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AoMH SD Adventure contest 2020: Yeebaagooon
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Author |
File Description |
Yeebaagooon |
Posted on 07/30/20 @ 11:26 AM (updated 08/14/20)
File Details |
Screenshot:
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Version: |
AoM: The Titans |
Yeebaagooon's entry to the 2020 contest, and the first place winner. The scenario is titled "Crystal Maze" and is for AoM:TT.
This map does not work properly on EE, many of the games are unplayable!
Extended Edition version now available!
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Author | Comments & Reviews ( All | Comments Only | Reviews Only ) |
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nottud
Staff |
Posted on 08/14/20 @ 09:12 AM
Playability: 4
Extremely fun map with a wide variety of puzzles. Following the TV show it has games for all areas to challenge yourself. I had some trouble getting it to run due to crashes and ran into a couple of minor cosmetic bugs (Chat carrying over from previous games, cinematic playing but not in cinematic mode after losing the mine memory game). With those resolved it will be a 5.
Balance: 5
This map despite the games shines in my view - the games are difficulty but all of the ones I played feel beatable with some practice out of the ones I failed at. Most of them provide some room for user error too so you don't need to be perfect.
(Just don't fail spectacularly in the dome at the end due to getting confused and collecting the wrong tickets :D )
Creativity: 5
I don't really know what to say without saying to see it for yourself. The games are very different from one another and there are a huge number of clever tricks employed such as flying buildings, walking across floating bridges, and some amazing sky box backgrounds.
Map Design: 5
I don't really know what to say without saying to simply see it for yourself. Extremely beautiful looking map - its almost a shame most of it is in cinematics so you can't feel roam and gawp at the amazing graphics - although saying that it would probably break.
Story/Instructions: 5
Great voiced over story - a very rare treat on that front with branches depending on performance. It is clear a huge amount of effort went into providing a consistent and well flowing story and it works well.
Additional Comments:
An excellent map that is a must play. It is a shame that it is difficult to run but I am hoping that the port in progress to EE will be of great success allowing easier accessibility. |
Lewonas |
Posted on 08/14/20 @ 02:51 PM
This unofficial review was written for the Mini Adventure competition.
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Adventure (7/10)
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Ah yes of course, I should have known. The minigame master is back with yet another wonderful minigame creation. I was a little concerned about how the concept of being in some minigame hub and playing some minigames was going to feel adventurous. But you made it work in the way you presented the whole thing, with the incredible Yeebaapalace main centerpiece serving as the minigame hub that just tied every minigame nicely together.
I must say I was a little bit letdown that I could not explore the palace myself and that I did not have any choice which parts I would have liked to explore (more on this later). From the intro cinematic it did seem like you were navigating through the palace by yourself, when in reality they were all little predetermined cinematic interactions. But I guess that would have been an insane triggering task to even accomplish.
So all the lovely little cinematic interactions that show you navigating through and exploring the mysterious palace by going from room to room that all offer unique challenges, delivered a nice rewarding adventurous feeling. After all, you never knew what exciting place or challenge was waiting for you next.
But alas, all adventures must come to an end, and this particular adventure ended a bit prematurely for my taste. Four minigames go by quite quickly and just when you got a real good taste of the Yeebaapalace, the adventure was suddenly yeebaagone.
The Crystal Dome finale unfortunately did feel like a bit of an anticlimactic conclusion of the adventure. I expected the finale to be more exciting like that awesome multi-dimensional maze minigame where you would have a limited amount of time (depending on how well you performed) to reach the final goal. After all, didn’t you mention that “the maze is waiting” (implying the palace / Crystal Dome is that maze you need to conquer)?
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Immersive storyline and experience (9/10)
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You did an incredible job with both the cinematic and the supporting voiced (!) dialogs. All the little cinematic interactions that show you navigating the passageways were masterfully crafted. And the voiced dialogs added a great extra immersive layer to the storytelling. The British accent also helped to add some bonus damage to those snarky remarks when you utterly failed your task. You even went the extra mile to add a lot of alternative voiced dialog lines so that you would not hear the same lines over and over again when you replay the scenario. Loved it.
The reason why I am not giving you a 10 here is because of two things. First, to be honest the storyline was pretty basic, especially when compared to the story of the winning competitor. And second, some minigames just felt out of place (I’m looking at you falling flags) or did not come close to feel as exciting and unique (Reachy) as the other ones.
