Competition D Results!

Competition D challenged everyone to design a game that uses only 2 buttons. The resulting games cover quite a wide cross-section of genres, meaning that there seems to be quite a lot of design room in the constraint - perhaps we'll revisit it at some point. Perhaps we'll even manage to take the idea the AMAZE planted in my skull for a 2-button MGSA arcade machine and turn that into reality eventually.

I think one of the coolest things that came out of this competition (for which I believe we should thank @Pomb, I remember his prototype being the first to do it) is games showing their input states on-screen while you're playing. That is so incredibly useful in 2 button games that I started really missing it in the entries that didn't have it. Who knew?

Here, in alphabetical order, are the mini-reviews of every single entry that I could play:

ArcanoTrack - @Thaumaturge
Two buttons for a game? Hmm, what else has two things? Tanks! Tanks have two treads, one key for each! Time to build a game, gogogogo! ... At least, that's kinda what I imagine @Thaumaturge's initial inspiration process was like, because that's exactly what Arcanotrack is; You're piloting a tank through what looks like a randomly generated warehouse full of both boxes and evil hover-tanks. Each room of the warehouse has a collection of these evil hover-tanks in it that you have to dispatch before the next room becomes accessible. Firing is handled for you, simply point your tank towards an enemy and if it's in the firing cone, your awesome gun of hax (which can fire through walls) will start taking pot shots at them. Simple enough, right? Well, it kinda stays that simple, which is a bit of a detriment because sometimes you end up in situations that you simply can't get out of at all because AAAAAH YOU CAN ONLY REALLY MOVE FORWARD CURSES RIGHT INTO THE ENEMIES! And other times you sorta feel all smart because you trundled your way behind a wall that protected you from all the enemy shots while you were able to fire with impunity. It feels a bit slow, but the tactical aspect of such a slow game is neutered somewhat by the view distance meaning enemies can't really be planned for because you can't see them in advance, plus you're just going to trade blows with them anyway - they don't have any more complex or predictable/exploitable behaviors other than move towards you and shoot when in range. An interesting game concept nonetheless, but I can't help wondering why the tank can't go backwards - it's not like all the possible key combinations had been explored already.

Archer9000 - @Pomb
Not only did @Pomb come up with the initial idea of displaying your input stat on-screen (which is strangely absent in his final entry version), he also set the pace in terms of using the two-button combos in game-relevant ways. His key idea? Make the game all move in a specific direction: You're an archer, defending a castle to the left of the level from enemies that constantly move in from the right. A moves you left, D right and then it gets interesting! Tapping D, then A launches your character into the air, entering the same combo again kicks you into one of the mose satisfying double jumps ever. Tapping the reverse, A followed by D charges up a bow shot, firing when you release the D key. These movements just seem to fit, "forwards" fires your bow while the direction that feels like "backwards" makes you jump, so slick! From these simple mechanics, @Pomb coaxes some incredibly rewarding gameplay. You feel like a virtuoso, tapping away to pepper legions of (clearly evil, I mean, look at their hoodies!) swordsmen, leaping into the air to battle dragons, shoot down birds for their health-bearing crates and curve arrow shots neatly onto the heads of charging horsemen. Once you discover the air dodge you'll feel like a total badass. The game also looks amazing, with pixel art touches that make the characters feel wonderfully grounded when they have animations for what they're doing. Unfortunately the game is a little let down by the lack of variability of the waves coming at you and sometimes it's not obvious why your special bar isn't charging, but those are just polish issues. With some love and attention, @Pomb could turn this already captivating game into something truly wonderful.

BLOCKBUSTER - @padie et al
Arkanoid gets really tricky when you rotate the paddle around blocks mounted in the center of the screen. Gah! That's what Blockbuster has taught me, at least. The lack of walls seems to screw you over twice: Not only are you the only thing that can catch a wayward ball that's off at some crazy angle, but you're also guarding the entire bloody screen because the ball can escape on any of the edges. That gets difficult fast, which isn't helped by my silly brain forgetting which way was currently "left" for the paddle and zooming off in completely the wrong direction in response to an odd bounce. Perhaps that could be avoided by putting the arrows on the edge of the paddle, maybe? Either way, I'm not sure how much enjoyable gameplay there is to find in a circular Arkanoid, but I have to give @padie and co props for trying. Their mouth-generated sound effects and ultra-sarcastic music definitely won some smiles, even while I was decrying that stupid bloody ball for escaping my grasp yet again! I think they nearly managed to implement everything from the famous Juicyness video too, except for the dynamic scaling (hint: image_xscale and image_yscale, you're welcome), that and screen-shake to go with the flash. Don't worry, @padie, there's always next game for more juice.

