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Star Spangled Hero

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Author Comments

Do you have what it takes to defend your country??? Are you a true patriot??? The only limit is your imagination. Featuring dynamic particle system for advanced firework simulation unlike any that has ever been witnessed by mankind.

-Controls-

MOVE: Arrows/WASD
FIRE: Space/Z/X
VOLUME: M

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Hell yeah this is amazing.

Well that got old fast

Wow, had great laught. Funny game with interesting point.

This is not that bad through...It has decent graphics and I think that the most important thing was the message, however, I may say the same about make better the idea (and different music, that would make it a little bit less annoying).

You already have the dialogues and the intention is pretty clear, so maybe in the future, with a little bit more of development and time, it can be an actually reflexive stunning game, keep it on! ;)

This is not a game, it is not art. It’s a soapbox for a political opinion. And even taken like that it’s realy bad.

Judging it as a game I give you half a star because it works as intended. The ‘game’ itself is just the most simple invader clone imaginable with no way to lose and poor graphics.

The only other feature is speech bubble, which spews a slew of pseudo-patriotic idiocities in order to make it absolutely clear that the readers should not associate themselves with him. This is so poorly done that I substract the half-star I have given previously.

The sad part is that it is easy to imagine how this concept could be executed better, though it would of course take quite a bit more effort than this ‘game’ probably took. There are a lot of games with messages after all, and even just looking at them and copying their methods would dramatically improve your chance to get the message across. (eg Deep State criticising surveillance and terror politics) Actually, I’m going to write down some ideas I had just in the 10 minutes between playing the game and writing this review:

Make it an actual game.
It can be extremely simple, it’s just an invader clone after all and the game doesn’t need to have anything special. For this you need levels and something to make the levels different. A couple of different sprites and ’mission’s (eg, get so and so many pink people) would already go a long way, but the sky’s the limit. (Different movement patterns, special enemies, upgrades between levels etc etc)

Message Delivery and In-Game Progress
Just shouting at the player won’t convince anyone. While there are many ways to do this, I would do it in a several steps:

Step 1: This is just a normal game.
Make it look and feel like just another invader clone. Don’t use people as sprites, but ust some generic blocks or something. Mr. Bad Guy also seems like a normal good guy, maye have him explain everything as a tutorial (even if the game is too simple to need a tutorial).

Step 2: Drop hints
Usually this happens near the end of a level. As a rudimentary example the sprites could slowly change into humans, or there could be blood if they are shot. Mr. BG could also drop some hints when talking about the invaders.

Step 3: Give the BG a story.
Why does he hate those invaders? Simple example would be, he lost someone close to circumstances that he attributes to that group. Perhaps something unintentional like his children caught a disease in another country and now they all have to die. Drop hints for this.

(extra step: Reversal
Suddenly there are some people you are NOT supposed to shoot. Perhaps BG knows them, or they remind him of his family or something. I dunno, I just write this down as I think of it.)

Step 4: The big reveal
When you have dropped enough hints, there has to be a reveal. Maybe include an evil monologue that explains everything (especially BG’s backstory). Here the BG might become good, or the player may decide to act against the BG, or the player may just continue to slaughter everyone.

That took me maybe 10 minutes to think of. It would probably take vastly more effort to actually implement and hash out, but I feel like your current game has already failed at that first step of trying to design a good game. I hope this criticism was constructive and won’t discourage you from making games.

Kcori responds:

One of my new years resolutions for this year was to learn how to make more thematically and stylistically strong games, and I guess this was sort of a first effort. After I uploaded this, I did come to the conclusion that the game probably wouldn't change anyone's opinions on war and pondered how I could have handled it better, so it's something I'm aware of.

I appreciate your feedback.

(Do you really think the graphics are poor though? #_#)

Credits & Info

Views
7,214
Faves:
13
Votes
29
Score
2.94 / 5.00

Uploaded
Jan 31, 2015
7:11 PM EST