Super Mario Bros. X: Hipster Hop!
Super Hipster Land by Blen
Hi all. The end of the spring semester at my college is nearly here. This week will be finals, then we'll have a week of nothing going on, followed by the start of the summer semester. I've signed up for a Mobile App Development class this summer, so I'll likely be a little sparse on game dev time. Still, it ought to be useful for my career.
Forgotten Gates has had a decent amount of progress this month for something I only work on during slack moments at my job, although it's nothing particularly exciting. I've been getting the code together for importing data about monsters, actors, and weapons into the battle plugin. I also need to make some adjustments to the spreadsheet from which that data comes.
Bombercan is almost complete. :o It plays with four players, it detects and announces a win, and it has menus for setting up game parameters. Unfortunately, there's still one critical bug: if there's a chain explosion of bombs, the game will lag significantly, and it can even cause items dropped from blocks destroyed by that explosion to be blown up by that same explosion. I have an idea what may be causing that, and I've started working on an alternate implementation to hopefully fix it, but I've put it aside because...
RPGMaker.net announced a Super Mario Bros. X Super Contest! :D Basically it challenged folks to make an SMBX stage, and the results would be compiled into a sort-of game (more a gallery of freely accessible stages than a traditional game, but still). Since that had a deadline (April 29), I focused all my attention on that once it became clear I'd need more time than I'd thought for Bombercan. It's a good thing too, because my SMBX stage wound up being completed about a half-hour before the deadline. Ironically, though, the site had a massive breakdown on that day and still isn't back up. X) Naturally, the contest deadline has been extended, and I can't complain -- I discovered and fixed a minor bug after the original deadline, and used the extra time to add an extravagant decoration to a section that was rather bland before. My stage is a music-based one set to the tune of Super Hipster Land, the remix in this post's video. I tried to record a playthrough of the stage itself, but it turns out SMBX doesn't play nicely with video recording software. :P
On NMR, I did a one-off mission between Cherii and her distant cousin Kioko. They went to a farming community to help with crop pollination using their bees, but found the town deserted. While trying to figure out what happened, they found that their bees kept getting drawn off by some very potent sweet smell, so they went to investigate that. It turned out to be caused by a gigantic flower bush with perfume that draws in any creature with an attraction to sweetness (including the townsfolk) and makes them want to just stand there smelling it. Naturally this abnormal shrub was the work of a plant-manipulating ninja, who was testing and perfecting the technique on a remote population he figured could go missing without drawing attention too soon. Fighting him was an extra challenge for the Kamizuru duo since their bees were mesmerized by the flowers. Cherii's culinary bent came in handy, she used some crushed garlic to help keep herself and Kioko from being overcome when the bush's full aroma was unleashed.
Also, Mushi has started up a plot for herself and Aburei. A pair of medics from the Neutral Medical Center were murdered with poison, and a poison container with the Kirigakure insignia was left at the scene. Naturally, Aburei and Mushi don't think Kirigakure would actually kill neutral medics for no apparent reason AND leave an obvious calling card, but since that's the only clue the killer left, off to Kiri we went for our investigation. At the current stage we're hoping to get a Kiri PC involved as our guide and inside investigator.
Yoshi's Woolly World:
On a tangent to this, if you're a Nintendo aficionado, make certain to get a My Nintendo account now that they're available and build up points in it. Even if (like me) you don't happen to have a smart device so as to play Miitomo, you can earn a little credit each week by logging into the Nintendo eShop, Miiverse, and My Nintendo, and those credits lead to tangible rewards. I got a 15% discount on Yoshi's Woolly World, which is a decent chunk of change on a $50 purchase. n.n
As you might guess from the title, Yoshi's Woolly World is a thematic twist on the Yoshi series in which the world is portrayed as built from yarn and related arts-and-crafts stuff, much like Kirby's Epic Yarn. Unlike Kirby's Epic Yarn, though, Yoshi's Woolly World does very little to stray from its series' formula. You're still slurping down baddies, turning them into eggs (or rather balls of yarn) and tossing them, and generally following familiar Mario-esque platformer mechanics. One thing that's sorta new is that you'll occasionally see a wireframe (not in the computer graphics terminology sense, just an outline that literally appears to be constructed from bent wires) which you can toss a yarn ball at to turn it into a solid and interactible object. They also added five skeins of yarn to the collectibles for each stage, rewarding you with a themed Yoshi that you can switch out to if you find them all. I rarely found the reconstructed Yoshis more appealing than the defaults, but hey, more collectibles mean richer stages. :) Oh, and they enabled simultaneous co-op two-player. Haven't had a chance to try that yet, but I imagine it would be fun.
Other than that, not a whole lot to say about it; like I say, it's mostly a familiar formula. I didn't find myself charmed by the creative flourishes as much as I did with Kirby's Epic Yarn, but it did have a few clever moments, such as the stage with sticky velcro conveyor belts -- both thematically and mechanically imaginative. X) Get it if you like the Yoshi series.
