#twinbeard studios

[miloscat]

[Review] Hop's Big Adventure in the Gift Dimension, Basil's Adventure, Basil Returns! (Pico-8)

A perfectly pleasant packet of Pico-8 platformers.

While browsing the Itch.io page of Twinbeard Studios, the creator of Frog Fractions, I decided to try out some of his other Pico-8 games; this time, a trio of platformers.

The first, Hop’s Big Adventure, is a Frog Fractions spinoff of a sort where you play as Hop the frog in a Santa hat picking up last-minute Christmas gifts from an abstract cavelike space. In what is stated to be a callback to my beloved childhood favourite, the Mac classic Glider, Hop rides in a paper aeroplane which is at the whims of air currents in the cavern. You explore by merely floating either left or right, with a button to slow your movement to better avoid the walls.

Exploring and nabbing presents becomes a light puzzle as you find a suitable air current, since your vertical motion is strictly either up or down depending on the last one you passed through (this, and the graphical style, are inspired by VVVVVV). A handy map shows you presents you’ve seen and lets you warp between checkpoints, the goal being simply to find 20 gifts and return to the starting point. Adjusting the glider movement to navigate the cavern makes for a pleasant little challenge.

Basil’s Adventure has you as a carefree dog whose only goals in life are to knock off dandelion seeds and meet butterfly friends… and get back to her cosy home, of course. A more naturalistic setting gives way to some kind of metallic underground base with floating water blobs to swim through, but you’re soon above ground again with your house not far away, and a waiting ranking of time taken and how many dandelions and butterflies you interacted with. It’s a moody little experience although without threat, and gathering a following of various coloured butterflies keeps it from being too lonely.

Basil’s Return is a little longer, this time with a “lost civilisation” vibe underground and a brief castle section. The tone is similar, with a slightly more detailed look and a few new graphical flourishes like windblown snow and more ambient animals. The returning sniff mechanic which indicates the direction and distance of butterfly pals is more useful here since there are more points of no return, but this time you’re not graded at the end; you simply get a lovely full screen art of Basil warm and safe at home, relaxing in front of a Christmas tree. And so we come full circle, having seen just how capable Jim Stormdancer is of making simple games that are nevertheless engaging and wholesome. They were made as gifts for his loved ones but I'm glad they were made available publicly so I could enjoy them too; thank you Jim!

[tinysamm]

“Hidden depths” serve as the primary gameplay motif of Frog Fractions, with the player able to determine that there is more behind the game presented to them when it begins introducing esoteric and outlandish mechanics to what is ostensibly a simple premise. This is brought to a head when the player first gains access to their Flying Dragon, upon whom they are able to dive below and traverse a world completely unexpected based on the game’s prior presentation. These depths only continue to propagate as the game takes on entirely new genres of play, building to something entirely new all the way to the end of the experience.

[frogs-in-games]

Frog Fractions (2012)

[miloscat]

[Review] Bouncy's Winter Solstice Ride & Maximum Overdrive 2 (Pico-8)

A pair of top-down treats.

After playing all of Twinbeard/Jim Stormdancer's other Pico-8 games, I thought to myself "Self, why not knock off the last two?" And so I did.

Bouncy's Winter Solstice Ride is another holiday-themed game made by Stormdancer as a "greeting card game". This one has you as a cute little rodent of some sort who finds herself bringing her community together by delivering presents to her animal friends and neighbours. She is able to do this because of her own gift, a fancy sled which has fun momentum mechanics and reacts with different surfaces in the snowy glade, especially the frozen-over lake. Navigation is a simple enough task but keeping control of your sled without bumping into every tree on the way is the real challenge. I played this one on my phone thanks to Pico-8's nice touchscreen implementation, although since this game requires holding buttons I encountered some interface issues as the browser kept annoyingly selecting parts of the page, but it didn't stop the game from utterly charming me.

Maximum Overdrive 2 was made for PiCoSteveMo (similarly to Look Who's The Shining 2 which I played recently), a Stephen King-themed Pico-8 game jam. Inspired by the only movie King directed, this has a near-future setting where autonomous vehicles have taken over the world. You play as a hapless human born into the labyrinthine wastes of a fully-mechanised Earth, scrounging for bananas which can uniquely disable the tyrannical automobiles.

It plays out as a roguelike in the truest sense, a top-down maze where your enemies can only take a turn stepping across the grid when you do, and where your runs through the game are totally separate. Bananas are at once your weapon, your restorative, and your final score when your run comes to a sticky end. You also have witch's hats to block pursuing cars, roombas, lawnmowers, etc. in the narrow corridors, and a key fob which can reveal their locations through walls. The robotic menaces have vision cones, but even with their predictable paths you can quickly blunder out of stealth mode and into running-for-your-life mode.

For a seemingly simple game keeping on top of these mechanics is tricky, and the number of enemy vehicles quickly ramps up as you progress through floors. Different floors have their own properties in fun ways: lawn floors are swarming with lawnmowers in wide open space, while road floors are a tight maze of narrow streets. For a game jam project this is impressive and has a lot of ideas packed in, maybe too many! Despite setting the pace yourself the game always has a frantic feel which works well. Once again nice one Jim and I hope to see more Pico-8 experiments in the future!

