Another bad game post through

Instead of animating a character frame by frame when walking, they take the already finished sprite of the character's leg and simply move it back and forth. at least that is what I think he meant

It's spreading. Easy and low effort, when accepted, will become the norm. Shitty animation will be taught in schools if it becomes the standard.

I don't _have_ to play shitty games. I just enjoy them for a very specific reason. But that explanation will have to wait. It's a long post. obviously I'm not a youtuber, thank god for having made better life choices

That's right. You make a "paper doll" made in pixel art, and then you rotate the limbs so the pixels in that piece of the character rotate making the pixels in the model turn, making impossible diamond shaped pixels - that is not possible in old games that is the art style these hacks are trying to replicate.

This game has fixed pixels. It's a big plus, but everything else is pretty bad.

So do you already have the screencaps and text from your playthrough ready to be posted?
Because if so come on, this seems like fun

Sorry guys, but these first post are going to be a bit long, but I need to get some of this basic gameplay stuff out as fast as possible. The later posts are going to be shorter, more informative and more entertaining, I swear.

You land on a shore of a frozen land, and then you get control of your viking character, and holy shit, the animation and controls are bad. It's hard to really describe it accurately - I have to go back to Commodore64 era to find any comparisons.

There is no inertia, none at all. If you hold up to jump, as terrible as that is in itself, the viking just bounces like a hardrubber ball. The millisecond you touch the ground your y-axis movement reverses, what the fuck? Horizontal movement is not any better. It's really slow, and binary at best, on or off, left or right. This unbelievably lazy coding gives a very familiar feel of old C64 games. Made me think if this game was some "let's code in Basic" experiment, or something.

Animations are mostly one frame animations. That is ONE frame. ONE. So walking is alternating "standing still" and "walking" frames. Attack is alternating "standing still" and "attack" frames. Jumping is locking "walking" frame and moving up. It makes the game feel insanely bad combined with the horrid controls. Just for comparison, most of C64 games had smart coding to compensate the sprite animationframe limits. In C64s game "Bruce Lee" all character animations are one frame, but by adding varible frame timings, coders made the movement feel smooth even with only 2 frames of animation. And even in C64 games you usually lose horizontal control while in the air, to make it feel even that little bit realistic, not so in Ravager. I'll be getting back to these topics later.

The tutorial area is a terrible mess. You fight the controls and a ton of enemies, and you learn new skills. You get new skills and upgrade old ones to more powerful ones in skill shrines. Also this is when the stamina bar comes into play. Yes, after DS, every game needs to have a stamina bar now. It's a greenlight requirement. The viking has a really powerful horizontal hammer-charge-thing, but it drains the stamina bar so fast, and it clips to terrain, that it's nearly useless. I was hoping to use it to fight the frustratingly slow movement speed. There is no sprint, so you are stuck with the "cripple-crawl-speed" you have.

The tutorial area ends with the shittiest boss fight I have ever experienced. Not exaggerating at all. It's the Goblin Commander or something. Remember those one frame animations? The boss is 4 times the size of the viking and has one frame attack animations. It stunlocks you with it's "facekick" and you are dead. This post is getting too long so I'll talk more about the gobling commander later. Game starts finally when you cheese the boss somehow.

Next post: The King, The Story and The Lore.
Pic. is the actual start of the game

Yes I have most of the material and I've played the game through. Had to do the last boss twice for reasons we get in later. Doing this thread would be impossible if I was just playing the games while posting. Main reason being: I really want to think about what is important to get in to the thread.

Its called tweening.

Good metapost, btw
Forgot to say that I have only bare minimum of notes on the posts I want to make, so they keep changing all the time. I find this to be the best way of doing this.

Did you mean to say "touch the peak of your jump" here? I don't know how you'd notice a y coordinate change if you're already on the ground.

This looks like a mid-2000's-era Flash game hosted by Newgrounds.

This shit industry will never make a Viking simulator that lets me go on plunder campaigns, fight filthy Christians and collect my own harem of concubines, or ride down to Constantinople and earn an honest shekel.

Not enough stolen sprites for that.

You can kinda do this in Mount and Blade.

