We just got a really nice review from these guys.
Besides feeling great about an overwhelmingly positive review, I definitely found myself agreeing with the guy’s main critique: Frogatto is way too easy for a grizzled platforming veteran. On the other hand, being easy opens us up to a huge world of people who for whatever reason just won’t (or even physically can’t) play an aggressive “nintendo hard” game. We’ve been thinking about how to solve that, and besides a risk of changing plans later and thus breaking a “promise”, there’s really no reason to keep our cards close to our chest.
We’re most likely to do a series of tiered difficulty levels, like halo has; it’s tried, true, and does exactly what we want – getting an easy and a hard version of the game. You have the exact same levels (which eliminates an unbearable burden of trying to maintain two completely different level-sets, one of which would likely get neglected in testing), but there are major changes to the enemies on the levels. Not just more enemies, but enemies with much more aggressive twists to them. For example, imagine if our ants had the sense to turn around and dart towards you. Imagine if our kitties fired spread shots. Imagine if our flying ants did dive-attacks to intercept you. Little twists like this to the AI to make sections much more aggressive. Another thing would be lifting a few cues from an ancient mac game called dark castle (which recently had a remake you ought to check out, if you’re a mac user). Specifically, they had puzzles, very reminiscent of “myst”, which would expand their possibility space on the most difficult levels. The puzzles had additional twists on “hard” that made them more challenging.
To be frank, while the game is admittedly pretty easy, the current indie gaming scene’s idea of difficulty is pretty askew, to the point where it’s less about proper skill and more blind luck in successfully getting through a point or getting set back an absurd distance.
@Lily S: Absolutely agreed. I get the impression from dabbling in indie gaming forums that they’d rather have something like contra.
Fortunately I think we can satisfy everyone with difficulty levels. Hopefully.
Maybe Frogatto is too easy, I never finished it.
I like the characters and the whole design, reminds me a lot of Psygnosis best games.
The thing is that with the game and characters you have created for an opensource project it is still possible to ask for the gamers to developp their own levels and in this end to promote them by releasing the new maps in a future release.
Like what has happened with Doom, leting people do their own levels with a powerful tool.
We would very much welcome that. We’d love it if people would make new levels, and post them on the forum.
Remember – you can get at the editor by pressing ctrl-e anywhere in the game.
Fantastic review!
Personally I like that Frogatto is user-friendly. Sometimes it’s nice to be challenged in a game, but having to continually start over at the beginning of a level after dying and things of that nature just don’t make a game very challenging in a fun way. Just tedious.
I like the idea of multiple difficulties though!