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Atmosphere (8/10)
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There’s a lot to like here. The music was great and fit really well with the playful and mysterious theme you were going for. I liked how you also incorporated some little humoristic scenes to liven up the mood after you had done a very challenging, tense minigame. The different kinds of custom sky textures and lighting modes you created helped out a lot to change the look and feel of the palace. All the little interactions had some sort of fitting sound assigned to them and some incredible looking SFX effects. Overall, you’ve done a great job.
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Balance (7/10)
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Well, some minigames were hit and miss. Some were incredibly difficult to beat (minefield and especially the survival one) and others were incredibly easy to beat (scorpion and flags one). The randomness factor you added to the minigame selection played a huge role in how likely you were to set a good final score. Getting the easier ones would almost always guarantee a good score and result in you winning the Crystal Dome minigame. I think it would have been better to have a selection of increasingly difficult minigames to (randomly) choose from after every round. Then you would always have a challenging run and feel like you really earned a potential Crystal Dome victory.
The randomness and limited minigame selection increased the replay value because you could potentially get to play new exciting minigames, but it also ended up hurting it because you could potentially not get to play them. I ended up being cursed by the RNG gods to almost always play the same minigames over and over again and I did not get to see and play at least 2 or 3 of the other ones. I did get and activate a cheat code to unlock all the minigames, but it still randomly selected the minigames for me which was a shame.
EDIT: After I wrote this review, Yeebaagooon mentioned that the minigames actually aren't randomly chosen. So ignore my remarks about the randomness factor. There's a different hidden mechanic that chooses a particular minigame based on the game state.
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Map design (9/10)
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I like the way you approached the limited map space problem. If you can’t build too wide or too deep, why not build up? It also allowed you to use all the map space in the 100x100 gameplay area for your minigames because, well, a floating palace would not be getting in the way, now would it? That’s just genius.
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Eyecandy (10/10)
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You did a phenomenal job here. The palace is not only an impressive triggering feat, but it is also very mesmerizing to look at. Combine that with the incredibly detailed palace passageways and the beautiful looking areas where the cutscenes in between the minigames take place, and you have earned yourself 10 points.
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Features (10/10)
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And again you absolutely nailed it. This scenario has some of the coolest shit I’ve ever seen. First off, you accomplished an incredible feat with the way you created an unique, insanely impressive and highly detailed palace through the power of triggers. Then you added some trigger magic to mimic some smooth walking animations when the units are navigating the actually impassable passageways. You added some more magic to dynamically create branching pathways literally out of thin air. And then let’s not underestimate how much playtesting it must have taken to create these little interactions, the huge palace and the perfect camera tracks all in thin air where the palace would magically appear when you play the scenario. Really impressive stuff.
And then there still are all sorts of diverse minigames that offer unique challenges. So overall, this scenario offers a very high quality of diverse gameplay features and triggering wizardry that I’ll gladly reward with a well-earned 10 points.
I did experience one major bug when I used the cheat code to unlock all the minigames. After I completed two minigames and the camera cut to the minigame hub area with the elevator, the game suddenly went out of cinematic mode which prevented me from pressing the hotkeys to choose the next minigame. So I had to restart the scenario.
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Final score: 60/70
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Zenophobia |
Posted on 08/16/20 @ 03:54 PM
Playability: 5
The scenario was completely bug free, especially the part where we got to use the Bug Exterminator 4000. :p There weren't any parts where the controls felt clunky or non-responsive, and the player was given adequate time to try their hand at every puzzle.
Balance: 4
You had a good variety of difficulty in the puzzles and minigames, although some of them were a tad too difficult in my opinion. The dodging game was nigh impossible, and the timer ones were difficult purely because there was a time limit to solving them. As you saw in my playthrough, I just paused the game to solve the hieroglyph one, and got to the very last square in the minefield before time ran out. Having time be the balancing factor is an issue specifically for puzzle games because everyone is different and people solve puzzles at their own pace. In addition, being on a timer puts more pressure on the user. Perhaps that was what you were going for, but to me, it felt more like a hindrance rather than a challenge. This was only an issue in the timer puzzles, however, as the other ones were far better balanced and relied on the puzzles themselves being difficult in order to create meaningful challenges.
Creativity: 5
Incredible work here with all the puzzles you've created. They offered a fantastic variety of gameplay and puzzles, and I thoroughly enjoyed being able to experience all these different games. The voice acting was great and there were tons and tons of randomized voice lines, which I thought was a great touch. Too bad I was forced to listen to two of you at once since we were in a discord call lmao. I can only begin to imagine what more you could have added had the size limit of the map been increased.