Wait, on the jumps thing, you're telling me there's no acceleration on the jumps? It's just go up at x speed then once you reach the peak of your jump you go down at x speed?

It's missing the "rape" part in "rape and pillage" so it's not the full experience.

it's almost as if vikings haven't done any raping and there are no sources for them???

I'm willing to bet someone has modded that in.

Holla Forums is a Christian board, faggots aren't allowed here.

No the jumps y-movement speed is a perfect cosfunction. I meant you have no slowdown frames between landing at full speed and going up in full speed.

but i'm not seeing any sources on that. hmmmmm

There's dickplomacy, but it's a shitshow. Hopefully Bannerlord will allow for more robust sex mods.

And finally the game starts. And I can start making shorter posts.

The king tells you to go kill everything. also the shitty tutorial boss was actually "Troll General", not "Goblin Commanded" how racist of me, thinking that all green things are goblins

I instantly open the map screen and see something that might make the game good. A lot of shit to ravage. The map screen is great, it shows where the bosses are and it shows… well that's it. The game map is actually just a continuous wrapping one layer, like Terraria should have been.

Pic2. Is the deepest lore I found in the castle. Don't worry, it means nothing, it will never come up again spoilers

I go left to ravage everything, but the slow movement speed is really getting to my nerves. So I use the hammer-dash-skill to make it semi-bearable. I kill a lot of goblins or trolls. And notice a BIG PROBLEM THAT IS ALSO REALLY GREAT. Enemies stay dead. Once I turn them to mincemeat pixel blobs, they are dead for ever. While this is great, the horrible game mechanics are getting worse. The big enemies can just stunlock me into unavoidable death. And a group of small ones can do that also.

Also I remember one of the guards in the castle to break the fourth wall by saying something like: "You can go anywhere, it's an open world game". The joke being that basically two directions wrapping around might be considered "open world", I didn't buy it.

Next the first boss.

That "map" looks like a children's xylophone.

The first boss for me, (it's open world right(), was somehow pretty easy. I found it on top of a statue, and it used the most boring clone-at-half-health trope. It gave me my first new character to play with, The Gargoyle. So obviously I changed to it in the next shrine, and it was really bad, so I changed back to the viking. Not a huge surprise, but it got me thinking…

Thinking about how and why this game was made. What was the reason to have a massive amount of assets made for a game so poorly coded. The pixel art assets are fairly ok, and the variety in assets is extremely good. This game has more unique art assets than some AAA titles. The core game design is really good too. Having tutorial and tutorial boss, gradual upgrades through exploration in 2d-plane, and skill shrines still one-upped by new characters with new skills to upgrade and to top even that, you have bossfight-locked areas, "free farm" areas, and safe zones. Everything is so well designed in game design perspective.

Next post: My reason to play shitty games, and some basic analysis on the game design flaws in this one.

Holy fuck that statue at the bottom of the picture looks like garbage. It looks like someone came all over it.

I bet you play shitty games to see how hard game design actually is and what doesn't work which makes you appreciate the good ones even more.

You can learn more about game design by shitty games than great ones.

>that no ladder animation
oh boy

Sorry bro, not really seeing it shown by the pics posted so far. Unless you have examples not yet posted.

They used lazy animation tools and still manage to have worse animation than Jumpman. Especially pungent trash.

Story continues: I went back to the King hoping for new dialogue for killing a boss, but got none. So I went back to kill more.

At this point I was in a wierd state of mind. It's like being in a trance, but still mostly awake. It's like the "flow" or "in the zone", but very different. Let me explain:

Being in the "zone" or in the "flow" means that 100% of your attention is focused on the task or game. It gives a really strong, but focused, dopamine fueled haze. This is easy to archive in sports or fast paced skill intensive tasks, like some computer games. What I get from these shitty games can only easily be described by reverse or inverse "flow" or "zone". 100% of my attention is not in the game, while my hands and eyes are playing the game, I'm thinking how the game was made, and how the game mechanics might work. It goes so far that I start to make fictional scenarios of how the game development might have started to fail. This is why I play these shitty games, they give me "reverse flow". TV, as brainless as it is, doesn't do this for me. don't try it, I think "reverse flow" might make you retarded in the long run.

