Reviews for Rot

[rizafromthesanctuary]

I must admit, I didn't come here with the intention of playing more than a five or so minutes, but in fact, I stayed for at least an hour. I actually like this one and I think I'll check out Rot Purge as well. Might be a lot of fun!

The good:

Solid visual design. Voxel graphics usually suggest that the developer looks for simplistic graphics which are easy to pull off. This does not always yield a satisfactory result as developers don't always know the difference between nice, simplistic visuals and simply lacking visuals.
Fortunately, in this case, it can clearly be seen that actual work went into making sure the game looks pleasing while also using simple graphical solutions. Both the ingame graphics and the menus are rather nice.

Fun gameplay. The controls are simple and easy to remember and the player character responds well to the player input and these things can easily make or break a game. The first day/tutorial level gives a nice taste of what to expect and the game just escalates things from then on at a relatively okay speed. After saving up some money and getting a shotgun, the first possibilities arise to get a taste of the rampage mode, which gives a nice flow to the levels as more and more zombies appear on each day. The challenges are okay, while the harder level choices are clever and fun. I do like that the player has the choice to do a normal day to day level or the modified level at the start of each day.

The bad:

The unlock system.
The game does not make it 100% clear how costume unlocks work. First, there is the coin collection system, (more on that later) and the shop. The game tells the player that the blue coins can be used to unlock costumes. To be honest, I did not reach the highest rank ingame as of the writing of this review, so there might be for purchase costumes later on that I do not know of yet. However, for a considerable portion of the game, costumes seem to be unlocked automatically when their rank requirements are met. This devalues the blue coins considerably, as they seem to be totally useless for quite a while. Weapon unlocks are totally okay on the other hand.
While I'm at it, I'd recommend an alternative to the unlock system; achievements as unlock conditions for unlockables, retro style. This is a much more fun way to go about unlocks IMO, as the dev is forced to come up with unique achievements and let's face it, achievement hunting, within the realm of actually doable achievements, is much more fun than endless grinding for a fixed amount of virtual currency.

The blue coins.
As far as I am aware, these things can be lost as a death penalty. Which, given the above point about them being effectively worthless for much of the game, is not the best way to go about such a feature. The rank system seems to work nicely and some form of an experience related death penalty would be much better in my opinion.
Back to the blue coins; my other problem with this system is that it reminds me (and I am probably not alone with this) of the dual currency systems used by many free-to-pay type games which plague the mobile gaming market. It is not a big deal here, as there is clearly no such scam in the game, but it does give off the impression that Rot Purge might include such shenanigans and that is not a good way to grow the potential player base.
Still, this might be just me being way too cynical for my own good. Take this as a word of advice, something to consider.

Conclusion:

Some things could do with some polishing and reworking, but all in all, Rot is a fun little game and I will definitely take a look at Rot Purge.

Squize responds:

This is why NG is my favourite portal, what an excellent review.
I've not touched any of the UI stuff yet in Rot Purge, partly because I hate coding it, and partly because I'm still not a 100% sure which direction I'm taking with it, and feedback like this helps a lot.

The "dual currency" was actually as you said ( You weren't being too cynical ;) ), I planned to have IAP in the game and it was going to be more focused for the Facebook / mobile crowd as I've never touched that part of gaming before and wanted to experiment with it.
I changed my mind as I didn't think I was in a position to offer good value content, and if you're just selling any old crap to make a dollar then you become like all the other companies out there and I really didn't want to go down that path.
The in-game shop is a really obvious throw back to that, I didn't remove it as some players like the choice of what to spend their coins on, but I very much doubt it'll make it's way to Rot Purge unless I can think of something cool to do with it ( Which I can't atm ).

Just to clarify, Rot Purge won't have any IAP. I wouldn't buy a game with IAP ( DLC is different ), and I wouldn't expect anyone else to.

Thanks again, and I do like the idea of achievements for outfit unlocking, I may steal that :)

[Apocalyptic13]

I personally think this game is pretty damn fun. I don't get the haters here. Sharpnova, dude, you need to lighten up. You stress over the small stuff, you will die a lonely person. The only thing with this game is it seems to take forever to be able to level up to an effective state. Other than that small detail, the game is good.

Squize responds:

Thanks mate.
Balancing out the levelling up is always so tricky in every game, you never want the player to go more than a couple of rounds without something new to either get, or be in reach of getting, which means you either need to have tons of content which usually ends up with a lot filler, or decent things to unlock but then you can get everything fairly quickly so you have to spread it out more than you'd like ( Like I did :) )

[leon2550]

i personally love the game.

sharpnova, that's a normal thing now. death has consequences.

