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Competitions / "A Love Letter To FreeBASIC" Game Dev Competition results
« on: March 01, 2019, 04:31:55 PM »
The final results of the competition are as follows:
Congratulations to Pitto for winning round 1 of the competition with his Impossible Victhorse!
Please scroll down to the third post, if you don't need a detailed run-down.
Impossible Victhorse
Game design: 26/35
The game makes solid effort to incorporate the theme into its setting, and probably does the best from all the entries, in that very aspect alone. It's a platform game played in a sort of dystopian world, where FreeBASIC is outlawed and its keywords hidden and encrypted in cryptographed mainframes by Darkistra, a demented ruler of fictional Codingland. Daristra being an evil pupil of Edsger Dijkstra, so the story is mainly inspired by Dijkstra's scanthing words on BASIC most of us are very familiar with. You play Victor, obviously modeled around the image of the real life creator of FreeBASIC, André Victor Vicentini, as the only person who can free the forbidded language. A lot was done to make the world feel menacing and anti-FreeBASIC in small details. Also, the addition of a hologram assistant that pops out here and there helps to flesh out the setting. Where the game gets negative points is the fact little of this is incorporated in the very gameplay, reduced probably to only one feature (the FB horse). Also in the first mentioned aspect, the game does leave much room for improvements, like more NPCs, maybe some dialogues with enemy characters, and a more thematically compeling ending.
Gameplay: 11/15
Impossible Victhorse is a solid platform game, but does feel iffy in more than one aspect. The platforming feels more tricky than it should, and this could be related to some features that alone might not be problematic. Like sliding of platform edges and having to press up again to activate a consecutive jump, which together result in many frustrating moments. Also, the fighting part of the gameplay doesn't feel fully developed, and appears much less challenging and fun than the platforming, despite the fact that platforming part was often frustrating to me. Since there is no any collision between you and enemies that effects player's movement, either by stopping you or pushing you out, in combination with a too simplistic AI that just lunges at your position, a lot of interaction with the enemies boils down to rather one-sided and clunky confrontations. Also the level design is not terribly inspiring and varied, and Pitto seems to have ran of ideas there too soon. Overall, it's fun to play and beat, but leaves much to be desired for.
Progression: 4/6
The game does feature a solid amount of content spread over 9 levels. It introduces new features and enemies with good pacing, but fails to do the maximum to translate that to the very experience of playing the game. Impossible Victhorse doesn't seem to succeed to exploit these new features as one expects them to be exploited, the first time they are interacted with.
Replay Value: 4/6
Despite my previous criticism, the engine is quite robust and smooth, and makes the game fun to experience multiple times. A highscore table with preset scores helps increase the replayability, although the top scores are not too challenging to beat. The lack of secrets, easter eggs (as far as I know) and achievements, which is a feature constantly milked nowadays but nevertheless makes sense, definitely doesn't help Impossible Victhorse to motivate you to play it again after beating it.
Graphics: 5/7
I'm quite impressed by the design and consistency of Pitto's pixel art. While being far from sophisticated, it's very well designed, clear, effective and coherent. It really looks like a proffesional game from the early 90ies, almost to a point. Not perfect, I know, but close to something being done by someone in full control of his skill. If I was Pitto, I would be definitely encouraged by the work delivered in this game to hone this skillset in the future. I think there is genuine talent to be found here. Negative points really come down to penalizing lack of more content and sophistication in the work, and incoherent presentation here and there.
Sound/music: 6/7
The game features very good original sounds effects, and unoriginal MOD tracks, that are kind of a hit and miss. Standard fare here. Separate music/sfx volume level would be a plus.
Personal likeness: 5/6
I probably liked this specific entry the most, mostly because it was the biggest surprise of the competition, at least to me personally. Most other entries ended up being what I expected from those developers, but I didn't know what Pitto was capable off, and his work surprised me in very a positive way. Definitely a very enjoyable, stylish short platformer, and a game with a character. I only wish Pitto made a home run with a boss battle or something more effective for the finale. All in all, looking forward to his future game dev endevours.
Community vote: 14/14
Total: 75/96
Download executables: WIN, LINUX
Download source: Impossible_Victhorse-master.zip
Screenshots: 1, 2, 3
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Love Letter to FreeBasic (chan!)