Remnants of Isolation:
Yet another RPG Maker Humble Bundle game, and probably the last one I'm going to actually bother with reviewing. X) I've at least tried the others, and some of them I actually got a decent way into, but as hypocritical as it might be, my patience for amateur-grade games in a genre I'm not particularly fond of in the first place dries up after a couple hours of awkward story-telling or a point where the way to make progress becomes unclear. Here's to more time for actually working on my own amateur-grade games.
Remnants of Isolation is a short game as RPGs go, which I personally appreciate. It follows the story of a mute monster girl and a minor noble trapped in a castle designed to hold those with magical power (which in this world apparently causes blight as they involuntarily draw mana from the land around them). Since the monster girl can't speak, the noble (and the player) is left to discern the history of the castle and the monster girl's role as the "heart of the castle" from writings scattered about by previous prisoners. Their goal, naturally, is to escape, although how they'll live after that as beings that unavoidably damage the environment in the outside world is a hanging question.
The primary appeal of the game's combat lies in an interesting spell fusion system. There are two kinds of magic in the game: innate skills which each character learns as they level up, and elemental spells which can be accessed by equipping spell cards. If one of the characters uses an innate skill and the other then uses a spell in a given round, the spell will be modified. One skill will simply make the spell more powerful, another will cause it to affect all enemies (or both heroes if it was a healing spell), another will turn it into a buff/debuff spell, etc. Most of the innate skills have a low cost, less than the mana each hero regenerates per round, while spells cost slightly more than mana regenerated. So ideal play usually revolves around using an innate skill on one hero and a spell on the other, then switching roles on the next round, all the while trying to get the most useful modifiers for the current situation and hopefully not be stuck in an emergency situation where you have to, say, spend mana on a heal without gaining a bonus from a modifier. There are a couple other occasionally useful options, like doing a physical attack (weaker, but at least you're doing something while letting mana build) or defending (good for when you know a whammy is coming obviously, plus it generates EXTRA mana!). One more interesting design note: you start each combat with relatively little mana, basically enough to cast one spell, and you can accumulate quite a bit more, but anything not used before the end of the combat will essentially be lost. That's a smart design choice I think (mainly just to realize it's a choice that can be made at all rather than going with the default of starting the heroes at max mana), because it forces the gameplay to stay on that knife's edge of being almost out of mana, where the interesting decisions are to be made.
Bottom line? This one's actually not free, and personally I probably wouldn't have been very satisfied with it for the retail price. But then, RPGs aren't my main line, and it does have more tactical thought than most RPGs. Get it if you'd pay ten bucks (or less if you spot it on sale) for a short RPG with a nicely-done combat gimmick.
Click to viewHi all. The end of the spring semester at my college is nearly here. This week will be finals, then we'll have a week of nothing going on, followed by the start of the summer semester. I've signed up for a Mobile App Development class this summer, so I'll likely be a little sparse on game dev time. Still, it ought to be useful for my career.
Forgotten Gates has had a decent amount of progress this month for something I only work on during slack moments at my job, although it's nothing particularly exciting. I've been getting the code together for importing data about monsters, actors, and weapons into the battle plugin. I also need to make some adjustments to the spreadsheet from which that data comes.
Bombercan is almost complete. :o It plays with four players, it detects and announces a win, and it has menus for setting up game parameters. Unfortunately, there's still one critical bug: if there's a chain explosion of bombs, the game will lag significantly, and it can even cause items dropped from blocks destroyed by that explosion to be blown up by that same explosion. I have an idea what may be causing that, and I've started working on an alternate implementation to hopefully fix it, but I've put it aside because...
RPGMaker.net announced a Super Mario Bros. X Super Contest! :D Basically it challenged folks to make an SMBX stage, and the results would be compiled into a sort-of game (more a gallery of freely accessible stages than a traditional game, but still). Since that had a deadline (April 29), I focused all my attention on that once it became clear I'd need more time than I'd thought for Bombercan. It's a good thing too, because my SMBX stage wound up being completed about a half-hour before the deadline. Ironically, though, the site had a massive breakdown on that day and still isn't back up. X) Naturally, the contest deadline has been extended, and I can't complain -- I discovered and fixed a minor bug after the original deadline, and used the extra time to add an extravagant decoration to a section that was rather bland before. My stage is a music-based one set to the tune of Super Hipster Land, the remix in this post's video. I tried to record a playthrough of the stage itself, but it turns out SMBX doesn't play nicely with video recording software. :P
On NMR, I did a one-off mission between Cherii and her distant cousin Kioko. They went to a farming community to help with crop pollination using their bees, but found the town deserted. While trying to figure out what happened, they found that their bees kept getting drawn off by some very potent sweet smell, so they went to investigate that. It turned out to be caused by a gigantic flower bush with perfume that draws in any creature with an attraction to sweetness (including the townsfolk) and makes them want to just stand there smelling it. Naturally this abnormal shrub was the work of a plant-manipulating ninja, who was testing and perfecting the technique on a remote population he figured could go missing without drawing attention too soon. Fighting him was an extra challenge for the Kamizuru duo since their bees were mesmerized by the flowers. Cherii's culinary bent came in handy, she used some crushed garlic to help keep herself and Kioko from being overcome when the bush's full aroma was unleashed.
