I want to stress that I take ZERO offense by the game's theme of death, destruction and brutality. I was purely commenting on quality. I personally think it's OK if Minetest games sometimes go the "dark" or "brutal" way as well, but that doesn't excuse low quality. There are many brutal games out there, and they always were a core part of gaming, so it was only a question of time that they will come to Minetest eventually. Which isn't a bad thing, actually. :-)
I think it is actually a bit brave you posted this here, you might be the first one ever to actually post a very openly brutal game. That alone deserves a bit of respect (even if the quality is bad). It's stuff like this why I like the game jam, you never know what to expect!
The map looks very incomplete. The buildings have the beginnings of an interior design, but most rooms are empty. The outside design is very incomplete. It's a few buildings, with a few simple decorations like a traffic lights and a gate, but that's mostly it. There are huge empty areas. There aren't any cars, nor is there a lot of stuff that burns. But there are many people, some peaceful, some hostile. It's pretty chaotic.
Your spawn point is really bad. You spawn in one of the houses, and you have to run down the stairs, but you're too fast for the stairs and will take fall damage.
Stability / performance
The game is unstable, although playable if you know the bugs. The game crashes when rightclicking elevators or mailboxes. I also fell out of the map twice somehow. I had no performance problems. The bombs are also not very reliable, they sometimes randomly go through solid blocks without hitting them.
Graphics
The graphics are a mix of Minetest Game, X-Decor and some (apparently) simple hand drawings. It doesn't look great. Fire creates HUGE smoke clouds, so I give a plus for that gimmick. :D
Sounds / music
The music is minimal and cheesy, and I don't like it. It doesn't fit the game's mood of "death and destruction". The sound effects feel a bit minimalist either, pretty boring.
Story
Frankly, the story feels kind of forced into the game. In the game it isn't even clear who your enemies are. Okay, there are the cops. But the game told me I was drafted but where are the soldiers?
No recommendation. The core gameplay just doesn't work out, as the only thing that you can reliably attack are windows, and even then your ammo is limited and there is no way to refill. And everything else about this game is not good either.
Gameplay
It's very simple. You run around a town and firebomb everything on sight. And that's basically it. There is a destruct-o-meter but pretty much the only thing that raises is are glass windows. A few other things can be destroyed as well, but they are too rare in the world to be relevant. My record was to get the destruct-o-meter to 100, then I ran out of ammo. The town itself looks very incomplete, there are a lot of empty areas. There are cops that try to kill you on sight, so you have to be on the run.There are 3 weapons: Fire bomb, pipe bomb and your fist. The fire bomb makes a lot of fire, but it doesn't seem to be very useful with destroying things. The pipe bomb is your main weapon, but it seems to be only useful to destroy windows and the occasional furniture. Most things appear to be immune to damage.
Once your run out of ammo, you only have your fist left and the game is basically over. There are no ammo pickups or anything like that, which is a huge bummer. When you die, you just respawn with your entire inventory and score. The game doesn't even restart properly when you die.
The game isn't fun at all, the core gameplay mechanic just doesn't work out, especially since you apparently can't actually attack a lot of things to increase the destruct-o-meter and you have to deal with a SINGLE ammo supply for the entire game, and the game doesn't even restart properly.
The game is stable. It greeted me with various console warnings. Movement felt a bit jerky, but this was not game-breaking at all. I didn't find any real bugs. I had no performance issues.
Sounds / Ambience
The node sounds are OK. The klots sounds fit perfectly, the sounds of other blocks are a bit ... wrong? When you bump into metal, you hear a glass sound. The ambience is still great. Very calm and fitting, good "thinking music". Good attention for detail: The "boom" when you get sucked into the wormhole, or the special ambience sound when you did something right in the puzzle. Overall clever use of ambience. It's very good ambience. This game has IMHO the second-best ambience of the game jam. (The best ambience IMHO is SSP (Secrets of the Space Parable)).
The biggest UX issue is the reliance on color, so colorblind people are screwed, I guess. Just a reminder, ca. 10% of men are colorblind!
The controls are very easy to understand, but my 2nd-biggest criticism is the movement. The movement controls are fine, but the movement itself feels a bit ... laggy? So the movement just doesn't feel right, which was pretty irritating. I guess doing zero-G movement in Minetest right is hard.
Theme / Story
The game has no text (except in the end) but still manages to tell a mini-story. I even found a little secret, a block of bones in a sliding door. :D The space theme works very well for this game, it fits perfectly with the puzzles.
Graphics
The graphics are (mostly) copied from MTG and Sci-Fi nodes. My initial thought when I started was "Oh no, not another MTG ripoff!" because of the MTG textures. But the space station was well-designed. I've never seen Sci-Fi nodes being actively used anywhere, so that was a pleasant surprised (even if the textures are not new work). My biggest criticism of the textures is resolution. The klots have hi-res textures, while everything else is 16×16. This is an obvious inconsistency for no real good reason. The game makes a good use of the particle use, both for broken glass in space and the wormhole.
A BIG recommendation from me, EXCEPT when you're colorblind, then not (hopefully this gets fixed). Overall, I was pretty impressed by that one, but please figure out the accessiblity thing. Apart from that, the game still can use a bit of polishing and especially content, but hey, it's a game jam! :D
Gameplay
This is where the game shines. You have to figure out everything on your own, but the game is never unfair to you. Every concept is introduced one after another. It seems a lot of time was put into level design, even with a lot of attention for detail, which I appreciate a lot. The core feature of the game, the pushing and pulling of klots, works perfectly. The movement of the klots is completely smooth, both visually and physically; even a player collision was considered to prevent awkward overlaps. That alone is quite an achievement, WOW!
There aren't a lot of levels, and the game sadly ended before it really began, but this is a fake complaint, as it is WAY outweighed by quality. Thinking of good levels for such a game isn't easy, I guess.
The graphics look mostly like MS Paint drawings by an absolute beginner, especially in the story part. The blocks are simple but fine tho. The formspec / GUI has an awful choice of colors.
