Everyone who played my game found it easy to play.I’m happy with the difficulty being relatively easy, I will try to ramp up the difficulty in later levels.I personally am happy for the playtime of this because it is meant to be a short and simple level 1.One of the people who played my game described the hitbox for the last enemy being off so they couldn’t beat the game. They also didn’t bother restarting to replay and try to beat it, so this motivates me to make my game more engaging for the player.
Here are the detailed feedback from people who played my game. Moving forward I’m definitely going to look into fixing the obstacles of my game and making the visuals super good so that playing it becomes smoother and more enjoyable. I will also fix the bugs with the instruction screen as more than one of my players had that problem.
My game is called ” Spooky Game” and it’s about a good-spirited ghost who is trying to navigate the world of the dead to collect enough souls to turn back human.
Here I designed potentially for the game. One is an evil demon, the other an angel because I thought it would fit for an angel to be the natural enemy of our ghost protagonist, the other a reaper to eliminate the ghost’s spirit.
Potential rewards sketches
One reward could be a soul which the ghost collects to make himself human again.
The other is a ghost coin which would be the currency in the supernatural landscape the player travels in.
The goal of this game is to beat it while successfully memorizing all of the crazy trick traps the game has set out throughout its world. It lures you in with the familiar aesthetics of a Mario game, and that’s where the player makes their first mistake as this game is nowhere near as easy as your average Mario game. The player’s false pretenses before actually physically starting to play the game sets the stage for it to subvert your expectations.
If I had to label this game with a genre I’d call it a Kaizo game. Kaizo in japanese means to reconstruct so it’s kind of like a “deconstruction” of mario games. It’s a genre that is typically fan-made from hacks that deal with creating excessively difficult Mario levels that only the most skilled or stubborn players can beat.
Personally I don’t believe these kind of games are trying to make a deep statement. I think they’re made for a very specific of skilled platformer gamers who want to take the platforming in Mario to the most insane levels for their own fun and enjoyment. The game is also very self aware as has a lot of humor to be found in it. I think it is a game made purely for people to have fun with.
Unexpected Moments:
unexpected moment #1: the platform fell and killed me but this time I was aware and returned to take a screenshot of the moment. this type of surprise messes with expectations of the player as nothing like this in classic Mario occurs so it catches you off guard.
unexpected moment #2, after taking the previous screenshot I died while I thought I was safe to walk forward suddenly the ground caved in on itself and geniueniely shocked me.
unexpected moment #3, I was trying to jump over the pitfall they placed when suddenly I jumped into blocks which ended up making me fall in the pitfall anyway.
This is the general idea of what I want as the scenery in my game. The idea is a ghost who lives in the land of the dead, so I wanted spooky scenery to convey what kind of world they live in. Some elements that show this idea are the tombstones, the copius amount of “dead” trees with no leaves, and spooky elements like the moon being the only source of light and the spiderweb.
Final Fantasy X is a fantasy game with amazing world building that anyone can infer its genre from just a quick look at some of its set pieces, character design, and world design.
Above is an image of the stadium the in game citizens inhabiting the world use to play a fantasy game called blitzball. Essentially it’s fictional soccer but underwater. You can see that the stadium is floating above the ocean and the sphere of water is where the sport actually takes place. You can tell the genre of where it’s set quickly from looking at it.
Here’s another picture from a forest area in the game. It is beautifully designed and you can quickly tell its fantasy from the unrealistic aspects of this scenery. There is a kaleidoscope colored tree sitting on top of a lake here.
Lastly, here’s a photo of a major city in the game. It has unusual architecture for it to have been designed with the modern world in mind, and looks distinctly new and fantasy. There is a water bridge in the background too which by all means is impossible to occur in real life. All these elements tell you the genre of the setting.
A game that I’ve been playing recently is Genshin Impact, released in 2020 for mobile and PS4.
The main goal of Genshin Impact isn’t entirely defined as the game is ongoing , with multiple events and story quests being released alongside updates. As a result of this, while playing a person will find themselves creating lot of their own personal goals they want to achieve. For example, my personal goal in the game is to level up my favorite characters to their max potential which requires a lot of in game grinding to get the materials needed in order to upgrade said characters.
There exists a system present in the game called “resin,” which is consumed whenever a player claims rewards from weekly bosses and dungeons. Without resin you can’t claim the needed materials to upgrade your equipment and characters. Resin exists as an obstacle and is regained by waiting real life minutes for resin to be regenerated. The resin system is loathed by many players because when you run out of resin you are essentially locked out of claiming rewards and you lose incentive to keep playing the game until your resin is regenerated again.
The reward in the game may depend on each player, but for me it’s seeing my characters get stronger as a result of my grinding for materials , and being able to clear hard content because of how strong they became.