Next post is less stupid, and we actually castrate a goblin or troll king.
Pics some futuristic assets just outside of the castle.

The art guy, may he/she rest in peace, obviously worked with some self or devgroup posed restrictions. I'm pretty sure that most the "sprites" are 4-8 colors with alpha. Most of the stuff looks fine. But i can't say anything good about the horrid way it looks in motion. Shits bad in the actual game. I can deal with super lowres pixels, but if they look bad in animation, it's irredeemable

I like to stare at the sky and at walls for 30-ish minutes straight sometimes, and in the Fall it's nice to sit on the ground and pick up random leaves and smell them. They all smell different

I've never done drugs in my entire life
This bad game thing you have sounds like something I'd do, honestly

The text doesn't looks like it was typed out because the spaces and font are very inconsistent.

Looks like bad scaling to me.

Something tells me whatever drag and drop engine the guy used to make this game would've already sorted all that out for him.

is that a penis?

I go for a literally 5 minute walk from the castle to the troll or goblin area. Since all stays dead it's boring as fuck, but I have my "reverse flow", so it's not a problem at all. I drop down in a upsidedown city. And I kill my way to goblin or troll king. And this is what happens:

He offers treasures to save his life, but I gut him. This is also a red herring. spoilers It does not matter if you kill him or not. For some reason you cut off his dick, and then we are off to new adventures.

Next part: Shit get's weird.

I wouldn't be so sure. See how the I's are extremely thin, while the T's are thick at the top and thin at the bottom? That looks like low-resolution graphics getting upscaled in a way that wasn't meant for text.

See, that's the point. You can't do shit like this in any of the "drag and drop engines" that I know of. That's why I got that basic-coding low effort feel.
also sorry for the bicubic filtering in the pics. It's not that bad, but still too late to change and redo in linear

That's clearly supposed to be a stomach wound but the proportions are drawn so terribly that it looks like he had his dick removed.

Fuck now I'm curious
Got me scared there OP

That looks like either shitty filtering, scaling or font kerning to me. Whatever it is, really hope it wasn't intentional.

I got bored after dying to shitbox glitch to stunlock for the third time. So i wasted a good 10 minutes going back to castle. Then going right, the automatic "tutorial messages" told me to go left to find the boss I had just beaten. Defiantly continuing left, I found the holy grail, that kept me playing till the end. It was a simple thing, easily ignorable, a small thing.

I found a character that can turn into a deer. The deer is faster than anything I've seen and jumps fairly high. It has no special attacks, can only do one charge attack that has no combo potential. But the movement speed was a really big thing for me, because I was about to stop playing, for the game being a fucking horrible waste of time.

The deer had a few more special things that I will list here:
First:
The wierdest ass ever on a deer
Even counting deviantart shit
Seriously. It looks like a saggy, baggy, wierd thing. Parasites Eve comes to mind.

Second:
The Deer is a Murder God from Beyond
It just stuns and kills everything in one or two charges. And because the coding is absolute shit you can charge at any point in mid jump or when ever.

Next: The reign of the deer death god.

That colour palette is absolutely disgusting. What kind of fucktard thinks green sky looks good?

I explained in:

It's about getting a good long "reverse flow".
We really need to make a better word for it.
Any ideas?

Toriyama, considering Namek.

Sounds like the Chasers in PE2. Those things were a real hazard in groups.

Sounds more like metaflow than reverse flow really.

a bored satori ?

I'm sorry. I don't get it.

Yea, I see that. But PE feeling was just from the weird protrusions in normal things.

I thought about that too, but it's not meta if it's only the opposite of "flow". Metaflow would be about the factors behind the "actualflow". Right? Get your meta semantics straight, dude.

Yeah I had shit to do and post after a while, now I'm catching up with this……thing….can't really call it game
Well it's a stoned style of mentality so I guess negattention?*apathention?

Somehow the deer just owned everyone and everything. I went through Satyrcamp, Skeleton forest, Troll forest, Stone temple, to Lycan cliffs. (Pic. Map included).

Going through these areas as the death incarnate (deer) was basically just holding right.

