Jack Ham Zero Debriefing

Considering the fact that this is a game built on the foundation of failed levels from the second game that I ever made, I'd say Jack Ham Zero turned out pretty well.

HOT POTATOES:

Some good, challenging puzzles, a badass soundtrack, & that trademark sense of humor upon which the Potato Clock Games empire is built all conspire to make this game just barely worth playing. I think it's better than Jack Ham's Maze of Tribulations, so I guess it's doing what a sequel is supposed to do. ATTABOY!

COLD POTATOES:

I mean, yeah, it's not actually good, but I can hardly hold that against the poor guy. If I'm forcing myself to be critical, though, I think the difficulty ramps up a little too fast, probably because the game started out as Maze of Tribulations "Brutal Mode." The early levels could stand to be a bit less. Brutal, I mean. I don't actually like the action sequences much (space shooter, sword-em-up, minecarts), they mostly just distract from the puzzling. So do things like lives, score, passwords (as opposed to auto-saved progress), limited restarts (because of limited lives), enemies all over the place that kill you if they barely touch you. I think this would have been a better game without all of those things.

CONCLUSION:

Look, people, there's going to be a third game in this series, like or not. I've got a pretty good idea now of what it's going to look like. Most of the problems identified above are easy fixes & that just leaves me to concentrate on the fun stuff: puzzles, jams & Jack Ham lore.

RGB Debriefing

RGB is the reason we prototype games. What seemed, in my head, to be a clever, elegant puzzle game turned out to be sort of a shallow, boring one.

HOT POTATOES:

One of my personal criteria for a good puzzle game is simple mechanics. Really good puzzle games take a small rule set (like the various Japanese number puzzles) or a single interesting mechanic (Portal, or the different chapters in Braid) & craft interesting puzzles from that minimal toolkit. If you have to remember a bunch of rules & relationships (looking at you, Road Not Taken) then it's not a good puzzle game.

However...

COLD POTATOES:

The problem in this case is that it's just not very fun or interesting. RGB puts a big check in the elegance box but the puzzles just don't end up feeling worth the player's effort. I really don't like randomly generated puzzles, like, at all. A good puzzle game should feel like you're playing one-on-one against the designer; it should feel like an interaction with the puzzle crafter. RGB isn't as cold as, say, Minesweeper, but it's not that far off. Hand crafting puzzles would have taken a long time & I don't think that the benefit it would provide would be enough to save the game. So yeah, I took the easy way out.

CONCLUSION:

I only put a few hours of effort into this one so I'm not sweating it. It's good for maybe an hour or two of achievement hunting if you're really into puzzle games. I might use this mechanic as a part of another game (it might work as a room in a Chip's Challenge-ish game or something) but it's just not deep enough to make an entire game out of.

Rogue Matrix Debriefing

I want to take a few minutes to collect my thoughts about what did & didn't work with Rogue Matrix. I think I should try to do this with all of my games, just to give myself some direction in terms of design.

HOT POTATOES:

Music Generation: This was a successful little experiment which I'll definitely be exploring further.

Dungeon Generation: I like the look of the dungeons, layout-wise. I'll probably use this same algorithm if I ever make another roguelike, which I almost certainly will.

Light Strategy: There's just enough strategy involved to keep the game a little interesting. Check it:

The more enemies there are wandering around the level, the more the loot is worth. So to maximize your score on a given level, the best strategy is usually to pick up all the loot first, then kill the enemies. However, having more enemies around also causes your time to decrease faster, shortening your overall playtime & making it difficult to reach the later stages where loot is worth more. So then it would seem that the best strategy is to sprint through the first few levels to get where the big points are. But then you miss out on all of the items you could have collected, which are often essential for survival in the late game. So it's a balance, but there are enough random elements to keep the player from guessing at an optimal strategy for a specific game until all of the items have been discovered.

Look, I'm not saying it's a great game, but I do think there's a little more depth to it than first meets the eye.

COLD POTATOES:

Exploration is Boring: This is an immediate deathblow to a roguelike. Every part of every level looks exactly the same. Every enemy looks exactly the same. Exploration is a central game mechanic here & it just isn't much fun.

Worst Graphics Award: I mean, have a little bit of pride. Jesus.

Terrible UI: All that text in the infobar needs to be there because the game does such a bad job of explaining itself to the player. The strategic elements should be communicated to the player more elegantly through gameplay. It's Ok for a game to be hard to figure out completely, but only if figuring out the rules is designed to be part of the fun or the challenge. Here, it's just shitball UI & UX design.

CONCLUSION:

I think this game turned out alright considering the minimal amount of effort I ended up putting into it. I'll probably use this game as a starting point for building another roguelike in the future.