Music / sounds
The soundtrack is a bit cheezy, but OK. The sound effects are OK, but nothing too exciting. The robots don't make any sounds.
Controls
Good. The game uses standard Minetest controls so there are no surprises. It is a bit weird at first that you poo by the "place" key apparently but you get used to it instantly-
Stability / performance
The game is unstable. The game doesn't crash, but there are some "missing image" errors and numerous console warnings. The biggest problem is performance. Robots spawn at an alarming rate and eventually there are so many robots the game slows down to a crawl and Minetest reacts very slowly after placing blocks, up to a point where the game is almost unplayable and I have to restart.
Absolutely no recommendation. Both the game itself as the gameplay design are too broken.
Gameplay
It's really bad and doesn't make any sense. A seemingly infinite amount of robots starts to chase you. You have two abilities: You poo, which places a poo block where you look (???). With the plunger you turn a poo block into a package (??????). The robot army becomes huge very quickly so unless you stack yourself up or don't immediately wall yourself in poo, you will die very easily. The goal is to place 200 poo blocks and then "package" those 200 poo blocks (??????). Oddly, it doesn't matter if you die, because your poo counter doesn't reset, so you will win eventually, even if you die like 100 times lol.
The robots are really fast and you have to be constantly on the run; if you stay for even one second, you will die. I found two winning strategies: Stacking yourself up (nerdpoling), or walling yourself, both of them bypass the robots completely and you can easily complete the goal without dying. That's another minus from me, that the game can be essentially be exploited that easily.
Story
Well, the story is essentially just an excuse plot. It's kindergarden-level humuor. I want to be clear this whole "poo" theme does NOT offend me, this doesn't give the game a penalty. My issue is the game just does a really poor job at it. I think it IS possible to do piss/poo humour right; South Park is a famous example.
Very simple. It's the standard Minetest controls. You have an inventory, but this time, you have a HUGE hotbar so you never have to open the inventory menu. I like this, makes gameplay much more convenient. But there is a downside: The inventory menu is empty, so I could not sort my inventory like in many other games for Minetest (except for dropping my stuff on the ground and picking them up by hand). Also, the game doesn't display the names of any item anywhere.
There is a catch: If you're colorblind, you're screwed because the game heavily relies on color. :-(
Overall rating
It PAINS me to say this, but no recommendation from me. The reason is the high number of crashes, game-breaking bugs and numerous ways to reach an unwinnable state. The game would be pretty good if it were more stable, and this is the reason for my "no recommendation". PLEASE fix the bugs post-jam, I want to see a shiny polished version of this; it would make a GREAT addition to the collection of Minetest games, this game, it's something very special. Oh, and please make the game colorblind-accessible.
This is where the game sadly falls flat in my opinion. This game is seriously broken. First, there is a LOT of console warnings. On the first start, I spawned in mid air and fell into the infinite void of despair. I deleted the world and tried again, then it worked. The worst part is that the game crashes frequently when I move from room to room.
Also, there are numerous other bugs. In the graveyard, when I dig up some of the graves, there is just endless air! Also, when I fall out the world, the game does not react in any way. I have to cheat and fly back to where I came from. :(
In the forest with the "gearbox", I can use items on these nodes, but they get destroyed.
Fire can destroy the floor of rooms, another way to fall out of the world.
If I leave an item in a room, it's gone forever (even for key items).
And the list goes on and on and on ... (Don't worry, I will post it all on the bugtracker).
A few small bugs are fine, but in this case, it's just too many, and game-breakers. This is too much even for the Game Jam. Please fix your game. :P
Performance
No issues. 60 FPS constantly on a >10y old computer.
It re-uses a lot of graphics from Minetest Game and other mods. :( The textures aren't bad, but I've seen them soooo often, it doesn't give a special feel anymore. But I'm obviously very biased as a Minetest old-timer. :D But that doesn't mean the room design is bad, quite the opposite.
Sounds / Music
The sounds are the standard Minetest Game node sounds. The MTG sounds are OK, and I can live with them, but a lot of actions are without sounds: Using a key, reading a book, etc. There are no music nor are there ambience sounds as well, which is disappointing, this game could have really benefit from an ambience, even a simple one. Many other Game Jam entries had an ambience and/or music. But this wasn't really an issue for me, I still had fun.
A big general downside of the gameplay right now is that is seems there is a LOT of ways to leave you in an unwinnable state (like when you toss away an important item), this needs to be addressed in future versions. I think the game should always guarantee you're never in an unwinnable state and can always continue, this is just fair given that some puzzles are really tricky.
Enough complaints! I LOVE that there is healthy amount of rooms to explore, and the room designs are really cool. A lot of effort was put into this, and I appreciate it a lot, this is what carries the game, this is where the game shines the most. The nodes still need polishing tho, as some nodes do unexpected/annoying things or have annoying collision boxes (like the candle), but overall, it's OK. Even if I didn't solve most puzzles, I did made progress and had a lot of fun doing so.
Story
The story is apparently kept quite vague. You aren't told much, just little pieces of information. Which isn't bad actually. The pieces you get do form a story eventually, and I actually liked that one. There is an explanation about what happened in the past. I think this submission has the best story of all game jam submissions. Good job!
The idea of a "cursed house" isn't new. "The Shining" written by Stephen King is a famous example. But that's not a bad thing at all! I like when something like that is turned into a game, and yes, I WAS surprised when I first entered the house. I like the game just throws you into this cursed house and you must figure things out. The gameplay is simple, yet hard: You run around from room to room, try to figure out what is happening and slowly piece things together. The puzzles are not easy, but I made some progress. I found different special rooms, and 2/3 crowns. I also managed to get the axe and get access to the ice in the smelter room, then failed to move on.
