24: ArGeeBee

[Nandrew]

Hewwo!

The competition premise is a challenging one indeed, and I've found it fairly difficult to fuse two genres in a way that's both feasible and rewarding. So instead, I've taken the liberty of fusing three. Sort of. I hope it works out, since I probably broke a few good dev practices in making this thing.

ArGeeBee:

An experimental game which throws a run-and-jump platformer, a top-down RPG and a match-3 puzzler into the same room and forces them to play nice with each other. Themed in three delicious colours.



(29 DECEMBER)

ArGeeBee is 20 levels strong and ready for release. It's not Teh Most Awezome Gaem Evar(TM) or anything, but I think that it'll be an great playthrough for anyone who has a passion for different and experimental games. Hopefully it'll have you thinking in all sorts of brand new ways: designing the levels for this has been startlingly brain-breaking -- even for simple scenarios -- and I forsee one or two interesting challenges for anyone who picks this up.

Whatever the case, I'm going to close the book on this proggie and move on to something else. It's been really fun to develop, and I hope that this provides many people with half an hour of delightful puzzle-solving/RPG/action platformer madness!

Get ArGeeBee (Final)

NOTE: Level 7 should be fixed now.

ArGeeBee Stuff (press pack of images, links and game/comp descriptions)

[CiNiMoDZA]

Well, I atleast now I have a valid reason not to enter this comp :P

[Nandrew]

Nawww, just set yourself a short time limit, think of a game that you can execute in that time limit, and voila! Before you even know what you've started, you're in the polish phase and moving a cool little game out the door. :)

Also, for those who are curious about the sound in this game, I put up a piece about it: "Foley for people who suck at sound"

[CiNiMoDZA]

More levels...more levels

[Deathy]

Nice game! Quite challenging, but enjoyable. The interface feels a bit rigid, though thats not really a problem. I Like the simplicity of the game mechanics, though its not at all easy. Will play it with sound when I'm not at work;)

[Fruzz]

I really like it. I think the three different game types work really well together. I like the platformer/roguelike mixture most because it changes the spatial interpretation so drastically.

The tutorials are good, they're fun and I managed to pick up the game mechanics from them quite easily. I'm hideously stuck on puzzle 8 though. I think maybe I missed some vital mechanic somewhere along the line. Maybe you could emphasise that one more if I missed it somehow :)

[SkinkLizzard]

no I don't think you did, I was as horribly stuck
it has to do with how you arrange the green blocks in the floating box to get 2 sets of 3, L shaped groups of 3 can be shifted in at least 3 different ways to make a straight line, also you have to start that level with bee

[The Dash]

Loving it so far, will edit this with a full comment later, but for now i have found a bug i want to post before i forget. Once Bee has frozen an enemy, landing on the corner of this frozen enemy still kills him :( This has only happened once so far, and i am going to try do it again

EDIT:
Firstly, excellent name. Only when i started writing this did i get it.

Another excellent work from you, and easily in the top 3 for this competition. Puzzles were hard enough to prove a head scratcher, but not totally impossible. Its an excellent concept that's been well implemented. Will play through the levels again and come back and edit my comment to try find some faults :P

MOAR PUZZLES!

[Fruzz]

I just finished it. The last level was great fun :)

Maybe its worth mentioning in the tutorials that you can make more than 3 green blocks blue if you move them correctly. I think it was a bit of a fluke that I worked that one out. I assumed that you could only ever line up 3.

It might be fun to have a challenging platformer tutorial bit to give a bit of a subtle clue early on for a level like the last one. It would also be good practice for getting your platform timing more precise and easing the learning curve.

I liked the way that the blue character was emphasised over the other two in the last level. I'm not sure if any other colours get a chance in the spotlight in other levels, the last one just stuck out for me.

[edg3]

I want to try this, but my only issues are these: how big is the download? Also, did you make it vista friendly Nandrew?

Im stuck without proper internet (got a whopping 6kB/s down today) and just need to work out if i'll be able to stay connected to the net to download it (it took me 3 fails and a large amount of hair pulling over an hour odd to get game maker)

[Goraan]

Well done Nandrew. I enjoyed this game a hell of a lot. Not quite as much as Electric Zombies but enough to keep me playing to the end.

Well done sir. Well. Done

[Nandrew]

Awesome, great to hear the positive feedback! I'll be shipping off one last version with more puzzles on Thursday, then marketing and dusting this product in favour of a new project (or a return to OOTEZ). What I'm aiming for with this is to give the good folk of the Internet a few minutes of fun while trying something new.

@edg3 The download is 1.7 MB. And it's definitely Vista friendly, I've been using Vista for a while now.

[edg3]

Awesome that its small and vista ready but I cant hit Box.net, will download it next week when Im home and give feedback then. Thanks anyway :P

[Nandrew]

ARGEEBEE IS FINISHED!

I meant to get it out a few days ago, but the deadline was pushed back because I decided to conduct additional research in FPS/RPG genre fusion (read: been playing Borderlands since Christmas, and I'm not ashamed to admit it). I've also dropped the idea of submitting it to the Experimental Gameplay comp, because I think that my game's link to the theme of "Art Game" is shallow and tenuous at best. :P

I'm going to let it stew for a day or two here, I think, then send it off to a few review places and see if they want to slap it around. This little time window is basically here just in case any Game.Dev members find some magical crippling flaws or whatever. :)

The game is hard, I'll admit. At least, I think it will be. I really wanted to see what sort of challenges I could throw at people, and while I've done my best to be "fair" (taking care to arm players with important information as they go along) I'm not always holdin' yer hand. In particular, I think level 19 should provide an interesting challenge. Just bear in mind that while doing levels in sequence is a good idea, you can actually skip ahead if one puzzle proves too difficult for you.

Have fun! It's not meant to be totally epic or anything, but I'd like to see it provide about 20/30 minutes of entertaining gameplay overall.

[Nandrew]

Oh, and I'll just reiterate here: speedy feedback is welcome for matters of Great Game Importance (serious bugs, crashes, whatever). Aside from that, I don't need anything urgent. The game is complete to my satisfaction, and any commentary will be treated as postmortem info to bear in mind for future projects. :)

[Nandrew]

Oops, I've just found a problem in Level 7 (thanks d).

(--EDIT--) Aaaand fix'd. Sorry if I inconvenienced anyone. (--END--)

[Tr00jg]

http://www.indiegames.com/blog/2010/...geebee_ro.html :) Picked this up in my feeds.

[Nandrew]

I credit that to the wisdom of Comp 23 and the congeniality of the IndieGames staff. :)

My sound apparently needs work (not too surprised there), and I'm quite inspired to look into that with more detail on my next game project (or use DrPettr's super-easy sound generator -- though it's beginning to become a little too trendy for me). I've started on the path of homebrew sounds, and I think it's worth looking into making GOOD homebrew sounds now. :D

[dislekcia]

I'm liking how the views are climbing :)

Hi there international visitors, why not try Nandrew's other games while you're here?

[FuzzYspo0N]

Played it, loved it. Nice work on combining them , really.