GR#014 - Tobe's Vertical Adventure - Sideview Game Art

[bitterbug]

Looks like a nice game. Love the main character.
Do the Xbox Indie titles actually sell at all? Have you looked at the PS3 Minis?


We put out a game on the iphone and it got great reviews, but only managed to sell enough copies to cover the Mac mini and the app store license. Not a complete failure though

[smiker]

just lovely. it is beautyful and preserves the arcade old school style. very nice work here, A+ from me

[JDog053]

As a developer in XNA C# I can respect the work aswell as from an art perspective (which looks devine, very clean and crisp and super readable!) a coding perspective, where everything seems to be in the right place and nicely organised, not too sure of more though as I haven't seen it in motion.

But yeah, ***** 5 stars from me!

If you need any code for another project you're doing, fire me a PM

[Tobe]

Looks like a nice game. Love the main character.
Do the Xbox Indie titles actually sell at all? Have you looked at the PS3 Minis?

We put out a game on the iphone and it got great reviews, but only managed to sell enough copies to cover the Mac mini and the app store license. Not a complete failure though

Thanks for the love Sadly, the game didn't sell as much as we hope, even when we weren't expecting a lot, lol. I guess that's just the case for XBLIG, the userbase is really small, and game just get flush out of the "new arrival" really fast. I'm not too bothered though, since we manage to snatch some pretty decent reviews from reviewers and players. The obvious next move would be to bring the game to PC, but honestly, I don't have a programmer to do that now and I'm still trying to figure that out :/

If you need any code for another project you're doing, fire me a PM

I'm currently hoping to work on other platform, like....flash, Iphone, window mobile(which uses XNA), but who knows. If you're interest, we can work on a port?

Smiker : Thanks! The idea of the game was to create a tribute for the games I played as a child

[Elk]

Very nice pixels you have there =)
Didn't play it but looks very cute so far!

Keep up the good work

[bitterbug]

You could always submit it to BigFish, Steam, and company
And if I heard right the cost of PSP dev kits was dropping to $250.

BigFish has a page right on the site for submitting

[Scuba Steve]

No kidding. I had never put 2 and 2 together and realized that the demo I played was the same one from Pixelation. Don't I feel stupid.

I played the Demo a little while ago and was pleasantly surprised by the visuals. I enjoyed seeing high quality, pixelated images compared to the usual slop found on XBL. I wasn't keen on the decision to only use the d-pad (the 360 directional pad is garbage), but it was a fun romp. Now that I know the game was made by a member of the community... I'll have to pick it up... if for no other reason than to support acquaintances Excellent work.

[Edit] Looks like there was an update since the last time I played that includes analog support and fixed button colours? Excellent, will be downloading it again (and buying it.. and convincing others to buy it, too).

[Tobe]

Thanks a lot guys I believe a big part of Tobe's sales actually come from forumers of Pixelation and Tigsource , lol.
Also, the game is patched for a while now and it supports analog stick and fixed a few bugs.

Ans yes - do support acquaintances... because it's a nice thing to do 

[9_6]

If you guys are all like "this is a sega genesis game"
why
on
earth
do you take low res pixel graphics and put them into a high res game that is then being displayed on a tv screen? That's pretty awkward you know.

FYI the resolution of the genesis was 320x224 yet you went with somewhat twice that size.
I'm not even going into how the cutscene graphics clash with the game graphics.

Also the sound. Wouldn't it make sense to use genesis-ish sounds in a game that claims to be on a genesis?
Some 8-bit arcade-ish sounds would've fit much better than those generic piles of blandness that are in it right now.
That's also my main gripe I had with pixel. The sound was generitastingly sleep-inducing. Oh don't you dare to excite me too much.

And then there are the awkward controls, my guy sometimes just not climbing ledges if I just hold the directional button, insta-slowing down when running and jumping and choppy motions for example when you climb a ledge (you instantly teleport yourself forward a bit).
You know if I feel like I can code the controls better myself using as much as gamemaker, that kills the game for me.

Combine that with the underwhelming concept of "run around and collect stuff" and the "meh"-ness meter climbs to the max.
Judging from that youtube video, all levels even basically follow the same scheme of "collect stuff and get away".
This is a bit too basic, you know. Where's the exploration part of platformers? Where's the variation?
Mario wasn't all about collecting coins and neither was sonic only about collecting rings, they were about running through levels.
Exploring new areas, you know.

Sorry, not impressed.

[Helm]

Critique is fine and all but your tone is pretty harsh.

Jad infiltrates helm's post to not clutter up: Yes, I even posted a reply but then deleted it again because you actually offered useful critique. But what's up with sounding so whiny and angry? Are you seeing how unnecessarily harsh you sound? Plastering your game promo graphics onto the cart (for fun ...?) and then your game not adhering to genesis standards is usually not something that one would get all worked up about? WHY ON EARTH? well because it happened the other way - graphics first, box art later - obviously for fun. That's pretty awkward if you think about it. I'm sure Tobe does. Stop sounding so angry. Over and out.