From that point on, I had to cheat my way through the rest by looking at the code (sorry ...) and I was BAFFLED by the solution (and found more crash bugs, lol), something I would not have found out in AGES. What tripped me over are the furnaces. I tried to smelt the crown, and not all the other metal things, lol. Also, putting the colored liquids in the cauldrons in a certain order???? At least I now know where the color combination comes from, but still! I think a few puzzles would be fairer if the game gave you more feedback. I thought the cauldrons are useless since nothing happens if you put a bottle in it. Yes, there are star particles but I thought it was a bug, I still had the liquid, there was no splash sound, etc. With more feedback, the player would know that you can ACTUALLY interact with the cauldrons (even if they don't know what use they have yet).
I have NO idea how on earth I should have known that I must put the purple/fake purple liquid in those "bowl" nodes. Is this part of the game still incomplete, maybe? Probably I hacked myself through too much. :D
The gear mold is also a bit nasty. You can cool down the gear at ice, but not at water???? Pfff ...
Before you read ahead, be warned of SPOILERS! My summary is that I really like the game, but I don't recommend it YET because of critical bugs that ruin the experience. But I also recommend to players to just wait and check this game out later, when the bugs have been fixed. That way, you will have a more pleasant experience. Keep this game on your watchlist, folks! The game is also not accessible to colorblind people (yet).
If you want to read my REAL review (with MEGA spoilers), go in the comments.
There is a simple space ambience track which is very calm but I think it fits the game perfectly. There are no sound effects. :(
Controls
Easy: You just look where you want to go and hit Jump to move. There is also a level reset feature. A particle stream clearly shows the direction of where you would go.
There are some caveats: If the node you target is far away, it is sometimes hard to guess whether you hit it. There is no crosshair. The particle stream is a nice effect, and is a clever way to show the player the direction, but it's someimtes tricky to see your true destination until you hit Jump. Oddly, the game allows you to use the minimap (useless).
Stability / Performance
The game is stable. Launching the game greeted me with a few warnings (undeclared globals), but I didn't find any real bugs. There are no performance issues. 60 FPS constantly on a >10y old computer.
Theme
It's set in space, so it fits the Space theme. And the game idea completely makes sense to take part in space as well. It even has "Space" in its title.
I recommend it! The game is very short and could use some polishing as well, but overall I can still recommend it. I did have fun figuring out the puzzles and the game is stable. Just because it's short doesn't make it bad.
Gameplay
The concept is simple: You just move until you bump, or into one of these "grid nodes". I'm glad there is another node type added, and not just the solid one.
The puzzles are fun and and interesting. This is one of the game in which you have to think first, and then do something, or else you fly off into space and regret your decision. :D But this isn't annoying, you can always insta-reset.
It's a bit surprising that all levels are mushed together, in one big map. Normally, in games like these, levels are clearly separated. But I think this is fine. When you fail, you get teleported the the start of the level, not of the entire game. There is no level selection but that doesn't really matter as it's only 7 levels. That's really the only real downside of the game: It's over before it has really begun. :(
Graphics
Graphics-wise, I feel this is a bit TOO simple. There's just 3 nodes with no variation. There was also no decoration besides the skybox. This isn't really a problem tho, but graphics-wise, it had more porential. What annoyed me a bit were the grid nodes. It is not easy to distinguish between a grid node, and empty space between two grid nodes. The empty node looks like a grid node as well. These grid nodes definitely could've seen a graphical improvement because currently, it's kinda confusing. If you fly off into space (and fail), you just insta-teleport back to the level start, with no graphical effect at all. :( Overall, the minimalist graphics are pretty OK tho, although not great. Exception: Level 7. Here the flat color 100% makes sense and is pretty clever.
By the way, these bugs are already officially fixed by you now, which I hereby acknowledge:
Buggy lighting
Coin display overlap
Mirror
The repetitions have become less bad, but IMO the best solution is put all levels in a pool. When a new level is chosen, draw from that pool randomly, removing the level from the pool. Repeat until the pool becomes empty. When the pool is empty, reset the pool. This method guarantees that repetitions only happen once you completed every level once. It does't make sense to allow ANY repetitions until they're impossible to avoid. I might submit another PR for that if you're OK with this.
The "screenshot" with the name "default" looks like a fake to me. Is this a real screenshot? If yes, I wonder how you achieved the shadows like this.
I guess this image is actually a Blender render. If this is the case, this image violates screenshot rule 7.2 "Screenshots must depict the actual content of the package in some way, and not be misleading.".
I have been a long-time vocal critic of MTG, and for a number of reasons. This post serves as a summary. Review for version: 5.5.0
The biggest problem, tho, is that MTG just "feels" incomplete. In essence, MTG is a Big Empty Sandbox that Jim-Stephanie Sterling talked about on the Jimquisition. Meaning, the world is large, but the number of different things you can do is very small. It thus feels "empty".
So what can you do? You can explore the world, but the biomes don't offer special items that advance the game (except food, maybe). You can go mining, but it's easy to get to the best ore, the diamond ore. You can farm blocks and build, and you can farm wheat and cotton. And this is ... mostly it, apart from some smaller features. Needless to say, a new player will have explored all the major features fast. Not being able to do various different things is the death for any sandbox.
Thus, you run out of new things to do in MTG fast. Once you get the best tools, farmed some resources, built some things, that's all the game offers, basically. MTG is fine if you really only care about raw creative building. The selection of blocks is fine, and people did build amazing things in MTG.
But IMHO, the standalone MTG is completely uninteresting as a game. It is, however, extensively used for servers, but in a heavily modded form. As a basis for servers to add mods on, MTG has done its job well. As a basis for modders, MTG does an OK job.
But most players want more than just a raw sandbox. MTG does not deserve its special status as a default game and should therefore lose it. That MTG is still the default game is the single-most damaging thing to the whole community, because it makes such a bad first impression.
Thankfully, development focus has mostly moved away, as MTG is currently in "maintenance/bugfix-only" phase.
Full disclosure: I did contribute some smaller features and bugfixes in the past and also a translation. But not the big stuff.
I agree with the technical criticisms of MTG, and I have been a vocal critic of MTG for a long time, so I don't need to add here.
