably the high point of the game, and even with the wonky menu, and weird interactions, I think they probably felt fun.

Lessons Learned

One thing I learned from this experience is why RPG’s don’t usually have a party over 4: it makes the game quite a slog. I actually cut all enemy HP by about 20% late on Sunday because fights were taking too long. I didn’t want people to quit out of boredom. It’s a fun gimmick, but I don’t think it’s a good way to model a mob of characters.

The second thing was that I am always biting off more than I can chew. I thought I could do a single map RPG with no leveling up in 3 days. I still had to cut a player character, custom tile maps, face plates for dialogue, most of the mid boss, and 2 enemy types to finish on time.

It was also a good reminder that players don’t know anything you don’t tell them. I occasionally grouse about over tutorialization, but it’s necessary.

It’s also an interesting opportunity to look back at my previous entry and ask if I’ve used any of those lessons learned. I think the answer is yes. I was much more consistent about tutorials, and beating the player over the head with mechanics.

What would I do differently?

I should have forced the player to save before the final boss, in case they died. I also wish I’d “smoothed” the map design a bit more. Specifically, I wish I had pulled parts of the map in closer together. Here’s an example.

Smoothed design, where I cut down the total space significantly.

Unsmoothed design, it’s a significantly longer walk off the beaten path to find those chests.

I’ve already talked about the mid boss at length, but I think I know how I’d fix him now. While I’m happy with most of the art, I wish I’d done a second pass on the player sprite to fix its left/right direction, and its ears.

Conclusion

For someone who spends so much time on unfinished projects that never see the light of day, it’s nice to actually complete something for once, even in an imperfect form. I hope people have some fun with it.

I’m not sure that I’ll return to the game in any large scale, but I may make a “directors cut” version with some fixes and quality of life changes after voting finishes for games.

That said, we’ve had 3 weeks of “not game reviews” on the blog. After this last post, it’s time to return to your regularly scheduled blog posts: those of games and game reviews.

Thanks for reading and thanks to anyone who played my little game.