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Project Firefly

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Author Comments

"Help the little "Firefly" find the truth about the upper World, running away from the evil scientists who wants to study and hide his body from the people."


This game was done as a school project, my first try doing a game or trying to develop something using code. There's some minor errors that i found and i'll try to correct them as fast as possible. So... enjoy.

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At first I was pretty hesitant on writing this review, for several reasons. For one thing, this is my first review, so I don't really know how to structure my thoughts that well, so forgive me if it just sounds like i'm blurting out a huge mess of unorganized thoughts. The second thing is that I probably have the least experience when it comes to designing games and determining the quality of certain things, but recently, I've come to realize that whenever I make any form of work, I find myself wanting the complete opinion in its entirety of anyone and everybody, even if they're inexperienced and have no idea what they're talking about, because it's interesting to see what everyone thinks and you can always find some bit of helpfulness in every bit of criticism. Of course, I can always disregard anything I think is just plain untrue, but I'd want to know what they're thinking anyway.

SOOOO, anyway... here's what I think.

Gameplay wise, there really isn't anything new or interesting (Which is fine. I realize that you're a new programmer, it's your first time trying to develop and design a game so just doing something by itself is necessary to gain experience and very admirable by itself). The game mechanics are not only a bit buggy, but I also think they're a bit unsuitable and bad for this type of game. Your game features the old mario-acceleration type platforming, where characters can decelerate horizontally whenever they stop moving or change direction. It gives it a bit of an air-frictiony feel, which makes the game more challenging as a platformer, but I think it takes away from the artsy side of it and makes it a bit frustrating to play. For example, on the level where the building was exploding or whatever (I liked the shaky effect), since the level was like, running left, jumping on the next level, running right, jumping on the next level, and so on. I don't think it helped that intense feeling of running away before time runs out if I have to run, wait till my character decelerates, then accelerate in the other direction so I have enough speed to get to the next platform.

Also, the whole can't see anything except the stuff around you didn't make sense to me. It just made the game frustratingly and unnecessarily difficult and I don't think it really contributed anything into the art of it all. It was really annoying when I would jump onto the next platform that I couldn't see, and there would be a red monster-thing waiting for me, making me have to restart the level. Also, those red monster things are SOOO slow. That in combination with the acceleration mechanic, the can't-see-anything-past-2-inches-in-f ront-of-you, and the small platforms, made it pretty frustrating, which is something I don't think you want in an artsy story-platformer game.

Another thing, when you run out of time, you're forced to restart the entire game. What were you thinking when you did that, lol. There's no way someone would wanna hear any story, no matter how good it is, if they have to restart the game everytime they ran out of time.

Generally, in terms of level design, I think what you want in an artsy-game, are short, increasingly difficult (but not unnecessarily difficult, where it's only difficult because of bad mechanics), easily restartable levels.

So, there were a few bugs I noticed, which you probably already know, but for the sake of writing a review, I thought I'd list everything I noticed anyway.

When the game gets out of focus, the game stops and the timer pauses, which is a great idea. But upon resuming, the timer actually drops down for as long as it was paused for. It would even drop down into the negative values, lol. I was at -18 seconds.
For the invisible wall boundaries, you can actually decelerate into them and not actually collide with them, and then get sent back if you try to press the arrow key again.
There were a few grammar errors I noticed in the writing. I forgot them, but I do remember that they were there.
This may not be a bug, but the character seems to accelerate upwards mid jump for whatever reason.
If you press space bar mid air, you can hear the jump sound, even though you can't jump.

On the artsy side of things presentation is crucial. You gotta make the player care about the story and what's going on if you're going to make it a huge part of the game like this. The lack of music is fine in certain situations, because it gives it a sort of eerie vibe to it, but it doesn't work well here. It just made me feel more uninterested and out of it as I was playing this. I know it's hard to find music that you can use, but I just thought I'd add that in anyway. The way you presented the story didn't make sense to me either. The torn paper thing seemed super irrelevant, and actually just plain annoying and poorly designed. It made me even less interested in the story. The papers didn't latch onto each other, and it looked kind of odd when a paper fragment had a tiny bit of paper not attached to it, but floating next to it. The one where the pieces of paper were all squares didn't help putting me when I was trying to put it together either, lol. It would have been better if it was just artsy text that faded in or whatever (as cliche as that sounds). The papers also looked kind of poorly made. It looks like you tried to make it look old, but it looks like you used a circle brush and randomly dotted the edges and stuff.

Anyway, these are all of the thoughts and opinions coming from some random inexperienced dude. I hope I didn't miss anything I wanted to say, and I hope you've found anything at all I've said helpful.

Medi2 responds:

Thanks for the long review, you were spot on in various things that you mentioned that i already knew and others that i didnt. The art was indeed kind of rushed, like i mentioned it was a school project and my knowledge of programming was almost zero, so i wasted so much time doing it that i had to kind of "rushing" the art to be able to present the game, still theres some things that i cant make excuses. I learned so much about organization of this kind of projects that if i make another one right now,everything would turn better.

Thanks for the support and sincere opinions. Really appreciate it. :)

Some level are just plain frustrating because of the bad level design. ANd what the point of flash light? Sometime you don't even know wher you're going

Medi2 responds:

The light arround the character is the whole purpose of the story and gameplay.

It has potential.
Its has meaning and a okay story line, as far as gameplay goes its really buggy and kinda boring. there are no enemies and no sense of direction. I like the style of graphics, it looks pretty good.
In future versions you should just make the papers text between levels. The story isin't that interesting to just make it into a puzzle.

You have to work a bit with the jumping cuz on level 2 the platforms are to high to reach. I think that this game could be a masterpiece with a bit better coding and graphics "I understand that it's fuckin' hard to code so i'm not being rude.) Anyway, i'll give you 3 stars!

Medi2 responds:

Thanks for the feedback. Yeah, the player movement seems to have issues on certain levels, have to find a better way to implement it.

I enjoyed playing this but the movement system could be better though. Other than that, good fun!

Medi2 responds:

Thanks for the words. : )

Credits & Info

Views
1,909
Votes
5
Score
2.70 / 5.00

Uploaded
Jun 20, 2013
12:38 PM EDT