Some Quick Notes:
With the explicit music, this should probably be rated M
Otherwise a really 'tasty' game!
Reviews for "Hungry Joe"
Kwing responds:
Glad you liked it! I figured T was a fair rating for this game. I suppose some might disagree.
................................................................................................BWHAHAHAHAHAHAH
OMFGWTFBBQ!! Whoever thought of mixing those fabulous audio + culinary art + Megaman Battle Network deserve a lifetime free International buffet. Have you been smoking some angel dust or something? LMAO!! >o<
Holy shit. You got the freaking guts to pull this off. I really like this uniqueness of the game!!! >_<
Now, some problems:
- just like Megaman Battle Network 1, the gameplay mechanic is there but things are not so obvious and what not. They polish things up and make sure things are more smooth in later Megaman Battle Network. Most of the time, when I choose the attacks, I don't even know which does what. I choose whatever I can choose the most and just use them. But of course, if you know which recipe does what exactly, you can get strategic. But when things aren't so obvious, players will still stuck on "which does what" rather than flowing with the game and go "let's use this then that". It would be helpful if there is a little help text describing which recipe does what in battle.
- telegraphing: it is a bit hard to tell the behavior of some of the enemy attacks. For example, the flour rolling pin goes through me a few times and I still don't even know what it does.
- polish : what this game lacks right now is polishing department. All the idea are in and well, but if you can polish the game and make the gameplay formal and professional and you put it on Steam, I will probably vote for greenlight. Yeah... so polish it a bit, bro.
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Oh, well, that's all I wanna say. Now, I gotta go eat sashimi with ketchup with yogurt with rum and a bit of special powder - yeah, that kinda powder. LOLOL~~~
Kwing responds:
I did consider making it so that if you selected a recipe twice a message would pop up and tell you the nature of the attack. That might be something to add, as I'm still updating the game. I'll see what I can do.
Not all of the recipes' effects are immediately apparent. Checking out their function out of battle is really the best way to understand them, which means some will remain enigmas until you obtain them.
As it turns out, this game was a lot less polished before this - for instance, the recipes didn't have letters on them and didn't dim when selected until someone pointed that out very late in development. I did as much as I could to make the game perfect, but ultimately I only got 2-3 people to test this for me despite all of my begging. Unsurprisingly, there's a lot of fine tuning that's not accounted for.
This made me hungry...
Kwing responds:
Aye, that was the design of the game.
I should love the shit out of this game because I adore the Megaman Battle Network series, but this game is just lacking in comparison.
How come you have great sprite work on display for the enemies, yet all we get for maps is an MS Paint job?
Nearly every animation consists of a single frame, and that's never a good look.
And the worst part for me personally has got to be the music. I'm not even against this genre, but the music in this game just does not keep me motivated. It's almost like an afterthought that needs to be there for the game not to be silent.
Right now, there is absolutely nothing in this game that convinces me to play it. Looking at pretty food sprites just doesn't cut it. It's neither a horrendous game nor one that I could see myself playing for hours, which is the point of roguelikes these days. You want to keep playing. If that aspect is missing, something went wrong.
As it stands, it's an average time waster with a ton of room for improvement. If you take the MBN system, you better do it properly or else it falls flat. I didn't even touch upon the user interface because it worked and I didn't care that much, but objectively speaking, even that could look better and provide more information.
(There's currently a glitch, by the way, that doesn't show you the area of effect for the first recipe on the list once it comes up in battle, so you need to switch back and forth first to see it.)
Kwing responds:
I'm not sure what to say to this. You have some good points, but as far as the actual gameplay goes you haven't really given much feedback. All you've said is that it looks and sounds bad, and you haven't even gotten far enough into the game to have gotten a game over.
When it comes to the dungeon maps, I thought a lot about what I could do to make it look decent. Since it's drawn procedurally, it would inevitably end up looking basic, but I figured leaving it plain would be better than masking a bad texture over it (I worked on a game called Smidge that looks absolutely terrible because of that exact mistake.) And for the life of me I can't see what the soundtrack is lacking, aside from longer loops I suppose. The tracks were very carefully hand-picked to be the best 90s beats I could find.
I can't help wondering if you weren't motivated because you found the game to be too easy. The game used to be a lot harder, but constant complaints lead me to ease up the difficulty to the point where it may not hold interest for someone familiar with MBN. Then again, if you'd played through to the end you might have found a bit more of a challenge.
This game is severely lacking in a number of departments. First lack of propoer sounds and music, they hardly fit with the theme of the game. Second, art itself is quite poor, maps are executed hastily without any care for detail, enemies aren't much more than just a stationary image, the graphic quality itself isn't homogeneus; it should be a single kind of art, yet there is no such thing. Also menus are incredibly hard to navigate, considering how everything works with a single button. This should be corrected.
I don't recommend this game.
Kwing responds:
I'm really lost for words on this one, mainly because pretty much everything you said equates to this game being ugly. I really don't see how the foods could NOT be a stationary image... In most games, you see people breathing, or having running animations, but what the heck is a running loop for a bowl of cereal supposed to look like? And how is the art style not homogeneous when everything is pixelated and food-themed?
I know I'm getting way too salty over these reviews but there's really nothing worse than getting a bad review from someone that won't spend more than five minutes on a game that took more than five months to make.