Squize responds:

I'm calling death has consequences as a band name ;)
( Thanks for the review )

[sharpnova]

I sometimes just.. have no clue how people can make such bad game design choices and not really think about how something in their game will affect the player.

When I died and dropped a bunch of gold.... of course I quit.

Of course I did... how would that reaction not be obvious?

It's not a difficulty thing. It's an annoyance thing and makes my work feel meaningless.

Squize responds:

There has to be an element of risk / reward in games, like stories need some sort of tension to make them interesting and push them forward.
There are no lives, no game over, the _only_ risk you run is that you can lose up to 10 coins. Now even when you drop these, you can still collect them, the only punishment for failing ( Which is what dying is in games ) is that these dropped coins don't last as long so it's a little unlikely you'll be able to reclaim them all.
Pretty much exactly the same as the rings in Sonic, but without a lose of life or a game over screen.

Would you prefer lives and a game over screen, so that when you die the penalty is having to click through a few more screens to continue pretty much where you left off rather than a chance to continue exactly where you were at a cost of 10 coins at most ?
I make a game with infinite lives and a minor penalty and that's still too harsh it seems.

[xEcx684]

It looked like so much fun untill I started playing 8^(

Graphics look fun and simple - perfect for an online game. Sound effects are pretty good as well. So far so good.
The game setup feels unpolished. Starting the game in a swarm of zombies and losing 50% of health right away? Dang! Not beeing able to re-load manually is also hard to swallow. No manual reload in King of the Hill means that style of play is a no-no for me. Running around with 1 bullet and not beeing able to reload? 8^/
Upgrades feel a bit expensive to my taste. Fortunately you can replay levels to earn extra gold. That's no luxary here. Not sure if I'm just picky - do others agree with the gold-income thingie?

You (developer) showed ballz by making the leap from Flash to HTML 5. For that I take my hat off good sir/miss. You've taken the step from the past to the future, something bigger developers refuse to do because (imho) they are close minded and don't want to progress (one trick pony). Coding-wise and game-element-wise there remain a couple of challenges for you to tackle. If these are adressed in "Rot Purge" then thumbs up. But right now I can't help feeling like a guinney pig. Are we your beta testers? If so that's no shame but just say so. I think reviews and feedback will be more constructive and forgiving if you mention this clearly in game.

Just my 2 cents.

Squize responds:

Thanks for the well thought out response.
The main point I want to address is the issue of treating everyone like a beta tester. That's NEVER been the case, and never will be.
Rot was made in HTML5 because it's a skill I need to learn, like DN8 Pulse was made using Stage3D ( And I got slaughtered for that ), but it's still the game I wanted to make. I've never jumped on any genre bandwagons ( Says the guy who's just released a zombie game, but in my defence I'm at least 3 years too late ) just for the sake of an easy sale, every game I've made is because I've wanted to play it.

Now, Rot was going to be bigger. It's currently capped at rank level 25 but I was originally planning 50, but it reached the point where I would just be throwing money away. The HTML5 game market isn't like the Flash one ( And that's all but dead ), for every traditional sponsor like Miniclip ( Who sponsored this ) there's 10 sponsors who just want simple little games that will work on mobile, and they'll pay next to nothing for it.
So at present there's something like 18 outfits in the game ? That's x4 because we support two skin tones and both male and female. Each outfit is 20 frames of animation for the rotation, so it's an insane amount of frames for those outfits, adding another 20 or so to reach level 50 would have been so much work that I'd still be working on it now.
There's more content in Rot than Outpost:Swarm, which we did in half the time and earned over twice as much for. Factor in HTML5 is absolute hell to develop in, that every browser update can break something, that it's got to work in say 4 different browsers across two major platforms ( Not counting mobile ) all with their own weird quirks that you have to hack around.

The plan to move over to Unity to do a big balls out version happened around the time I realised I needed, not so much to cut back on Rot, but not go mental and put everything ever in it. So this isn't a cut down version done purely as a Greenlight advert, content wise I'm proud of it, I would be proud if I'd thrown as much into a Flash game ( Lost Outpost has more content, but then there were two of us working on it, and for a solid 9 months ).

Phew :)

Sorry if this reply comes across as me being butt hurt, I'm really not, I just think it's important to explain these things where I can. Also feedback like yours really does help Rot Purge be a better game ( I do really regret not giving the player a shield at the start of a level, or ensuring that no zombies can attack you straight away, that was poor design )

Thanks.