But that weird detour/rant about free software was unneccessary. This attitude of "normal people just don't care about free software" is toxic imho. Normal people don't care about their freedom until they get sued by a megacorporation for copyright infringement. :D
It's a mentality thing as well. Society teaches people that it is "normal" that "everything" is copyrighted and that you, the stupid average user, have no rights while megacorporations have all the rights.
That having said, free software is NO excuse for why MTG sucks. :D
Dethroning MTG is also one of my long-term goals.
Thankfully, MTG is officially in bugfix-only mode now, so this at least forced people to divert resources elsewhere.
Sadly, the so-called "Chest with Everything" excludes items in the not_in_creative_inventory=1 group (unlike in DevTest), therefore this mod is basically just a clone of the Creative Inventory found in many games. That's not really an improvement.
For development purposes, it's better to really show all things, even the "forbidden ones" so it's easier to test how they behave.
If you're worried about security, only allow players with the 'give' priv to take items.
This mod is more meant as a starting point for games to use and maybe modify.
As this mod only looks at the raw item definitions, the information it can use is indeed rather limited. Although stuff like digging speed can be extracted easily, things like the meaning of an item requires actual development from the game or mod developers. Obviously, this mod can’t just automagically figure out what an item is meant to do.
Absolutely nothing in my post is factually incorrect. Since one component of xdecor is non-free, xdecor as a whole can not be treated as free. This is pretty standard interpretation of free software / open source all across the board. It's also ContentDB's interpretation.
-NC is widely accepted as a non-free license clause in the community, both according to free software and open source definition. Yes, ContentDB allows -NC, but ContentDB also (correctly) classifies it as non-free.
I am not discriminating xdecor for being non-free. ContentDB is. I have no influence over how ContentDB treats packages.
Tell me what I am supposed to do: Deliberately choose a wrong license to get rid of the "non-free" status, although it's not the true license of this package? That doesn't make sense.
I agree that more content would be nice, that's what I like to do as well. I have lots of notes and drafts to what this game will become. As this game is still officially in the alpha stage, there might be drastic changes (I hope!). I think I will continue development rather soon, in the last months I was busy with Lazarr! (still not happy with that game, oh well... :( )
Content-wise, this game still has not much, I agree, so I like to especially explore the whole 'terraforming' aspect more. It's still very sandbox-style, but I think any good sandbox needs to give the player some stuff to do. It's not enough that the world is "big", the world also has to offer you things to do. :-)
As for being hard, this is not really intended, it's not really meant as a survival game. The current difficulty mostly comes from not really knowing how to proceed in the first place, and from slow progress overall; the README explains basic things but I want to make this information more accessible since many key things are not obvious.
This ContentDB entry had the wrong license set. There are multiple media licenses mentioned in LICENSE (per-file), so I picked the most restrictive license from the LICENSE file (CC BY-SA-NC) to trigger the red "non-free" warning.
Well, my excuse is that this was a rating for the 2021 Minetest Game Jam, and I wanted to rate the games for the game jam specifically. So this was kind of a special case. It feels weird that you can't give thumbs down for broken games for the game jam.
Anyway, I have decided to try it again, but this time managed to make this game work somehow. I don't know how. Here is my new rating: Thumbs down.
Reason:
Okay, so the game looks pretty nice, the graphics are really cute. I really like the minimalist landscape and how you used sky color to your advantage. Using the few tools that gives Minetest in such a creative way is something I really appreciate! :)
Unfortunately, the gameplay isn't really stable or reliable. The game runs a bit too slow. The idea is great, flying through the world and collecting coins. But performance is poor. The balloon often doesn't react too fast enough to move left or right. And many of the bonuses are placed in a way that you always just miss them. Not sure if intentional.
But the worst problem is this: If your ballon flies very fast, you constantly bump into unloaded terrain, making the game very errating (sadly) and unfun. The performance problem is so bad that it ruins the fun, sadly. :-(
Apart from that, the game would have actually be nice. The game is pretty complete, it's just too laggy. If the game would not be so laggy, I would have given it a thumbs up. But it also gets boring pretty fast. :-(
This might be a limitation of Minetest (because the balloon moves VERY fast at one point), but is still unfortunate. But on the other hand, maybe some trick like preloading the whole level would have done the trick, not sure.
Okay, I can solve now. You forgot to add paramtype="light" for the nodes with broken lighting (like glass and nodeboxes). :D See lua_api.txt.
the game does have a mechanic to avoid consecutive repetitions
That might be true, but it doesn't seem to prevent a "close repetition" like "Building A, Building B, Building A" which happened once to me. Maybe when one builidng was used, "block" for X rounds before it is allowed again. (this obviously requires many more schematics in general for it to work)
A few final words (not part of the review)
I want to stress that I take ZERO offense by the game's theme of death, destruction and brutality. I was purely commenting on quality. I personally think it's OK if Minetest games sometimes go the "dark" or "brutal" way as well, but that doesn't excuse low quality. There are many brutal games out there, and they always were a core part of gaming, so it was only a question of time that they will come to Minetest eventually. Which isn't a bad thing, actually. :-)
I think it is actually a bit brave you posted this here, you might be the first one ever to actually post a very openly brutal game. That alone deserves a bit of respect (even if the quality is bad). It's stuff like this why I like the game jam, you never know what to expect!
Map design
The map looks very incomplete. The buildings have the beginnings of an interior design, but most rooms are empty. The outside design is very incomplete. It's a few buildings, with a few simple decorations like a traffic lights and a gate, but that's mostly it. There are huge empty areas. There aren't any cars, nor is there a lot of stuff that burns. But there are many people, some peaceful, some hostile. It's pretty chaotic.
Your spawn point is really bad. You spawn in one of the houses, and you have to run down the stairs, but you're too fast for the stairs and will take fall damage.
Stability / performance
The game is unstable, although playable if you know the bugs. The game crashes when rightclicking elevators or mailboxes. I also fell out of the map twice somehow. I had no performance problems. The bombs are also not very reliable, they sometimes randomly go through solid blocks without hitting them.