Going through areas as anything else, than the deer god, would take over ten times of the time
Maybe multiple tries, and multiple slow, slow, slow, walks back. Deer god is the only way

Lastly, there was a long trip in wolf and werewolf filled areas, that was obviously supposed to be hard, but the deer just had a massacre.

I only had to change back to weredeer form to climb ladders. So weird. Why code ladders different to a random wereform? There is no animation on the ladders, sprites just "slide" up, as some user pointed out.
So there was some point n the development that they made the deer not able to slide up ladders, but normal chars can. Quite the effort, almost two lines of code, holy shit. (maybe 3 if deerform is not in creature/noladder group)

Next: Deer killing bosses in a row.

not sure, but perhaps it has something to do with this other game ? store.steampowered.com/app/328940/The_Deer_God/

First boss to fall to the absolute power of the deer god was the BIG BAD WOLF.

Fenrir had some interesting attacks, but deer just shat on them, and Fenrir was dead. This is also the part that I thought that: "This cannot hold, you just can't kill the game with the deer", but the mayhem continued. And in the Fenrir fight, i discovered the first of the many horrible glitches that make the deer even more powerful.

First super deer power: You can lock your direction by doing an attack and then holding buttons to any direction. This means that you can move backwards while the holding a direction. This enables you to do a very insane damage move if in deer form:

You can jump backwards, your weird deer ass first, into a big enemy, penetrating the hitbox with your ass while in the air, and just when you are about to hit the ground, you press attack. This makes you instantly charge away from the enemy while inside the hitbox and reversing your x-vector. The game gets confused, throws some dice, and you do 3-10 times the damage you normally do. Fenrir died in 3-4 of these.

Next: Minotaur maze and Draugr undead boss.

...

...

No relation. Bloody obviously

Yes, yes, the second "with your ass" was intentional. But I'm not going to let you easy on this thread. This game is about a goblin/troll dick collector that is playing as a weredeer that is a weird ass deer, that is played by an user. Not a lot of those around.

Trying to get the next post ready.

Now it is obvious that the deer is too powerful.

I have gained a lot of new characters, but they are all shit. They are just too slow. I got all the characters upgraded to near maximum, just to try them out at maximum potential. Most of them might work, but they all have one big flaw: They are too slow. The deer is faster and actually regenerates stamina while being fast, while others use stamina to be fast. I have no reason to use anything else.

I can literally kill a screen of undead with three deer charges, and they have no change to do anything. What a game.

Posting in an above-average thread

Lurking.

Hory shieet yeah I thought it was bad not just in static, the animation so far look shit too. For me it's not necessarily the low res alone but low detail for what it is. Probably from a fundamental misunderstanding of how to approach and make pixel and sprites. These nu retro style seems to have a crappy blend of atari type graphics mixed with 8 to 16 bit consoles mixed with CGA and EGA graphics, without understanding any of it.

Not just in the technical sense but also the artistic sense. Instead of approaching pixel art as a form of mosaic, it's a really bad jumbled mix of pixellated mess. Even some atari games had more visual definition and clarity, there are sharewares from the 90's that looks much better than this stuff.

Now is the perfect time to take a break, and talk about game design. The game is completely off the tracks. It's a horrible mess, but why and how? Let's try to get into the meat of things.

First. The game design is great. I would love to see that document, if it even exists. The intended gameplay is really good. Think of Salt and the Sanctuary, but then completely fail on everything about making a game. Most of the areas and bosses are really well designed, one area even has a fairly clever one-way shortcut.

You have a dodge, a 3-combo attack, upgradable skills, a stamina bar, open world, multi stage bosses, 12 heroes with different skills. But all this is just kickstarter material if you don't have even one competent person.

Second, the controls are coded to be horrible. Why? Did the coder actually think that this was ok, well obviously not. Well, did the team think, that it was ok, to have bad c64 controls, well obviously not.
So, why? Why? Why?
You can find free game code to do character movement in any form you want. It's not a new thing. So how did the horrible characted movement code get in the game? What happened?

Only thing I can think of is that this was made with a school-project tier engine. Then "ported" to unity, then "ported back". Then just pushed to an artist to make all the assets, artist being oblivious that his/her work is just being used to cash in a shitty game.

