2beegames 2nd contest, finalists announced

Marchal_Mig12 · 2009-11-09 19:46:24

2beegames revealed finalists for their 2nd contest. I am very happy to see that my colleague, a game maker user, sees his game nominated a second time. He has won the 2nd community favorite place for his last game: Save the Planet. This time, Ed_Cachun's game named Cochon Pursuit is part of the finalists.

His game is an awesome 2d platformer made with game maker which main goal is to save female "Cochons." For more information, please visit: www.edm-games.com

Link to 2beegames: www.2beegames.com

Meanwhile, 2beegames also completely redesigned their website which I am not pretty much satisfied from.

xDanielx · 2009-11-10 01:35:41

Nice polish!

xot · 2009-11-10 12:34:40

Save the Planet and this both look really nice. The graphic design is very clean and consistent giving it a feeling of professionalism. The palette is handled well even though I'm usually not a fan of such highly saturated colors. The special effects just put it over the top. It's really quite dazzling and certainly one of the best looking GM games I've seen.

I haven't played it, so I can't really comment on the the gameplay, but it looks interesting too. I guess it's sort of a hybrid auto-scrolling-shooter-platformer ... without platforms. wacko Are there any other examples of this style of game?

Best of luck to Ed.

xot · 2009-11-10 13:25:35

According to Game Maker Blog, four of the ten finalists were made with Game Maker.

http://gamemakerblog.com/2009/11/10/4-g … mes-final/

Philip Gamble | Game Maker Blog wrote:

Four Game Maker games are among the 10 finalists of 2BeeGames second Indie Game Competition. The winning game will earn its creator $10,000 with $5,000 awarded to the publics favourite.
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Tower of Heaven by askiisoft
This platformer is the latest game to enter the Game Maker Communitys cage match Hall of Fame having won beaten three games in successive weeks back in September.
Akiisoft website
KwikLook review
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Kablooey! by Vertigo Games/Mr Chubigans/David Galindo

This is the latest game from legendary Game Maker user David Galindo and has been created especially for the 2BeeGames contest. Davids last game won YoYo Games Save the Planet competition.
Vertigo Games website
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Cochons Pursuit by Edouard Mercure

Edouards Save the Planet won the community vote in the first 2BeeGames competition earning himself $2,500. Now he is back with the cartoony Cochons Pursuit which has been played less than 800 times in over a year at YoYo Games.
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Climb to the Top of the Castle by TwO Bros. Games

Incredibly detailed hand drawn graphics make this medieval themed game stand out.
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The three lowest scoring games in a public poll running until the end of the week will drop out of the final.

icuurd12b42 · 2009-11-10 21:10:41

Well Klimb to the top is a complete fail on level one. Why oh why do people may super hard level righ from the begining. I quit after 7 attempts. 3 lives and the load time to restart did not help at all.

Kabloooey is a fail on the second part of the map. TOO many options and none would combine. Though the mayor is damed funny, I'll give you that. Not enough time and the pop up "What to do" every 30 second or whatever that is makes no sense. So, yeah. good potential. But these game suffer from the "You should be as good <from the start> as the guys who made it" syndrome. A syndrome much too common on the GMC...

Last edited by icuurd12b42 (2009-11-10 21:11:41)

xot · 2009-11-12 18:21:14

I have to agree with your criticisms, I also found the games quite difficult to enjoy.

I'm almost ready disqualify Cochons Pursuit before it even starts. It's just been a series of let downs and I haven't even played it yet. First problem is the enormous 100MB footprint. It's implausibly big. Once I get it downloaded, I start the game and select the controls menu. There doesn't appear to be any way to exit it. Maybe I need an XBox controller to continue, I don't know. I hit ESC and the game abruptly ends. It's Game Maker, this isn't too shocking, but I don't expect it from a game of this level of polish. I start it again. Did I mention it is slow to start? While it's loading I check some headlines in my browser. I switch tasks to play the game, and it's completely unresponsive. I go to kill the process and see it has consumed 500MB of memory. At this point I don't know what to think of this game. Next topic.

I was able to play the others without any problems, they all played very smoothly. They all looked suprisingly good to me, with very slick presentation. Unfortunately, they also all suffer from exactly the same set of common problems.