Graphics
The graphics are a mix of Minetest Game, X-Decor and some (apparently) simple hand drawings. It doesn't look great. Fire creates HUGE smoke clouds, so I give a plus for that gimmick. :D
Sounds / music
The music is minimal and cheesy, and I don't like it. It doesn't fit the game's mood of "death and destruction". The sound effects feel a bit minimalist either, pretty boring.
Story
Frankly, the story feels kind of forced into the game. In the game it isn't even clear who your enemies are. Okay, there are the cops. But the game told me I was drafted but where are the soldiers?
Overall rating
No recommendation. The core gameplay just doesn't work out, as the only thing that you can reliably attack are windows, and even then your ammo is limited and there is no way to refill. And everything else about this game is not good either.
Gameplay
It's very simple. You run around a town and firebomb everything on sight. And that's basically it. There is a destruct-o-meter but pretty much the only thing that raises is are glass windows. A few other things can be destroyed as well, but they are too rare in the world to be relevant. My record was to get the destruct-o-meter to 100, then I ran out of ammo. The town itself looks very incomplete, there are a lot of empty areas. There are cops that try to kill you on sight, so you have to be on the run.There are 3 weapons: Fire bomb, pipe bomb and your fist. The fire bomb makes a lot of fire, but it doesn't seem to be very useful with destroying things. The pipe bomb is your main weapon, but it seems to be only useful to destroy windows and the occasional furniture. Most things appear to be immune to damage.
Once your run out of ammo, you only have your fist left and the game is basically over. There are no ammo pickups or anything like that, which is a huge bummer. When you die, you just respawn with your entire inventory and score. The game doesn't even restart properly when you die.
The game isn't fun at all, the core gameplay mechanic just doesn't work out, especially since you apparently can't actually attack a lot of things to increase the destruct-o-meter and you have to deal with a SINGLE ammo supply for the entire game, and the game doesn't even restart properly.
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Stability / Performance
The game is stable. It greeted me with various console warnings. Movement felt a bit jerky, but this was not game-breaking at all. I didn't find any real bugs. I had no performance issues.
Sounds / Ambience
The node sounds are OK. The klots sounds fit perfectly, the sounds of other blocks are a bit ... wrong? When you bump into metal, you hear a glass sound. The ambience is still great. Very calm and fitting, good "thinking music". Good attention for detail: The "boom" when you get sucked into the wormhole, or the special ambience sound when you did something right in the puzzle. Overall clever use of ambience. It's very good ambience. This game has IMHO the second-best ambience of the game jam. (The best ambience IMHO is SSP (Secrets of the Space Parable)).
Controls / UI / UX
The biggest UX issue is the reliance on color, so colorblind people are screwed, I guess. Just a reminder, ca. 10% of men are colorblind! The controls are very easy to understand, but my 2nd-biggest criticism is the movement. The movement controls are fine, but the movement itself feels a bit ... laggy? So the movement just doesn't feel right, which was pretty irritating. I guess doing zero-G movement in Minetest right is hard.
Theme / Story
The game has no text (except in the end) but still manages to tell a mini-story. I even found a little secret, a block of bones in a sliding door. :D The space theme works very well for this game, it fits perfectly with the puzzles.
Graphics
The graphics are (mostly) copied from MTG and Sci-Fi nodes. My initial thought when I started was "Oh no, not another MTG ripoff!" because of the MTG textures. But the space station was well-designed. I've never seen Sci-Fi nodes being actively used anywhere, so that was a pleasant surprised (even if the textures are not new work). My biggest criticism of the textures is resolution. The klots have hi-res textures, while everything else is 16×16. This is an obvious inconsistency for no real good reason. The game makes a good use of the particle use, both for broken glass in space and the wormhole.
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Overall rating
A BIG recommendation from me, EXCEPT when you're colorblind, then not (hopefully this gets fixed). Overall, I was pretty impressed by that one, but please figure out the accessiblity thing. Apart from that, the game still can use a bit of polishing and especially content, but hey, it's a game jam! :D
Gameplay
This is where the game shines. You have to figure out everything on your own, but the game is never unfair to you. Every concept is introduced one after another. It seems a lot of time was put into level design, even with a lot of attention for detail, which I appreciate a lot. The core feature of the game, the pushing and pulling of klots, works perfectly. The movement of the klots is completely smooth, both visually and physically; even a player collision was considered to prevent awkward overlaps. That alone is quite an achievement, WOW! There aren't a lot of levels, and the game sadly ended before it really began, but this is a fake complaint, as it is WAY outweighed by quality. Thinking of good levels for such a game isn't easy, I guess.
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Graphics
The graphics look mostly like MS Paint drawings by an absolute beginner, especially in the story part. The blocks are simple but fine tho. The formspec / GUI has an awful choice of colors.
Music / sounds
The soundtrack is a bit cheezy, but OK. The sound effects are OK, but nothing too exciting. The robots don't make any sounds.
Controls
Good. The game uses standard Minetest controls so there are no surprises. It is a bit weird at first that you poo by the "place" key apparently but you get used to it instantly-
Stability / performance
The game is unstable. The game doesn't crash, but there are some "missing image" errors and numerous console warnings. The biggest problem is performance. Robots spawn at an alarming rate and eventually there are so many robots the game slows down to a crawl and Minetest reacts very slowly after placing blocks, up to a point where the game is almost unplayable and I have to restart.
Summary
Absolutely no recommendation. Both the game itself as the gameplay design are too broken.
Gameplay
It's really bad and doesn't make any sense. A seemingly infinite amount of robots starts to chase you. You have two abilities: You poo, which places a poo block where you look (???). With the plunger you turn a poo block into a package (??????). The robot army becomes huge very quickly so unless you stack yourself up or don't immediately wall yourself in poo, you will die very easily. The goal is to place 200 poo blocks and then "package" those 200 poo blocks (??????). Oddly, it doesn't matter if you die, because your poo counter doesn't reset, so you will win eventually, even if you die like 100 times lol. The robots are really fast and you have to be constantly on the run; if you stay for even one second, you will die. I found two winning strategies: Stacking yourself up (nerdpoling), or walling yourself, both of them bypass the robots completely and you can easily complete the goal without dying. That's another minus from me, that the game can be essentially be exploited that easily.