Game design: 21/35
Love Letter to FreeBasic (chan!) also makes a solid hommage to the compiler, by making FreeBASIC itself an object of affection to be defended from unwanted woers. It's a single screen action game, where you basically defend the person in center (FreeBASIC chan) from the invading characters using two modes of attack. The game gives a nice rundown of ChangeV's game dev history in BASIC, by featuring characters from his old games, both QB and FB, as boss characters. It's all very cute, funny and entertaining. Still, gameplay is barely explored with the theme. It just works on a very simplistic surface level for a higher score to be warranted in this category, not that I don't appreciate the level of hommage it delivers.
Gameplay: 10/15
In its core, this is a very fun and entertaining gameplay. The main character is very responsive, the game is perfectly paced, it features nice "sliding off" collision, it fully delivers as a game engine. It feels like an endless score driven game, but it was fun to discover it actually features an ending. There is a nice progression to the difficulty, with each new boss ushering a more frantic wave of enemies. What works against the game is maybe an unfortunate combination of few gameplay elements, like the large sprites against a single screen playfield, together with the feature of enemies remaining on the screen after being killed, that make it maybe too frantic and constrained. Also, quite few elements of the game feel more like glitches than features, like dead characters as well as your hero cycling through walking animation while standing/dead, for which I'm pretty sure are bugs. If not, I think they are unfortunate design decisions. I admire how much the game pushed me to try harder, until finishing it, after some 8 attempts of so. And the ending is quite rewarding to watch. All in all, excellent work, but rather limited in content and scope.
Progression: 3/6
The game does feature "bosses", and there is a nice increase in difficulty, but the bosses themselves really don't introduce anything new, and serve more as goal posts toward the game ending. And almost all the content is recycled through the game, except the bosses. Anyway, I'm not saying any of this is bad, but this category servers to "award" entries that feature more depth and content than the other, so I need to "penalize" this aspect of Love Letter to FreeBasic (chan!).
Replay Value: 3/6
Once you beat the game, it's hard you'll be pressed to play it more than once. Perhaps if you had someone to compete with for the high score. It is however very addictive to play until you beat it, and overall, provides a rewarding experience.
Graphics: 5/7
It's the usual excellent work by JawsV. Everything is really well done, except maybe the background which looks a bit uninspired. The sprites themselves, Nintendo/Pokemon inspired, are quite vibrant and colorful, well animated, especially ChangeV flipping around. The presentation overall feels a bit lacking and rushed, so I think some graphical segments of the game were left our of the production pipeline because of the deadline. Also, the overall amount of content in the game is really limited, so any higher score would be ignoring this fact. But besides that, it's great work. I really don't know why they don't embark on a more ambitious project. They got the chops.
Sound/music: 6/7
The game feels very tight in this department. Excellent, pleasent sounding sfx, and briliantly picked music track for the theme. Again, the limited amount of sound content needs to be taken into consideration during scoring.
Personal likeness: 5/6
This game really took me by surprise once I digged a bit deeper. Initially, the glithes and odd choice to keep the enemies on the screen after they are killed was a bit off putting, but giving the game a second play really turned me to its excellent gameplay and funny, lighthearted atmosphere, which really carried me until I was able to beat it. A really, really lovely mini-game.
Community vote: 6/14
Total: 59/96
Download: LoveLetter_v1.0.zip
Screenshots: 1, 2
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Internet of Evil Things
Game design: 17/35
This game kinda stumbles in dealing with the main theme. Storywise, it deals with FreeBASIC superficially, by name only, which seems more plugged in than needed, and gameplay-wise, only graphically, where you shoot at enemies with letters going F->R->E->E->B->A->S->I->C, and turn parts of enemies from C+/PHYTON sprites into FreeBASIC sprites. It is however a cool mini-game featuring a nice throwback to classic games like Invaders, Centipede, and just misc rehashes of some classic genres. But if you can completely divorce the game from the theme by removing two or three sprites within the game and few references to FreeBASIC in intro/outro, this needs to be reflected in the score.
