It's simple mod but it does its thing well. Just rightclick with the spyglass to zoom. And the zoom is smooth and there's a simple HUD effect while you're zoomed in. So it feels like you're actually using a spyglass.
This mod is much superior to MTG's binoculars. A fork of this mod will be included in Repixture.
Thank you for this review. I kinda agree, this game needs balancing especially with the trades. And most importantly, this game just needs more of everything: Blocks, creatures, items, and whatnot. It's true, too many items only have one purpose, I want to change that in the next months.
I am currently in heavy development in this game. The painting system is very recent, and I just finished completing a major mob code rework. Many more features are planned. Please give it another try in a couple of releases or so.
I disagree that being able to place books makes item frames "less useful". I think it is legitimate to have multiple ways of decoration.
BTW: It is possible to multiply all plants, but some plants are harder to multiply. Some of them only spread on fertilizer. Experiment!
In the latest "libre10" update, most of your problems should be addressed now.
The red curtain now matches the color of red wool and should look less bad.
The trampoline is now 3D and no longer invisible from below.
The missing bowl of soup and the infinite extending rope in Creative Mode have been fixed a while ago.
The cactus brick and garden stone path is unchanged. I guess this is mostly a matter of taste; can't make everyone happy. *shrug*
I don't really want to touch the textures except for fixing obvious flaws, as I want to stick to the aesthetic of the original X-Decor mod.
Here are some more thoughts about some specific features of the game:
The world is very nice to look at. The trees are gigantic. The very tall grass in the jungles is quite annoying tho. I can't see, and I often keep missing the hitbox.
There is a shop feature. You can buy and sell items at any time everywhere and you even get to keep the coins after you die. This makes the shop pretty OP in its own right. The shop incentivizes you to just loot and plunder the villages and sell their stuff. Which is so hilarious that its fun again. Oddly, there are also special shops in villages, but the items are always more expensive than the shop you can access everywhere. And these shops are completely random.
There are "functional skins", skins that give you special skills. The snowman is completely broken. If you equip this skin, you regenerate health, food and water levels very quickly when you stand on snow, thus basically solving your food problem.
Features like this show how messy the game balance is. At parts, this game is ridiculously deadly but then much of it is nullified if you press the right buttons.
Cities are very broken. You just walk through the world and *POOF*! A city appears either inside you or under your feet. Full of cars that are all going to crash into everyone and everything including you. This makes GTA look peaceful in comparison. :D
Many foods can be eaten multiple times but this often leads to chaos in your inventory. Like, if you have a stack of 10 flesh, and eat it two times, the partially-eaten fleshes just litter your inventory. Very annoying.
And finally, to be fair, I barely scratched the surface of this game. There are so many features I did not use yet because I just die too often. XD
I think I will look again at this game later, hoping that the worst problems get fixed.
This game has a HUGE amount of content. That's a plus! It will take you quite some time to explore everything. I don't think I've even scratched the surface. You can find villages, even cities, lonely huts, animals everywhere, ruins. The underground is also full of mysteries. The biomes are large and complex. The overworld and underground are nice to look at. There are so many features. There is a LOT you can do in this game.
BUT: This game just want to kill me. Even touching flowing water can propel you at high speeds, often leading to insta-kill. The world is full of deep chasms that will kill you with fall damage. Even a single tiny wasp can kill you within seconds and you usually don't even know what killed you. Sometimes you just randomly die at full health and have NO IDEA why. If you happen to find a city, there are cars that just crash into everyone and everything. Food is somewhat sparse and hunger and thirst come fast. Especially thirst, figuring out how not to die of thirst is tricky.
There's an elaborate parcours mechanic. A LOT of special moves. But I keep triggering the moves when I do not want them and fail to trigger them when I don't. A worst of all, make a wrong parcour move, and you may take collision damage.
I don't have anything difficult games. But if most deaths just happen by random chance, this is not fun.
The menus look ugly and are full of typos. Many menu images are placed in a weird ways. Item names often look like "Crystal15".
And there are just outright bugs. So many bugs I don't even want to list them.
But still … this game, despite all its flaws, still was … kinda fun? Too bad its so broken and frustrating to play. :-(
This game really needs serious polishing and bugfixing before I can recommend it. To the developer I strongly recommend to stop adding more features but instead refine the existing ones, fix all the bugs, polish the UI and review ALL the text for typos.
Fun fact: Back when I was still the main dev of MCL2, I have been guilty of just spamming half-finished feature after feature after feature which eventually made the codebase messier and worse: buggier. The bugs started to pile up quickly which was one of the reasons that lead to me burning out and losing all motivation for MCL2. So some of the messiness of the codebase might be my partially my fault, lol. That having said, I think I never randomly broke compability for no reason except in VERY early stages of development.
If I would pick up leadership of MCL2 again today, my first priority would be to halt all feature development and focus on bugfixing and maintenance first until the bug count has returned to a managable level. Crash bugs will have top priority. Oh, and I would 100% nuke the hamburger. XD I would also be more strict on enforcing backwards-compability.
Anyway, I mostly agree with erlehmann and think having some dev standards for such a complex project is definitely very helpful. (Before you ask, no, I will not return to MCL2 dev in any way lol.)
As for the music argument, there are good news: In MT 5.8.0, music (or any large sound files) loads now much more efficiently (devs worked on performance). I think music should be "safe to use" for most games now.
PS: I haven't been following MCL2 development for years so please excuse me if I got anything wrong.
Tell me about it! I have been unsuccessfully trying to establish this as the (or a) default game for years but yeah. No success and I've given up by now.
Oh well. At least in version 1.1.0, the dialog boxes are fixed and you also can no longer fall in an annoying hole at the aforementioned coordinates. Thanks for finding the coordinates, this stuff is very easy to overlook.
Also, the shadows should no longer spawn at this alarming rate like in the game jam version 1.0.1.