[miloscat]

[Review] Gordy and the Monster Moon & Look Who's The Shining Two! (Pico-8)

A nice bite-size romp (or two).

The Pico-8 is a retro-style "fantasy console" made by Lexaloffle, and it's been a wellspring of cool little indie games that can be found in abundance on Itch.io and elsewhere. I've played lots of them on my weekly streams, but this one was just for some friends in a voice call since we'd previously communally experienced the more famous game of Twinbeard Studios aka Jim Stormdancer, Frog Fractions. This doesn't have the subversive genre-bending surprises of that game, but it is a fun little bite-sized action-adventure with a spooky theme.

The framing device has a frog parent telling a bedtime story to a frog child, about a spaceship crash and a surviving... pumpkin jack o'lantern. You play as this intrepid space explorer named Gordy, bouncing around an alien world opening the seed pods from your terraforming ship and gaining abilities in order to unlock the other main escape craft. Frog Dad does appear as a hint-giving NPC but otherwise the adventure is self-contained until the end gives you a final choice about the tale's outcome.

Gordy's adventure plays out like a Zelda- or Golvellius-like, the typical pixelated Pico-8 aesthetic lending itself well to a retro-style top-down adventure like this. But it's thoroughly modern with a smoothness, a friendliness, streamlined mechanics, a small scale that make it approachable and breezy. Goofy monsters abound, and Gordy has a cobweb attack that can hold them in place, its limited uses offset by an ability to spread on contact, which is used in many clever ways across the flip-screen map. The world is very open, but certain areas are gated off until you get the right tool, like wading boots for traversing water or a lollipop that breaks tooth walls.

Exploration is satisfying, especially when finding hidden paths or unlocking shortcuts. Opening a seedpod gives you a checkpoint but can also break walls in a smart way as plants spring forth. Being from the creator of the Frog Fractions games, players of course hunted for odd secrets, and there are one or two hidden easter eggs but nothing like a whole other game to be found… as far as we know. Even so, as a small but complete adventure it's good and charming.

I also checked out another Pico-8 game on Twinbeard's Itch page, "Look Who's The Shining Two!", because it has a similar vibe. Released a year later, it reuses some graphics from Gordy and the map mechanic, but skews more puzzley. Block pushing puzzles get rewind mechanics and interactions with topiary tigers layered on top until it becomes quite the brainteaser. There’s still exploration and shortcuts but the world size is even smaller, making for a delightful puzzle morsel. The concept is that it’s a sequel to The Shining starring a grown-up Danny and fun is made from referencing the movie/book in several silly ways. It’s fab!

[speckledburd]

Could Undertale be Frog Fractions 2?

[tinysamm]

Among the first indications towards a deeper theme in Frog Fractions comes about in the first level of play. As the player’s frog begins collecting points in base e, it points to the fact that this is much more than what it seems to be on the surface, and encourages the player to explore further.

[lowercasenospaces]

As conceived in 1632 by Portuguese printing press operator André Philipé, boxing was a gentleman’s game in which two men would square off and regale each other with stories monotonous for days on end, until one of them fell to the ground from boredom or exhaustion. Over the next few years, the new sport developed a respectable following of a few hundred local socialites. It was Phillipé’s son, André Philipé Philipé, who developed what he called the “punching strategy” in 1637, after seeing a schoolboy strike another in anger, causing him to fall down. When André Phillipé Phillipé challenged the then champion British ex-patriot “Sleepless” Bill Bishop to a match, Bishop was the odds-on favourite. You can imagine his surprise when, while he was describing what he had had for breakfast that morning, André walked up and thumped him in the neck, sending him down “for the count” in the parlance of our time. While it was universally agreed that the boy had violated the spirit of the game, officials were unable to find any actual rule that punching violated, and were forced to let the victory stand. This upset caused an uproar in the boxing community large enough to spill over into local newspapers, which drew the interest of many outsiders to come see what all the fuss was about. The newcomers were enthralled to engage in these borderline-barbaric of human strength and skill, and the rest is history. After a few spoilsport schoolmarms single-minded about safety added the padded gloves, of course. Today’s boxing enthusiasts fantasise about a newcomer that would rock the ring the way Phillipé did: classification of the modern rule-set has essentially locked the “punching strategy” into place, but it’s easy to get caught up in the fantasy. Young scholars with big dreams often enter the ring with their crazy new trick, usually a variant of hypnosis, and though they’ve achieved the occasional victory, none of the gimmicks have been robust enough to make it to the big-time. The real wonder, though, is that André Phillipé’s original vision of boxing is still around. Gentlemen’s boxing clubs can be found in cities all over the world - you can visit one most any day of the week, and see two erudite gentlemen exchanging pleasantries in the ring. Most people only come to watch a few hours of a match and then leave, but every once in a while you’ll find amongst your elders a stout fellow, a die-hard fan, who perhaps witnessed that historic battle between Phillipé and Bishop, who, for love of the sport, must stay to witness the last glorious seconds of waitfulness slip away, only to fight again another day.

A History of Boxing - Jim Crawford, Chris Hampton, Kumar Daryanani

From Frog Fractions - Twinbeard Studios

Link to track: http://frogfractions.bandcamp.com/track/a-history-of-boxing