Gameplay: 10/15
I'm split regarding scoring this game. On one hand, it offers a really challenging but beatable experience, which on the other hand, is quite frustrating, too often depends on luck, with randomization effecting too much on your chance to win. It basically starts in an "overworld" which is some professor's house, and you need to shoot at these floating programs going around to send them back into various electronic devices in the house. Once they are in a specific device in the house, you can enter that device to play a game, in order to "cure" the trapped program (turn its body into FB blocks instead of C+/PHYTON blocks in most cases). Each device respresent a type of game, and once you finish one level of it, you progress to the next once you enter a same type of device (some feature two levels, some three, some four). There is also a surprise level at the end, and a solid outro. Finishing all levels allows you to play bonus level outside the main game, which is a nice example of unlockable content. Also, you can practice every level you reach in the main game in the previously mentioned practice/bonus mode. So despite having all proper ingedients, I'm disappointed more care was not given to actually designing levels that always play the same, or at least, not make randomization a deal breaker for wining or loosing. So the game actually lost points for me the second time I went back to it (succesful finished it after some 3 attempts or so), by bringing my attention to these flaws with randomization, which were missed during the first play session.
Progression: 5/6
There is definitely a solid amount of varied content in the game, that is unlocked with nice pace, with new content at the very end, and bonus levels you can experience afterwards.
Replay Value: 4/6
The game's feature that allows you to replay levels for a higher score, as well as bonus levels, all with individual saveable high score tables are a cool touch. But all this content that would give the game a perfect score in this department otherwise, is tarnished by the beforehand mentioned luck factor that influences each play and kind of makes any desire to beat any score, except on early levels, somewhat unrewarding.
Graphics: 4/7
Standard fare by ssjx here, perhaps slightly better than some other effors of his. The way most of levels inside of the devices are graphically conceptualized is rather effective and interesting, and a consciencious effort was made to make that part of the game notably different that the main "overworld". Also, both intro and the outro are rewarding to see, and are cool in their own unique way.
Sound/music: 4/7
Again, just solid effort, with nothing standing out or being unpleasent. It's interesting to note that the music tracks were generated by cgMusic, a program I was unaware of, because the tracks fit the game quite well. Sounds effects are somewhat scarce, though.
Personal likeness: 3/6
Initially, this was a solid 4 or even 5 for me, but the replay made me dislike the game's randomization quite a bit, and I just couldn't get passt it. I appreciate all the varied content within the game. It's perhaps the most varied entry of all, both from the gameplay and graphics angle, but the game fails to capitalize on that. It is definitely one of ssjx's better effors, and worth being played, but I'm not sure how much rewarding is to persist with it. But I personally didn't consider finishing it a waste of time. My time was awarded in that sense. I enjoyed it for the first time round.
Community vote: 10/14
Total: 57/96
Download: ioet_v05b.zip
Screenshots: 1, 2, 3
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Simple Console TANKS
Game design: 10/35
This is a simple single screen shooter where you are a FB object shooting at C+ objects, and this is were the implementation of the competition theme starts and finishes. Despite the simplistic concept, I think more could have been done for the theme, for example, by unlockable "FreeBASIC cameos" after certain amount of levels or something similar. With all this in mind, this game doesn't warrant a higher score in this cateogory.
Gameplay: 7/15
The game features solid gameplay mechanics. You are a movable object (a tank?) in a single screen, walled playfield, and you have a goal to destroy all enemies in the level before a timer expires by shooting projectiles at them, as well as avoiding collision. It's level-based, and each level introduces more enemies. It's playable, relatively fun, but all too rudimentary for a higher score. Also, it feels plagued by randomization a bit, where success, to some extent, depends on it.
Progression: 2/6
The game is very basic, and basically all discovery ends with completing level one.
Replay Value: 2/6
Well, the initial high score is set up rather high, so to some extent, the game is replayable in that sense, as well as trying to beat someone else's high score. Only, the amount of varied content and depth is so low, it's hard to stick with this game more than an hour.
Graphics: 2/7
The game's ASCII graphics is quite elegantly executed, and I really like how the main title was done. Only, the in-game graphics are really basic and limited in content, and there is little to "award" in this category.
Sound/music: 2/7
Minimal, but pleasent sound effects.
Personal likeness: 2/6
Solidly executed, playable, but simply too modest in ambition.