Bomb A Mole - @Muchie, @vegeta, @kaypeedub, @MTK001, @Crazylu
"You are the flaming squirrel and your job is to stop the moles." Now that's setting a scene! What's a flaming squirrel? What does it have against moles? What are the moles doing that needs to be stopped? I MUST KNOW! *plays game* ... Okay, so apparently the moles are stealing acorns which constantly drop from a tree, or at least, doing something to acorns that makes your (i.e. the flaming squirrel's) health go down. You can attack these nefarious moles by moving left and right on a platform mid-way up the tree and setting the acorns they're trying to voodoo-life-leech your health through on fire to pelt them down on the moles' heads. Each time you pelt a mole, you score points - scoring enough points moves you instantly to a new level, where the sun is slightly lower and presumably the tree has less acorns. There's also some sort of ability to destroy acorns, but I wasn't able to trigger it reliably. I must say that the game feels rather abrupt - the level changes are instant, the moles are constantly animating like they're popping out of the ground and the acorns often spawn below your squirrel, meaning you have no chance of getting to those. All typical mistakes for a first game, so huge congratulations for making something to get those out of your system with! That is seriously the best way to approach game development, I'm glad you took the plunge and I hope you all take what you've learned from this game and make new things in future competitions, good luck!

Boost - @LittleBear
There's a lot of learning to be had from a project like this. For example, when your game revolves entirely around dodging obstacles, it's always a good idea to make dodging obstacles be the thing you're doing most of the time. Boost moves slowly enough that you're not actually dodging very much and spend more time waiting for stuff to appear so you can dodge it. I also ended up hitting configurations that were impossible to avoid at all, in one notable occasion, that happened right before the end. Forum commenters have mentioned the concept of juice on Boost's thread, but I'd like to encourage @LittleBear to focus on the interaction he's promoting and make that the laser focus of what's going on on the screen. I mean, all you do in Super Hexagon is move left and right to dodge things and that's tense and visceral as anything! When pushing a button in the game just feels great, you're onto something awesome. Mine that awesome! The implementation was pretty solid though, so hopefully @LittleBear now has a base to build more things on in the future.

Bounty Galaxy - @Nandrew
Okay, so you've just been tasked with building a game that uses only two buttons. What should you produce, knowing that you need to keep the scope limited to cope with such limited controls? Well, if you're @Nandrew, apparently the answer is "Build a sprawling space exploration game, MWAHAHAHAHA!" (I'm simply assuming there was evil laughter, it would make sense). But yeah, left and right arrows turn your ship, holding both at the same time fires your main rocket and pushes you forward. With that brief introduction, you're set adrift in space with nothing but navigation pings to guide you. Do you head off and try to buy new equipment to upgrade your ship? Do you find a station that's offering a quest and corresponding monetary reward? Do you try to rescue some hapless nearby spacefarer? Or do you fly around looking for combat? Yes, there's combat: Point your ship towards an enemy and you'll automatically fire. At first this feels cumbersome, but after a while you'll get the hang of the inertia your ship has and start doing strafing orbits of enemies, tailgating them so they can't fire back at you and weave expertly around missiles. Then you'll realise that enemy ships are colour coded to match the resources they drop when killed and you can see further when travelling in deep space between quest nodes AND EVERYTHING WILL CHANGE FOREVER. Suddenly the game goes from a random-feeling "how long can you survive" to a more directed exploration of what's around you. Buying weapon and engine upgrades, getting better shields, trading ore to rescue other ships and hoping against hope you find some purple enemies so that you can get just enough fuel to make it to the next refuelling shop... This should get polished up and turned into an obsession for people's phones.

