Winter 2013 Dualstream Day of Zeux Scoresheet:Insidious

2013 Winter DsDoz Scores from Insidious

SCORE SUMMARY (in order of effective rank):

Team	Theme	Gameplay	Graphics	Technique	Story	Sound	Total
55314	100/100	70/90	60/70	30/60	49/50	28/30	337/400
20945	99/100	52/90	55/70	45/60	20/50	29/30	300/400
92887	75/100	15/90	30/70	10/60	15/50	20/30	165/400
65974	5/20	40/120	55/90	20/80	2/50	30/40	152/400
11776	85/100	20/90	5/70	5/60	10/50	20/30	145/400

11776 - Dragon Blaster - Theme Heavy - Dragons

I found this game interesting but, in the end, tedious. Its basically a standard MZX builtin shooter, of the type one might see submitted for a BKZX or made into a full game in the mid 1990s. This doesn't inherently make it a bad game, but certain elements combined together to make this not a very pleasurable experience.

Theme: 85/100

A very good choice of scoresheet here. The theme, Dragons, saturates the entirety of the gameplay. Almost all of the enemies are MZX builtin dragons, the story is about a village thats been repeatedly ransacked by dragons, even your first stay at an inn will be interrupted by a visit from dragons. 10 points are only taken off here because there's a certain lack of depth to this use of the theme. We don't ever find out why the dragons are attacking, we don't explore dragons as an idea... The game is certainly entirely about dragons, but if you weren't familiar with the MZX builtin of the same name, you wouldn't be able to even tell that thats what the enemies were supposed to be.

Gameplay: 20/90

A few token points are given here because initially the gameplay is quite fun. This is what MegaZeux initially was, what it was seemingly programmed to be, a top down action shooter engine against low-intelligence AI. But, it gets very tedious and very repetitive very quickly. This would be okay if there were something to break up the tedium, but there isn't. The boss is simply a dragon-spawner that must be shot repeatedly to shut down, and otherwise its 10 levels of shooting builtins. The difficulty level is nonetheless fairly high at times. Saving normally is disabled and, while there are no points taken away in this section for this particular bug, the fact that the save engine doesn't work simply makes the game that much harder.

Graphics: 5/70

Five token points here given for somewhat clever usage of the default charset when creating some of the initial levels backgrounds. However, this is 2013. In my opinion, you shouldn't be using the default charset and palette in a DoZ these days, with all the tools available to you in create your own custom characters there should be no need to fall back on unmodified defaults. It shows a rather distressing lack of effort.

Technique: 5/60

What would have been at least somewhat impressive technique in terms of the shooting engine, mercy invincibility, and other such things is marred by coding error and a general seeming lack of time spent bugtesting. Not only is there the save game engine where no attempt was even made to actually make it save your game until post-DoZ, but the bullets from your gun frequently pass through enemies, sometimes without doing them any harm. They also have a tendency to bunch up, even when on high charge, which appears to cause the game in general to slow down. With the exception of the aforementioned weapon and player controls code, nothing here is particularly new, innovative, or well put together. The 'status screen' is a simple static overlay, the 'gate' to each new level is simply a robot that dies when it sees that there are no more builtins around. Nothing new, nothing impressive, lots of repetition of code.

Story: 10/50

Dragons attack your town a lot. Kill them. That appears to be it. 10 points for having some semblance of a story, pity it didn't really go anywhere.

Sound: 20/30

The music was excellent, and if it weren't for the fact that the game uses those same PC speaker sound effects I've been hearing since 1997, this would have been the one perfect category for this game. Sorry.

Total: 145/400

Maxim, I'm disappointed in you. After all the guff you went through making sure you got a team number and your game got submitted, you turn up with something that feels entirely like you knocked it out in 2 hours. I know you can do much better than this.

20945 - The Ballad of Dargan the Dragon ((or was that Dragon the Dargan?)) - Theme Heavy - Dragons

An interesting an oddly charming, simple RPG battler. I enjoyed it, for the most part.