Right off the bat, they burden you with exposition. Tower of Heaver slams you with message after message after message before it lets you play. And they come up a far too slowly just to show off a presentation effect. Backwards priorities here. Climb to the Top has a pointless cut scene that can't be skipped. Then it shows the keyboard controls with a confusing layout that is far too large and intimidating. And pointless. This game must be played with a gamepad. Kablooey! has you watch a little drama complete with voice acting that I didn't really want to hear. It can be skipped line by line, but it's not clear if you are skipping anything important. Then when the levels start the player is hit with multiple pages of confusingly presented information. And it's up to the player to notice that there are multiple pages. It's information overload, most of which is unneed at any particular moment, and then unavailable at need. In general, none of these games let you go back a review information once it has been presented.

The next problem these three games share is cue management, by which I mean informing the player of the state, elements, and rules of the game. The problems here are two-fold. The first is information hiding. Tower of Heaven immediately turned me off by putting player in situations where repeated death is the only means of learning which elements are in play. I'm talking about things like an undetectable deadly spike in the floor. Climb to the Top does the same thing with a trap door immediately followed by an enemy that fires the first missile weapon seen in the game. Climb also doesn't do a very good job of distinguishing the interactive and background elements of its visually lush graphics. Kablooey!'s problem is a little bit different. The elements are difficult to comprehend visually. The actual clickable icon is easy to see and generic, but the lack of discernible visual information, and the changing nature of the elements over time, makes the context of the actual control devices vague or misleading. It makes it very hard to remember where things are and what options are available at any given time. I think this may be an intended part of the challenge, but I don't agree with its use.

The other half of the cue management problem is introducing too many elements too quickly. Tower of Heaven does a good job of showing the various sorts of jumping challenges that are created by positioning blocks certain ways. But it all happens so briefly that the jumping challenge is quite high right away. Climb to the Top is a lot more playable, but it also has you climbing and dropping and doing spatially and temporally precise jumps immediately. The first enemy is also quite fast and requires two well timed hits to kill. This is an unexpected challenge so early in the game. Kablooey! also gives the player far too much to deal with at the start. There are several elements on the screen which rarely combine. It's also not immediately clear that there are other screens that can be accessed nor how to access them. In fact there are four screen to manage right from the start. That's insane. Worse, the coloration of the interface may even cause the player believe that one of the screens is not even in play. This game, which I played the most, would benefit tremendously from a simpler first hour that only used elements on one screen. Use two screens for the next hour, and four for the rest of the game. All of the games would benefit from revealing various game elements at far more measured paced.

Next up is risk versus reward. These games all seem to punish the player for no apparent reason and with very little reward at stake. Tower of Heaven is downright hostile. I know that's the nature of the challenge of these Jumper-inspired games. I don't particularly like it, although there is a purity to it that can be compelling if well handled. Climb to the Top uses this arbitrary and antiquated "3 men" limitation with no mid-level checkpoints or any form of continue option. I know this is supposed to be old school hard, but even Castlevania had a password system. It also cruelly taunts the player with inoperable difficulty settings. Kablooey! is a lot more forgivable here. It does what it does for solid gameplay reasons. It even has/requires unlimited continues. That's welcome if not immediately obvious. Where it falls down is in how fast it must be played. The time limit is completely arbitrary. A turn counter would be just as effective. A lack of player control over this element is unfortunate, although it's a simple fix. It also fails the player by providing a very low success rate when it comes to combining items. Failing over and over, making no progress, all while the clock is mercilessly ticking away just isn't fun. As for interesting rewards in these games, if they are there, I didn't see them because I found the games too hard or tedious to justify continued play. Much more could have been done to dole out rewards in small regular doses.

These games are all well crafted but they still need a lot of refinement. I wish all of the authors luck in the competition.

icuurd12b42 · 2009-11-12 23:36:26

How, you surely are good at doing game reviews. Care to do mine next smile ?

Anyway, yeah, well said. I was too frustrated with climb to the top to even talk about it. I mean, from the video, it looks like there are very interesting levels. But what good is it that you can't get passed the first screen. Get pissed off at it and quit. Really, it's a waste of development time to make a game impossible to play. Out of 100 people, maybe 1 jedi master will have the oportunity to admire the work in it's entirety.

