Blog - Player's Thoughts - Disco Bert

6th June 2017

Each week, people share their thoughts with my games, and I like to make little community topics where I can answer/comment on their comments!
It's a comment-o-rama!

@TimeKillerGames

I find a little more effort could be put in to the title screens of some of your more recent games. Why not do what you used to do, and add a little more visuals of some kind to it?

-=-=-

Awww.

I know, and it's a bit of a shame that this week's titlescreen was indeed tacked on.
In fact, it was REALLY tacked on!
I'd already done the screenshots, logos, icons and all that, and was doing my "final" test, when I suddenly realised I hadn't done a bloomin' background for the titlescreen, yet!
I quickly rushed a simple generic looking texture, and decided that would be enough.

If you ever see a bland tasteless thing like that, assume it was a rush job.
There's a lot of things I can accomplish within the space of AGameAWeek, but some weeks it can be hard to remember to get everything done "properly".

RSKGames

Title: The effect used for the title makes it looks like it is etched in the sand. Nicely done. The Sand and mummies go together.

Yeah, the logo had more than 2 minutes spent on it.
.. It had about 3!
A simple text layer, followed by a couple of warp layers, and lastly a gradient layer.
I should probably make videos of my Logo generations, sometimes, as they're really not as impressive as they look

Gameplay: A more relaxed game with multiple levels compared to the last 2 games. Can be played for a good amount of time. Once the initial set of mummies are taken care of, player can focus of breaking the brick walls and unlocking the boxes and start hunting for the key.

In the original 8-bit "Oh Mummy" game you had no real weapons. There was occasionally a "mummy killer shield" thing, which let you run into a single mummy to kill it, but I never found that a decent sort of weapon.
The Bomberman style bombs were something I added when I made "Greenie - The Eccentric Egyptologist" and I enjoyed the secondary gameplay mechanic that that brought.

At first I didn't realize that I had to run around the boxes and enable to buttons. I was blasting a bomb on each but ton and wondering why I was not getting the key. Then after seeing the second screenshot where all the buttons are enabled and box is unlocked, I understood.

Oh dear. I do hope that's not a standard issue. Maybe a tutorial level might not have gone amiss, this week?

Killing all the mummies in unlocked boxes before they wake up is a good for not getting killed early.

Yeah, I wanted it to be at least slightly easy once you open a tomb full of mummies. After all, you don't want the whole maze being filled with the things.
I'm not sure if I made the bombs too powerful, but I guess only extended playtime will tell that for sure.

Random timer of the bomb and only one bomb at a time makes player use the bomb wisely.

The bombs always explode after the same amount of time. It's only the beeping sound effect that changes!!

Good care has been taken to avoid the scenarios where player is unable to unlock the boxes and get the key, as running around the boxes and enabling the buttons is tricky in few cases where the key is not present (Thanks to Quadoban level generator I guess).

That was originally full of blocked areas and such. The blocks would generate too close and cause all sorts of inaccessible areas.
I ended up spacing the block generation out a little, so there's always 2 grid-references between adjacent blocks.
It's not a clever level generator by any means, but it makes some nice enough layouts.

Graphics: Left and right movement of the player character gives the disco movement to fit the title. Both Elvis like player sprite and the mummy sprite has come out well. Blast effect is awesome. Liked the bomb animation along with the sound effect.

Fun Fact : Disco Bert wasn't drawn, this decade!!
About 3 days into this game, I thought "Well, I might as well just use the original Greenie player sprites from the last game."
I opened up the folder, and in there I found not only the original Greenie sprites, but this unused secondary character, along with a couple more unused characters which may appear in future games!!
They're even in the original game's uploaded bundle, too, so if you want to see them, go and grab "Greenie - The Eccentric Egyptologist" and spend some time wondering what they might be used for.

Scoring: 25 Points per mummy, 5 points per tile of the box and 150 per level is well balanced.

I'm still not sure on those values. Feels like completing a level should probably give you a bit more. But it also gives you the choice of aiming for the key, or just spending time defeating all the Mummies.
*shrugs*

Music and Sound: A totally different background score, medium paced with repeating melody in between seems to match the pace of the game. Liked the mummies dying sound effect. The sound effect for bomb varying per the timer interval is done very well.

The background tune's melody is ripped directly from the original 8-bit Oh Mummy, the original inspiration of this game.

Such a simple little tune.

Overall a very enjoyable game with cool graphics and a solid gameplay.

Yeah, it turned out nice.
.. although, I'd probably grumble that the controls aren't quite as smooth if you're using a joypad. I'm not sure why that is, since it's the same control code I usually use.
*shrugs*

Views 97, Upvotes 21

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