Story
Well, the story is essentially just an excuse plot. It's kindergarden-level humuor. I want to be clear this whole "poo" theme does NOT offend me, this doesn't give the game a penalty. My issue is the game just does a really poor job at it. I think it IS possible to do piss/poo humour right; South Park is a famous example.
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Controls/UI/UX
Very simple. It's the standard Minetest controls. You have an inventory, but this time, you have a HUGE hotbar so you never have to open the inventory menu. I like this, makes gameplay much more convenient. But there is a downside: The inventory menu is empty, so I could not sort my inventory like in many other games for Minetest (except for dropping my stuff on the ground and picking them up by hand). Also, the game doesn't display the names of any item anywhere. There is a catch: If you're colorblind, you're screwed because the game heavily relies on color. :-(
Overall rating
It PAINS me to say this, but no recommendation from me. The reason is the high number of crashes, game-breaking bugs and numerous ways to reach an unwinnable state. The game would be pretty good if it were more stable, and this is the reason for my "no recommendation". PLEASE fix the bugs post-jam, I want to see a shiny polished version of this; it would make a GREAT addition to the collection of Minetest games, this game, it's something very special. Oh, and please make the game colorblind-accessible.
Stability
This is where the game sadly falls flat in my opinion. This game is seriously broken. First, there is a LOT of console warnings. On the first start, I spawned in mid air and fell into the infinite void of despair. I deleted the world and tried again, then it worked. The worst part is that the game crashes frequently when I move from room to room. Also, there are numerous other bugs. In the graveyard, when I dig up some of the graves, there is just endless air! Also, when I fall out the world, the game does not react in any way. I have to cheat and fly back to where I came from. :( In the forest with the "gearbox", I can use items on these nodes, but they get destroyed. Fire can destroy the floor of rooms, another way to fall out of the world. If I leave an item in a room, it's gone forever (even for key items). And the list goes on and on and on ... (Don't worry, I will post it all on the bugtracker). A few small bugs are fine, but in this case, it's just too many, and game-breakers. This is too much even for the Game Jam. Please fix your game. :P
Performance
No issues. 60 FPS constantly on a >10y old computer.
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Graphics
It re-uses a lot of graphics from Minetest Game and other mods. :( The textures aren't bad, but I've seen them soooo often, it doesn't give a special feel anymore. But I'm obviously very biased as a Minetest old-timer. :D But that doesn't mean the room design is bad, quite the opposite.
Sounds / Music
The sounds are the standard Minetest Game node sounds. The MTG sounds are OK, and I can live with them, but a lot of actions are without sounds: Using a key, reading a book, etc. There are no music nor are there ambience sounds as well, which is disappointing, this game could have really benefit from an ambience, even a simple one. Many other Game Jam entries had an ambience and/or music. But this wasn't really an issue for me, I still had fun.
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Gameplay (contd.)
A big general downside of the gameplay right now is that is seems there is a LOT of ways to leave you in an unwinnable state (like when you toss away an important item), this needs to be addressed in future versions. I think the game should always guarantee you're never in an unwinnable state and can always continue, this is just fair given that some puzzles are really tricky.
Enough complaints! I LOVE that there is healthy amount of rooms to explore, and the room designs are really cool. A lot of effort was put into this, and I appreciate it a lot, this is what carries the game, this is where the game shines the most. The nodes still need polishing tho, as some nodes do unexpected/annoying things or have annoying collision boxes (like the candle), but overall, it's OK. Even if I didn't solve most puzzles, I did made progress and had a lot of fun doing so.
Story
The story is apparently kept quite vague. You aren't told much, just little pieces of information. Which isn't bad actually. The pieces you get do form a story eventually, and I actually liked that one. There is an explanation about what happened in the past. I think this submission has the best story of all game jam submissions. Good job!
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Gameplay
The idea of a "cursed house" isn't new. "The Shining" written by Stephen King is a famous example. But that's not a bad thing at all! I like when something like that is turned into a game, and yes, I WAS surprised when I first entered the house. I like the game just throws you into this cursed house and you must figure things out. The gameplay is simple, yet hard: You run around from room to room, try to figure out what is happening and slowly piece things together. The puzzles are not easy, but I made some progress. I found different special rooms, and 2/3 crowns. I also managed to get the axe and get access to the ice in the smelter room, then failed to move on.
From that point on, I had to cheat my way through the rest by looking at the code (sorry ...) and I was BAFFLED by the solution (and found more crash bugs, lol), something I would not have found out in AGES. What tripped me over are the furnaces. I tried to smelt the crown, and not all the other metal things, lol. Also, putting the colored liquids in the cauldrons in a certain order???? At least I now know where the color combination comes from, but still! I think a few puzzles would be fairer if the game gave you more feedback. I thought the cauldrons are useless since nothing happens if you put a bottle in it. Yes, there are star particles but I thought it was a bug, I still had the liquid, there was no splash sound, etc. With more feedback, the player would know that you can ACTUALLY interact with the cauldrons (even if they don't know what use they have yet). I have NO idea how on earth I should have known that I must put the purple/fake purple liquid in those "bowl" nodes. Is this part of the game still incomplete, maybe? Probably I hacked myself through too much. :D The gear mold is also a bit nasty. You can cool down the gear at ice, but not at water???? Pfff ...
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Summary
Before you read ahead, be warned of SPOILERS! My summary is that I really like the game, but I don't recommend it YET because of critical bugs that ruin the experience. But I also recommend to players to just wait and check this game out later, when the bugs have been fixed. That way, you will have a more pleasant experience. Keep this game on your watchlist, folks! The game is also not accessible to colorblind people (yet).
If you want to read my REAL review (with MEGA spoilers), go in the comments.