There are more screens in the kablooey? Ah well. don't care now. They should have introduced game play more gradualy, instead of a simpleton introduction followed by a level from hell.

Cochone, I played a while back. It got frustrating after a while. I would always die. If I remember. It's also has a life count. I hate those. Thank god it's a thing of the past. Life centric games are for coin operated systems. not somethiong you want to enjoy at home (unless it's also point based).

xot · 2009-11-13 04:04:18

I'm always happy to post an overly negative game review. Send me a link to your game and guard your ego if you want one.

But what good is it that you can't get passed the first screen. Get pissed off at it and quit. Really, it's a waste of development time to make a game impossible to play.

What you say about wasting development time is so true. This medium delights in withholding content. What artist or craftsman in their right mind creates and releases a work that can't be experienced or used. I wonder how much of the strange behavior found in gaming subculture can be pinned some deep mental problem that most hardcore gamers share. How many of those problems are caused by the games themselves. Are games a vector for mental disease? I'm joking of course ... mostly.

They should have introduced game play more gradualy, instead of a simpleton introduction followed by a level from hell.

Kablooey! is a good example of needless complexity. A much more fun game could have been created with fewer elements in play at once. I point the reader to the fantastic "Grow" series of games. They are all very simple, they just require the player to decide the order in which they wish to attempt to achieve a handful of goals. It's little more than a guessing game, there is very little interactivity, and the actual goals work to achieve themselves once initiated. In Grow RPG there are only eight interactive elements in the eight turn game, but that's enough variety to create 40320 potential scenarios. Complexity builds very quickly which is why game makers interested in making their games more fun and accessible should concentrate on reducing and reusing elements rather than creating new ones.

The Grow games may be similar to Kablooey! in only a small way, but there a few other important things that it could learn from them. One is giving every action an outcome that impacts the game state. Mr. Chubigan's earlier game, Sandbox of God, handled this better. Another chance for improvement is scoring goals based on a level of completion rather than its pass/fail system. A pass/fail system doesn't give the player a good sense of progress. Even when they make real strides towards achieving the goal, unless they achieve it completely, it results in a failure just like all the other attempts before it. Finally, a big part of the success of the Grow series is watching the cute, rewarding animations which represent a dramatic unfolding of a story based on your game choices. Kablooey!'s rewards are so few beyond simply achieving the stated goals, it doesn't give the player a compelling enough reason to continue. When I play, I feel like I'm doing all of the work while the game isn't compensating me in any pleasurable or unexpected way.

http://www.eyezmaze.com/grow/RPG/index.html

icuurd12b42 · 2009-11-13 06:54:46

http://www.yoyogames.com/games/show/6777

Do your worst LOL.

The mental desease you are refering too, it's probably a mix of pride crippled by under achievement. Uncontious self sabotage. You do amasing work and hide it under various methaphorical carpets. In this case behind seamingly unsurmountable difficulties or complexities. Most of us just never puplish for fear of ridicule. A few do publish but over compensate. Subconsiously hiding their work for only the worthy to ganther.

Maybe games are a cure of sorts. Where as game programming is some sort of desease.

I'll take a look at that game tomorow. I just spend 14 hours playing Dragon Age and i'm out of mana.

Marchal_Mig12 · 2009-11-13 08:04:44

xot wrote:

I'm almost ready disqualify Cochons before it even starts. It's just been a series of let downs and I haven't even played it yet. First problem is the enormous 100MB footprint. It's implausibly big. Once I get it downloaded, I start the game and select the controls menu. There doesn't appear to be any way to exit it. Maybe I need an XBox controller to continue, I don't know. I hit ESC and the game abruptly ends. It's Game Maker, this isn't too shocking, but I don't expect it from a game of this level of polish. I start it again. Did I mention it is slow to start? While it's loading I check some headlines in my browser. I switch tasks to play the game, and it's completely unresponsive. I go to kill the process and see it has consumed 500MB of memory. At this point I don't know what to think of this game. Next topic.

There is a newer version of it. Actually, he had to release it in a rush :S.

Here's the new link: http://www.edm-games.com/CochonsPursuit_Demo.zip

The newest version is much better! Everything you said is fixed!

