Edit: upon rereading this article there is actually nothing here about success. Sorry!
-Ido.
TeeGee of MoaCube recently wrote a very interesting article labeled
Failure study: Rune Masters. Read it now, it's worth your time. In it he is analyzing the release of a game called
Rune Masters by first time indie developer CodeDaemons that has suffered through some less-than-stellar sales.
I've been thinking of that article as I was getting ready to play a couple of games that have been on my backlog for a while. Two of these that I ended up actually playing were
Shoot First, a shooter-roguelike (much more fitting of that label than its more famous evolutionary-cousin The Binding of Isaac), and the Lovecraft-themed horror-roguelike
Infra Arcana.
I was much more interested in
Infra Arcana, being a bit of a fan of the setting and the genre and somewhat averse to shooters. But even tho I was really eager to sink my teeth into it, I ended up playing a lot more of
Shoot First instead. I think the reasons are mostly due to what I consider classic "roguelike sins", which
Infra commits with much vigor and enthusiasm while
Shoot mostly (but not entirely) avoids.
The first thing that
Infra actually does quite well are the graphics, at least in-game graphics. The Lovecraft setting is a bit hard to get right graphically, since it mostly contains indescribable horrors, so how do you describe or show them?
Infra very nicely utilizes minimalistic abstract graphics, a bit like classic-roguelike ascii-graphics in the resulting style but actually consisting of simple figures and objects rather than letters and symbols. It looks good and keeps plenty of room for your imagination to fill up with the unimaginable.
And what complements such graphics perfectly in a horror game? Creepy, instrumental music! Just enter "lovecraft" into last.fm and you'll come up with a huge list of perfectly suitable music for that theme. Naturally,
Infra has
no music. And
no sound effects. And
no effects of any other kinds either. Why would you forgo collecting the lowest hanging fruits in enhancing the atmosphere of such a gloomy game like
Infra? They're not even low hanging, they've dropped straight at the developer's lap and they just shrug them away.
Onwards to the next classic roguelike sin - interface! This is what the menu screen looks like in
Infra:
If it's a bit hard to figure out at that size, rest assured you're not missing anything. It's red text on a black screen in some fixed-width variation of Arial or some other equally plain font. The current selection is marked by being rendered as white text. And you can't select the menu options by clicking them (you can however press 'a', 'b', 'c', 'd' or 'e').
Oh, and none of these allow you to change settings such as full-screen/windowed mode. To do that you have to
edit config.txt and restart the game (of course!).
Here is an in-game screenshot:
It's a bit hard to see the actually really awesome tiles and sprites (no sarcasm), but check out the HUD at the bottom: here is that fixed-width Arial font again in radiant green, red & teal on plain black background. Nice, right? Nothing makes you think Lovecraft more than teal, fixed-width, Arial. It goes without saying that there is no tweening or any other such graphical effects used in the game, everything snaps silently into position (which is actually alright with the tiny graphics).
How about input you ask? The game's maual (another txt file) lists 32 keyboard command in addition to the 8 movement keys (some of these are different cases of the same letter, e.g.
r to reload wielded firearm and
R to study texts). Needless to say the only way to access commands like save or exit is via such keys, as there is no in-game menu.
These are all pretty superficial complaints, but honestly it's not that hard to get them right and most players first impression will be harshly impacted by such seemingly trivial details.
At the same time despite its flaws,
Shooter gets most of these right (even tho some keyboard controls in the menus are a bit strange and/or buggy) and that's probably almost enough by itself to make me much more likely to play it than
Infra. It just feels much more like a game that had a lot of love & care put into it.
Anyway, this is all barley scraping the surface and goes into fewer details than I first planned, but this post is probably already the longest I have on this blog so I'll stop now. If you want to hear more about the subject of
polish and
feel I suggest you give the two following videos a watch:
-Ido.