Cap-Ship - @Rigormortis
@Rigormortis chose a space theme, but instead of going for the usual left/right thruster-analogue controls, picked a really different charging mechanic. He also flipped the gameplay area to make it a 3D dodge-the-stuff-coming-at-you concept. The two combined work surprisingly well! Tapping a direction repeatedly will charge the thrusters on that side of the ship, releasing that charge by tapping the other direction will propel your ship in the opposite direction to the one you were charging in. It feels really elegant, mostly because it makes you plan your moves ahead in response to the green/red/blue asteroids coming at you - those are all different speeds, so the field needs a bit of prediction as well. I'm rather proud of my 135 score, although I'm not entirely sure what it's counting, but it seemed high anyway - mostly because the screen was full of asteroids when I eventually died. As a prototype, this is @Rigormortis stretching his game design muscles and churning something out really quickly, it's certainly good enough to warrant a look or two - the precise-but-variable amount your ship will move feels good, all it needs is some visual feedback to go with the already-useful audio. Let me know if you get higher than my score!

Colour-Me-Thru - @Colour_Bug
Seeing a brand new team pull of a really neat mechanic with their first game is awesome :) Colour-Me-Thru has you zipping through a tiled grid along tiles of the same colour, every time your pen runs into a new colour, you have to choose which direction to go in next. Hitting the right arrow key cycles between the available directions and spacebar sends you catapulting off for as far as you might be able to go: Sometimes that's a single square in a fragmented part of the grid, other times you zoom across half the board in one swoop. It's a solid mechanic that feels like all it needs is some polish and perhaps a secondary set of feedback (maybe the pen would change the colour of the board somehow, maybe there were enemy pens that would move when you moved and block you off, maybe the pen would uncover parts of a secret letter or cypher if you were on the optimal path, etc) the boards could do with being randomly generated and while the music was neat, it did end up grating a little after a while - the option to turn it down somewhere would have been good (although I can understand the 2 button limitation might have made that hard)... Still, awesome first game from team @Colour_Bug, well done!

Defend The Sheep - @PragmaOnce
Defend the Sheep never really made it past the gameplay testing phase, which is a shame - given that the basic gameplay seems to work pretty well: Left and right turn your farmer (gun turrent, essentially), both together fires your weapon and double tapping a direction switches between the available weapons. You're pivoting left and right to take down lions that are trying to attack your sheep, because that's what lions do when they're not running in straight lines. Actually, that's something that the game could have benefited from: Targets that moved in more complex ways. It could also do with greater differences between the weapons, or at least a reason to switch between them more often. I quickly hit on a winning strategy: Stay on the pistol and sweep in a direction until you're just leading a lion, then hold the other button to start firing, hold down until lion is gone, repeat for next lion. After a while I started letting lions through, just to see what happened. Nothing did, blast. As a start it's a great one, the game works fine and there's definitely fun to be had in this space, @PragmaOnce just needs to keep looking for it! Here's to the next version.

Gemegedon - @tbulford
Gemegedon is a match 3 game where gems fall, pachinko-like, through a series of agitators and you have to try and catch them on a paddle of sorts. The paddle only has sides tall enough to support a single row of gems, so trying to stack things too high can easily end with you flinging gems into the abyss below (which places the gems in an emergency buffer on either side of your screen, from which it's actually possible to match as well), let the emergency stacks get too high and you'll lose. It's a simple enough system and the physics feel pretty good, gems slide around and seem to behave differently depending on their colour, simply shucking the gems back and forth feels quite fun. Unfortunately you end up amusing yourself with that sliding more often than you end up having to make matches, as it doesn't feel like there's much skill to the game at first - it's almost painfully slow in the beginning. To get to a level that even mildly stresses you out, you have to play through a series of "starter" levels that don't really feel like fun at all. There's a series of extras that @tbulford added to the game as well: There's a "diamond" collecting unlock sort of thing to try and get all the stages (although you can't skip the slow levels if you're good enough at them, which is what this sort of system usually facilitates) and the surprisingly robust menu system ends up being used for a bit of a text-adventure that gets unlocked if you read through all the help screens, spelling errors and all. The game feels like it's feature creeped itself in the wrong direction, I remember earlier builds being more hectic and thus, more fun. Perhaps if there'd been a focus on allowing matches of more than 3 for special powerups, maybe?

