Really pretty. I'm intrigued.

often the character is in some way difficult to relate to.

Aren't we all?

I mean, think about your statement taken to its conclusion; the "best game" would be the one which challenges as few of its players' preconceptions as possible. It can be weird for the character you're controlling to have his/her own personality, but there are many legitimate reasons to give a game a strong, developed protagonist.

Some quick thoughts:

I like that the songs are dynamic and have drum breaks and slow parts. The drum programming is also pretty good; it reminds me a lot of some black metal I know of... I also think the melody at the beginning of the BOSS 4 one is pretty good, and I like the slow part later in that one too. I like the melodic bit that starts shortly before the 1-minute mark in BOSS 1. BOSS 3 also has some good stuff going for it; very heavy and structurally easier to follow than the others.

I don't really care for any of the samples you're using. The drums are quiet and not very propulsive at all; they seem more muted than is right for this kind of music. The melodic samples are not really consistent in sound; some of them are 8-bit but they're mixed with some higher fidelity sounds that clash a bit. All in all it's just a bit hard to track what's going on and it doesn't always mesh. I'm not sure if you're going for an 8-bit sound or a guitar-based metal sound or what.

Melodically and structurally they are complex to the point of seeming random, and they are overwhelmingly dissonant. I understand that for this kind of game you want the feel to be frantic and aggressive, but I think there are better ways to do that unless there's something very specific you're going for. I find the tracks pretty hard to follow.

My suggestions are to use clear, loud drum samples and stick to one or two or three instruments that work well together. Compositionally, maybe just be more careful with your use of dissonance? It's great up to a point, but works best in contrast to something, or at the very least with shorter phrases and more repetition so that the listener can follow it better.

Hope this is helpful; I don't mean to be discouraging.

I'm thinking of making the "figure out what the symbols mean" thing be a part of the puzzle solving. It fits in because Dropsy, by his nature, is a terrible communicator.

This sounds awesome. I wasn't initially onboard, but then I figured out how the dialogue system works and I'm onboard.

I could also do some kind of soundtrack contribution (I would love to try to do something vaguely Earthbound-like) but I understand if there are already enough cooks in the kitchen and all that.

I've recently been enjoying the Earthbound soundtrack. It's pretty weird, but that fits the game.



a good one, but there are so many great tracks and so many different styles represented that a single track can only scratch the surface. So what the heck, here are some more. It's got atmosphere, it's got melody, it's got funk, it's got heart, it's got all four at once more often than one could reasonably expect.




http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jd1njB6SQok
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Il8zM8TH3Dg
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TcDwdF84aTU

This one's for a spooky kind of forest, I guess, but it's gorgeous.





A more placid, idyllic kind of thing.

Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time - Lost Woods

Seriously, you guys. Shame on you for not mentioning this.

Legend of Zelda: Majora's Mask - Southern Swamp
Legend of Zelda: Majora's Mask - Woodfall Temple

Swamps are like jungles, right? Well, whether it counts or not, this music, like all the music in this game, is great. Unsettling in the best way.

Kirby 64 - Quiet Forest

I don't actually know how fitting this is as forest music, but that's what they used it for. I think it's pretty cool regardless.

Within a Deep Forest - Meyah

This is one of the best pieces of video game music I know of. This artist sadly seems to have done very little other music.

Is this just going to be freeform, or will you have to place a set number of pieces with fixed shapes to produce the desired result? When I heard "Umbragram", my mind jumped to Tangram, so I immediately assumed the latter, but now I'm not sure.

This is a really cool idea, although I personally might hate playing it because isometry always messes with my head.

Will the block placing area be rotatable? Might make block placing a little easier.
Would also allow for puzzles with 6 shadows to match...*shudder*

I'm guessing that a big part of the point of this game is that the perspective is fixed...
but if nothing else the game could have some hard puzzles with a shadow in the third dimension that also needs to be matched. (Not quite sure how you'd display it)

This is cool and the colors are incredibly pretty. I found a few things unintuitive while playing the tutorial, though; you might want to mention that you right click on items in the inventory to do stuff with them, and you might want to mention that once you start cutting a tree, you have to end your turn a couple of times before it'll finish. I was waiting for a good 30 seconds before I realized it wasn't going to finish on its own.

Also, not important at all, but when the "Hold on to your hats and pipes!" line was followed by "My hat!" I really hoped someone else would say "My pipe!"

This is an excellent graphical style. The word that comes to mind is "surreal," because it's an almost perfectly realistic-looking rendition of a particular unreal environment. Unfortunately I've got no iOS device either, but I thought I'd mention my admiration from afar. Looks like you've done great work.