Community vote: 0/14
Total: 27/96
Download: sctank.zip
Screenshots: 1, 2
Congratulations to Pitto for winning round 1 of the competition with his Impossible Victhorse!
Please scroll down to the third post, if you don't need a detailed run-down.
Impossible Victhorse
Game design: 26/35
The game makes solid effort to incorporate the theme into its setting, and probably does the best from all the entries, in that very aspect alone. It's a platform game played in a sort of dystopian world, where FreeBASIC is outlawed and its keywords hidden and encrypted in cryptographed mainframes by Darkistra, a demented ruler of fictional Codingland. Daristra being an evil pupil of Edsger Dijkstra, so the story is mainly inspired by Dijkstra's scanthing words on BASIC most of us are very familiar with. You play Victor, obviously modeled around the image of the real life creator of FreeBASIC, André Victor Vicentini, as the only person who can free the forbidded language. A lot was done to make the world feel menacing and anti-FreeBASIC in small details. Also, the addition of a hologram assistant that pops out here and there helps to flesh out the setting. Where the game gets negative points is the fact little of this is incorporated in the very gameplay, reduced probably to only one feature (the FB horse). Also in the first mentioned aspect, the game does leave much room for improvements, like more NPCs, maybe some dialogues with enemy characters, and a more thematically compeling ending.
Gameplay: 11/15
Impossible Victhorse is a solid platform game, but does feel iffy in more than one aspect. The platforming feels more tricky than it should, and this could be related to some features that alone might not be problematic. Like sliding of platform edges and having to press up again to activate a consecutive jump, which together result in many frustrating moments. Also, the fighting part of the gameplay doesn't feel fully developed, and appears much less challenging and fun than the platforming, despite the fact that platforming part was often frustrating to me. Since there is no any collision between you and enemies that effects player's movement, either by stopping you or pushing you out, in combination with a too simplistic AI that just lunges at your position, a lot of interaction with the enemies boils down to rather one-sided and clunky confrontations. Also the level design is not terribly inspiring and varied, and Pitto seems to have ran of ideas there too soon. Overall, it's fun to play and beat, but leaves much to be desired for.
Progression: 4/6
The game does feature a solid amount of content spread over 9 levels. It introduces new features and enemies with good pacing, but fails to do the maximum to translate that to the very experience of playing the game. Impossible Victhorse doesn't seem to succeed to exploit these new features as one expects them to be exploited, the first time they are interacted with.
Replay Value: 4/6
Despite my previous criticism, the engine is quite robust and smooth, and makes the game fun to experience multiple times. A highscore table with preset scores helps increase the replayability, although the top scores are not too challenging to beat. The lack of secrets, easter eggs (as far as I know) and achievements, which is a feature constantly milked nowadays but nevertheless makes sense, definitely doesn't help Impossible Victhorse to motivate you to play it again after beating it.
Graphics: 5/7
I'm quite impressed by the design and consistency of Pitto's pixel art. While being far from sophisticated, it's very well designed, clear, effective and coherent. It really looks like a proffesional game from the early 90ies, almost to a point. Not perfect, I know, but close to something being done by someone in full control of his skill. If I was Pitto, I would be definitely encouraged by the work delivered in this game to hone this skillset in the future. I think there is genuine talent to be found here. Negative points really come down to penalizing lack of more content and sophistication in the work, and incoherent presentation here and there.
Sound/music: 6/7
The game features very good original sounds effects, and unoriginal MOD tracks, that are kind of a hit and miss. Standard fare here. Separate music/sfx volume level would be a plus.
Personal likeness: 5/6
I probably liked this specific entry the most, mostly because it was the biggest surprise of the competition, at least to me personally. Most other entries ended up being what I expected from those developers, but I didn't know what Pitto was capable off, and his work surprised me in very a positive way. Definitely a very enjoyable, stylish short platformer, and a game with a character. I only wish Pitto made a home run with a boss battle or something more effective for the finale. All in all, looking forward to his future game dev endevours.
Community vote: 14/14
Total: 75/96
Download executables: WIN, LINUX
Download source: Impossible_Victhorse-master.zip
Screenshots: 1, 2, 3
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Love Letter to FreeBasic (chan!)