Theme: 99/100

You are a dragon. Your enemies are dragons. The game explores the elemental attacks often associated with dragons in folklore. It also explores the physical characteristics of a dragon (with the exception of flight). The entire game is, also, about defending your village from dragons. A very thorough and honest exploration of the theme, given the genre, which gets you near full marks here.

Gameplay: 52/90

The gameplay manages to be charming and surprisingly deep given the simplistic nature of the game (fight dragons, move, fight more dragons) but, said simplistic nature ends up being its downfall in the end. To put it bluntly, the game is just too long. I had to grind to Level 8 to be able to beat the boss and that entailed dancing back and forth between a battle and a town for far too long, after which the novelty wore off and the battles frankly became a very repetitive game of tic tac toe. If the boss had been tuned for say, a Level 5 dragon, you would have ended up with far more points here because I would have been far less bored by the end of it all.

A few points were also taken away here because it wasn't until I lost against the boss the first time that I realized you can move back and forth on the seemingly one way linear world map.

Graphics: 55/70

This game manages to pack a lot of style into arguably simple graphics. The single color sprites effectively communicated the element of your enemy, and while that was, as was oddly admitted in an addendum on the instruction screen, less important than it would seem (though more than said addendum makes it sound!), it was still an effective use of graphics to streamline player interaction. The backgrounds for the world map and two battle scenes were quite detailed and lovely in their way, and all in all the game exudes a certain polished charm that I enjoy.

Technique: 45/60

This is... an odd game to score on technique. The actual engines and code presented here are pretty well executed and very smooth. A number of bug fixes were posted on the forums but I didn't actually notice a single difference in the game with the bugfixes implemented or not implemented. A few points were lost here because of those bugs, which I only know of because of the fixes... Perhaps a case where honesty was not, necessarily, the best policy.

A few little problems with the way the engine is structured that were NOT fixed with the bug fixes deserve mention and dragged this score down a little more. As noted on the instruction screen, whether an elemental matchup truly provides an advantage seems to be random and not entirely as you would expect. As well, there should be a way to queue up your player's actions for after the enemy attacks, fighting against the "enemy is attacking, you can't attack" prompt so that I can get a shot in before I end up dead seems an arbitrary and probably not intended difficulty increaser, and is mentioned here as it could easily be fixed with some extra code.

With the exception of those very minor quibbles, one of which is admitted to before you even start the game, and the apparent "bugs" fixed on the forum thread, I find this game's technique to be quite interesting. The method of generating random matchups seems to be very fair and yet at the same time challenging. All of the actions in the game are very smooth, and everything works the way you'd expect it to.

UPDATE: Apparently the issue was if you attacked the final boss with fire, it would freeze. Well, since my final boss was a fire dragon, I didn't think to do that. :P Good to know. As I had to be notified of that by the author themselves, I won't be taking any extra points away.

Story: 20/50

The story is told in poetry in a blurb before the beginning of the game. Its nice, and its a LITTLE more in depth than simply "your town is under attack by dragons", but not all that much. More damningly to this score though, its never mentioned again or expanded on except in the ending. Which might be acceptable except that this game seems to be attempting to be an RPG, a genre noted for attention to story. You played with my expectations and then dashed them :(.

Sound: 29/30

Music is wonderful, and reminds me of Phantasy Star Online at its best with its airy synth feel to it. It very much fits the style of game this is, and impresses me greatly. Sound effects are simple but effective, being reminiscent of Gameboy sound effects, specifically having a bit of a Pokemon feel to them. Very impressive sound design here. A point taken away simply due to the repetitiveness of the soundtrack after a while, given only a few songs. Should have had a few battle tunes on a random loop! It wasn't really repetitive enough to be noticed, however, so only a point was lost here.

Total: 300/400

A definite contender despite its simplicity! Work on pacing, you've got the rest down to a tee I'd say.