This looks nice. I like the plot and the enemy designs, and there need to be more games set in the American desert.

I'm a little bit surprised that some people seem to dislike silent protagonists in general (unless I am misunderstanding). This strategy has been employed in a lot of otherwise brilliant games, such as the first half-dozen Zelda games and Pokemon R/B/Y, and I'm not saying that this makes it a good idea, but there's no denying that tons of players have found those games to be highly effective pieces of entertainment in general, so I think the strategy shouldn't be dismissed out of hand. I think Rinku probably has it right in saying that if the protagonist is silent, they have to spend a lot of time interacting with an interesting cast of secondary characters. When this is done, though, I think the result is quite satisfying, because it doesn't try to force the player into relating to a character whose personality may displease them (see: CD-i Zelda).

I find the issue with blank slates to be that the self-definition offered in such games is something of an illusion, because no matter how many decisions you make, the character still feels blank. They display no emotion, and I'm generally a little too aware that there's nothing to keep my character who was a goody-two-shoes one moment from murdering some hapless guy the next.

I'm thinking of the Elder Scrolls when I say that, but now that I think of it this is probably a problem with Western RPGs in general. The player character's role in the game is always fixed in some way, and yet the game proposes to let the player's self-definition have some meaningful impact on the game, which it rarely can because this sort of thing is immensely difficult to design. On the one hand, the player can be proposed a series of predetermined paths, in which case all their "choices" were foreseen and thus not really free; or on the other hand, the game world can let them interact with it roughly how they like, but then the world has the same issue as a blank slate character does - it tends not to respond to player choice in any expressive way. Which is fine for an MMORPG or something like Minecraft, since those are blank slate games, but it works out rather poorly with story-oriented games. Some games succeed in this paradigm, but I think that almost none of them actually gain strength from their non-determinism - either they succeed in story-telling because they are poor at really allowing player choice (e.g. Baldur's Gate), or they succeed at being a blank slate game because the story has the sense not to get in the way (e.g. Morrowind).

I would argue that even someone like Commander Shepherd is basically a blank slate in this way, and therefore an unsatisfying design choice to me. I can make good choices as Shepherd, but I never really get to feeling like Shepherd is a good person, and same with evil choices, since in the next conversation I know I can turn the whole thing around. Basically, I'm inclined to think that such "characters" are incapable of really being characters at all, as opposed to a silent protagonist, who at least has consistency, even though the player might fill in details in his or her head.

Aside: back to the topic of names - I've always found it strange that Zelda games let you name the protagonist, even though not only is his role in the game fixed, but he has an agreed-upon canonical name. Any thoughts about why this was done and what impact it has?

Some NPCs from a lo-res RPG kind of thing.



@Hamish - I really like that. I think the animations have good personality (particularly the dog's, which are downright adorable), and I like the colors you chose, particularly the purples.

Have you talked to the designer? If you haven't, that could clear this up quickly.

@JOBA - I like how that's looking.

a horse for a game about knights.

making high loot areas not require like 50x50 spaces

If you're suggesting that gigantic rooms full of loot is a bad idea, I'd like to respectfully disagree.

This is really pretty. I like the crystalline trees and rocks, as well as the colors you have chosen.

Man, I feel bad for the sucker who can only go 100 km/h.

Do you remember what kind of game it was supposed to be? It looks cool.

This is very good. Compositionally they're a diverse collection, although unified in mood. The production is very basic, yet you eke a lot out of it. Each track had just the right amount going on in it, and they admirably avert outstaying their welcome - indeed, with this ambient sort of material, some of the tracks could probably afford to go on longer. The two shortest ones may have been my favorites. I like how "One Foot on the Ocean Floor" morphs into some kind of Romantic-era dance music or something halfway through.

"Epoxy" reminds me of the song "Stone in Focus" by Aphex Twin, and the percussive piano sounds in "Antipode" remind me of the prepared piano on his drukqs album. Some of the sounds in the first two tracks remind me of some Boards of Canada tracks as well. Are you a fan of these artists by chance? (This is not criticism; the echoes, if they are echoes, are subtle.)

My only note of criticism regards the mix; several of the tracks seem a little bit heavy in the low-mids (e.g. the first one and the last two); the mix might open up if you cut down on those a little bit.

I also like the cover art.

I don't know if I ever designed a whole game, per se, until I was in high school. But I know that somewhere around my parents' house there is a drawing from when I was five or so (I'll scan it if ever I get the chance) of a made-up Super Mario World level where every platform is covered in moons - 10-Up Moons, 100-up Moons, etc.

That there was nothing more tantalizing to my imagination than having a hundred extra lives in Super Mario World probably says something about my gaming skills at the time.