Reviews

Review by amarillion all reviews by amarillion

Flower Flyer Tron looks like an old arcade game. Gameplay wise, it's best described as a mix between snake and pac-man (although thinking that way is little misleading, see below). You have to move through a maze (randomly generated!) with a long snake-like text following behind you. Instead of eating pills, you water flowers, and the more flowers you water, the more points you score. After you traverse a maze, you move on to the next level, and you get a longer text trailing behind you. I imagine a maverick pilot that is making an extra buck on the side by flying an advertising banner while spraying crops - although why the plane would fly through a maze is beyond me.

Given this entry was made in only a fraction of the 72h time, it packs a lot of interesting ideas. This is the only entry that made the text scroller an integral part of the game. The procedural maze generation is top-notch. The process is animated, and the algorithm automatically culls dead ends (by necessity, because the snake-like text scroller makes back-tracking impossible) Therefore a deserved 5 points for technical.

The graphics are entirely in 8 bit style, hard-coded as binary strings in the source code. This effectively makes fun of the old fashioned BBC Micro graphics (personally, I have more experience with the ZX Spectrum, a similar but less expensive computer) One level you get the text "ONE OF OUR CUTTING EDGE GAMES IN COLOUR", which could be a marketing slogan right from 1982.

There are some twists in the mechanics, that are not immediately obvious. My instinctive comparison with snake is misleading, because it's only the flyer that can collide - collisions of the text with itself do not count. This means that you can move through gaps in the text. Also, wherever a flower is watered, a gap appears as well. This means that you can make clever use of flowers on crossings for new navigation possibilities. Another thing that wasn't clear immediately that you don't have to water ALL flowers - the game becomes a lot easier once you realise that. All of that wouldn't be such a problem if the game wasn't so punishing: each mistake is an immediate game over, resetting the player back to the very first level. This doesn't give the player an incentive to experiment, for example with gaps in the text (a long gap only appears in later levels). By the way, it would be nice to get a reward if you do manage to water all flowers.

There are a few more missing features that I would have expected if you had put in the full weekend: music, sound effects, and hi-scores saved to disk (although probably the BBC Micro wouldn't have been able to do that either)

Overall, innovative entry that could do with a few quality of life improvements.

Scores: Overall 3 Artistical 4 Technical 5 Genre 3

Review by elias all reviews by elias

[I'm lazy and just copy&pasting my allegro.cc post here.]

Very impressive, especially considering you could only spend some of the time on it and also wrote it in a new programming language. I loved all the old-style effects like the tile update delays and the flood-fill(?) map reveal.

The game was surprisingly hard - I always crashed myself into a wall at first so couldn't beat level 1. Finally learned to avoid keyboard auto-repeat and limit myself to small one-step movements and made it to level 4 before running into impossible small closed chambers. Was about to give up when I realized that I could sometimes run twice before the snake moves. So I had to revert my initial trick and go back to auto-repeat, having to master the fast movement after all. That got me to level 9 or 10 doing some impossible between-the-update jumps :)

Scores: Overall 5 Artistical 5 Technical 5 Genre 5

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 NunoMartinez all reviews by NunoMartinez

I'm jealous of this game: it is beautiful, elegant, simple, fun and well made. Why didn't I had that idea?

I like the aesthetics, so old school that I feel like I was playing in an old Sinclair ZX-Spectrum or an MSX. A little bit of sound will make the game perfect.

Good job.

Scores: Overall 4 Artistical 5 Technical 4 Genre 5