Let's just say I didn't really know what I was doing; I tried to do a little bit of everything and didn't have a great game idea to begin with, especially one that fits with the theme "Unexpected". I changed the direction of the game twice and stuff got a little chaotic … I'm happy I managed to get out something playable with 4 levels in the first place! And some people still liked it tho. I think we can all agree this game does not even come close to Glitch. :D
Yeah, fair enough. I tried to do something with mobs for the 2023 game jam but this was a risk since I'm not very experienced with them. I'm not really happy with the end result either, but you know, time constraints. As for the Unexpected theme, there is a minor plot twist / surprise / ??? at the end that you probably haven't reached although the question of how good it is is debatable of course. Admittedly, the 2023 theme is quite hard to find a good game idea in the first place. Just look at the other submissions. :-(
But yeah, it's not like I disagree with the critics or I'm unaware of the problems. That's the thing with risky game ideas, you can never know how well they turn out before you actually put them into practice. Originally I've planned more types of mobs but it turns out making good mobs is hard lol, especially under time contraints.
Anyway, it seems you haven't figured out how to reach the end boss. If you have 3 light crystals, you need to approach the bush in the last level (portal in the 1st floor of the Tree of Life) to unlock the final level.
I admit the dialog doesn't communicate the goal very well, maybe I improve it in the next version.
Overall, I agree with you. I'm also only half-happy with the result.
In the floating stone platform area, there's a spot where it's not deep to fall down, and you can see the ground. It's unexpected that one dies there, but unexpected in a bad way.
You can easily get out of the level in the first level, and directly go to the last level. This doesn't seem intended.
There are too many enemies at once.
Picking up items by walking over them doesn't work reliably.
Version 1.1.0 has been released and hopefully all your reported bugs are fixed here, including the sound. See forum thread for changelog. You can also check out the new sound directly here: https://codeberg.org/Wuzzy/Shadow_Forest/issues/10
Please tell me if it's OK or if it still needs fixing.
It sounds like you’re not using X-Decor-libre but only X-Decor which is the original but outdated and very buggy. I assure you X-Decor-libre does support the 50-move rule (but a player must invoke it for it to count as draw (I applied FIDE rules)) and castling, too. Also, you need at least Minetest 5.7.0 for X-Decor-libre.
Strange. I am unaware of any of the bugs you just mentioned. Sure you use the latest version of X-Decor-libre (libre8)? If yes, I would like to see the crash logs.
So, thanks for the review. Now that the game jam results are finally in, here's a longer reply:
Actually, this game was never meant as a "soulslike", as in "absurdly difficult". The large amount of mobs was not intended. The problem is that I've put too few restraints on mob spawning in so that mobs just keep spawning and spawning and killing them doesn't help to stop the spawning. Mob spawning is kinda broken and in fact, this is the last item on my TODO list before I ran out of time. :-/
There actually ARE limits to mob spawning, but obviously these restraints are just unbalanced and way too "permissive", i.e. allowing too many mobs to spawn. I think the biggest problem was that killing mobs doesn't stop or even slow down the infinite stream of mobs. So the current winning strategy is to run, which wasn't really intended lol.
Are you sure it's the projectile HIT sound that has a high frequency problem? I would say if any sound is a problem, it'll be the SHOOT sound since it's much higher pitchde than the hit sound. But anyway, I'll add that to the TODO list. This is actually one of the very few problems in the game I was NOT aware of before submission.
PS: I'm also planning to write a making-of and post it in the forum thread soon(ish). Stay tuned for that (and the post-jam update :P).
Item pickup does work reliably but you must stand VERY close to the thing. I think I should increase the pickup range
The unexpected part is the reveal in the final level where you learn where all the shadows are coming from. Your light orb literally says the word "unexpected" in the dialog. THAT is the unexpected part. OK, OK, I admit this is quite "forced". tbh I mostly ignored the theme but still tried to apply it somehow. lol now you know the truth. :P
Goal could be communicated better: Yeah, the wizard is a little cryptic and doesn't explain what the light crstals are for which I think is pointlessly confusing. But apparently not THAT confusing since you obviously managed to break the shadow bush barrier
No boss music: Yes, but this is why: This was the first time ever I composed and published my own music! This already cost me a lot of time. Adding a boss music would have completely destroyed my time schedule. And actually I tried anyway but failed to come up with a good melody but failed as I'm not really a musician lol so I just had to scrap the idea. I'm still immensely proud I managed to put any of my music in the game in the first place tho :P
Boring boss fight: Yeah, my experience with mob development is still low and it's a very very basic mob but at least it's not as broken as the other mobs. But I see if I can make the final boss more interesting
No feeling of progress ... I don't know what to say about that. Very subjective, hard to "fix"
I'm happy you like the light orb. I spent WAY too much time on making it work absolutely smoothly with natural-looking movement without lag .
I don't think I used the damage indicator in a hacky way. It works perfectly, does it not?
The reverb works with the most boring trick ever: Duplicate the normal stone nodes, but add a reverb sound. All reverb sounds are actually new sound files, too. Totally unimpressive programming-wise but the player doesn't have to know :D
The dialog text bug is the worst bug in the game ever because in the final day, I actually added code to make the font smaller on small resolutions but some people still got the bug because I chose a bad cut-off point :-( I'm SUPER mad about this bug because my last-day bugfix was still buggy lol
Good point about the floating stones. I think I should make the chasm waaaaaay deeper so it's actually believable that you die
Great job in finding a way to escape the level! I tried hard to make that impossible but I overlooked something lol. The forest level is the last level I made in the final day so it was hastily put together lol. Not surpried it is THAT level that still had a bug
I agree there are WAY too many mobs. Mob spawning is the most broken/least polished aspect and the only thing left on my TODO list before I ran out of time. Sadly, due to personal life issues (nothing serious, don't worry) and just bad time planning, I failed. I decided to make a game with mobs this time, which was a big risk because of my lack of experience with them. Maybe if I had chosen a less risky game idea, I would have won. :P
I basically agree with most criticisms expect for the "unexpected" part.
But yes, mobs are by far the least polished part of the game and you're right, it is indeed infinite spawning. Also, just way too many of them spawn.
My excuse is that I had poor planning and time management and "fixing mob balancing" was the last item on my TODO list. :-(
Basically I took a risk by attempting mob development and failed. Yeah, that's the thing with risks lol. ;-)
This game was meant as partly combat- partly exploring-style but it was NOT intended that mobs overwhelm you and annoy you all the time.