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Sound/Music
There is a simple space ambience track which is very calm but I think it fits the game perfectly. There are no sound effects. :(
Controls
Easy: You just look where you want to go and hit Jump to move. There is also a level reset feature. A particle stream clearly shows the direction of where you would go. There are some caveats: If the node you target is far away, it is sometimes hard to guess whether you hit it. There is no crosshair. The particle stream is a nice effect, and is a clever way to show the player the direction, but it's someimtes tricky to see your true destination until you hit Jump. Oddly, the game allows you to use the minimap (useless).
Stability / Performance
The game is stable. Launching the game greeted me with a few warnings (undeclared globals), but I didn't find any real bugs. There are no performance issues. 60 FPS constantly on a >10y old computer.
Theme
It's set in space, so it fits the Space theme. And the game idea completely makes sense to take part in space as well. It even has "Space" in its title.
Summary
I recommend it! The game is very short and could use some polishing as well, but overall I can still recommend it. I did have fun figuring out the puzzles and the game is stable. Just because it's short doesn't make it bad.
Gameplay
The concept is simple: You just move until you bump, or into one of these "grid nodes". I'm glad there is another node type added, and not just the solid one.
The puzzles are fun and and interesting. This is one of the game in which you have to think first, and then do something, or else you fly off into space and regret your decision. :D But this isn't annoying, you can always insta-reset.
It's a bit surprising that all levels are mushed together, in one big map. Normally, in games like these, levels are clearly separated. But I think this is fine. When you fail, you get teleported the the start of the level, not of the entire game. There is no level selection but that doesn't really matter as it's only 7 levels. That's really the only real downside of the game: It's over before it has really begun. :(
Graphics
Graphics-wise, I feel this is a bit TOO simple. There's just 3 nodes with no variation. There was also no decoration besides the skybox. This isn't really a problem tho, but graphics-wise, it had more porential. What annoyed me a bit were the grid nodes. It is not easy to distinguish between a grid node, and empty space between two grid nodes. The empty node looks like a grid node as well. These grid nodes definitely could've seen a graphical improvement because currently, it's kinda confusing. If you fly off into space (and fail), you just insta-teleport back to the level start, with no graphical effect at all. :( Overall, the minimalist graphics are pretty OK tho, although not great. Exception: Level 7. Here the flat color 100% makes sense and is pretty clever.
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I have officially retracted this review because of this: https://github.com/Minetest-j45/build-n-buy/pull/8
By the way, these bugs are already officially fixed by you now, which I hereby acknowledge:
The repetitions have become less bad, but IMO the best solution is put all levels in a pool. When a new level is chosen, draw from that pool randomly, removing the level from the pool. Repeat until the pool becomes empty. When the pool is empty, reset the pool. This method guarantees that repetitions only happen once you completed every level once. It does't make sense to allow ANY repetitions until they're impossible to avoid. I might submit another PR for that if you're OK with this.
converted review into a thread
OK, this is a good point. Minetest really needs to treat
time_speed
as a per-world setting rather than a global one. :-(I don't understand this mod. This just seems a complicated way to do "/set time_speed 0".
This is very simple but also pretty interesting and fun. It works well with many games. I tried it in my Repixture game and it works like a charm.
It's fun to slowly but surely build your island and it's exciting when you finally get an important item like a sapling or dirt. Good mod.
The "screenshot" with the name "default" looks like a fake to me. Is this a real screenshot? If yes, I wonder how you achieved the shadows like this.
I guess this image is actually a Blender render. If this is the case, this image violates screenshot rule 7.2 "Screenshots must depict the actual content of the package in some way, and not be misleading.".
https://content.minetest.net/policy_and_guidance/
If this is not a real screenshot, please remove it. Or replace it with a real screenshot that looks nice.
This package violates the screenshot rule 7.2 "Screenshots must depict the actual content of the package in some way, and not be misleading."
https://content.minetest.net/policy_and_guidance/
The first image is an idealized "box art", not a screenshot. Please remove it or put an actual screenshit in its place. That's all, thanks.
This package violates the screenshot rule 7.2 "Screenshots must depict the actual content of the package in some way, and not be misleading."
https://content.minetest.net/policy_and_guidance/
The first image is an idealized "box art", not a screenshot. Please remove it or put an actual screenshit in its place. That's all, thanks.
This package violates the screenshot rule 7.2 "Screenshots must depict the actual content of the package in some way, and not be misleading."
https://content.minetest.net/policy_and_guidance/
The first image is an idealized "box art", not a screenshot. Please remove it or put an actual screenshit in its place. That's all, thanks.
This package violates the screenshot rule 7.2 "Screenshots must depict the actual content of the package in some way, and not be misleading."
https://content.minetest.net/policy_and_guidance/
The first image is an idealized "box art", not a screenshot. Please remove it or put an actual screenshit in its place. That's all, thanks.
This package violates the screenshot rule 7.2 "Screenshots must depict the actual content of the package in some way, and not be misleading."
https://content.minetest.net/policy_and_guidance/
The first image is an idealized "box art", not a screenshot. It should therefore be removed.
This package probably violates the screenshot rule 7.2 "Screenshots must depict the actual content of the package in some way, and not be misleading."
https://content.minetest.net/policy_and_guidance/
The first image looks like an idealized Blender render, not a real screenshot. It should therefore be removed.
This package violates the screenshot rule 7.2 "Screenshots must depict the actual content of the package in some way, and not be misleading."
https://content.minetest.net/policy_and_guidance/
The first image is an idealized "box art", not a screenshot. It should therefore be removed.
As of version 3.3.0, I hope all of the points should have been addressed now.
Note: The pickaxe dig speed is new in 3.3.0, the other two things were addressed in previous versions.
I have been a long-time vocal critic of MTG, and for a number of reasons. This post serves as a summary. Review for version: 5.5.0
The biggest problem, tho, is that MTG just "feels" incomplete. In essence, MTG is a Big Empty Sandbox that Jim-Stephanie Sterling talked about on the Jimquisition. Meaning, the world is large, but the number of different things you can do is very small. It thus feels "empty".
