____________________________________________________________ DualStream Day of Zeux: Winter 2013 (Q1) Lachesis ____________________________________________________________ I wasn't incredibly excited about this Day of Zeux given the sort of lack of lead-up, plus there was the judge drama last time; the number of registrations (eleven by the time the thing was over) didn't do much to help. That said, there are some fun entries this time. Good job, everyone who submitted! Keep submitting! Even if I say bad things about your game. Especially if I say bad things about your game. I want to make a special note here as I've been scoring the games: Dragons was not a particularly good theme for the Theme- Heavy scoresheet, and unsurprisingly it was one of the more commonly picked combinations, too. I have tried to judge the entries in question (2) fairly but I will admit some criteria did not translate perfectly and as a result your games will be disqualified & have been incredibly enjoyable to play _____________________________________________________________ / 11776 Dragon Blaster \ \ Dragons Theme-Heavy \ \_____________________________________________________________/ ____________________________________________________________ \ Theme! \\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\ 35/100 \ This is a fairly barebones interpretation of the 'Dragons' theme. Dragons exist in this game (the built-in kind, anyway) and you fight them, but they don't really look like dragons (more like big snakes, ugh). I'm sorry, but while this game had more dragons than your average built-in shooter, I just wasn't quite feeling the dragons in any other aspects of the game. The architecture could have said 'dragons' more ____________________________________________________________ \ Gameplay! \\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\ 36/90 \ The player's weapons are essentially reimplementations of MZX bullets and bombs designed to be less useful and more frustrating. The bullets gradually slow down as you hold space, which means you need to plan your attacks more carefully. The bombs shoot colored globs in the cardinal directions; not very useful until the boss fight. Damage is more forgiving than in other games based on built-ins, as you will temporarily recieve invinco after each hit. Not that it helps much. The enemies are all built-in enemies and are fortunately used tastefully. The game adds different kinds of enemies over time, but we've fought them all before. The only enemies that aren't built-ins are stationary targets at the end. Altogether this game had a very average, if particularly dull gameplay experience, that is hampered by the projectile system that was not designed to account for the movement of built-ins, lack of variety, and towards the end outright cruelty to the player. ____________________________________________________________ \ Graphics! \\\\\\\\\\ 14/70 \ There's so much barebones here I would have otherwise thought the topic was 'Skeletons'! The character set is the default with only a few alterations, the palette is the default rebalanced to be less garish, and neither are used in a particularly creative way. Colors are used in questionable or even bad combinations sometimes, but rarely in ways that impede gameplay. Generally servicable but in no way pleasant. ____________________________________________________________ \ Technique!\\\\\\\\\\\\\ 15/60 \ The biggest offender here is the hastily constructed projectile system with bullets the player and enemies can walk through. The weapons in this game are actually a step or three backwards from built-in weapons, since those are at least reliable. Otherwise, robotic code is fairly sparse, so there's not much to judge here, and also not much to award points for. Built-in enemy usage is tasteful, which feels like it's worth at 3-5 points. The level design isn't anything special, but the encounters feel like they were at least tested several times and balanced, which is where most of the points here are coming from. Another thing to note is that you can't save in this game unless you fix it yourself, which is unfortunate as I sure needed this feature given that my weapon won't hit half of the things I shot it at. ____________________________________________________________ \ Story! \\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\ 23/50 \ Four sentences on the main menu and two in the ending; nothing extensive, deep, or thought-provoking here, but you know what, it does its job. In the same way as Catacombs of Zeux, I got the feeling that all of the interesting parts of the story happened before the game began. It would have been nice to see the player's hometown get destroyed; there would have been more motivation to go murder some dragons than with a one-sentence reference to it. I don't know, maybe the player could have secretly been a dragon ____________________________________________________________ \ Sound! \\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\ 15/30 \ An okay, fitting selection of music, and mostly built-in SFX. Thanks for turning off the invinco and dragon fire sound effects. Nothing here really augments the gameplay experience though. ____________________________________________________________ \ Total! \\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\ 138/400 \ I'm having a hard time believing not one but ten Maxims worked on this game, because I'm pretty sure one Maxim alone can do at least ten times better than this. "Congraturation! You are a real brutal dragon slayer." _____________________________________________________________ / 20945 Ballad of Dargan the Dragon, The \ \ Dragons Theme-Heavy \ \_____________________________________________________________/ ____________________________________________________________ \ Theme! \\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\ 71/100 \ I'd say there was quite a bit of Dragons going on here! The player controlled a dragon, all of the enemies were dragons, the boss was a dragon. The dragon also hatched from an egg and noticably grew up as you increased the level, which was a great touch. Overall the setting