Hostage Situation - @Kixie
After much back and forth on how to compile a Java game from source (cross-platform language my shiny hahahahahahaha), it turned out that Hostage Situation did't quite adhere to the competition rules due to a misunderstanding. I think it's interesting that mouse position wasn't obviously a set of input data, but I'll give this a quick review anyway: Minesweeper is a fertile ground for design ideas, the game itself is well understood and surprisingly robust, the grid provides a focus on location that allows for a lot of new mechanics to be injected. Hostage Situation, for instance, places hostages on the board that you need to identify by revealing all the tiles around them. Triggering a bomb no longer ends your session, but kills nearby hostages instead. There's also a time element added to the game, presumably to add tension, although this doesn't work too well - most people seemed to ignore it or not realise what it was for. Perhaps individual timers visible on bombs you had revealed or triggered would push the tension to clear the board before they went off... I have no idea how you'd convert a location specific game of minesweeper into a two button game though, I'd definitely be interested in seeing @Kixie try ;)

Kerbang Space Program - @aodendaal
Having not played Kerbal Space Program (the acknowledged inspiration for this entry), that probably makes me both a horrible person AND vaguely unsuited to understanding how the 2-button restriction could impact the original game's systems. That said, it seems a little sad that @aodendaal abandoned this concept so early on in the competition. Trying to correctly maneuver your ship to land on the moon seems like it would have been an interesting challenge, I know I enjoyed trying to abuse its gravity well and hang motionless at the center of it in the version I have here... Perhaps not sticking too religiously to the constraints of Kerbal Space Program as founding vision would have freed the game up to explore what it would be like trying to pilot a fantastically thrust-heavy little ship around a fast-spinning orrery of crazy moons and planets? Bonus points for landing on every moon/planet in a random system in a specific sequence? There's more game there, definitely, all that needs doing is digging it up.

Left or Right - @atomicdomb
No playable :(

Legends of the Swell - @Manikin
Hey, I'm friggin surfing! Hah! What a great use of the two button constraint. Legends of the Swell has you paddling up to waves, turning your board, transitioning to standing up on a wave, carving AND pulling tricks, all with just the left and right arrows. It's a lot of fun catching a wave, dodging jet-skis and basically just trying to, y'know, surf. I did end up finding out that I could do more tricks by paddling into waves and treating them as ramps to flip and spin off of. Still, the hugeness of the freak waves really caught me by surprise when one first appeared and the way the game managed its state changes really felt solid. I do kinda wish there was more of a reason to play though, seeing as there's really no end condition apart from a nebulous time-out. The music, controls and, above all, waves come together to make this an amazing entry.

MecHero - @Pixel_Reaper
A platforming mech game where you use combos to fire different weapons. Like any good mech game, you're ridiculously overpowered, carrying the equivalent arsenal of a small island nation on your trudging frame. If only the combos to use your incredible weaponry and tactical systems felt a little snappier - right now getting a combo to be recognised feels sluggish - you often end up bashing away at a combo multiple times because the wait between an old combo executing and a new one being started seems to ignore keystrokes in strange ways. Thankfully you can see a combo in progress appearing on screen right above your robot, so you at least know when you've made a hash of things and should wait for a new combo window. I liked how the autocannon combo (three directional presses) rewarded you with extra shots fired if you just kept hammering the button, that was neat. The platforming felt quite mech-like, a little slow and there were jump jets when you became airborne. It felt like the enemies firing at you from waaaaaaay off-screen was a little cheap though, which explained the need for visible targeting lines so you could tell that something would probably fire at you. But managing armor and heat didn't seem to be too big a deal in the end. Perhaps if the ponderousness of mech movement were emphasised: Hold down left for a second or so to actually start moving left, at which point you start walking that way, hold down for another second to start running, etc; Then make the combo execution feel really snappy, so while your mech was lumbering along you'd be firing off missiles and blocking shots with your shield in interesting ways. @Pixel_Reaper could probably make this game sing without the 2 button restriction. I almost feel bad for imposing it.