Also, Mushi has started up a plot for herself and Aburei. A pair of medics from the Neutral Medical Center were murdered with poison, and a poison container with the Kirigakure insignia was left at the scene. Naturally, Aburei and Mushi don't think Kirigakure would actually kill neutral medics for no apparent reason AND leave an obvious calling card, but since that's the only clue the killer left, off to Kiri we went for our investigation. At the current stage we're hoping to get a Kiri PC involved as our guide and inside investigator.
Yoshi's Woolly World:
On a tangent to this, if you're a Nintendo aficionado, make certain to get a My Nintendo account now that they're available and build up points in it. Even if (like me) you don't happen to have a smart device so as to play Miitomo, you can earn a little credit each week by logging into the Nintendo eShop, Miiverse, and My Nintendo, and those credits lead to tangible rewards. I got a 15% discount on Yoshi's Woolly World, which is a decent chunk of change on a $50 purchase. n.n
As you might guess from the title, Yoshi's Woolly World is a thematic twist on the Yoshi series in which the world is portrayed as built from yarn and related arts-and-crafts stuff, much like Kirby's Epic Yarn. Unlike Kirby's Epic Yarn, though, Yoshi's Woolly World does very little to stray from its series' formula. You're still slurping down baddies, turning them into eggs (or rather balls of yarn) and tossing them, and generally following familiar Mario-esque platformer mechanics. One thing that's sorta new is that you'll occasionally see a wireframe (not in the computer graphics terminology sense, just an outline that literally appears to be constructed from bent wires) which you can toss a yarn ball at to turn it into a solid and interactible object. They also added five skeins of yarn to the collectibles for each stage, rewarding you with a themed Yoshi that you can switch out to if you find them all. I rarely found the reconstructed Yoshis more appealing than the defaults, but hey, more collectibles mean richer stages. :) Oh, and they enabled simultaneous co-op two-player. Haven't had a chance to try that yet, but I imagine it would be fun.
Other than that, not a whole lot to say about it; like I say, it's mostly a familiar formula. I didn't find myself charmed by the creative flourishes as much as I did with Kirby's Epic Yarn, but it did have a few clever moments, such as the stage with sticky velcro conveyor belts -- both thematically and mechanically imaginative. X) Get it if you like the Yoshi series.
Remnants of Isolation:
Yet another RPG Maker Humble Bundle game, and probably the last one I'm going to actually bother with reviewing. X) I've at least tried the others, and some of them I actually got a decent way into, but as hypocritical as it might be, my patience for amateur-grade games in a genre I'm not particularly fond of in the first place dries up after a couple hours of awkward story-telling or a point where the way to make progress becomes unclear. Here's to more time for actually working on my own amateur-grade games.
Remnants of Isolation is a short game as RPGs go, which I personally appreciate. It follows the story of a mute monster girl and a minor noble trapped in a castle designed to hold those with magical power (which in this world apparently causes blight as they involuntarily draw mana from the land around them). Since the monster girl can't speak, the noble (and the player) is left to discern the history of the castle and the monster girl's role as the "heart of the castle" from writings scattered about by previous prisoners. Their goal, naturally, is to escape, although how they'll live after that as beings that unavoidably damage the environment in the outside world is a hanging question.
The primary appeal of the game's combat lies in an interesting spell fusion system. There are two kinds of magic in the game: innate skills which each character learns as they level up, and elemental spells which can be accessed by equipping spell cards. If one of the characters uses an innate skill and the other then uses a spell in a given round, the spell will be modified. One skill will simply make the spell more powerful, another will cause it to affect all enemies (or both heroes if it was a healing spell), another will turn it into a buff/debuff spell, etc. Most of the innate skills have a low cost, less than the mana each hero regenerates per round, while spells cost slightly more than mana regenerated. So ideal play usually revolves around using an innate skill on one hero and a spell on the other, then switching roles on the next round, all the while trying to get the most useful modifiers for the current situation and hopefully not be stuck in an emergency situation where you have to, say, spend mana on a heal without gaining a bonus from a modifier. There are a couple other occasionally useful options, like doing a physical attack (weaker, but at least you're doing something while letting mana build) or defending (good for when you know a whammy is coming obviously, plus it generates EXTRA mana!). One more interesting design note: you start each combat with relatively little mana, basically enough to cast one spell, and you can accumulate quite a bit more, but anything not used before the end of the combat will essentially be lost. That's a smart design choice I think (mainly just to realize it's a choice that can be made at all rather than going with the default of starting the heroes at max mana), because it forces the gameplay to stay on that knife's edge of being almost out of mana, where the interesting decisions are to be made.
Bottom line? This one's actually not free, and personally I probably wouldn't have been very satisfied with it for the retail price. But then, RPGs aren't my main line, and it does have more tactical thought than most RPGs. Get it if you'd pay ten bucks (or less if you spot it on sale) for a short RPG with a nicely-done combat gimmick.