looked and felt very appropriate for dragons to be existing in it, and all of the story was in rhyme! You just can't beat that. ____________________________________________________________ \ Gameplay! \\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\ 50/90 \ I wasn't a fan of the arrows-only controls at first but they quickly grew on me. It would have been more intuitive to put the single-target attacks for fire and ice on the right arrow. Wish the controls had been more responsive; switching to MZX speed 2 for would have worked since they locked up anyway during animations. There were a handful of fights early on in the game where I could only whittle down the enemy's HP around 2-5 at a time, and the enemies had something like 30 HP, which got irritating fast, but that didn't last long, as only a few levels in, I was destroying them all and hardly taking any notable damage. The gratification of killing four enemy dragons before any of them could hit me actually seemed to make up for the frustration early on. I think the boss only managed to hit me once on my second playthrough. Good balance? Nnnnnno, probably not, but pretty alright given someone who doesn't like this genre (after level 2-3, at least). Enjoyable but broken. ____________________________________________________________ \ Graphics! \\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\ 58/70 \ Wow! Everything just looks great here. You can tell where the patterns in the background repeat but they do it in an unoffensive and effective way. The title screen, story, and ending screens are nothing special, but once we get into the game proper everything just looks magnificent, the bar ends blend in perfectly... well, okay, not everything looks great -- the path is bland and the mountain slopes stick out pretty bad. The font is just the default. The dragons pictures are well drawn and show obvious progression between forms, including when your dragon hatches in the intro. The battle animations are done in half chars, which fits much better than I would have thought (given how gorgeous everything else is), and are animated pretty smoothly. If I have any complaint about the battle backdrops, it's that if even though they repeat nicely, some more variation would have been nice. Even still, great job here. ____________________________________________________________ \ Technique!\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\ 41/60 \ For the most part, the game is solidly built from the first battle to the last. The bookends are a bit mushy; the title, story, ending, and game over boards all appear to have been thrown together last minute or to have been placeholders that never got replaced. There was a major lack of variety in this game's contents; all of the enemies attacked with the same attacks, even the boss. They even share the same graphics as the player, just recolored. It's like playing through Pokemon but there's only one Pokemon. The balance is questionable. At the beginning the enemies are taking sizable chunks out of my health and I can barely hit them for half of that at best, and by the end I can do twice as much damage to all of the opponents in one hit as they can to me. The experience curve also does not account for increased experience gained from higher level enemies, so while getting from level 1 to 2 is a chore, getting from level 9 to 10 (or **) usually takes one battle. It seems like this entry was played a little close to the mark and there wasn't enough time to tidy up the ends in general. ____________________________________________________________ \ Story! \\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\ 33/50 \ Is Dargan the Dragon the player's dragon or the monster in the mountains at the end? The game's story is simplistic and makes everything clear (who the bad guy is, why I want to murder it), and doesn't introduce any unnecessary plot elements. Well, I guess it didn't tell me who Dargan is, but you can't win 'em all. ____________________________________________________________ \ Sound! \\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\ 25/30 \ There were only two pieces of music in this game, both were well constructed and neither managed to get old. All of the attacks have unique sound effects, besides the enemy attacks which are all the same. Everything fits well. The only things that feel questionable are the pops in the first instrument in the title/map music but I forgot about them after a while. It feels like there should have been around three more tracks, maybe. ____________________________________________________________ \ Total! \\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\ 278/400 \ Maybe not the greatest DoZ RPG ever, but a great looking one, an honorable submission, and an enjoyable-if-easy game while it lasted. _____________________________________________________________ / 55314 Schone Zeiten \ \ Nostalgia Theme-Heavy \ \_____________________________________________________________/ ____________________________________________________________ \ Theme! \\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\ 86/100 \\ \ I was pleasantly surprised by this entry's implementation of its theme; it was clear, efficient, maybe even inspiring, and never mentioned the theme by name once, which is always a good sign. Clearly there was something to be learned from the last Day of Zeux. The sepia tone and gentle jazz music playing in the background music set a perfect atmosphere. The narrator yearns for the simpler days of space civilization as he retells his past. As you explore, you live the narrator's story, continuing to each location the story marks relevant. At first I thought you were a different character in the present revisiting each planet while the narrator accompanied you and reminisced, which I felt may have fit the theme more, but that is obviously not the case since you eventually become directly involved in the narrator's fights. ____________________________________________________________ \ Gameplay! \\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\ 68/90 \ Schone's gameplay is mostly exploring systems and discovering/ trading