Minigun Invaders - @FanieG
The idea of going with a Space Invaders-style concept for a two button game makes a ton of sense. Making that even cooler by adding neat overkill weapons sounds like a good idea too. After playing Minigun Invaders long enough to develop some strategies that worked really well with the minigun (and getting a little finger-sore, I have to admit) I was left wishing that it wasn't quite so badass, like maybe if the enemies had health and moved slower, or dropped dangerous bombs when killed sometimes, so I'd want to kill them and then get out of the way instead of only worrying about heat buildup. I'm kinda hoping that @FanieG keeps working on this and adds other weapon types (like a charge-up bomb that goes as high as you charge it before falling back down, as one example) but I can understand it being a fun concept to mess around with and then move on from.

Onstage Onslaught - @TheeDC
Onstage Onslaught isn't quite the metal beat-em-up gore-fest it's title makes it sound like, but it's pretty close. Well, reasonably close... Um. Anyway! You're a guitarist on stage (yes!) and you have to dodge things that are being thrown by the crowd, except for the things that you can collect for bonus score, those you probably shouldn't dodge. The controls feel good and the dodging is surprisingly forgiving, which is something I was worried about when I initially saw screenshots of the game - the main character looked really large and unwieldy. But somehow this broad guitarist is twists and weaves his way through the barrage pretty damn nimbly. I was also quite taken with the music - not many of these competition entries even have music in them, but to hear a track composed for this game specifically? That's cool. As a first game, it certainly is better than what I used to produce (musically doubly so) there are some slight visibility issues with the thrown items being hard to distinguish from the crowd sometimes, but that's something that @TheeDC and his brother can fix in their next game.

Override - @Jwho303
Pretty! Aha, I can fly - whoa, the whole screen moves when I turn. Okay, I can get this, this reminds me of Spacehack, yeah (shameless plug alert). Oh, firing happens when I hold down and release both keys. Sweet. Aww, that ship is way slower than I am, so I lost it... At least these red things are APPARENTLY STUFF THAT DAMAGES ME, ouch! Okay, this game could be really neat. It just needs, y'know, stuff to do! Beyond exploding yourself if you hold down both buttons for too long. And maybe the ship should move a little slower. And have double-taps to dash sideways, because that would be super useful in a bullet hell situation.

(arbitrary snip)

Comments

  • Page Ripping Champion 2013 - @AlphaSheep
    Hold F to move one hand, hold J to move the other. The interesting thing is that these moving hands are tearing pages out of a book. Why? Nobody knows. Maybe it's a book about repetitive strain injuries and this is catharsis treatment, maybe you're a particularly militant censor with a fast-approaching lunch hour? Either way, it's never clear if the cramp that the readme talks about is in the game or in your own fingers as you keep speeding up to try and get through those pages faster. The game could do with some status indication changes: Maybe when you did something correct to increase your multiplier your hands could show you with a flash; And the game crashing instead of showing you your score screen is a bit unfortunate, not to mention a sudden end indeed - a flashing warning when you're close to getting kicked out, perhaps? Still, a first competition entry is entitled to an issue or two, I'm certainly looking forward to more completely left-field ideas out of @AlphaSheep in the future.

    Shift - @Nitrogen
    Unspecified disasters are a known hazard of space travel. As are escape pods. It's almost enough to make you start to wonder if traveling around in actual escape pods from the start might not be a better idea, although I guess that would mean you'd have to escape the escape pod eventually. Shift sees you piloting an escape pod, mid-disaster, along tracks that would (theoretically) launch said pod into the safe vastness of non-exploding space. I said theoretically in the previous sentence because many of these tracks are blocked or broken, presumably by the disaster that you're trying to escape from, and remaining on them ends badly for you. The two game buttons try to help you out by letting you jump from track to track, although there seems to be a maximum distance you can move and the tracks often get too far apart to allow for jumping, which means that you often get stuck watching your ship slide to an inevitable doom. The tracks themselves have a secondary wrinkle to them: You slow down when a track twists and turns, so it's in your interests to try and pick the straightest tracks you can. Although see previous jump limit for the same issue with trying to pick better, faster tracks. As a prototype this shows that there's a potential game in here, it just needs better random track generation and probably less of a focus on setting up front - this game could be set anywhere and should have had its mechanics be in charge early on, not graphics.