The idea was, once you defeated some mobs of an area, you are free to explore (at least for a while). Sadly, none of that managed to get in the game. Time constraints. :-(((
As for "too many collectibles": They are all optional tho and you don't even have to find all to get max. HP. Other people seemed to like the collectibles. I'm not sure what I should change here. You can complete the game and ignore all vases (although it's harder then). Maybe you're saying the game would have been better without any vases, or just with fewer? But then, most other players liked them. Difficult decision on what to do post-jam. :-/
I agree with the dialog problem, the appearance mid-combat feels a bit off, too. I'll see what I can do.
But to be honest, I'm a bit mad tho that you outright refuse to complete the game (just like with Glitch last year) after only 1 death. :-( I don't like this (even if I agree with most of your criticisms). I feel like you give up way too early on game jam games. I noticed this with your other game reviews, too.
Anyway, I think all these problems can be fixed. Most importantly, I'm planning to rework mobs completely post-jam.
I'm glad you liked the game, even the mob combat, although mob combat is the least polished aspect of the game. I also noticed there are some dirty tricks where you can just slaughter the shadow mobs without getting hit once, thus quickly getting most upgrades. Although I think not many people found these dirty tricks. Mobs in general are not the smartest and I definitely need to fully rework them. Many players had problems with the mob fight and I fully expected this. I sadly didn't have the time to polish mobs more but I'm planning a post-jam version. If you're interested, I will also write a making-of and post it in the forum thread.
I also agree that Glitch is better (simply way more polished).
The shadows still spawn, and there appears to be no increase in light.
Maybe I shoudn't have built the exit portal in the boss room then to hide this issue. XD
I only added it so you can go looking for the remaining vases. A treat for completionists, basically. ;-)
The in-world excuse is that "the forest still needs time to heal" but this is very lame, of course.
Yeah, since you can return to the Tree of Life, the environment should definitely change.
And yes this was a time constraint thing.
Yeah, basically I took a risk this time by trying a game with mobs, something I have not much experience with. Additionally, I decided to do everything myself, even the music. Which I did. (I'm going to post a making-of in the forum thread soon(ish).)
But I had a lot of problems with time management this time and also pointlessly lost time due to personal matters and procastination.
But ultimately I just ran out of time to polish the mob fighting. :-( The mob spawning is clearly unfair (it never stops spawning) and that's because I didn't really complete it. Basically all the criticisms WRT mobs I got from you and others I agree with and these are problems I am very aware of. Mobs are the only item that were left on my TODO list when time ran out. :-(
Anyway, I think this and some other problems can be fixed.
The most polished mob in the game is the light orb, I think, which I'm actually very proud of how smooth it works.
Interesting how you like the graphics when some other people hated the looks for some reason and thought Glitch looked better. Well, I guess you can't please everyone. :D
My excuse is that I just had poor time management and planning. I think it wasn't that great of a game idea in the first place, plus I was struggling with ideas for a long time. Also, building the map. I also had other difficulties, and you can read more about that in the making-of that I'm going to post in the forums eventually.
Basically I decided to take a risk and try something with mobs. Risky because I still don't have much experience with them.
I wanted to polish everything. But mobs are clearly the least polished thing and it's basically the only big item left on the TODO list before I ran out of time. And I completely agree mob spawning is pretty broken. Fun fact: It was even more broken on the last day, with so many mobs spawning in the old mine that you just can't fight your way through even when maxed-out. I fixed at least that but obviously that's far from enough.
Long story short, the way how mobs work now is not intended and this game was not meant to be ridiculously unfair. Basically all your criticisms about mobs I agree with and are just the result of poor time management. Mobs are the least-polished aspect by far. Of course that's all planned for the post-jam version.
Thanks. Yeah, I spent a lot of time on polishing the light orb behavior and it shows; I wanted to make at least one "mob" with very fluent and believable movement. My trick is to not waste time in writing a mob API in the first place but just directly code everything into the entity. You will read more about that in the making-of I'm going to post in the forum thread eventually.
Sadly, the other mobs are not even close as polished (YET!) as you can see from the other reviews.
my only request is that i'd love upgrades to really beat up the shadow mobs after destroying the boss :p
An interesting idea. You can already return to the Tree of Life (the level hub) after you defeat the boss (who dropped a lot of shadow fragments). An exit portal will open in the boss room. But the world doesn't really change. I'm not sure if I'll add this idea; first I have to balance the main game more (especially mob combat).
I never planned to add more "lore" to the game. The story is intentionally kept very minimalist and is mostly just an excuse plot like in Super Mario games. I wanted to focus more on the gameplay.
As for "drive", I don't know exactly what you mean but my excuse is that, this time I managed my time too poorly (I will post a making-of in the forum thread later if you're interested).
This game is/was incomplete at the date of submission. A lot of the story is clearly missing. The intro kinda works and you get a little dialog at the beginning, then you get to explore some rooms of a building in the barren snow desert but there's not much to do except walk and look. So the gameplay is very very incomplete.
I recommend to check this game out at a later day, when it's complete.
My favourite entry for this year's game jam.
You encounter ruins and a ghost. You find things that make you go to the past, then to the future and there is 5 time periods of a citadel.
You then have to use the seeds of plants and timetravel to reach different parts of the citadel. Each time period unlocks new speeches of the ghost which is a nice touch.
I played this game for like 2 or 3 hours because I also wanted to find all 7 artifacts. (and I did. Woohoo!)
The map is well-made and must have taken ages to piece together.
Using plants to rise in height feels awkward. What I did was I placed an acorn and jumped to the corner and made future travel hoping it'll let me, then I move quickly back to the tree. Only takes me like 50 tries but it works somehow. Awkward. Unless this is cheating?
You'd think that standing on top of a small tree then going to the future would work but no.
The challenge is to obtain several important items and reach tricky locations by clever exploring and timetravel. The final goal is basically to reach the top with a special item.
But that's not all! There are artifacts! These are a clever addition and they kept me hooked a while longer although they were completely useless. And some artifacts had really clever locations. Sadly they don't unlock anything, not even a secret dialog.
The music is simple but sets a good tone. I wish there would be more sound effects. There isn't even a footstep sound yet.
Shadows seem to not work in this game? Every block seems to glow?? It looks certainly a little weird but you get used to it.
I don't really understand where the "unexpected" comes in but whatever.
The submitted game jam version sadly had a lot of small bugs and it crashed when I destroyed the crystal (but this was the end anyway). I really want this game to become bugfree and more polished in future versions.
Anyway, this game definitely kept me busy from start to finished including bonus items, so good job!
