A GHOST BY CHOICEI downloaded the .mll through shady means but even after acquiring it the game tells me direct 8 isn't working or something. don't know what that's about, I have direct11. I think I saw a 3d pigman on the twitter of one of the makers of this game though, so I really hope its issues get cleared up some day. y'all don't know how much I love pigmans. Hint: it is a lot
edit: wait nm the pigman was something else, it was golf menace
SCORE: 9/10
DEATH BY PISTOL 2000this is game with pigman! or is it wolfman? whatever kind of man it is, it's my kinda man <3 ... a coldblooded killer. ball is kinda slow to stop, and I could not quite figure how to hit it harder than the gentlest tap
SCORE: 9/10
KISSIN' WIZARDmake love not war... love is a battlefield... these are the conflicting thoughts I carried with me as I set out on my quest to kiss all monster. is a noble quest? I dunno... he who smooch monster should see to it that he not also become monster...
but then I gazed into the wrong abyss and the abyss looked back into me. by which I mean a bug crashed my game when I tried to take an exit that was not real
the machine kiss of death...
I consider this a valid part of the experience. it is a reminder life is short, painful, and arbitrary... and could and could use more wizard kisses
great job gods17 it's great to see you doing stuff with gamemaker!
Rating: I kissed a wizard and I... liked it? -"katy_pery" 2013
SCORE: 9/10
ECLIPSEa profound statement on urban alienation and the futility of violence in the face of prejudice. killed 72 zombies before a screen told me to hit escape to restart because I died. hitting escape did nothing. perhaps a testament to the finality of death and mortality
SCORE: 9/10
LIME XPRESSthis game has it all: trains, hell dimensions, friends with tentacles. very salt in aesthetique and attitude. love it, and hope to see it expanded upon some day. My favorite thing about it was the dialogue
SCORE: 9/10
4-LUNG BOYthis is absolutely fantastic!
it goes without saying that the art is of exceptional quality, maroonracoon's talent is something we've been lucky enough to see before already. the writing was sometimes cute, and sometimes surprisingly lucid. in fact, my absolute favorite part of the game was in one of the endings, where
Spoiler (Click to reveal)you are floating in space, and the astronaut and you are talking about the necessity of small talk and the common denominators of rural America. That really hit close to home, I'm a small town kid myself.
maroonracoon, you're a top class teen and I hope we get to see more of your work around these parts.
denzquix, thanks for sharing some of your magical mystery coding secrets used to make the game, I'll definitely make good of use of it... perhaps in the not too distant future...?
I'm so thrilled you guys put forward a gem like this, and it delights me that this game is getting a following outside of our little salt community because it is probably the most jaw-dropping title of this jam in terms of polish, style, and storytelling
congratulation! Of course you get...
SCORE: 10/10
TREAT FIGHTER: TRIPLE TREATstreet punx are jerks, but at least they have the generosity to not to gang up on you in crowds of more than 3. is there... honor among these thieves?
or maybe they just do not take you seriously enough...
punchy-kicky does get a little dull after a while, but I think with a beat-em-up game, it can be challenging to mitigate that kind of fatigue, specially in a 9 day game project. maybe having different enemy types w/different kinds of attacks and movement might help?
I will say it helps to mix things up when you get ahold of triple crown (haha, horse joke) and can crush those jorks into delicious candy.
killin' enemies into food items is a proud vidgame tradition I am glad to see upheld
SCORE: 9/10
PUMPKIN MOONSHINE It was good decision to make opening cutscene skippable, given how easy it is for greed/hubris to make you take the big orange drink ...
I am in love with the background music, the chorus of "muh" is so moody, it definitely gives the experience sort of a spooky, dreamlike quality. It really feels like spelunkin in haunted cave... natural place for the best pumpkins to harvest. On the note of sounds and pumpkins, the chimey bit that accompanies the unearthing of gourds is very rewarding
An occasional frustration was that the bomby dudes would sometimes break away the limited points of passage upwards, basically meaning that all that is left for our square protagonist is to wait for the rising magma to end its horrible entrapment. this happened on the one run where I got a ghost juice, so that was a bit of a bummer
I think nurse oats did a good job on the spritework especially for the pick-em-ups, though I will say that I thought the old beers were some kind of shrunken cyclops heads or other similar diabolical magical idol
overall, this project is a real charmer, and I'm glad nurse came to saltw to show it off.
I give Pumpin Moonshine a full 10 because it's fun to play, charming as heck, and exemplifies the competition's theme
SCORE: 10/10
PUZZLE DREAM some talking head in game design once said that puzzle games are the hardest to make right. for that reason I admire your ambition in tackling that kind of a project for a game jam. my spatial reasoning's pretty terrible though, and I got stuck on around level 9. I'll probably keep at it, though, because it looks like there's a locked .rar archive called "mystery tome", and gatdamn I loves me those kinds of secrets, so I will definitely keep at it to find out what my mystery prize is
SCORE: 9/10
CACTUS CITY ROAD sometimes gas tanks spawned off to the far reaches of the screen that are inaccessible on foot. momma always told me to never drive farther than half my tank of gas from the last fuel station, she musta known that white ghoasts are jerks and will spook me to death if I run dry on fuel
SCORE: 9/10
MYSTERY CHANNEL I think for a lot of us, your project was the most anticipated entry in the jam. you did not disappoint
the first thing I loved right off the bat was the vincent price-esque horror host. this is another example of your recent trend towards 3d models in your games, which I heartily approve of. I think that started with the muppetlike creatures in Pleasure Dromes of Kubla Khan and most recently was seen in the thematically similar mini-horror game Horrible Screaming Murderer IV. I hope you keep it up, because I absolutely adore the 3d lifeforms you magic into existence
of course getting into the meat of the game, it becomes clear this is also another instance of your even more recent trend towards whimsical mini flashgames with hand-drawn sprites and backgrounds. in terms of their content, I think my favorite part was
Spoiler (Click to reveal)your commentary on the absurd distressing hell dimensions that are horror movies, and the impact they had on you when you were a kid. I also really liked the illustrations of the girls in PJRIP.
Rating: AIEEEE!/10
SCORE: 10/10
WITCH KING OF DECADENCIAOkay so I figure this is a good place to write up a post-mortem
I originally wanted the game to be in Adventure Game Studio but I was not smart enough to make the machines do what I wanted them to do. Fortunately Twine is an excellent, user-friendly tool that helped a dumb babby like me to create something like the kind of experience I had ~envisioned~ when I set off to work on this project.
I honestly thought I was going to make something jokier than this story ended up being, but I guess I ended up accidentally being true to myself... my sorta narcissistic, serious, “auteur” self that I am generally have the good sense to stifle under a heavy veil of self-deprecation and shame
Someone told me that the game sets up archetypes but doesn't really explore them, and I feel that's a pretty fair criticism. I think I said in my own defense at the time that I was tight on time, but if I had more sense I would have maybe scaled down the project so I could more adequately explore one or more two themes instead of halfhazardly skirmishing from concept to concept.
Then again, hindsight is 20/20, and all that
I've been working on something sillier and more saltpunk as kind of an antidote to my own reservations about this production.
but even though I have these concerns about what I did, I had a lot of fun actually making something for a change. My favorite thing was making the drawings, even though for someone like me who has zero formal training and minimal technical skill, it could be frustrating having to try multiple times to create something fairly simple. (I am thinking about drawing a hand holding a bottle, especially. 8 tries and I still feel like it looks off)
SCORE: what is this shit, some kind of fairy tale? grow up junior, it's time to enter MANS WORLD
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SW-JAM 2013 Review/Score Round-Up (posted on behalf on ed)