Hope you enjoy it ! smile

xot · 2009-11-13 13:47:47

The newest version is much better! Everything you said is fixed!

Thanks for the link, I'm looking forward to trying this game. I thought Save the Planet had a lot going for it.

http://www.yoyogames.com/games/show/6777
Do your worst LOL.

Alright, this going to fun. 6000+ plays, that's a good sign. Oh! And congrats on it's recent "staff pick" selection and on being number one on the "What's Hot" list. How come I've never heard of this game? Review coming soon ...

icuurd12b42 · 2009-11-13 18:09:40

OMG. really? Featured after almost 3 years! I am surprized. A lot of people almost got me in trouble with yoyo staff by imploring them to staff pick it over the years. Cool. anyway, it's as good now as it was then. And wow, 6000+ plays. I'm falling off my chair! Must have gotten a few thousands just recently...

IamCalle · 2009-11-13 19:51:31

Now I'm excited, looking forward to the review, xot. ;D

xot · 2009-11-17 17:22:35

Reviewing Cochons Pursuit and The Tank Game is taking longer than expected because both games have a lot of depth. Right now I'll only say that Cochons Pursuit manages to avoid nearly all of the problems mentioned about the other GM entrants. It's not without its flaws but it's looking very tight so far. I'm a bit shocked and disappointed that voting has put it in last place.

game | votes | rating | plays ===============================|=======|========|========= Kablooey! | 23% | 3.41 | 982 DriftMoon | 19% | 3.25 | 843 Vector Conflict: The Siege | 16% | 3.02 | 405 Tower of Heaven | 14% | 3.08 | 738 Turba | 13% | 3.36 | 707 Climb to the Top of the Castle | 9% | 2.79 | 1500 Cochons Pursuit | 6% | 3.12 | 511

Marchal_Mig12 · 2009-11-22 13:22:21

xot wrote:

Reviewing Cochons Pursuit and The Tank Game is taking longer than expected because both games have a lot of depth. Right now I'll only say that Cochons Pursuit manages to avoid nearly all of the problems mentioned about the other GM entrants. It's not without its flaws but it's looking very tight so far. I'm a bit shocked and disappointed that voting has put it in last place.
game | votes | rating | plays ===============================|=======|========|========= Kablooey! | 23% | 3.41 | 982 DriftMoon | 19% | 3.25 | 843 Vector Conflict: The Siege | 16% | 3.02 | 405 Tower of Heaven | 14% | 3.08 | 738 Turba | 13% | 3.36 | 707 Climb to the Top of the Castle | 9% | 2.79 | 1500 Cochons Pursuit | 6% | 3.12 | 511

Too bad Cochons Pursuit seems like it will not do it for the next round. Anyways we are counting on the judges decisions for other recognitions smile . I am waiting your review patiently smile .

GMLscripts.com

#1 2009-11-09 19:46:24

2beegames 2nd contest, finalists announced

#2 2009-11-10 01:35:41

Re: 2beegames 2nd contest, finalists announced

#3 2009-11-10 12:34:40

Re: 2beegames 2nd contest, finalists announced

#4 2009-11-10 13:25:35

Re: 2beegames 2nd contest, finalists announced

#5 2009-11-10 21:10:41

Re: 2beegames 2nd contest, finalists announced

#6 2009-11-12 18:21:14

Re: 2beegames 2nd contest, finalists announced

#7 2009-11-12 23:36:26

Re: 2beegames 2nd contest, finalists announced

#8 2009-11-13 04:04:18

Re: 2beegames 2nd contest, finalists announced

#9 2009-11-13 06:54:46

Re: 2beegames 2nd contest, finalists announced

#10 2009-11-13 08:04:44

Re: 2beegames 2nd contest, finalists announced

#11 2009-11-13 13:47:47

Re: 2beegames 2nd contest, finalists announced

#12 2009-11-13 18:09:40

Re: 2beegames 2nd contest, finalists announced

#13 2009-11-13 19:51:31

Re: 2beegames 2nd contest, finalists announced

#14 2009-11-17 17:22:35

Re: 2beegames 2nd contest, finalists announced

#15 2009-11-22 13:22:21

Re: 2beegames 2nd contest, finalists announced

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