The beginning of the game looks like an outright bug. After a first briefing, the screen is (almost?) completely black. I thought the game is broken because I couldn't see the vent I am supposed to open. It is VERY dark and I had to find it basically blind. And the vent glows but it is VERY hard to see. Not a great start.
Once I finally entered the facility, the real game began.
There are a couple of very basic rooms to explore but they're mostly useless. Lots of robots move around but they're harmless vacuum bots or mini-tanks? There is an adventure-game-like interface of inspecting, reporting, using things you see. Sadly, much of it is unfortunately unused.
The game has a lot of dialog but using chat for it is a terrible idea: Font is too small.
Eventually I found some kind of "robo-labyrinth". You try out some very basic puzzles where you can guide robots through mazes with instructions (move North, South, etc.). I wasted my time "solving" the puzzles but the actual goal is to just start the puzzles and pick up the robot that looks different because it's the battle robot. I solved all puzzles but it's no challenge at all; you just need to count the squares, basically.
Once you picked up the battle robot, you must reach the exit and that's it.
I have died like 2 times for no apparent reason. Suddenly a screen showed up telling me a robot killed me. I don't know where it came from and it was an insta-death. Very confusing.
The game idea is relatively unique and hasn't been tried out too often. Trying to explore the world (almost) only by sound. Interesting, but I find it to be very confusing in practice. The README explains things well, but I still didn't get very far.
You're not entirely blind. Blue particles float upwards from blocks, so they're an useful indicator of the landscape while still leaving much ambiguity. I like that concept, so you're not staring at a completely black screen all the time. XD
I managed to dig a few blocks like dirt and sand. But the pickaxe seemed useless. I tried to dig stone for like 1 minute but apparently stone is unbreakable in this game, even with a pickaxe. There are "achievements" but I only found 1 for digging lots of sand, maybe? I don't know what the other achievements are.
My biggest success is killing a few chicken for food.
The world itself must be very barren. I walked 1000s of blocks but all I found is dirt, sand and stone, and what seems to be the occassional cave. Leaves and woody-like blocks exist but are rare. I don't think I ever found a forest.
Item selection is confusing. You have an "audible" hotbar, meaning by switching tools, you hear a sound. Each thing has its unique sound, which is nice, but you still have to guess what each sound means. And I think this is where the whole item system kinda falls apart, sadly.
Low health is signalled by heartbeats but I find it stresses me out so I just restart the game when I take damage lol.
The sound design isn't that great. The sounds that are in the game are pretty good, but there are too few of them overall. There's music, but it plays too rarely. If you don't do anything, the game is often silent. There is a lack in ambient sounds which for a game like this is a bummer.
I get the game is supposed to be about blindness but I think the whole UX needs to be reworked entirely cuz I simply don't have any idea WTF I'm doing lol.
This is a very simple but clean Chess implementation. The pieces look nice, you know whose turn it is. En passant works. Castling works. Basic draw conditions work. And the computer opponent is stronger than me, but then, I'm terrible at Chess, rofl.
Dead position detection is incomplete but that's a known problem in Chess software. Also, promotions always promote to queen, you can't choose.
What I criticize is that you must use a chat command to start the game. Why not use blocks or buttons or something on the chessboard instead?
But this isn't Chess. It's Chess with luck. Every few turns, something random happens. A piece disappears or gets added. Two pieces are swapped. A lot of pieces disappear. Night mode gets activated. You travel back in time. And so on.
While this is an "unexpected" idea, I think the random events are just too random. Worst, they are just very poorly balanced. The developer just took a few simple ideas and threw them in. Any random event can make or break the game at any time. The Showdown events removes all pieces except kings and queens and is probably the most broken event lol (in terms of gameplay). One random events leaves the board in an seemingly "illegal" state: Sfter two pieces are swapped, it can happen a pawn ends up at the other side of the board but it does not promote so it can't do anything anymore.
Another UX criticism I have of the luck element is that you don't see which pieces got removed/added/swapped/etc. You have to recall it from memory somehow (VERY hard). This makes it awkward to play. So the luck is not only too random, but also too confusing.
I give this a negative rating because the luck elements kinda ruin the game. If the luck elements would have been more balanced or be more fun, that would be different. To be fair, there's a "normal chess" mode but this wasn't the point of this game.
Well, this is something special. It replicates the UI of old OSes from like 30 years ago and captures the look-and-feel ... somewhat. Even the booting screen is (somewhat) replicated.
It supports multiple windows (but overlapping is buggy). It can run multiple "applications" (read: windows) at once.
The most impressive part in mineos is "Boom", a simple Doom-like shooter completely within a window. This window is very small but it actually works. The game itself lets you just shoot things, there is no mission, health or pickups, but it's a great proof-of-concept.
There's also a Pong clone (sadly, no win condition, too) and a ... Lua interpreter (which is very hard to use since you must type with a on-screen keyboard).
I am a bit disappointed there aren't more applications or things to do, or that at the very least , the existing things weren't more fleshed-out. The icons on the desktop can only be dragged but are otherwise non-functional so a bit more polishing would have been nice.
But still: Thumbs up because of the innovation. Although there is not much to do and it gets boring fast and there isn't much in terms of gameplay, it's the technical innovation that you check out.
[NOTE: This review is for the game jam version of the game]
The game mechanics are pretty simple: You get a magic staff and it has 3 capabilities: You can float, you can shoot blue projectiles of ... something and you can become small.
The rooms are pretty simple parcour and/or puzzle maps. Only one room has frustrated me a little because the timing of your jump had to be near-perfect, but I still managed to do it. The "shooting" and "become small" abilities work exactly as you think and they work perfectly.
The "floating" ability feels kinda awkward tho. Basically it just deactivates gravity for you for a few seconds, so you have to first jump, then activate the ability and time it VERY precisely. It works, but it's awkward to use. I wish this ability had been more fleshed-out. I would strongly recommend this in case a larger, more serious version of the game is planned.
The game is pretty short. At the end there's a simple but solid boss fight. It crashed but I could restart and finish the game.
The game is okayish but not great. It's well enough executed for a neutral rating. Neutral because the floating is not well balanced and there is one room that was pointlessly frustrating because you needed perfect jump timing. With better polishing and levels, I would have given thumbs up.