55314 - Schone Zeiten - Theme Heavy - Nostalgia

Theme: 100/100

The use of the theme here works on multiple levels. From the moment you load it, you don't have to ask what theme its in because it's obvious. A game set in a sort of nostalgic space-future, with sepia tones, jazz music, and people who talk like they're from a film noir. And then, besides the obvious trappings, the whole game is set as a man looking back on his checkered past, as a young space explorer turned momentary anti-alien racist then turned do gooder, and of finding out who the person he'd thought was his friend all his life truly was. The narrator also mentions that space used to be full of valuables, of things to explore and collect and do, and the often humorous descriptions of every planet coupled with the wealth to be found just by exploring helps set up this story. I get the feeling that this view of space is sort of through rose colored glasses, the nostalgia that the storyteller is experiencing coloring the experience.

Gameplay: 70/90

This game happens to be in one of my favorite genres, and one I wish would be explored more often in DoZ games, and megazeux games in general. The space trader. Sure, the outright objective of it all is to survive pirate attacks and gear yourself up to fight the plot-point battles but really, its all about finding the resources of the planets, accompanied by their humorous little descriptions, and trading them in to get more and more powerful. And despite some minor playability flaws, most of which we'll go into in Technique as they're mostly code-related, the game is a very good implementation of this. Sure, all the rewards at the planets are statically defined, but they also have reasons for being there. The combat is fun and fluid, frustrating at first if you happen to catch the wrong side of the RNG (at one point I was attacked by two high-powered pirates right after the opening monologue) which is why this loses a few points (I would suggest that early systems should be balanced to have either no pirates or very few so that you can get your space legs as it were). Everything fits together well and it feels well done, well thought out, and just plain fun. I had fun playing this game, even though it took me longer than any of the other DoZ games combined. And thats saying something.

A minor niggle here, there should have been a Sell All button in the trading screen, clicking Sell 200 times for 200 gallons of oil became quite tedious at one point. (Since when is each oil barrel just one gallon, anyway? Those are some tiny barrels.)

Graphics: 60/70

The graphics here are nice. The sepia toned effect and well chosen color palette are probably the easiest thing to mention here as praise, but the enemy designs are surprisingly unique and seem to fit with the sort of 1920s retrofuturistic theme. As a lot of the game is spent staring at stars and round blobs, the UI gets a lot of attention here and it is downright beautiful. Call me MZX dumb but I actually don't know how you manage to make the mouse mesh with the buttons that well without obvious character boundaries, though since the character boundaries thing happens in the starmap, I assume it has to do with the specific characters used for the buttons and menus. Everything looks very stylish and fantastic.

Technique: 30/60

Some major points were lost here due to the very, very large number of bugs in the scripting, robotics, etc which had to be fixed with a lengthy and multiply-edited post on the forums. I might suggest next time if you want to write a scripting engine, maybe write a syntax highlighter for something like Notepad++ or something beforehand, so that mistakes are easy to catch. Maybe even a code validator.

Also, points were lost due to the method chosen to enter and exit systems on the starmap. Specifically, flying into them. While this seems perfectly sane, the issue comes in that with the way this works, you sometimes have problems where you exit a system and then fly back into it without intending to. At one point, my star map coordinates somehow got set to inside the Hyde system, and I was utterly unable to continue the game (as leaving the system just spat me back into it) until a fellow judge, Wervyn, provided a counter debugging fix so that I didn't have to restart my game entirely. Major points lost here due to that, as it provided quite a lot of frustration, as well as worry that I was going to lose my hard won ship setup because I would have to start again, as I'd saved inside the system and didnt have any other saves.

The code is brilliant, don't get me wrong, and its that brilliance that ends up floating this technique score around the halfway mark, but the game was certainly marred by multiple bugs.

Story: 49/50

The story here is very interesting, well narrated, plays out in surprising depth giving the genre, and is in general the main focus of the piece. Very enjoyable indeed. There's little to say about the story itself that I didn't say above when discussing the theme, as the story ties very heavily into it, being entirely told as an old man reminiscing his younger days. A single point was lost here simply because I would have liked to have understood more about the backgrounds of the protagonist and antagonist. I found myself thirsting to know what this world (galaxy?) is like they live in, beyond the snippets given here and there in planet descriptions.