    Skaterbot - @aodendaal
    And endless runner game where you're a robot riding a skateboard and can only lean forward or backward? Hells yes, gimme! Skaterbot seems like an idea that really needed a physics system and a whole ton of sarcasm to turn it into a game full of amusing robot crashes. As it stands, the game has you using your two buttons to perform either an ollie or nollie and from there launching into a limited set of tricks. It feels pretty fun to explore the trick system for a while, but it's rather obvious that eventually @aodendaal got a bit stuck trying to come up with ways to trigger more tricks - I couldn't figure out how to kickflip without first doing another trick, but there are still a good few ways that the two keys could have been pressed/mashed/held in combination, for instance. The time constraints also seemed to mean that the game ended up not having terrain that your robot would interact with or avoid in some way, which feels like a bit of a shame, really. Maybe I'm just an asshole for wanting to see robots fall down...

    Speed Snake - @D3zmodos
    Take the classic concept of Snake. Flip it around so that your tail length is your score. Then give the game a time limit and running into your own tail doesn't destroy you, it just destroys those segments. Finally, take the snake off its customary grid, give it a wrapping space to play in and make it speed the hell up evey time you hit a pickup. The result is crazily frenetic and oddly interesting in that sort of zen way that reflex games often head towards. Sure, you're not really competing against anything besides yourself and where the random pickups spawn, but it's fun realising that crossing your own tail early doesn't really matter very much - those segments are going to disappear as you move because you're still a short snake anyway. But later on when you're zipping around and trying to hit as few of your own segments as possible because your time is about to expire? That gets hard. It's probably made a little harder by not being able to see your time left easily - perhaps putting that in as a large visual background element would have been a good idea? The little score and time indicators in the top left get a tad difficult to check on as the game speeds up. The only other thing I'd want as a player are difficulty levels - maybe ease us into the crazy high-speed endings a bit.

    Super Hexapinball - @Chippit
    Super Hexapinball feels very slick in its execution. The transitions when you lose or start a new game are stylish, the game itself feels very solid and everything has multiple layers of feedback, from the background changing colour to match the area that's bottom-most on your screen right now, to the sound effects. It's just not immediately clear what it is that you're controlling... Eventually you realise that you're spinning a series of "gates" that you're trying to get matching coloured objects through, these objects spawn in the middle of the screen and it's your job to rotate the entire structure to align the correct gates and then let gravity do the rest. And I think that's where it comes apart a little - gravity is a fickle system and its interactions aren't immediately apparent, meaning that sometimes you feel a little bit screwed by a spawn that you had absolutely no control over as a purple object that falls faster that that orange spiky thing hurtles past into the orange gate before you had much chance to do anything about it and costs you the game. I can understand the goal of trying to be like Super Hexagon, but I think the cost to immediacy is something we can learn from. Also, I had no clue how to use the bumpers properly, what makes them move?

    Warpfield - @Gazza_N
    You're a mining ship, 1 button increases your gravity field and sucks things towards you, the other button decreases the field and repels stuff. It's a little more complex than that in practice, being gravity after all, but that's the gist of it. Use your gravity controls to smack asteroids into each other to expose their juicy gems- ahem, gemmacubes, then collect those because that's what mining ships do. Flicking asteroids around your ship and slingshotting them into each other is quite rewarding, as is the neat feeling of picking up the gemmacubes they drop. Sometimes you have to forgo cubes in order to prevent an asteroid smacking into you, but generally you have too much health to really bother with avoiding asteroids too much. There's also this really neat starfield warping effect going on to indicate your current gravity settings, which really communicates what you're doing well. The only bad thing about the game is that I felt like I wanted more reasons to mess with gravity. Sure, flicking asteroids and getting them to orbit was fun, but what if there were aliens who fired missiles that responded to gravity differently? What if there were dark matter asteroids that reversed gravity around them? I'm sure a good few minutes of brainstorming could generate all sorts of things to do in the game. Oh, and give asteroids trails. And take away ship health - 1 asteroid hit and you're dead! Mwahahaha!

    Final Results:

    1st: Archer9000
    This game is just way too much fun, packaged in a collection of awesome. Please make more of it. PLEASE!