resources, interspersed with the occasional space battle. The exploring was, by far, my favorite part of the game, and there was plenty of entertaining incidental text for exploring planets (Terror Planet IX was probably my favorite). I wish there were more areas to explore after completing the story portion of the game. There is a shop system where you can take the materials you've gathered to sell them and buy ship upgrades. Once you have explored sufficiently it becomes obvious which planets to buy from and sell to, and there is almost nothing stoping you from buying large bulk of something and trading it to other planets for profits that can border on ridiculous. The game has a built-in mechanism to prevent you from doing it to excess, which I will explain later, but I would have just preferred smaller profits per item until the end of the game. Combat begins fairly easy and gradually increases in difficulty, but not by too much. Generally, you can just fight whatever and succeed given you have up-to-date equipment. Towards the end you need to learn the specifications of each ship class and how to take them down as efficiently as possible if you want to survive combat. Most of the enemy encounters felt the same with minor exceptions, like the satellite. The final wave of enemies started strong but ended too easy. There are two kinds of weapons, lasers and cannons, with some differences I won't bother documenting here. The most expensive weapon has attributes of both, but unfortunately the recharge time is so long it's essentially worthless. There are few different ship upgrades to worry about altogether; more levels/types of upgrades would have extended the replay value. ____________________________________________________________ \ Graphics! \\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\ 48/70 \ The only thing I was particularly impressed by here is the dynamically-generated planet backdrops when exploring planets, which actually were pretty darn neat looking. Might have wanted to clean up some of the dither and mountain chars, though. Also, one gas giant had trees. You know gas giants don't have trees right, O.K., just makin' sure, some people think they have those. Aside from the exploration view the planets were not particularly great looking, but not to the point that they were offensive. Okay, maybe the fly-in/out view was a little offensive, but probably just because it was right before/after the very nice terrain view. Something I think that would have been a lot nicer to look at is more detail on the starmap, nebulas in the background, distant stars, ideally with colors much closer to that of the background so it doesn't look like crap when the player's ship or the mouse move over them, then you'd can the low fuel animation and replace it with a sound effect (more appropriate anyway). As-is, the simplistic nature of the backgrounds helps the theme, so maybe less detail is better. Alternatively, with the two-color approach, you could have given the starmap smooth scrolling. Finally, the font did not read very easy, and the white borders of the UI stuck out way too much. I don't think using the starmap BG color for the outer border lines and the outer border color for the button border lines would have hurt (and getting rid of that dither and just inverting the two non-text colors on button press). Also, the space ships had cool designs. ____________________________________________________________ \ Technique!\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\ 49/60 \ The script system was a great idea to take the stress of having to know the inner workings of things off of the scriptwriter's shoulders and probably didn't take very long to implement. It would have been an even better idea to write something to check your scripts for missing zaps, syntax errors, and anything else suspicious too (lines of text starting with command names, code that would never be executed, set plot_scene 3...). Also, naming scripts correctly helps sometimes too :> Mouse navigation is poorly supported, even frustrating, which is boggling as the UI has to be used with the mouse. Leaving a system with the mouse can be anywhere from annoying to impossible without backing up and trying again, and it's never consistent. Eventually I gave up and switched between keyboard and mouse as needed, but I shouldn't have had to. A frequent theme was me being thrown straight back into a planet or system I just left because I didn't leave it exactly the way the game wanted me to. Why not just let the player fly over everything? The ship's already making the edges of the planet look ugly; there isn't anything to lose by adding an "Enter System/Orbit" button. Of minor note, the bug where closing the F3/F4 dialogs with the mouse resulting in the click being detected by the game is an MZX bug. The last thing I think needs mentioning is the lack of a way to sell more than one item per click. You get a lot of materials from the game's natural progression and can buy more than you ever dreamed of from stores, but you have to do it one at a time. The lack of foresight here is unfortunate. I did not attempt to fix this myself, as I wanted to feel every single mouse click to give a more fair score. I've been typing these scores with the bloody stump of my right index finger. ____________________________________________________________ \ Story! \\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\ 40/50 \ The story is narrated to the never-seen audience while the player acts out the past experiences of the narrator revisits the places of the narrator's past. The starmap is well designed in that it keeps the story segments paced well apart, although I ended up going the wrong direction and had already explored most of the galaxy before I triggered the plot event on Ashburn. It felt like it could have been more involved -- the motivation for going from place to place had some feelings of "get to the next place" than being entirely natural. More plot would have been okay too. The narrator has depth and is genuinely likeable. Character depth seems to be a place where most MegaZeux games struggle. As I mentioned