Map Design: 5
Stunning camera shots really displayed the impressive grandeur of the Yeebaapalace, and the custom skies and textures really brought an epic and splendid feel to it all. Interior shots were made incredibly well. More importantly, the puzzles themselves were crystal clear and didn't have any unnecessary artifacts or details floating around and distracting the player from the gameplay itself. I've begun to really appreciate designers who can create a healthy balance between detailed environments and gameplay clarity, and you absolutely nailed it here.
Story/Instructions: 4
At no point was I confused about the nature of the puzzles. The instructions were delivered in a clear and concise manner, which is important especially for the more complicated puzzles like the starlight challenge. Overall, the storyline was rather basic, but that was all it really needed to be, since this was more like a game show scenario where the contestant ran around competing in games. It might have been quite interesting if you really did turn it into a game show, with you being an announcer and having an 'audience' react to or cheer the player on.
Additional Comments:
Too bad I couldn't beat the minefield by a hair's breadth :p. I daresay that this scenario has surpassed all of your previous singleplayer works in terms of quality and exquisiteness, although in terms of volume, of course Masterball and Ripto still take the cake.
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Yeebaagooon
Staff
File Author |
Posted on 09/04/20 @ 08:39 AM
Progress on the EE port is going well. Slight problem but should be able to resolve it - all things to plan expect the port this coming week.
Edit: EE edition now available.
http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2220304784[Edited on 09/05/20 @ 11:07 AM]
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Out Reach (id: newreach268) |
Posted on 09/25/20 @ 03:22 PM
Playability: 5
Overall a very enjoyable map. Very interesting how the paths branch, and how different decisions at different times lead to different games. Eventually got to find myself after a few plays.
Balance: 4
Overall the balance is fine for the tone and setting. Some games are more arbitrary than requiring any kind of skill, you either get them or you don't, but that's the tone of the game show so can't complain in the grand scheme of things.
Creativity: 5
It's a maze, there's crystals, you do games, also if you look out you can find me in the eelatorium listening to classic eel music. 5/5 would eel again.
Map Design: 5
Faultless given the small size. Excellent use of vertical space, while us peasants toil on the ground. Great details throughout.
Story/Instructions: 4
Fully voice acted, and brilliant dialog throughout which reacts to victories and failures. Should note that there were some minor sound issues in some places, especially when the sounds clips were longer than average and they'd get cut short by the next line.
Additional Comments:
Very nice however as one of the voice actors I'm pretty bias. |
Nickonhawk |
Posted on 02/12/21 @ 12:59 PM
I did not write a review the first time I played on account of being disgruntled with the measurements of my performance.
Today I made another attempt. After getting the same puzzles in the same order, and having the same final result, the bugged dialogue with learning nothing about ourselves, I feel much better.
Playability: 5
If you press 1 too late the intro track breaks. Some camera cuts are janky, probably from the EE conversion. You can attack the walls in the maze. If you delete yourself in the minefield you won't respawn. Sometimes the militia won't appear in cinematics. You can press the number for selecting a minigame type before the prompt shows causing the prompt to be skipped. Some dialogue does not match the sound played.
As a designer myself, I see this as an absolute five.
Balance: 4
Some are easy, some are hard and those use a timer can be paused. If the pause keys were unmapped then I could see the difficulty going up? Maybe. I think overall it's okay.
Creativity: 5
Yes!
Map Design: 5
Yes!
Story/Instructions: 3
Clearly you put more work into instructions than story. Or are the instructions the story?
You know when you watch a flashy movie and you're like this is so dumb, it was made purely for entertainment and makes no sense outside that. It's like this, but while you were aware and not afraid to jump into the crazy, you still constrained yourself with that sitting on a couch and watching something old that plays a sound of people laughing after every line atmosphere. Now constraints are good for creativity, however if you don't enjoy this specific old couch theme, what you're left with is Minigames X stylized for single player. Which sounds meh. The fun in maps like Minigames is that it's multiplayer.
I guess it's subjective, but I feel like it would've felt better if there was something more engaging driving the action forward.
Additional Comments:
yOu mUsT cOnStRuCt aDdItIoNal pYlOnS! |
HGDL v0.8.2 |
Rating |
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4.6 | Breakdown |
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Playability | 4.6 | Balance | 4.2 | Creativity | 5.0 | Map Design | 5.0 | Story/Instructions | 4.2 |
Statistics |
Downloads: | 218 |
Favorites: [] | 0 |
Size: | 76.53 MB |
Added: | 07/30/20 |
Updated: | 08/14/20 |
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