    2nd: Bounty Galaxy
    There's so much to do and so much gameplay hiding under such simple controls. Bounty Galaxy takes a while to get used to, but once you're there it's rewarding as hell.

    3rd: Legends of the Swell
    Surfing! There's physics and jetskis and things to pick up and tricks to try and wow.

    Best New Entrant: @TheeDC
    We had so many new entries in this competition that this was actually the hardest thing to decide. In the end Onstage Onslaught had the best gameplay loop and was the game I ended up playing longest out of the new entrants. Hope to see more of you guys :)

    In Closing...

    Holy crap, that was a lot of judging. I feel pretty glad that I managed to finish it all, but I'm much happier with the state of the games people were submitting. There's a lot of potential for awesome mobile games in this competition! Also, I wasn't kidding about that 2-button arcade machine either, I'd love to see something like that representing MGSA at whatever happens to be going on in the local event scene. Especially if "2-button game" became a staple of these forums, with people building new ones for the arcade machine every so often.
  • Congratulations to all the entrants and especially to the winners!

    We must definitely see about a 2-button cabinet.
  • Hooray! Well done to the winners (see, @Pomb? Called it :P) and everyone else. Well done to @dislekcia for surviving twenty-something comp entries and still being able to manage his consistently excellent critique.

    Something that struck me was the increased implementation of sound and music, btw. Back in the day nobody really bothered because of time, so it's rad to see solid mechanics *and* graphics *and* a nice shiny audio polish layer.

    A sequel competition may well be worthwhile in a few months. 2 Button Games 2: Deuxsign challenge? :P

    I'll second (hurrrrr) the two-button cabinet.
    Thanked by 1Tuism
  • @dislekcia how did you find time. Awesome comp guys look forward to the next one.
  • Oh em gee. That's a lotta games.

    I also really liked the cabinet idea when I heard about it, and these things have been ridiculously successful in pretty much every environment they've been exposed to, so that's ALSO proof that the concept works. This *needs* to be done.

    And I think there's an adequate demonstration out there, somewhere, of the sheer level of creative space inside two buttons ...
  • Amazeballs, just so amazeballs :)

    It's incredible to see so much love for this comp, it proves this is a game-making community after all :P

    The two-button cabinet NEEDS to be done. And we can even expand it with two-player one button games :) Arcades are made for peoples - like plural, you know? :)

    Rawr rawr rawr :)
  • edited
    Very well done, @Pomb, and well done @Nandrew and @Manikin! ^_^

    Dislekcia, thank you very much for judging, and for both judging so many and providing feedback on all entries! ^_^

    Regarding my own entry:

    The point about the view-distance is a very good one, I think; perhaps it might have been better to have kept the camera static (save for moving between rooms), centred on and showing all of the current room (with the tank then either teleporting into the next room or moving automatically into it). I also agree that the game would likely have benefited from more complex enemy AI, and perhaps a player weapon that didn't pass through walls.

    (In retrospect, it also occurred to me that it might have been interesting to have included tiles that changed the player's weapon, activated on passing over them like the trap tiles. These might have provided a little more strategy and made the game a little less limited.)
    ... I can't help wondering why the tank can't go backwards - it's not like all the possible key combinations had been explored already.
    In short, I really don't like combo-based gameplay. For me, tank-track controls (and similar systems, such as I think that Bounty Space used) are at least intuitive, with the forward motion of pressing both movement keys being relatable to outcome of the normal action of those keys alone, while most combo-based mechanics feel really unintuitive.

    Of course, I realise that plenty of people feel otherwise, but I do believe in "making a game that one would like to play" -- at the least it doesn't seem to make sense to attempt to build a game (let alone under such a time constraint) that uses gameplay that I find unintuitive.

    (I could see doing so as a personal challenge, or in an attempt to stretch oneself, but I'm not sure that it would work out well, and the time constraint would seem to make it a poor idea anyway.)
  • Yay! Thanks so much @dislekcia for judging all of those games! I know the track record with responding with compo results has been spotty in the past, but I don't think anyone could say that this wasn't timely, given the number of games you had to rate. Thanks for taking the time to do them.