PS: My game completion time was 24 minutes, 18.467227 seconds (very precise game timer lol)
This is just low-effort trolling. You click on a lever, then it's game over. LITERALLY.
The rest of this ... thing ... is a lengthy on-screen text basically mocking the player. Basically: How you could have been so stupid to expect a real game? The text isn't even funny or clever, just insulting. I kind of hoped the REAL game would start after the text but nope. That's literally it. There is ONE joke, and it's not even funny.
OK, there are "achievements" for such challenging things like "look at the ceiling" (before pressing the lever) but that's all the content you will get.
This entry is so lazy, not even most of the code was written by the submitter, a lot of code is just borrowed. This is not against the rules, but I think this is missing the point.
Lol of course I understand the code, I've been making Minetest mods on and off for over 10 years.
It's simple mod but it does its thing well. Just rightclick with the spyglass to zoom. And the zoom is smooth and there's a simple HUD effect while you're zoomed in. So it feels like you're actually using a spyglass.
This mod is much superior to MTG's binoculars. A fork of this mod will be included in Repixture.
Thank you for this review. I kinda agree, this game needs balancing especially with the trades. And most importantly, this game just needs more of everything: Blocks, creatures, items, and whatnot. It's true, too many items only have one purpose, I want to change that in the next months.
I am currently in heavy development in this game. The painting system is very recent, and I just finished completing a major mob code rework. Many more features are planned. Please give it another try in a couple of releases or so.
I disagree that being able to place books makes item frames "less useful". I think it is legitimate to have multiple ways of decoration.
BTW: It is possible to multiply all plants, but some plants are harder to multiply. Some of them only spread on fertilizer. Experiment!
The fact this mod is even needed is probably evidence that Minetest suffers from undiscovered memory leaks.
The real long-term solution to the described problem, thus, is to investigate what on Earth is going wrong with Minetest.
Ideally, Minetest should be able to run for a long time with no memory issues.
In the latest "libre10" update, most of your problems should be addressed now. The red curtain now matches the color of red wool and should look less bad. The trampoline is now 3D and no longer invisible from below. The missing bowl of soup and the infinite extending rope in Creative Mode have been fixed a while ago.
The cactus brick and garden stone path is unchanged. I guess this is mostly a matter of taste; can't make everyone happy. *shrug* I don't really want to touch the textures except for fixing obvious flaws, as I want to stick to the aesthetic of the original X-Decor mod.
Thank you for saving the world. You're a hero! :D
Here are some more thoughts about some specific features of the game:
The world is very nice to look at. The trees are gigantic. The very tall grass in the jungles is quite annoying tho. I can't see, and I often keep missing the hitbox.
There is a shop feature. You can buy and sell items at any time everywhere and you even get to keep the coins after you die. This makes the shop pretty OP in its own right. The shop incentivizes you to just loot and plunder the villages and sell their stuff. Which is so hilarious that its fun again. Oddly, there are also special shops in villages, but the items are always more expensive than the shop you can access everywhere. And these shops are completely random.
There are "functional skins", skins that give you special skills. The snowman is completely broken. If you equip this skin, you regenerate health, food and water levels very quickly when you stand on snow, thus basically solving your food problem.
Features like this show how messy the game balance is. At parts, this game is ridiculously deadly but then much of it is nullified if you press the right buttons.
Cities are very broken. You just walk through the world and *POOF*! A city appears either inside you or under your feet. Full of cars that are all going to crash into everyone and everything including you. This makes GTA look peaceful in comparison. :D
Many foods can be eaten multiple times but this often leads to chaos in your inventory. Like, if you have a stack of 10 flesh, and eat it two times, the partially-eaten fleshes just litter your inventory. Very annoying.
And finally, to be fair, I barely scratched the surface of this game. There are so many features I did not use yet because I just die too often. XD I think I will look again at this game later, hoping that the worst problems get fixed.
(review for version 2024-01-23)
This game has a HUGE amount of content. That's a plus! It will take you quite some time to explore everything. I don't think I've even scratched the surface. You can find villages, even cities, lonely huts, animals everywhere, ruins. The underground is also full of mysteries. The biomes are large and complex. The overworld and underground are nice to look at. There are so many features. There is a LOT you can do in this game.
BUT: This game just want to kill me. Even touching flowing water can propel you at high speeds, often leading to insta-kill. The world is full of deep chasms that will kill you with fall damage. Even a single tiny wasp can kill you within seconds and you usually don't even know what killed you. Sometimes you just randomly die at full health and have NO IDEA why. If you happen to find a city, there are cars that just crash into everyone and everything. Food is somewhat sparse and hunger and thirst come fast. Especially thirst, figuring out how not to die of thirst is tricky.
There's an elaborate parcours mechanic. A LOT of special moves. But I keep triggering the moves when I do not want them and fail to trigger them when I don't. A worst of all, make a wrong parcour move, and you may take collision damage. I don't have anything difficult games. But if most deaths just happen by random chance, this is not fun.
The menus look ugly and are full of typos. Many menu images are placed in a weird ways. Item names often look like "Crystal15".
And there are just outright bugs. So many bugs I don't even want to list them.
But still … this game, despite all its flaws, still was … kinda fun? Too bad its so broken and frustrating to play. :-(
This game really needs serious polishing and bugfixing before I can recommend it. To the developer I strongly recommend to stop adding more features but instead refine the existing ones, fix all the bugs, polish the UI and review ALL the text for typos.
Fun fact: Back when I was still the main dev of MCL2, I have been guilty of just spamming half-finished feature after feature after feature which eventually made the codebase messier and worse: buggier. The bugs started to pile up quickly which was one of the reasons that lead to me burning out and losing all motivation for MCL2. So some of the messiness of the codebase might be my partially my fault, lol. That having said, I think I never randomly broke compability for no reason except in VERY early stages of development.
If I would pick up leadership of MCL2 again today, my first priority would be to halt all feature development and focus on bugfixing and maintenance first until the bug count has returned to a managable level. Crash bugs will have top priority. Oh, and I would 100% nuke the hamburger. XD I would also be more strict on enforcing backwards-compability.
Anyway, I mostly agree with erlehmann and think having some dev standards for such a complex project is definitely very helpful. (Before you ask, no, I will not return to MCL2 dev in any way lol.)
As for the music argument, there are good news: In MT 5.8.0, music (or any large sound files) loads now much more efficiently (devs worked on performance). I think music should be "safe to use" for most games now.