before, I had slight confusion over the exact nature of the narrative's relation to the gameplay until the plot battles made it more obvious. This could have been clarified with some sort of scene with the introduction before throwing the player straight into the gameplay. I was probably the only person who had this issue. ____________________________________________________________ \ Sound! \\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\ 24/30 \ I have few complaints about the sound. There are sound effects where appropriate and nothing sounds out of place, although a few spots are lacking. For example, there could have been some space ship whoosh sounds when entering/leaving atmosphere and when your vessel moves on the starmap and in systems -- okay, a 'whoosh' is too obvious, but *something*, as most of the game time is spent on these screens. I DON'T CARE IF THERE AREN'T SOUNDS IN SPACE DON'T USE THAT EXCUSE The music tracks do a great job as is, but similarly I wished there had just been more. Tracks for different star systems, or a different track for exploring planets (pressing that sell button 800 times sure got lonely). For an even more nostalgic feel you could have had some sort of jukebox feature. ____________________________________________________________ \ Total! \\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\ 315/400 \ Great submission here that was enjoyable and felt complete despite a few rough edges. This team could have benefitted from a dedicated artist. _____________________________________________________________ / 65974 Dracos Corona \ \ Dragons Theme-Lite \ \_____________________________________________________________/ Unfinished Day of Zeux game with major potential strikes again! But what went wrong? Let's find out! Trust me I'm a doctor, sort of ____________________________________________________________ \ Theme! \\\\\\\\\\\\\\ 5/20 \ Well, it mentions a dragon. Also, the gameplay was "dragon" quite a bit if you ask me that's only two dragons though so just barely a pass ____________________________________________________________ \ Gameplay! \\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\ 56/120 \ I was not much a fan of the gameplay here; and I spent most of this game running away from my opponents instead of fighting them. At least you get 'Dash' at the end of the game and you can run away from everything in style. Exploring was much more satisfying than fighting anything was; by the end I was just irritated that unfightable hordes were distracting me from the scenery. Hitting stuff is a chore here where it should be natural in an action game; instead of holding a direction and charging with a different key, maybe just have the direction key charge, or let the player charge before aiming. Also, stop wasting my near complete charge every time I step out of range dodging. The charging mechanic is dependent on the aiming mechanic and it and it should be the other way around. In practice, the only usable weapon before you got 'Dash' was the Burst, and it took too long to charge. The camera movement didn't help much either. For the amount of effort and time it takes to hit anything, the enemies take too many hits to die, as well. ____________________________________________________________ \ Graphics! \\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\ 63/90 \ The player animation is fluid, but I'm not sure what all of these enemies are supposed to be, and I'm not sure I want to know. The projectile graphics are also incredibly lacking, even garish. I'm glad the levels, for the most part, are nice enough that I didn't care too much. The grandfather image in the intro is probably the worst looking thing in the game, or in any MegaZeux game, though. Regarding the level graphics, I really enjoyed the first and last dungeons (the forest and the volcano, respectively). The main area was fine looking but the lack of intensity contrast between the ground and other terrain colors was offputting. The castle is overall bland and once again there are balance issues (purple carpet), but even as the "worst" looking area it's still very nice. ____________________________________________________________ \ Technique!\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\ 45/80 \ It seems like there was a plan behind the execution of this game but it fell apart in the details. There are bugs and bad design choices here that could have been found by a single complete playthrough. In no particular order: * LOCKED bug and strange viewport behavior after unlocking with F11 * DIE ITEM without adjusting the viewport * Infinite HP, although I give it a pass because I needed it. * Dash frequently throws me in the middle of terrain. * Couldn't shoot the statue blocking entrance to the castle until I moved to the far left of it, after which I could target it. * You can skip the castle entirely. This happened to me the first time I played (it seemed more obvious to turn right than left). * Enemies are frustrating to fight (see Gameplay). * There's no obvious way to tell when the charge bar is done charging without looking away from the action. The top of the charge bar is impossible to see out of the corner of the eye because it's weak dither on black. I have no idea what the work distribution between the teammates for this game was, but if I had to guess, that's where some improvements could have been made. The levels were well executed and mostly everything else seems to Just Work besides what I outlined above. ____________________________________________________________ \ Story! \\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\ 20/50 \ We get a huge, unnecessary plot dump at the start of the game from dying grandpa, followed by essentially no story development at all. This game feels like it needed story cutscenes to freshen it up between endless murdering (running from) things segments, or alternatively something more concise and to-the-point. The ending here basically sucked, and I didn't even get to fight the dragon. ____________________________________________________________ \ Sound! \\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\ 