Game design: 21/35
Love Letter to FreeBasic (chan!) also makes a solid hommage to the compiler, by making FreeBASIC itself an object of affection to be defended from unwanted woers. It's a single screen action game, where you basically defend the person in center (FreeBASIC chan) from the invading characters using two modes of attack. The game gives a nice rundown of ChangeV's game dev history in BASIC, by featuring characters from his old games, both QB and FB, as boss characters. It's all very cute, funny and entertaining. Still, gameplay is barely explored with the theme. It just works on a very simplistic surface level for a higher score to be warranted in this category, not that I don't appreciate the level of hommage it delivers.
Gameplay: 10/15
In its core, this is a very fun and entertaining gameplay. The main character is very responsive, the game is perfectly paced, it features nice "sliding off" collision, it fully delivers as a game engine. It feels like an endless score driven game, but it was fun to discover it actually features an ending. There is a nice progression to the difficulty, with each new boss ushering a more frantic wave of enemies. What works against the game is maybe an unfortunate combination of few gameplay elements, like the large sprites against a single screen playfield, together with the feature of enemies remaining on the screen after being killed, that make it maybe too frantic and constrained. Also, quite few elements of the game feel more like glitches than features, like dead characters as well as your hero cycling through walking animation while standing/dead, for which I'm pretty sure are bugs. If not, I think they are unfortunate design decisions. I admire how much the game pushed me to try harder, until finishing it, after some 8 attempts of so. And the ending is quite rewarding to watch. All in all, excellent work, but rather limited in content and scope.
Progression: 3/6
The game does feature "bosses", and there is a nice increase in difficulty, but the bosses themselves really don't introduce anything new, and serve more as goal posts toward the game ending. And almost all the content is recycled through the game, except the bosses. Anyway, I'm not saying any of this is bad, but this category servers to "award" entries that feature more depth and content than the other, so I need to "penalize" this aspect of Love Letter to FreeBasic (chan!).
Replay Value: 3/6
Once you beat the game, it's hard you'll be pressed to play it more than once. Perhaps if you had someone to compete with for the high score. It is however very addictive to play until you beat it, and overall, provides a rewarding experience.
Graphics: 5/7
It's the usual excellent work by JawsV. Everything is really well done, except maybe the background which looks a bit uninspired. The sprites themselves, Nintendo/Pokemon inspired, are quite vibrant and colorful, well animated, especially ChangeV flipping around. The presentation overall feels a bit lacking and rushed, so I think some graphical segments of the game were left our of the production pipeline because of the deadline. Also, the overall amount of content in the game is really limited, so any higher score would be ignoring this fact. But besides that, it's great work. I really don't know why they don't embark on a more ambitious project. They got the chops.
Sound/music: 6/7
The game feels very tight in this department. Excellent, pleasent sounding sfx, and briliantly picked music track for the theme. Again, the limited amount of sound content needs to be taken into consideration during scoring.
Personal likeness: 5/6
This game really took me by surprise once I digged a bit deeper. Initially, the glithes and odd choice to keep the enemies on the screen after they are killed was a bit off putting, but giving the game a second play really turned me to its excellent gameplay and funny, lighthearted atmosphere, which really carried me until I was able to beat it. A really, really lovely mini-game.
Community vote: 6/14
Total: 59/96
Download: LoveLetter_v1.0.zip
Screenshots: 1, 2
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Internet of Evil Things
Game design: 17/35
This game kinda stumbles in dealing with the main theme. Storywise, it deals with FreeBASIC superficially, by name only, which seems more plugged in than needed, and gameplay-wise, only graphically, where you shoot at enemies with letters going F->R->E->E->B->A->S->I->C, and turn parts of enemies from C+/PHYTON sprites into FreeBASIC sprites. It is however a cool mini-game featuring a nice throwback to classic games like Invaders, Centipede, and just misc rehashes of some classic genres. But if you can completely divorce the game from the theme by removing two or three sprites within the game and few references to FreeBASIC in intro/outro, this needs to be reflected in the score.
