Sensing a game
There’s a lot to love here in this game about a lot of loving. Basically, this game is, in the developers own words, WarioWare meets PornHub. It’s a wonderfully entertaining game, with a few hiccups, but otherwise well made.
Basically, the player is given a few seconds to complete a mini-game and depending on their performance, will either continue playing the game or lose a life. Simple and straight forward.
What isn’t straight forward is the the way in which the game presents itself. Porn isn’t a topic handled very often in games and its inclusion definitely adds a bit of titilation to the gameplay.
All of the game uses the arrow keys. Each mini-game asks the player to figure out what is required of them with a simple word prompt. However, due to the theme, the player is always tuned to figuring out how to make the arrow keys control the acts of pleasure and this had me grinning the whole way through.
With more common themes there’s an aspect to themes I forget about sometimes, which is how it makes you think about the context of things and act them out. For example, there’s a mini game about teasing, pulling panties down, but not too far. When I was doing this, I started thinking about the kinds of things I’d find enjoyable in a tease and tried to play it out in the game. What a wonderful thing games are eh?
Unfortunately, this game does a problem. Some of the mini-games aren’t that clear in what they ask of you and require a bit of fiddling around in that case. That lead to an instant loss sometimes and I wouldn’t quite understand why.
The art is amazing.
This game was fun and refreshing. 8/10
I bounce off most twine games in all honesty. Generally, the writing can sometimes not be up to snuff and the way in which the twine engine is used for interactivity is almost never interesting. This game, however, doesn’t fall into either trap and kept me interested straight through to the end.
It’s a rather simple game about being a translator, trying to make trades to make the most money possible using your limited knowledge about the other language and trying to gain more knowledge by sussing out the context and meaning of words through images. It’s an interesting concept I don’t think I’ve seen attempted before and props to that. I always, if nothing else, enjoy a new concept.
The game also switched up its gameplay format multiple times, which I wasn’t expecting but prevented the game from getting boring. It dragged just slightly too long for my taste in each of those sections, but that’s just me. I can be impatient.
One thing that really irked me in the game was only present in the beginning. The text appearing was a bit too slow for me, not appearing when I finished a line a second before. I wish I had control over that.
The ending to the game was also a bit vague. Interesting, but vague. Which is fine, given the context of what was happening, you were haggling in a language you didn’t fully understand. It just stuck out to me when I was trying to make the most money possible. But again, the theme saves this little issue.
A funny interesting twine game that uses language to great effect. 7/10.
Monkey see, Monkey flu by Andrew Wang, Fabian Fabro, Mika Dumont, Shaun Oliquiano, John Zhou, Nicholas Hines
Another game from Global game jam. This is a game that uses the theme to interesting effect, having to avoid getting sick while communicating with the people around you. The gameplay is something the team member Andrew wang has a lot of experience with, a 3rd person character platformer-ish game. I should note that this was a team effort, so I don’t know how much influence was Andrews to push it in this direction.
The gameplay was unique. I don’t believe I’ve seen this combination of mechanics before, having to collect objects spawned by other elements in the game. In the game, the player has to do everything in their power to keep from being lonely, while also trying to avoid flu viruses. Both of which take the form of little orbs that float up into the sky from different characters that are walking around. There’s also a countdown, all the player has to do till the timer hits zero and they win.
I’m a fan of very compact games such as these, it keeps problems with the gameplay to a minimum frustration level(due to the briefness of the time with it) and keeps the focus on the expression of the mechanics. I did have problems with the game, but due to the timer I felt compelled to beat the game because “why not, its not that long”. I actually like the timer a lot. It was a very good touch.
I also enjoyed realizing there were collectable items in the game, I found different ones on each run which helped keep things fresh. Good job there.
That art was also very well done, the style of low poly had a sense of grit that I’m not sure what the source of could be. But it was pleasant for the eyes.
My issues with the game stem from two things, lack of acceleration and depth perception. The first one just comes from the player character being just a little bit too fast for the level of control I would like, but without acceleration I was unable to modify the speed and was stuck with the full speed all the time. It’s a small thing and will have a big impact on the feel of the game, so it’s not a choice that is a light one. This is just my opinion since I do like acceleration personally.
The second issue is that when I first started playing, the orbs were hard to gauge in terms of distance from me. After a bit of playing I learned how to compensate for this, but I still had to translate from what I was seeing.
This was a fun game that covered its tracks with one little smart bit of design. Worth a play 7/10
Ah the stranger. Don’t be a stranger to the stranger any longer.
The stranger isn’t a stranger to amazing art. The style of this game is quite pastel and bright mixes with lower poly models end up creating a delightful world to look at. The quality of this art doesn’t really drop until near the end of the game, but the game has enough of eye candy to make up for this, and even then its lows aren’t that low.
The design of the game is pretty simple. Basically, the player will be walking from room to room, solving light puzzles and slightly heavier platforming challenges. They also acquire a grapple hook at some point and end up traversing more complicated topography thanks to that.
Nothing in this game blew me away in terms of things I haven't encounter in other games, but everything was very elegantly presented. Style gets you everywhere I suppose eh? There were some little extras thrown in for no purpose whatsoever, such as a basketball hoop and things you can throw in it. These went a long way for giving the game character, I think without these little additions I would have lost interest in the game.
I’m sad that more games don’t have little pointless extras like this.
I didn’t like the writing that much, but I did enjoy having multiple characters to give the game some flavour.
I fucking loved the transitions.
The weird thing about this game is that the whole time, I had this nagging feeling like the game was missing something. I still don’t know what it could be, but I still have that feeling even today. I’m not sure what thats about.
Overall, this game was fine. Didn’t really blow my mind, but it was very well constructed. 7/10
Sensing the game
Something I’ve been thinking about is how sometimes, when playing a game, I feel somewhat physically affected. When I’m playing a very difficult situation and I die just before completing it, I feel it in my bones. When I finally harvest my crops, I feel a rush of elation. When I finally solve a puzzle, I get tingly. These feelings, how does a game get so under our skin to have this connection?
I was thinking about this and I don’t know if I have an answer, but I certainly have a few thoughts I’d like to share.
To figure this out, I started thinking about how anything at all effects us. This all starts at one point, the senses. We can’t register anything that moves us without the sense capable to feel those things. Going from here, we should come to understand what sense themselves are and how they commonly function.
They are different in specifics, but I realized they have one shared attribute. They all depend on changes in states or vibrations of some sort to function. For example, are you feeling the shirt you may be wearing right now? Not until I mentioned it I’m sure. How about the smell around you, it may even be hard to figure out what the smell is even now that you are thinking about it. Same with sound, sight, and taste. We tune out any constants from our sensations of the world, making us blind in that direction.
It’s not until something changes (the shirt comes off, someone farts, silence turns into sound, etc) that we notice the sensations again. This is the basis of how we feel the world around us. States changing so that things are not uniform. Otherwise whats the point of sensing something that never changes?
So this I thought about applying to games. Everything that I could bring up as an example for things that have effected me has some grounding in what I’ve thought about up there. For example, screen shake. The changing of stable, to non stable cameras based on an event creates a certain sensation that we notice. If the camera were always stable, we wouldn’t even notice the camera or what it makes us feel because it would never change. This, I feel, is the basis of what can sometimes be called “Game feel”
However, this extends not to just little tricks but game wide things, from death mechanics to farming mechanics. Cycles, State changes, Gameplay progression, Levels, everything that changes in a game weaves together the different sensations they create to make the symphony of play.
I think this is quite lovely.
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