    I will say quite proudly that I totally stole @Pomb's input-on-screen idea, cause it was a really awesome idea given the constraint. Dude, consider yourself cloned :P

    I think the arcade cabinet is a really fun idea and something some of us should do. I know very little about either carpentry or electronics, but I'm sure between us we could sort something out. After seeing the way Sos put together that collection of his games (albeit without the actual cabinet) - almost as a part portfolio or as a way for anyone playing to keep up to date with his projects - the thought of making a kind of mini portal and sticking it in an arcade sounds really fun.

    Anyway, great compo, well done all! Looking forward to the next one.
  • @disleckcia - Thanks for doing the effort to judge all of these awesome games
  • edited
    Awesome! Well done everyone! I had such a good time with this challenge, thanks for all the suggestions. Thanks @disleckcia for judging, what a mammoth task man, very well written critiques! As for the arcade cabinet, that is a ridiculously awesome idea! Great compo, Makin' Games!
  • edited
    Awesome stuff guys, I was blown away by the entries! I'm still learning about gameplay first then graphics - I find it extremely difficult to make games that dont have something pretty to look at, and I think I figured out why:

    I primarily play games for the escapism - the ability for them to transport you away into different environments. The actual mechanics of a game (running, jumping, shooting) dont really appeal to me as the core of the game, I only see them as a means to an end (experiencing the game environment).

    Now I have realised this, it should be interesting to see what the next compo brings.
  • Thanks for all your hard work @disleckcia.

    It's the first time I've ever put a game out there for feedback, and it taught me a lot. Most importantly, I learned that I should
    1) Do more thorough bug testing, and
    2) Post the game early so that I have time to fix the issues people have with my game.

    Apart from the issue of the game just exiting after the last page (which I only got to fix after the compo deadline), I'm pretty happy with how it all turned out.

    And to everyone else who entered, well done. There were some really awesome games in there.
  • Out of curiosity, would the mouse axes have counted as our "two inputs"? Could we perhaps have made a game in which the important input was the mouse position?

    If so, two interesting ideas come to mind:

    1) The player controls a warrior who moves towards the mouse cursor, and who attacks any enemy that he collides with. However, there are several weapons available in the game, and most enemies are susceptible to only one or two (perhaps indicated by icons over their heads); the challenge then is to attack enemies that your current weapon will kill, avoid enemies that it won't, and in-between dodge to various special tiles that contain the other weapons, stepping on which will swap your current weapon for the one on that tile.

    2) This one is somewhat inspired by @Nitrogen's post above. Similarly to the previous idea, the player controls a character who moves towards the mouse cursor, and again there are enemies, but this time the player has no direct means of fighting back. Instead, the player character is an archaeologist exploring the ruins of a lost civilisation, attempting to discover what calamity befell them.

    The backgrounds would be pictures of beautiful ruin, and the player would be required to collect various artefacts and documents through which they might piece together the story, at least in part, of the people who once lived there. Perhaps -- if time is not considered another "input" -- there might be friezes or walls covered in hieroglyphs that the player would be required to stop at for a certain amount of time -- measured by a meter that would appear above the object -- in order to translate the markings thereon.

    However, there are also monsters that the player must avoid. In some cases, perhaps, the player could lure less-intelligent foes into traps, or lure them towards other monsters that they are antagonistic to (perhaps undead are hostile to all life, allowing the player to draw them to, say, a pack of wolves in order to tie up both parties). In other cases perhaps evasion is the only viable solution.

    (Given the time constraint of the competition, this second idea might have only a few rooms at entry-time.)

    (In either idea above, the menu system could perhaps be handled by placing it in a set of special "rooms", with menu options represented by doors between rooms through which the player walks to select the relevant item.
  • edited
    Well, that'd probably be something else, because the constraints are two digital buttons - with on and off states, not a range of analogue inputs.

    We could do a challenge where all you do is move the mouse :P Arguably fruit ninja is like that.
  • Well, my thought is that since games that used both mouse clicks and mouse position were ruled against on the grounds that the mouse position counted as (at least one) additional input, position alone might count for the required input. :P

    (If we do have such a competition, however, one of the above would likely be my entry.)
  • Just make it! :D
  • I have enough projects on my plate already, and more waiting to be made! XD;;
Sign In or Register to comment.