Hey. Hello. HI!
A short stream this week. I had a false start stream where 2/3 of it was useless... So... I took the 1/3 of it and edited it to one video on youtube! I was hoping to pick up my rate of feedback for these coming weeks but this last one was rather difficult for me adjusting from my "vacation" – do you really get to vacation when you are in charge of a 3 year old?
This weeks games;
- The InBetween By VCD
- Race For Glory By Snap Games Studio
- Monke Simulator by Totem SoftProducts
Last Bastion #
Steam Demo | Twitter | Threads
This was another charming game in my eyes. 100% original artwork with a story... yes please! I didn't really get too far but the story felt inspired by Heartbound, which is great! Heartbound is a fantastic game to draw inspiration from. I'm not sure this is the case but there are some parallels. While I did not get very far in my 50 minute playthrough (wow, where did the time go??)... I can see this game has a ton of love put into this.
The Good
The entire world that was built is very captivating. With fully fleshed out cut scenes and a ton of dialog, this was a very immersive world. The music, animation and modeling all fit together very nicely. In addition to this, the level design was good – mostly (more on that later). Once I got out of the town I found the platformer elements I experienced to be engaging and the right kind of challenging.
While I did not get to any other abilities I enjoyed how the dash was used to traverse the map vertically. I would be very interested to see how the different abilities unfold!
The Bad
The default controls were a little wonky. I feel like this was designed on a gamepad... which is fine... but the default keyboard controls were not ideal for me. I would certainly be rebinding them... c for dash was very confusing for me.
There was a large chunk of time I spent attempting to find the portal. There was a vague hint about a "cool looking guy" and I mistook this description to mean a different building. To fix this make the climb up to the next level of the town much more obvious. Bonus points for some kind of direct hint if the player struggles for too long.
The combat simulator could use a bit of attention. Namely these two small points;
- I could not tell I was supposed to hit arrow directions.
- The hitbox for the arrows was too large. Probably space the arrows out a bit more so they can't be hit at the same time. This is visible in my playthrough.
The Ugly
I was able to crash the game at one point. You can see it @ 20:00 of the stream; I was attempting to find the portal and I was slamming a BUNCH of buttons. This would probably be a doozy to reproduce but is perhaps worth looking into.
The controls screen has a bug; Any time a player enters the screen they are forced to rebind the "up" key.
Conclusion
Very strong game here. I believe single player RPG / platformers are probably the hardest genre to break into. This game feels like a unique experience, even if it is slightly reminiscent of the Heartbound story. On that point, I wouldn't even take that too seriously because I've only played about 1 hour of both of these games.
My thoughts are that this game is quite close to a release to be proud of. Assuming the story is complete and the level of quality gameplay, ux and level design stays the same, this game is basically ready to release. Very polished and complete feeling for a demo. Great work!
Race for Glory #
Download on itch | Discord | Twitter | Itch page
I love racing games. Definitely one of my favorite genres. Race for Glory was a bit frustrating for me. I played... a lot... of this game. This was a game I failed to record properly so I played this for about an hour in total.
The Good
The colors, models and overall world was great. I love me some vaporwave and there is no better genre to implement that type of style. I enjoyed the look of the game quite a bit. I am assuming these car models are part of a pack... but if they are not... bravo. Either way they were the right models for this game.
The gameplay loop was great while the AI was working. I like the concept of racing for "pink slips" (ownership of the car). I'm sure other games have done this type of thing but it's very fitting for a small game like this.
The Bad
The race tracks were a bit too repetitive and should be given some love. The first 4 or so felt exactly the same. The first unique race track had a rather disorienting fence post mesh lining the track.
There are some minor elements that need fixing;
- Current car player is viewing should be the "selected" car.
- When the garage is full give the player the option to sell a car. Currently if your garage is full and you win, the car you won just... doesn't go in the garage.
- the engine sound should be linked to the speed of the car, it currently just starts when the player hits the gas. If i'm going 150 mph and i let go of the gas... the sound starts over when I accelerate.
- Crashing into the wall is unforgiving and didn't feel right.
The Ugly
The way car handled very poorly. It was very different from any racing game I've played in a very distinct and frustrating way. The issue can be seen when I hit a wall and am forced to back up. I suggest changing the turn rate depending on the speed. If i'm backing up or going slow it should be faster than if i'm going full speed.
The AI was horrible. It was either crashing immediately and never recovering or it was absolutely smoking me. This could have been because I figured out how to break the AI very early on and was probably going up in levels too fast.
Conclusion
The bones for something fun are all here. Fixing the car handling then re evaluating the AI would do wonders for this game. These two "uglies" are definitely enough for me to not enjoy this game. After that, I would very much enjoy a small racing game like this. With the big issues out of the way and a little polish I think this would be a very compelling. The developer asked if anything was "missing" and it's really just polish. Don't add any other feature until these issues are addressed and then probably just release that bad boy.
Monke Simulator #
Please Note. This dev submitted their game to r/destroymygame and I took it from there. This was recorded in a separate session.
Hilarious. Fun. Challenging in the right ways. NOT the best visuals. Definitely Unreal Engine. You can tell by the floaty feeling physics... Which work very well for this game. This one was very polished. It felt like there was a pretty large amount of content off my limited playthrough. I had a lot of fun with the speedrun aspect of it. I can see this being very addictive.
The Good
It felt complete. This demo does the game justice and is very compelling. The level select in particular was very nice and well executed. The gameplay loop was satisfying. I feel like the variety of both abilities and levels really shine in this one. There was a lot of love put into this project.
Really good menu's. Really good gameplay. The abilities, even if I only got to see a couple of them, were really compelling and fun.
The Bad
Making low fidelity "minecrafty" graphics is a real challenge. I feel like it's an art in-and-of-itself to mix high resolution models with low resolution textures. A game that does it... wonderfully... is Minecraft Dungeons. I'm guessing there are strict guidelines and strategies that the makers of Dunegones used to have such high resolution assets that are meant to look low res. Perhaps exploring what makes these models so great is a worthy task.
The wall jump was a bit glitchy. It felt like with some practice I could bypass a lot of the level mechanics. I was pretty easily able to infinite wall jump which seems like a bad idea. It's rather difficult to program wall running / jumps in a sane way, however, this needs to be revisited.
The Ugly
The tutorial level felt harder than the first level. There was a TON of stuff thrown at me at once. I feel like this needs to be broken up into different sections and dispersed through the world.
I'm not 100% sure but I suspect people are cheating to achieve the high scores. If there is no authoritative server verifying gameplay then this is almost certainly the case. I suppose it's possible the other abilities or weapons are powerful enough to zip through levels in seconds... I highly doubt it.
Conclusion
Loved it. I can imagine the vast possibilities for this one. I am unsure of the price point on this one but I would imagine this to be a decent success on the steam charts. With some better and slower introductions into the base movement mechanics I think it would be more approachable, but that is being very critical. I feel like I would enjoy this on steamdeck, so it's worth adding compatibilities to it.
The release date is set for 2024, so lets see when they deliver!
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