#game a week

[mirymom]

Game a Week #1: Vindication

#gameaweek I played quite a few games in the first seven days of 2019, but I'm going to talk about Vindication. I received it as a Christmas gift, and have played it only once so far. 

The premise is that you are wretched, an unworthy debased creature cast ashore on an island. Your goal is collect honor and possibly redeem yourself along the way. You do this by exploring the fantastical island and taking a range of actions. This is one of those games that doesn't have a single path to victory. You can earn honor points by defeating monsters, claiming territory and collecting honor as a sort of Monopoly-style rent, completing your secret journey, acquiring relics and traits, and probably some other way that I can't remember now. I was worried that so many possible paths would leave me feeling directionless in the game, where I floundered around trying a bit of everything and getting nowhere, but I really appreciated the secret journey card. Like route cards in Ticket to Ride, they can give you some purpose and shape to your action choices. Since mine awarded honor for defeating monsters, I went that route, and defeated several monsters that came with end of game bonuses. Capitalizing on those end of game bonuses had me collecting certain territories and types of attributes. I didn't win, but it was close! There are quite a few fiddly bits to this one, so I maybe wouldn't break it out with your friends who think The Game of Life is a complicated game. But it is well planned with good visual elements and four medium-to-highly-experienced gamers had little trouble figuring it out at La Casa Bryant. When I got it, we spent some time with a video from the makers about how to utilize all the very smart game-storage pieces that came with. If you nerd out about good game storage and thoughtful mechanics, you'll probably love this game. 

[mokume1shine]

音をつけてみるとそれっぽい。

明日までなのにこの状態からどうするんだろう。

[mokume1shine]

Game a Week No.2

Processingで簡単な物理演算を実装しようとして、グリッチだらけでちょっと嫌になる。

物理エンジンの凄さを知る。

[tomkail]

Game 6: Average Bet

My first attempt at an office break room game.

The rules:

Players place bets on what the average bet will be. Any (real number numerical) bet is valid. The closest at the end of the day wins.

It’s quite nice in how it forms a working system, but it’s just not that good a game. It’s fairly random, so the act of playing just isn’t all that interesting. Since you only get one turn (which is also a bit of an issue), it’s also much easier to play at the end of the day. That said, it was nice seeing what others had played as the game went on, if you looked.

[tomkail]

Game 5: Helichopter

A silly multiplayer two button game. Using two buttons you add forces to the tail or the nose of the helicopter - hold both buttons to push up in the direction your blades are facing. It’s quite a fun toy, and not even the worst game. Apparently it’s like Piloteer on iOS.

Only took about an hour or two to make, so I added sound effects and some basic visuals to give it a bit of polish.

[one-game-a-week]

Week 9: Sewer Dungeon

https://redye.itch.io/sewerdungeon

My goal for this week was to design a dungeon, so I started by making a main character and used up at least 2 days just for that. The protagonist is based on procedural animation (all sprites are moved with mathematical functions based on the players movement) https://twitter.com/Ahr_Ech/status/692147002277302273

What went well

The player character looks really interresting and unique

the different characters fit well enough into the setting

a relatively big amount of content compared to previous projects

the tilemaps work well and allow for a easily extensible map

What didn’t go well

The timing on the player animations is suboptimal and could’ve used some work, also more moving part would’ve helped

the enemies are pretty similar and have basically no attack patterns

the fireball spell can be easily spammed and destoys the balance completely once understood

the fireball spell easily overloads the screen brightness and makes it impossible to read

the light of the fireball isn’t as atmospheric as it could be because the base brightness of the level is pretty high

the boss is pretty straightforward but it works well enough (the problem with that mainly lies with the fireball)

[tomkail]

Death From Above: Game 3

The third was an archery combat game, where you can only fire directly upwards, meaning that arrows would rain down on you from above. It was Josh’s idea, based on how Hanzo’s arrows (Overwatch) don’t time out. 

It’s quite fun, but it’s not especially deep, since the only strategy is to move near enemies and spam the fire button while dodging other arrows.