Reviews

Review by MarkOates all reviews by MarkOates

My highest caption score goes to the genre requirement, for the elaborate and creative procedural generation of flowers. I like the game's idea of discovering/generating flowers through code, and this game tied that requirement directly into the gameplay. Of all the games, this one had the most complex set of rules for flower generation, too, so bonus points for that.

I did have difficulty with 2 things:

- The window size on my display was very small, and as such the buttons and fonts in particular were microscopic and hard to read.
- I had difficulty finding documentation on how to play the game. I searched a.cc, the progress logs, and the readme, but had to figure out the UI by randomly clicking things. Since the fonts were so small, it made it especially difficult to read the difference between G - C.

Apart from that, there was one flower that I could have sworn was matched to the example, but nothing happened, leaving me to believe it was up to me to appreciate the match, or match at the top row, until I matched a flower later and was met with the victory sound.

The sound effects were fun, and added a bit of polish to the game, too.

I give the game a lower score in the "Overall" category for the small text, lack of instructions, and making the game somewhat unplayable without a lot of guessing.

Scores: Overall 3 Artistical 3 Technical 3 Genre 5

Review by MarkOates all reviews by MarkOates

Wow what an entry.

I had very slow framerates with the game starting in fullscreen, but I was able to toggle in and out of fullscreen to get good speeds. I appreciate the fullscreen option, which worked particularly on my display scaling the graphics up to usable levels.

This game was remarkably complete for a TINS game. I appreciated the graphics, sound effects, and gameplay in general. Mostly, I found picking up the strength and weapon enhancing items to be the most rewarding part of the game, because they were the most rare.

I also appreciated the pre-designed rooms, and variety of enemies. I feel this game has a solid foundation of an engine and with more level design expansion, weapons, enemies, boss fights and a few tweaks like power bars, could be a solid game all around.

Scores: Overall 4 Artistical 4 Technical 5 Genre 5

Review by MarkOates all reviews by MarkOates

OK that was fun. I made it all the way to Year 5, having barely scraped by at year 4.

My first impression was I love the music and the style. It reminds me of my actual coding environment so I felt right at home knocking baddies away from my brilliant projects that can only get worse when the invaders come in.

It hit very close to home, if I may say so ;)

I loved the comments each of the naysayers. I found a lot of them very funny and wouldn't mind having 20x more of them so I could just read them and enjoy during gameplay.

I did have some trouble with the controls, and would get stuck between circles. I'm not sure if this was part of the gameplay, but several green circles would go into those notches and I would not be able to reach them. I wasn't sure what was causing me to go faster or slower during the game, maybe there is an indicator that I missed out on?

I'm sure I'll play it some more.

I played on Windows (had no problems running), however, the screen was higher resolution I believe causing the layout to show differently than intended. Here's a photo of my laptop screen running the program.

I think this would be really fun with joystick support.

Technical, I give it a 3, mostly because of glitches in the gameplay, difficulty with navigation controls.

Scores: Overall 4 Artistical 5 Technical 3 Genre 4

Review by MarkOates all reviews by MarkOates

This gameplay typically isn't the type of game I gravitate to very much, but I did find myself getting more enjoyment out of this entry than most of the others.

My favorite aspect was the attention to detail and technology behind the retro graphics. The retro artistic style was spot on, and took no shortcuts to produce what felt like a tweaked ascii table of special characters displayed on a hot Z80 processor. The transition FX were a fantastic touch, and the integration of the special scroller into the gameplay was a clever use of the technical rule #2. The game felt to me like one of the obscure cabinets I might find at a retro arcade bar.

If I were to make any improvements to the game it would be to add a title/splash screen with instructions, some audio fx, and a special shader or two to give the game a CRT look. That, in addition to having an auto-moving player sprite would really make this entry pop.

Scores: Overall 4 Artistical 5 Technical 5 Genre 4

Review by MarkOates all reviews by MarkOates

Right off the bat this game gets a 5 in technical for using 3D graphics. That's a very rare thing to see in hack games so I'm super stoked not only to see polygons, triangles, models at varying level of detail, but a level of touch with animations and flower bouncing motion to match.

I made it past level 10 and appreciated all the self aware humor in the special text scrollers. "final time, I promise" and "collect *ALL* the pollen, just kidding" both legitimately caught me off guard and had me laughing out loud.

Overall the game could use a bit more polish, (titles, options, direction hint arrows, hud, etc) so a tad off from full marks. I ended up preferring the keyboard controls over the mouse. Mouse movement point-to-point was too aliased and became a distraction.

I would also like to see a richer use of color theory and hues. A lot of the colors felt like out-of-the-box yellows, reds greens, and blues. I would love it if these palettes had a more styled approach that would give the game a more unique look and feel, along with better color contrasts to make the elements easier to distinguish (making the queen being more visually distinct from the environmental elements and other bees, light text on darker background, etc).

At first I didn't like the small hit box on the pollen, but as I progressed in the levels I actually preferred it when I needed to pick pollen from only certain color flowers.

Other little touches I really enjoyed were the little crown on the queen, and the flapping animations on the bee wings.

Overall, this was definitely one of the more technically comprehensive entries, and you can really tell it takes a lot of experience to pull something like this off that is so technically extensive in such a short amount of time. Control, camera constraints, world, graphics performance, all really impressive and admirable for any TINS entry.

Scores: Overall 4 Artistical 4 Technical 5 Genre 5