I'll be back to end this, if the thread survives the night. See you.

You nailed it. No understanding how to blend palettes in a scene. No understanding how to make movement softer, in bg or chars, just by picking the right colours.
In short: Skills on paper only, and nepotism. No real passion to do anything.

I thought we were past this for several years. This is the most cynical representation of an indie game trailer I've seen so far.

You might wanna mail this to the devs
This criticism could make or break them in the future

Ok I browsed the steam page review, and looked at a youtube gameplay vid of it. I'm even more confused in some ways. When you played it, did you find the character and monsters to be too small that it starts becoming a hindrance in seeing what is going on?
No really, the characters looks too damn tiny to me, and the game can only hide behind the a "stylistic" choice for so long. Did I miss something, was there a zoom in function at all? Yes granted it appears to be a 2 man dev team(?) and maybe it really is a school project level quality as you mentioned, type of shovelware on steam. But jesusfuck, couldn't they have made the sprites bigger, zoom in, scale it up or whatever the fuck so the players can see what is going on. Even with the 1 frame animation and shit sprite work, even the typeface and fonts are annoyingly fugly in that overly thin and overused cliche of spider thin scrawl.

Speaking of which, the steam page reviews listed the "beautiful artstyle" as a plus. What the fuck are we the last people with functioning eyes in this damn world. Is it all one big joke that I am not in on.

Stopped reading right there. Why the hell do you do this to yourself?

That's marketer speak for "bad graphics".

The hero Holla Forums needs but not what we deserve.

The rape in "rape and pillage" means to steal or covet. Hence why Hades' rape of Persephone isn't about the God of the Underworld doing porno with the girl 24/7 much to my dismay but rather about kidnapping.

it looks like one of those freeware edgy ms paint platformers

did you also do ELEX review posting?

I think what you're doing tbh

I killed the Draugr King that had no change against the ass first boomerang charge. And again, the actual design of the boss was great: You had to thaw frozen bells and then ring them to shatter the boss armor, while he could freeze the bells and grow new armor. Too bad the game play is so horrible that all these good ideas just go to waste.

That is a really good point I forgot to mention. This game has one of the worst cases of "too much useless screen area". Since you are mostly stuck with melee attacks, all the action happens consistently in the small area on the bottom middle of the screen. Nearly 95% of the screen is useless filler at every point of the game. Some long range shooting enemies help this problem but not much.

Holla Forums needs people who play shitty games? I must be your god emperor then.

Another boss falls. I keep repeating myself but: Jormungandr had good design, executed in the shittiest possible way.

On the next area I tried the minotaur character, just to be sure I was not missing something. It still feels unbelievable that only one of the chars is playable. The minotaur was ok damage- and skillwise, but changing from the space and time bending speed of the deer just is not worth it. Playing a game like this, you really want it to end quick.

The lore bits also start to fall a part at this point. Remember how the Norse Mythology had robot titans fighting Black Knights? We did see that blue Tau firewarrior/enemy from Iji outside the castle, so I guess the devs just stopped giving a shit at some point. Can't blame them.

The forest part before Jormungandr fight had a really obvious puzzle or lore element with a huge key hanging from a tree and a box with a key hole it was actually a hole shaped like a key, not a lock. wtf.. But it was just background never to be seen or mentioned again. Every area is littered with unfinished ideas, and it makes this game even more sad. Someone really cared about his game.

Another iconic Norse Mythology boss bites the dust. The Bronze Knight. And then suddenly we are in the future with laser swords, mechs and robot dragons… I mean seriously.

I also tried the golem character, with the same results: It's fucking horrible compared to the deer.

I don't really have much more to say, so I'll just post the rest of the screenshots with minimal comments.

This is how the ending plays out:
Once you have killed all the bosses with the deer, you get a portal to the last boss. The Nidhoggr fight is just plainly bad, and full of good ideas. This is also the first time the deer is not OP. The boss is on a platform so you can't do the deer ass backwards charge trick. You can just bang your tiny deer head to the ledge like an idiot, until the boss dies.