PS: I haven't been following MCL2 development for years so please excuse me if I got anything wrong.
Tell me about it! I have been unsuccessfully trying to establish this as the (or a) default game for years but yeah. No success and I've given up by now.
Version 1.1.0 is out with many bugfixes. I hope it is better now.
Oh well. At least in version 1.1.0, the dialog boxes are fixed and you also can no longer fall in an annoying hole at the aforementioned coordinates. Thanks for finding the coordinates, this stuff is very easy to overlook.
Also, the shadows should no longer spawn at this alarming rate like in the game jam version 1.0.1.
Let's just say I didn't really know what I was doing; I tried to do a little bit of everything and didn't have a great game idea to begin with, especially one that fits with the theme "Unexpected". I changed the direction of the game twice and stuff got a little chaotic … I'm happy I managed to get out something playable with 4 levels in the first place! And some people still liked it tho. I think we can all agree this game does not even come close to Glitch. :D
But thanks for playing! XD
Yeah, fair enough. I tried to do something with mobs for the 2023 game jam but this was a risk since I'm not very experienced with them. I'm not really happy with the end result either, but you know, time constraints. As for the Unexpected theme, there is a minor plot twist / surprise / ??? at the end that you probably haven't reached although the question of how good it is is debatable of course. Admittedly, the 2023 theme is quite hard to find a good game idea in the first place. Just look at the other submissions. :-(
But yeah, it's not like I disagree with the critics or I'm unaware of the problems. That's the thing with risky game ideas, you can never know how well they turn out before you actually put them into practice. Originally I've planned more types of mobs but it turns out making good mobs is hard lol, especially under time contraints.
Anyway, it seems you haven't figured out how to reach the end boss. If you have 3 light crystals, you need to approach the bush in the last level (portal in the 1st floor of the Tree of Life) to unlock the final level.
I admit the dialog doesn't communicate the goal very well, maybe I improve it in the next version.
Overall, I agree with you. I'm also only half-happy with the result.
In version 1.1.0, these points are fixed now:
Version 1.1.0 has been released and hopefully all your reported bugs are fixed here, including the sound. See forum thread for changelog. You can also check out the new sound directly here: https://codeberg.org/Wuzzy/Shadow_Forest/issues/10
Please tell me if it's OK or if it still needs fixing.
It sounds like you’re not using X-Decor-libre but only X-Decor which is the original but outdated and very buggy. I assure you X-Decor-libre does support the 50-move rule (but a player must invoke it for it to count as draw (I applied FIDE rules)) and castling, too. Also, you need at least Minetest 5.7.0 for X-Decor-libre.
Anyway, let’s continue this discussion here: https://forum.minetest.net/viewtopic.php?t=28891
Strange. I am unaware of any of the bugs you just mentioned. Sure you use the latest version of X-Decor-libre (libre8)? If yes, I would like to see the crash logs.
How far in the game did you get? Did you at least reach the Hub?
So, thanks for the review. Now that the game jam results are finally in, here's a longer reply:
Actually, this game was never meant as a "soulslike", as in "absurdly difficult". The large amount of mobs was not intended. The problem is that I've put too few restraints on mob spawning in so that mobs just keep spawning and spawning and killing them doesn't help to stop the spawning. Mob spawning is kinda broken and in fact, this is the last item on my TODO list before I ran out of time. :-/
There actually ARE limits to mob spawning, but obviously these restraints are just unbalanced and way too "permissive", i.e. allowing too many mobs to spawn. I think the biggest problem was that killing mobs doesn't stop or even slow down the infinite stream of mobs. So the current winning strategy is to run, which wasn't really intended lol.
Are you sure it's the projectile HIT sound that has a high frequency problem? I would say if any sound is a problem, it'll be the SHOOT sound since it's much higher pitchde than the hit sound. But anyway, I'll add that to the TODO list. This is actually one of the very few problems in the game I was NOT aware of before submission.
PS: I'm also planning to write a making-of and post it in the forum thread soon(ish). Stay tuned for that (and the post-jam update :P).
(to be continued ...)
I basically agree with most criticisms expect for the "unexpected" part.
But yes, mobs are by far the least polished part of the game and you're right, it is indeed infinite spawning. Also, just way too many of them spawn. My excuse is that I had poor planning and time management and "fixing mob balancing" was the last item on my TODO list. :-( Basically I took a risk by attempting mob development and failed. Yeah, that's the thing with risks lol. ;-)
This game was meant as partly combat- partly exploring-style but it was NOT intended that mobs overwhelm you and annoy you all the time. The idea was, once you defeated some mobs of an area, you are free to explore (at least for a while). Sadly, none of that managed to get in the game. Time constraints. :-(((
As for "too many collectibles": They are all optional tho and you don't even have to find all to get max. HP. Other people seemed to like the collectibles. I'm not sure what I should change here. You can complete the game and ignore all vases (although it's harder then). Maybe you're saying the game would have been better without any vases, or just with fewer? But then, most other players liked them. Difficult decision on what to do post-jam. :-/
I agree with the dialog problem, the appearance mid-combat feels a bit off, too. I'll see what I can do.
But to be honest, I'm a bit mad tho that you outright refuse to complete the game (just like with Glitch last year) after only 1 death. :-( I don't like this (even if I agree with most of your criticisms). I feel like you give up way too early on game jam games. I noticed this with your other game reviews, too.
Anyway, I think all these problems can be fixed. Most importantly, I'm planning to rework mobs completely post-jam.
So, stay tuned for the post-jam version! :P
I'm glad you liked the game, even the mob combat, although mob combat is the least polished aspect of the game. I also noticed there are some dirty tricks where you can just slaughter the shadow mobs without getting hit once, thus quickly getting most upgrades. Although I think not many people found these dirty tricks. Mobs in general are not the smartest and I definitely need to fully rework them. Many players had problems with the mob fight and I fully expected this. I sadly didn't have the time to polish mobs more but I'm planning a post-jam version. If you're interested, I will also write a making-of and post it in the forum thread.
I also agree that Glitch is better (simply way more polished).
Maybe I shoudn't have built the exit portal in the boss room then to hide this issue. XD I only added it so you can go looking for the remaining vases. A treat for completionists, basically. ;-) The in-world excuse is that "the forest still needs time to heal" but this is very lame, of course. Yeah, since you can return to the Tree of Life, the environment should definitely change. And yes this was a time constraint thing.