18/40 \ There are some good musical choices here but the sound effects are almost non-existant. The charge up sound actually does more harm than help; it has no correlation with the actual amount of time it takes to charge up your weapon and doesn't stop playing if you release the space bar. Since the bar on the side of the screen is nearly useless unless you look directly at it, this sound effect is the only thing I have to go by, and it lies to me. New sound effects that might have been helpful are something to tell you when you have found a new target, one for when the target has gone out of range, and one for when the charge is done. This isn't counting adding sound effects for just about everything else in the game that needs them. ____________________________________________________________ \ Total! \\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\ 207/400 \ I really wanted this game to be better than it ended up being. This team has consistently released alright to good quality games for the past few Day of Zeux competitions. I hope you keep the trend up and have better luck than this next time. _____________________________________________________________ / 92887 Nostalgia \ \ Nostalgia Theme-Heavy \ \_____________________________________________________________/ ____________________________________________________________ \ Theme! \\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\ 39/100 \ The theme was a laid out a bit more obviously here than I prefer. I think my biggest complaint overall is probably that the narrative loves to remind us that these are Nostalgic Games you are playing through (in case you forgot the game's title/theme). Another one is that the nostalgic value of these games is quite subjective -- I never played Zork, Wolf3D, or Doom anywhere near when they came out, and have no nostalgia for them. Instead of attempting to invoke nostalgia through the writing and atmosphere, it tries by showing the player other games. It would have been interesting to see where this game went if it had been finished, though. ____________________________________________________________ \ Gameplay! \\\\\\\\\\\\\\\ 25/90 \ I like the idea of a minigame-centric Day of Zeux entry, but all we got here was a text adventure, a 'hit the things as they come toward you' minigame, and two built-in shooting segments, none of which naturally progress into the next. As far as each segment goes: the horse minigame is pretty monotone and the built-in shooting was similarly dull. The only section I had much fun with was the text adventure, and it was far too underdeveloped to hold this game on its own. I would recommend one of two things to the authors for next time: a uniform, solid gameplay style instead of "N" minigames, or to have minigame concepts pre-planned ahead of time -- perhaps something to think about ahead of time and then to pull out of your file when another DoZ comes along where the 'minigames' concept fits. ____________________________________________________________ \ Graphics! \\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\ 30/70 \ What kind of graphics score do you give to a text adenture? Words can paint wonderful pictures, but the descriptions here didn't do a whole lot for me. The actual graphics in this game are altogether unoffensive; there is nothing eyepopping to see here, though the forest background looks quite alright. On a side note, I was hoping the player's face would change in the Wolf3D/Doom segments when damaged. ____________________________________________________________ \ Technique!\\\\\\\\\\\ 12/60 \ What is the deal with that second minigame? Oh, I see, it has a bunch of arrows that almost blend in entirely with the BG. I don't know if that's intentional or not, but I hope not. That's mean. Here's a point of advice: use MZX speed 2 when taking text input from the user. Increasing the MZX speed does not affect the rate of KEY_PRESSED's autorepeat, but it does make the game miss far fewer keystrokes. On a more general note, a lot more thought could have been put into this game, especially in giving the different games a stronger thematic connection, even if it meant cutting the game down to three minigames at most (which is essentially what happened anyway). Not knowing where to draw your lines in a DoZ is an issue everyone has at one point or another, but with practice eventually you get used to doing it. Another thing to note is the inexcusable filesize of this entry. ____________________________________________________________ \ Story! \\\\\\\\\\\\\\\ 19/50 \ The story only really exists to get the player from one minigame to the next, and even then, the minigames don't really do anything to progress the story once you're outside of the building. Oh well. It's not really that important to the game, and it did what it was intended to do well enough. For what the game is trying to do the story should be stronger, and I wish there were some stakes. ____________________________________________________________ \ Sound! \\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\ 14/30 \ The music fits each segment well enough, but then, how hard is that to do if each segment is based off of games that already exist? The keyboard sounds during the text adventure were humorous at first but took me out of it overall. Hey look, it's Bernard the Bard. ____________________________________________________________ \ Total! \\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\ 139/400 \ I think that overall, scrapping the framing story and/or sticking to a single gameplay style might have helped the authors' efforts result in a complete game. ____________________________________________________________ / \ | Ranking | \____________________________________________________________/ I really don't feel like there were any surprises in the rank order of the games. Good job everyone, see you in 6 months! Hopefully I won't be judging again, I prefer making DoZ games. Title Score 01. 55314 Schone Zeiten 315/400 02. 20945 The Ballad of Dargan the Dragon 278/400 03. 65974 Dracos Corona 207/400 04. 92887 Nostalgia 139/400 05. 11776 Dragon Blaster 138/400