So what can you do? You can explore the world, but the biomes don't offer special items that advance the game (except food, maybe). You can go mining, but it's easy to get to the best ore, the diamond ore. You can farm blocks and build, and you can farm wheat and cotton. And this is ... mostly it, apart from some smaller features. Needless to say, a new player will have explored all the major features fast. Not being able to do various different things is the death for any sandbox.
Thus, you run out of new things to do in MTG fast. Once you get the best tools, farmed some resources, built some things, that's all the game offers, basically. MTG is fine if you really only care about raw creative building. The selection of blocks is fine, and people did build amazing things in MTG.
But IMHO, the standalone MTG is completely uninteresting as a game. It is, however, extensively used for servers, but in a heavily modded form. As a basis for servers to add mods on, MTG has done its job well. As a basis for modders, MTG does an OK job.
But most players want more than just a raw sandbox. MTG does not deserve its special status as a default game and should therefore lose it. That MTG is still the default game is the single-most damaging thing to the whole community, because it makes such a bad first impression. Thankfully, development focus has mostly moved away, as MTG is currently in "maintenance/bugfix-only" phase.
Full disclosure: I did contribute some smaller features and bugfixes in the past and also a translation. But not the big stuff.
I agree with the technical criticisms of MTG, and I have been a vocal critic of MTG for a long time, so I don't need to add here.
But that weird detour/rant about free software was unneccessary. This attitude of "normal people just don't care about free software" is toxic imho. Normal people don't care about their freedom until they get sued by a megacorporation for copyright infringement. :D It's a mentality thing as well. Society teaches people that it is "normal" that "everything" is copyrighted and that you, the stupid average user, have no rights while megacorporations have all the rights.
That having said, free software is NO excuse for why MTG sucks. :D Dethroning MTG is also one of my long-term goals. Thankfully, MTG is officially in bugfix-only mode now, so this at least forced people to divert resources elsewhere.
The screenshots are hi-res now.
Sadly, the so-called "Chest with Everything" excludes items in the
not_in_creative_inventory=1
group (unlike in DevTest), therefore this mod is basically just a clone of the Creative Inventory found in many games. That's not really an improvement. For development purposes, it's better to really show all things, even the "forbidden ones" so it's easier to test how they behave. If you're worried about security, only allow players with the 'give' priv to take items.This mod is more meant as a starting point for games to use and maybe modify.
As this mod only looks at the raw item definitions, the information it can use is indeed rather limited. Although stuff like digging speed can be extracted easily, things like the meaning of an item requires actual development from the game or mod developers. Obviously, this mod can’t just automagically figure out what an item is meant to do.
Absolutely nothing in my post is factually incorrect. Since one component of xdecor is non-free, xdecor as a whole can not be treated as free. This is pretty standard interpretation of free software / open source all across the board. It's also ContentDB's interpretation. -NC is widely accepted as a non-free license clause in the community, both according to free software and open source definition. Yes, ContentDB allows -NC, but ContentDB also (correctly) classifies it as non-free.
I am not discriminating xdecor for being non-free. ContentDB is. I have no influence over how ContentDB treats packages.
Tell me what I am supposed to do: Deliberately choose a wrong license to get rid of the "non-free" status, although it's not the true license of this package? That doesn't make sense.
I agree that more content would be nice, that's what I like to do as well. I have lots of notes and drafts to what this game will become. As this game is still officially in the alpha stage, there might be drastic changes (I hope!). I think I will continue development rather soon, in the last months I was busy with Lazarr! (still not happy with that game, oh well... :( )
Content-wise, this game still has not much, I agree, so I like to especially explore the whole 'terraforming' aspect more. It's still very sandbox-style, but I think any good sandbox needs to give the player some stuff to do. It's not enough that the world is "big", the world also has to offer you things to do. :-)
As for being hard, this is not really intended, it's not really meant as a survival game. The current difficulty mostly comes from not really knowing how to proceed in the first place, and from slow progress overall; the README explains basic things but I want to make this information more accessible since many key things are not obvious.
This ContentDB entry had the wrong license set. There are multiple media licenses mentioned in LICENSE (per-file), so I picked the most restrictive license from the LICENSE file (CC BY-SA-NC) to trigger the red "non-free" warning.
Files that make this mod non-free:
xdecor_enchanting.ogg
Well, my excuse is that this was a rating for the 2021 Minetest Game Jam, and I wanted to rate the games for the game jam specifically. So this was kind of a special case. It feels weird that you can't give thumbs down for broken games for the game jam.
Anyway, I have decided to try it again, but this time managed to make this game work somehow. I don't know how. Here is my new rating: Thumbs down.
Reason:
Okay, so the game looks pretty nice, the graphics are really cute. I really like the minimalist landscape and how you used sky color to your advantage. Using the few tools that gives Minetest in such a creative way is something I really appreciate! :)
Unfortunately, the gameplay isn't really stable or reliable. The game runs a bit too slow. The idea is great, flying through the world and collecting coins. But performance is poor. The balloon often doesn't react too fast enough to move left or right. And many of the bonuses are placed in a way that you always just miss them. Not sure if intentional. But the worst problem is this: If your ballon flies very fast, you constantly bump into unloaded terrain, making the game very errating (sadly) and unfun. The performance problem is so bad that it ruins the fun, sadly. :-(
Apart from that, the game would have actually be nice. The game is pretty complete, it's just too laggy. If the game would not be so laggy, I would have given it a thumbs up. But it also gets boring pretty fast. :-(
This might be a limitation of Minetest (because the balloon moves VERY fast at one point), but is still unfortunate. But on the other hand, maybe some trick like preloading the whole level would have done the trick, not sure.
Okay, I can solve now. You forgot to add
paramtype="light"
for the nodes with broken lighting (like glass and nodeboxes). :D Seelua_api.txt
.That might be true, but it doesn't seem to prevent a "close repetition" like "Building A, Building B, Building A" which happened once to me. Maybe when one builidng was used, "block" for X rounds before it is allowed again. (this obviously requires many more schematics in general for it to work)