Sound: 28/30

The music here is wonderful, some great jazz that manages to both be atmospheric in line with the theme while being appropriate for the phases of the game, exploration, story, trading, battle... Some very good choices of music here. Where this lost a few points was in the sound effects department. The sound effects during battle were fine, but I found some of the ones used during for example the trading sequence to be quite annoying when played multiple times in rapid succession, as they often are.

Total: 337/400

This game is the clear winner for this DoZ for me. Lots of attention put into it, and a very unique and engrossing experience.

65974 - Dracos Corona - Theme Light - Dragons

Theme: 5/20

So uhh, apparently your dad wants you to prevent the rise of the great dragon. And then we promptly forget about that for hours (see my comments in Gameplay about how absurdly long this game runs due to the maze-like-ness of its main area) before, oh, great dragon. And we're dead. Bad end. Well, this gets a very bare pass! A very, very bare pass.

Gameplay: 40/120

Oh dear, dear dear... This game had so much potential in the gameplay department that was absolutely by poor UI design choices (don't put your UI in the left side of the screen, especially when one of your judges has only a right eye! >.>), poor targeting, and absolutely headache inducing camera problems (who ever heard of a 2D game having camera problems? Yeesh).

Thats not to mention that you can actually miss picking up the first weapon in the game and wander around clueless as to what you're supposed to do, as I managed to do the first time.

The weapons definitely had the potential to be very, very fun. The enemies were a bit too fast and too gun-happy, but if the weapons controls were different (more about that in the technique section) it would have been quite a fun little action romp. As it is, its a slog, a long, long slog. About that long slog, actually...

You see, Lancer released a game outside Megazeux called Meritous a while back, a game I think a lot of people should check out because while it's not a MZX game it shows a lot of neat little tricks used that can be used in Megazeux as well. For example, when you step on the Compass tiles, an arrow points you to your next objective. How is this relevant? Well, I spent hours, literally hours, wandering around the landscape of this game trying to find where I was going only to need to be told where to go by the game's author simply so I could be done with it. This could have easily been solved by calculating a line between the player and the next statue door that needed opening, and drawing a part of that line either when a key was pressed or at all times to function as a compass. Something to tell us at least in vague terms where we need to go next.

A lot of potential, and unfortunately I can't give this game more points on gameplay because it was a lot of potential wasted.

Graphics: 55/90

The graphics were very nice in their way. It was rather hard to tell what the enemies were supposed to be, though. Dragons? Dragon cultists? Skeletons? Blobs? Try larger sprites, I know its more code and more hassle but the extra detail will help in the end. The backgrounds were great, the level designs, though in the case of the main level bad for the gameplay, were quite beautiful. The weapons effects were pretty snazzy, though when the screen explodes into what looks like a fireworks display because I'm surrounded by enemies it gets a little less so. All in all a nice showing graphically.

Technique: 20/80

Erf. ERF. Yeah, there were some problems here. For one thing, the viewscreen jumps around all the time in a way that makes it really hard to focus on whats actually going on. In fact I found myself sometimes getting a headache simply trying to do so. This isn't helped by the fact that while you're trying to focus, certain enemies will partially blind you or cause you to jump around even more, rendering the whole game a mess. The charging timing felt off, the weapons engine would have been so much better implemented as either a 'hold down the target direction button to charge, don't lose target/charge when they're out of range' or, better yet, just a simple mouse driven click, hold, and release based engine. The dragons that cause you to move around can cause you to break down walls, turning them into spaces. Frequently, without the fixes posted on the boards, you end up locked when you beat a 'level'. Even with the fix, the level takes an amazingly long amount of time to recenter itself after you beat a level. Dying is impossible without a fix posted on the boards. One of the weapons that you're supposed to get in a later level is mistakenly given to you as a 'secret' near the beginning, enabling you to skip most of the game if you wanted to. The dash weapon allows you to charge headfirst across lava, which should definitely have some sort of penalty to the player.

I could go on and on. Frankly, this game is a mess.

Story: 2/50

Theres a story, yes, but its handled so awkwardly as to be pathetic and an obvious end-of-competition attempt to bring everything together. It sounds pretty much like a bad setup for a D&D dungeon crawl, and as Alice can tell you, I'm familiar with bad DMing.