But, wait. There is a second part in this fight. Apparently your gross deer ass has finally made the Nidhoggr nauseous and it has decided to just fly a way. I'm guessing the game also started bugging out at this point because I got changed to the golem char for no reason. You just walk to the dragons head and smack it on the back of the head. The end.

But, wait! What about the Evil Witch every god damn NPC has been talking about. In the forest area there was an army waiting to take on the Evil Crow Witch. I wonder what will happen next??? Soo fucking exiting.

Next: The "conclusioning"

And then this happened… yeah. I would like to point out that the FATAL error is " in action number 1 of step event0, cannot find any instance for the player object". So basically the there is no player. Fairly meta ending. I-is this Valhalla? A-are we there yet?

But this game really didn't have that pretentious hipster feel, so it was probably a bug. So I started the game again and walked through the whole map now filled with only corpses my deer rampage had left behind. Decided to try the Lich/Wraith character because it had ranged attack that didn't use stamina, but it was quite arse. Still beat the boss again, and again the golem bug or maybe it is intentional, who the fuck knows at this point.

Next: The "actual" "conclusioning".

No surprise that this shit was made in that poor excuse of an engine.

Are you excited for the big ending?
I had gotten pretty numb for disappointment, but the fact that you don't get to be the deer in the end, still managed to make me fairly pissed off.

The conclusion:
The Crow Witch Morrigan is just as retarded as you. You, now as the viking, decide to join Morrigan and go to Valhalla. The End. No boss fight, nothing is explained, nothing happens. And you get shitted back to the beginning of the game where nothing has changed.

What a weird game. So much potential, so many great game design choices. But no good idea survives when maimed by the unrelenting force of incompetence. What a waste.

Overpowered deer ass back flip boomerang charge/10.

A good carpenter can do great work a bad hammer.

Can a good carpenter do great work with rotten wood? Plus if you were a good carpenter, capable of using Mjolnir as a fucking tool, then why use the shitty hammer in the first place?

Well, that ended pretty much how I expected it would. I suspect that your excellent write-up provided more people with joy then this broken dream of a game. Bravo

Why are the witch's eyes bulging out?

Entertaining thread good job OP

Why would a good carpenter buy a bad hammer though

This thread somehow made me very sad. I wish there were more threads like this.

Balancing player character options with movement speed in a game with tons of moving about seems like awful game design. Even if the balance was right, at best it would be a trade-off between gameplay utility and tedium.

I'm getting RoR vibes from this picture.

Yeah, this was a good thread with interesting content. We need more of this shit on Holla Forums. Minimal to no shitposting, either; I guess the slow, content-focused nature of the thread didn't draw any faggots in. I should probably do some shit like this sometime.

Most ideas are overrated in the vidya industry imo, and "ideaguys" are either worthless or actively fucks up the game if they don't have the chops to flesh out their ideas. Execution and craftsmanship matters a lot more tbh fam.
I think I'm a bit lost with that part bro. Apart from you enjoying some of the deer gameplay. And maybe the map layout even though that text layout is ass. Most of the game design choices you listed in the thread seems not very well thought out or not executed well at all in the game. And that's with generously setting aside the technical bugs in the game as a separate issue.

What game design choices did you see that was great or at least salvageable in this game?

I have been saying this since I was a CHILD gamer. Refinement > "new" ideas every single time.

Shadow of Rome isnt original at all but its one of my favorite games of all time thanks to one of the best combat systems in gaming, as well as some of the best, one-on-one boss fights

...

Just quickly browsed the developer indie db page, this might be their second(?) game. Looking over the steam review page again, they have 7 total reviews when I looked at it, 4 are non english and 2 received the game for free.
Since you went through the game, do you think these guys have a chance for improvement. You noted 2 examples where they had something that could be very good if it wasn't fumbled in the execution.

Looking at the market right now, it's pretty much saturated with games that looks like this, but how long can that last. It made it to Steam, but things like smartphone games with fancier looking graphics are probably the next saturation point on steam, if it's not underway already. Do you see these types of games and devs able to improve, or do you see them clinging to the retro indie crutch, or try to flee into teaching "game development" or academia?