Yeah, basically I took a risk this time by trying a game with mobs, something I have not much experience with. Additionally, I decided to do everything myself, even the music. Which I did. (I'm going to post a making-of in the forum thread soon(ish).)
But I had a lot of problems with time management this time and also pointlessly lost time due to personal matters and procastination.
But ultimately I just ran out of time to polish the mob fighting. :-( The mob spawning is clearly unfair (it never stops spawning) and that's because I didn't really complete it. Basically all the criticisms WRT mobs I got from you and others I agree with and these are problems I am very aware of. Mobs are the only item that were left on my TODO list when time ran out. :-(
Anyway, I think this and some other problems can be fixed.
The most polished mob in the game is the light orb, I think, which I'm actually very proud of how smooth it works.
Interesting how you like the graphics when some other people hated the looks for some reason and thought Glitch looked better. Well, I guess you can't please everyone. :D
My excuse is that I just had poor time management and planning. I think it wasn't that great of a game idea in the first place, plus I was struggling with ideas for a long time. Also, building the map. I also had other difficulties, and you can read more about that in the making-of that I'm going to post in the forums eventually.
Basically I decided to take a risk and try something with mobs. Risky because I still don't have much experience with them.
I wanted to polish everything. But mobs are clearly the least polished thing and it's basically the only big item left on the TODO list before I ran out of time. And I completely agree mob spawning is pretty broken. Fun fact: It was even more broken on the last day, with so many mobs spawning in the old mine that you just can't fight your way through even when maxed-out. I fixed at least that but obviously that's far from enough.
Long story short, the way how mobs work now is not intended and this game was not meant to be ridiculously unfair. Basically all your criticisms about mobs I agree with and are just the result of poor time management. Mobs are the least-polished aspect by far. Of course that's all planned for the post-jam version.
Thanks. Yeah, I spent a lot of time on polishing the light orb behavior and it shows; I wanted to make at least one "mob" with very fluent and believable movement. My trick is to not waste time in writing a mob API in the first place but just directly code everything into the entity. You will read more about that in the making-of I'm going to post in the forum thread eventually.
Sadly, the other mobs are not even close as polished (YET!) as you can see from the other reviews.
An interesting idea. You can already return to the Tree of Life (the level hub) after you defeat the boss (who dropped a lot of shadow fragments). An exit portal will open in the boss room. But the world doesn't really change. I'm not sure if I'll add this idea; first I have to balance the main game more (especially mob combat).
I never planned to add more "lore" to the game. The story is intentionally kept very minimalist and is mostly just an excuse plot like in Super Mario games. I wanted to focus more on the gameplay.
As for "drive", I don't know exactly what you mean but my excuse is that, this time I managed my time too poorly (I will post a making-of in the forum thread later if you're interested).
So more polished than Chess in X-Decor-libre?
This game is/was incomplete at the date of submission. A lot of the story is clearly missing. The intro kinda works and you get a little dialog at the beginning, then you get to explore some rooms of a building in the barren snow desert but there's not much to do except walk and look. So the gameplay is very very incomplete.
I recommend to check this game out at a later day, when it's complete.
My favourite entry for this year's game jam. You encounter ruins and a ghost. You find things that make you go to the past, then to the future and there is 5 time periods of a citadel. You then have to use the seeds of plants and timetravel to reach different parts of the citadel. Each time period unlocks new speeches of the ghost which is a nice touch.
I played this game for like 2 or 3 hours because I also wanted to find all 7 artifacts. (and I did. Woohoo!)
The map is well-made and must have taken ages to piece together.
Using plants to rise in height feels awkward. What I did was I placed an acorn and jumped to the corner and made future travel hoping it'll let me, then I move quickly back to the tree. Only takes me like 50 tries but it works somehow. Awkward. Unless this is cheating? You'd think that standing on top of a small tree then going to the future would work but no.
The challenge is to obtain several important items and reach tricky locations by clever exploring and timetravel. The final goal is basically to reach the top with a special item.
But that's not all! There are artifacts! These are a clever addition and they kept me hooked a while longer although they were completely useless. And some artifacts had really clever locations. Sadly they don't unlock anything, not even a secret dialog.
The music is simple but sets a good tone. I wish there would be more sound effects. There isn't even a footstep sound yet. Shadows seem to not work in this game? Every block seems to glow?? It looks certainly a little weird but you get used to it.
I don't really understand where the "unexpected" comes in but whatever.
The submitted game jam version sadly had a lot of small bugs and it crashed when I destroyed the crystal (but this was the end anyway). I really want this game to become bugfree and more polished in future versions.
Anyway, this game definitely kept me busy from start to finished including bonus items, so good job!
This is the whole gameplay: You click on two things, then walk to the finish line and it's game over. Yeah, it's disappointing.
BONUS: The only room you'll ever see has eye-cancer-inducing colors lol.
I have no idea what this game means and what it was supposed to be. Looks like a last-minute panic submission to me (for the Game Jam). Sorry. :-(
Another sad case of "author ran out of time"?
The beginning of the game looks like an outright bug. After a first briefing, the screen is (almost?) completely black. I thought the game is broken because I couldn't see the vent I am supposed to open. It is VERY dark and I had to find it basically blind. And the vent glows but it is VERY hard to see. Not a great start.
Once I finally entered the facility, the real game began.
There are a couple of very basic rooms to explore but they're mostly useless. Lots of robots move around but they're harmless vacuum bots or mini-tanks? There is an adventure-game-like interface of inspecting, reporting, using things you see. Sadly, much of it is unfortunately unused. The game has a lot of dialog but using chat for it is a terrible idea: Font is too small.
Eventually I found some kind of "robo-labyrinth". You try out some very basic puzzles where you can guide robots through mazes with instructions (move North, South, etc.). I wasted my time "solving" the puzzles but the actual goal is to just start the puzzles and pick up the robot that looks different because it's the battle robot. I solved all puzzles but it's no challenge at all; you just need to count the squares, basically.
Once you picked up the battle robot, you must reach the exit and that's it.
I have died like 2 times for no apparent reason. Suddenly a screen showed up telling me a robot killed me. I don't know where it came from and it was an insta-death. Very confusing.