And then you hit us with the bizarre non-ending of "Ooop, its a dragon. Bye." Yeah, not impressed.

Sound: 30/40

The music was nice. Every weapon got its own charging and firing sound effect, though this actually ends up counting a little against the game as the charging sound effects are not at all timed so that they end when you're fully charged, often ending considerably after you're fully charged, so if you're not watching the UI (something quite difficult for me, as I noted above) you tend to overcharge and thus slow yourself down.

Total: 152/400

A lot of potential here that sadly ended up wasted under too little attention paid to the 'small things' like bug and playability testing.

92887 - Nostalgia (in which the past is revisited) - Theme Heavy - Nostalgia (duh)

Theme: 75/100

For a game about nostalgia, this hits quite a few of the exact marks I was expecting when I chose the topic. The nods back to DOS, to old games. The look back at years past. I would have liked it to be taken a little more in depth, and the rather obvious nods to the topic in the form of capital letters, bold, different colored text stopped being funny in 2004, but all in all this game made me nostalgic, which is what I wanted from a game with the topic of Nostalgia.

Gameplay: 15/90

Well, as the game warns you right from the start, its unfinished. The text adventure at the beginning is fairly rudimentary and only responds to a few very specific commands, often assuming far more about your actions than any actual text adventure would. "LOOK? At what? LOOK FRIDGE etc". The clone of an amiga game (and I'm not sure what game they're referring to as I've never played it) was honestly pretty dull and flavorless feeling. The 'meat' of the game was the wolfenstein/doom sections, which while quite stylish (we'll get to that in graphics) were very short very dull builtin shooters. All in all, there was very little actual gameplay to be had here. The game was more a collection of (admittedly quite funny to me) jokes with a vague game-backing to them. I think this premise could definitely have more to it, I like hayashi's sense of humor and Rob's concept here and think if they put some time into the actual game bit, you'd have a classic MZX game. Basically, I'm imploring y'all to finish this thing, and with some class! Give it some gameplay! Its got everything else.

Graphics: 30/70

This is a hard game to score in this category. The actual graphics were quite crude, simple, ineffective, and dull. However, the style chosen really did seem to fit the games being pastiched on, and there was a certain kind of charm to all of it nonetheless. Without the rose colored glasses on, I have to admit to myself though that they probably didn't take too much effort in the end.

Technique: 10/60

Technique? What technique? The text adventure engine was the only thing that really had anything more than basic robotics, and its input was quite broken, (I tried to type DONGS and it came out as DOGS. COMMANDS came out as CMMDS. Turn your MZX_SPEED down to 3 or 2 and re-time your animations so that the player doesn't notice the speed increase, your input timing would be much better.) so that doesn't get you many points. Everything else was very simple, baby's first MZX game stuff, with the final more game-y sections consisting almost entirely of builtins.

Also, 60MB of WAVs which don't actually get used? Shame on you.

Story: 15/50

You're a 90s guy whose 386 doesn't have enough RAM to play the game you're trying to play. You inexplicably keep being teleported from nostalgic game to nostalgic game in your quest to buy a stick of RAM (I hope it was going to be two paired SIMMs, you didn't really buy a single stick back then... *coughs*). The story segments were often the funniest and most engaging parts of the entire process, so a lot of points are given here for that even though the story itself was very shallow and pretty much an Excuse Plot.

Sound: 20/30

Great selection of music here. The keyboard sound effects in the intro and in the text adventure bit are quite a fun addition. A lot of the sounds that were GOING to be used in game were quite interesting too, though they won't get you any points because they weren't really implemented. All in all some really nice sound design for such a short game. By the way, fairligh.mod is by Fairlight. As in the still-active game cracking group thats been around since the 80s Amiga scene, that Fairlight. I just thought I'd point it out since it was credited to Unknown. Nice of you to try to credit even the music you didn't make yourselves though! A rare touch these days in DoZes.

Total: 165/400

A surprise 3rd place contender here, at least in my ranking, due to some real nice stylistic choices in an otherwise broken non-game. Do something with this concept! Finish it! I implore you!