Gameplay: 10/15
I'm split regarding scoring this game. On one hand, it offers a really challenging but beatable experience, which on the other hand, is quite frustrating, too often depends on luck, with randomization effecting too much on your chance to win. It basically starts in an "overworld" which is some professor's house, and you need to shoot at these floating programs going around to send them back into various electronic devices in the house. Once they are in a specific device in the house, you can enter that device to play a game, in order to "cure" the trapped program (turn its body into FB blocks instead of C+/PHYTON blocks in most cases). Each device respresent a type of game, and once you finish one level of it, you progress to the next once you enter a same type of device (some feature two levels, some three, some four). There is also a surprise level at the end, and a solid outro. Finishing all levels allows you to play bonus level outside the main game, which is a nice example of unlockable content. Also, you can practice every level you reach in the main game in the previously mentioned practice/bonus mode. So despite having all proper ingedients, I'm disappointed more care was not given to actually designing levels that always play the same, or at least, not make randomization a deal breaker for wining or loosing. So the game actually lost points for me the second time I went back to it (succesful finished it after some 3 attempts or so), by bringing my attention to these flaws with randomization, which were missed during the first play session.
Progression: 5/6
There is definitely a solid amount of varied content in the game, that is unlocked with nice pace, with new content at the very end, and bonus levels you can experience afterwards.
Replay Value: 4/6
The game's feature that allows you to replay levels for a higher score, as well as bonus levels, all with individual saveable high score tables are a cool touch. But all this content that would give the game a perfect score in this department otherwise, is tarnished by the beforehand mentioned luck factor that influences each play and kind of makes any desire to beat any score, except on early levels, somewhat unrewarding.
Graphics: 4/7
Standard fare by ssjx here, perhaps slightly better than some other effors of his. The way most of levels inside of the devices are graphically conceptualized is rather effective and interesting, and a consciencious effort was made to make that part of the game notably different that the main "overworld". Also, both intro and the outro are rewarding to see, and are cool in their own unique way.
Sound/music: 4/7
Again, just solid effort, with nothing standing out or being unpleasent. It's interesting to note that the music tracks were generated by cgMusic, a program I was unaware of, because the tracks fit the game quite well. Sounds effects are somewhat scarce, though.
Personal likeness: 3/6
Initially, this was a solid 4 or even 5 for me, but the replay made me dislike the game's randomization quite a bit, and I just couldn't get passt it. I appreciate all the varied content within the game. It's perhaps the most varied entry of all, both from the gameplay and graphics angle, but the game fails to capitalize on that. It is definitely one of ssjx's better effors, and worth being played, but I'm not sure how much rewarding is to persist with it. But I personally didn't consider finishing it a waste of time. My time was awarded in that sense. I enjoyed it for the first time round.
Community vote: 10/14
Total: 57/96
Download: ioet_v05b.zip
Screenshots: 1, 2, 3
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Simple Console TANKS
Game design: 10/35
This is a simple single screen shooter where you are a FB object shooting at C+ objects, and this is were the implementation of the competition theme starts and finishes. Despite the simplistic concept, I think more could have been done for the theme, for example, by unlockable "FreeBASIC cameos" after certain amount of levels or something similar. With all this in mind, this game doesn't warrant a higher score in this cateogory.
Gameplay: 7/15
The game features solid gameplay mechanics. You are a movable object (a tank?) in a single screen, walled playfield, and you have a goal to destroy all enemies in the level before a timer expires by shooting projectiles at them, as well as avoiding collision. It's level-based, and each level introduces more enemies. It's playable, relatively fun, but all too rudimentary for a higher score. Also, it feels plagued by randomization a bit, where success, to some extent, depends on it.
Progression: 2/6
The game is very basic, and basically all discovery ends with completing level one.
Replay Value: 2/6
Well, the initial high score is set up rather high, so to some extent, the game is replayable in that sense, as well as trying to beat someone else's high score. Only, the amount of varied content and depth is so low, it's hard to stick with this game more than an hour.
Graphics: 2/7
The game's ASCII graphics is quite elegantly executed, and I really like how the main title was done. Only, the in-game graphics are really basic and limited in content, and there is little to "award" in this category.
Sound/music: 2/7
Minimal, but pleasent sound effects.
Personal likeness: 2/6
Solidly executed, playable, but simply too modest in ambition.
Community vote: 0/14
Total: 27/96
Download: sctank.zip
Screenshots: 1, 2