Overall, the game is too short and not fun. :-(
The game idea is relatively unique and hasn't been tried out too often. Trying to explore the world (almost) only by sound. Interesting, but I find it to be very confusing in practice. The README explains things well, but I still didn't get very far.
You're not entirely blind. Blue particles float upwards from blocks, so they're an useful indicator of the landscape while still leaving much ambiguity. I like that concept, so you're not staring at a completely black screen all the time. XD
I managed to dig a few blocks like dirt and sand. But the pickaxe seemed useless. I tried to dig stone for like 1 minute but apparently stone is unbreakable in this game, even with a pickaxe. There are "achievements" but I only found 1 for digging lots of sand, maybe? I don't know what the other achievements are.
My biggest success is killing a few chicken for food.
The world itself must be very barren. I walked 1000s of blocks but all I found is dirt, sand and stone, and what seems to be the occassional cave. Leaves and woody-like blocks exist but are rare. I don't think I ever found a forest.
Item selection is confusing. You have an "audible" hotbar, meaning by switching tools, you hear a sound. Each thing has its unique sound, which is nice, but you still have to guess what each sound means. And I think this is where the whole item system kinda falls apart, sadly.
Low health is signalled by heartbeats but I find it stresses me out so I just restart the game when I take damage lol.
The sound design isn't that great. The sounds that are in the game are pretty good, but there are too few of them overall. There's music, but it plays too rarely. If you don't do anything, the game is often silent. There is a lack in ambient sounds which for a game like this is a bummer.
I get the game is supposed to be about blindness but I think the whole UX needs to be reworked entirely cuz I simply don't have any idea WTF I'm doing lol.
The "air sword" is an old Minetest meme and it's getting stale. I think it is time to put it to rest.
As for the "game", this is literally an empty game. Just forget it.
This is a very simple but clean Chess implementation. The pieces look nice, you know whose turn it is. En passant works. Castling works. Basic draw conditions work. And the computer opponent is stronger than me, but then, I'm terrible at Chess, rofl. Dead position detection is incomplete but that's a known problem in Chess software. Also, promotions always promote to queen, you can't choose.
What I criticize is that you must use a chat command to start the game. Why not use blocks or buttons or something on the chessboard instead?
But this isn't Chess. It's Chess with luck. Every few turns, something random happens. A piece disappears or gets added. Two pieces are swapped. A lot of pieces disappear. Night mode gets activated. You travel back in time. And so on.
While this is an "unexpected" idea, I think the random events are just too random. Worst, they are just very poorly balanced. The developer just took a few simple ideas and threw them in. Any random event can make or break the game at any time. The Showdown events removes all pieces except kings and queens and is probably the most broken event lol (in terms of gameplay). One random events leaves the board in an seemingly "illegal" state: Sfter two pieces are swapped, it can happen a pawn ends up at the other side of the board but it does not promote so it can't do anything anymore.
Another UX criticism I have of the luck element is that you don't see which pieces got removed/added/swapped/etc. You have to recall it from memory somehow (VERY hard). This makes it awkward to play. So the luck is not only too random, but also too confusing.
I give this a negative rating because the luck elements kinda ruin the game. If the luck elements would have been more balanced or be more fun, that would be different. To be fair, there's a "normal chess" mode but this wasn't the point of this game.
Well, this is something special. It replicates the UI of old OSes from like 30 years ago and captures the look-and-feel ... somewhat. Even the booting screen is (somewhat) replicated.
It supports multiple windows (but overlapping is buggy). It can run multiple "applications" (read: windows) at once.
The most impressive part in mineos is "Boom", a simple Doom-like shooter completely within a window. This window is very small but it actually works. The game itself lets you just shoot things, there is no mission, health or pickups, but it's a great proof-of-concept.
There's also a Pong clone (sadly, no win condition, too) and a ... Lua interpreter (which is very hard to use since you must type with a on-screen keyboard).
I am a bit disappointed there aren't more applications or things to do, or that at the very least , the existing things weren't more fleshed-out. The icons on the desktop can only be dragged but are otherwise non-functional so a bit more polishing would have been nice.
But still: Thumbs up because of the innovation. Although there is not much to do and it gets boring fast and there isn't much in terms of gameplay, it's the technical innovation that you check out.
You just walk around the world and it replaces blocks around you. That's it.
And even this mechanic isn't well-implemented, I get spammed with performance warnings.
[NOTE: This review is for the game jam version of the game]
Sadly, this game was released in a near-empty state when the game jam development time ended. There was only a single room and nothing to do in it.
I'm waiting for the shiny "official" release with actual gameplay and I might update this review then.
[NOTE: This review is for the game jam version of the game]
The game mechanics are pretty simple: You get a magic staff and it has 3 capabilities: You can float, you can shoot blue projectiles of ... something and you can become small. The rooms are pretty simple parcour and/or puzzle maps. Only one room has frustrated me a little because the timing of your jump had to be near-perfect, but I still managed to do it. The "shooting" and "become small" abilities work exactly as you think and they work perfectly.
The "floating" ability feels kinda awkward tho. Basically it just deactivates gravity for you for a few seconds, so you have to first jump, then activate the ability and time it VERY precisely. It works, but it's awkward to use. I wish this ability had been more fleshed-out. I would strongly recommend this in case a larger, more serious version of the game is planned.
The game is pretty short. At the end there's a simple but solid boss fight. It crashed but I could restart and finish the game.
The game is okayish but not great. It's well enough executed for a neutral rating. Neutral because the floating is not well balanced and there is one room that was pointlessly frustrating because you needed perfect jump timing. With better polishing and levels, I would have given thumbs up.
PS: My game completion time was 24 minutes, 18.467227 seconds (very precise game timer lol)
This is just low-effort trolling. You click on a lever, then it's game over. LITERALLY.
The rest of this ... thing ... is a lengthy on-screen text basically mocking the player. Basically: How you could have been so stupid to expect a real game? The text isn't even funny or clever, just insulting. I kind of hoped the REAL game would start after the text but nope. That's literally it. There is ONE joke, and it's not even funny.
OK, there are "achievements" for such challenging things like "look at the ceiling" (before pressing the lever) but that's all the content you will get.
This entry is so lazy, not even most of the code was written by the submitter, a lot of code is just borrowed. This is not against the rules, but I think this is missing the point.