A look back on Strip The Forest Bare

I learned a lot from reading comments, playing and making Strip the Forest Bare. Here some of my observations.

What went Good :

• The game is working great, there is no apparent bug (As one of my first games that is something that matters).
• The drawing is cute.
• The online Highscore is working good too (It was my first time programming online connection).
• I had good comments about the poem at the end.
  
• In general the game is OK.
  

What went Wrong :

• The game is not fun enough. The challenge increase but not the fun. If I was Valve I would had cancel my project and start it all over again. Since I am not and I was doing the one week challenge, well I just could not do it all again.
• The controls are a little off, it took a little bit of adaptation to understand how to cut the trees perfectly.
• There is nothing special about it, so why the player would play the game. The game is just a little dull, the player is always doing the same thing, the game doesn't reinvent itself after a while, so I think that is where the game starts to be dull.

In general I am trying to learn from my mistakes, by imposing myself to keep everything as minimum as possible, I made the mistake to not listen to the game itself, but only to my base idea. I think that were all the problems came from.

Here my super algorithm about games:

Exprimental Gameplay : Strip the Forest Bare

Strip the Forest Bare is a little game where you play Thiery a lumberjack. Thiery likes to make money by cutting down trees, but the bears are not happy about it and will try to stop him. In other words you play a lumberjack, in order to make money you have to avoid bears and cut trees down.

You can download the game here.

This game is an entry to the Experimental Gameplay Project for the month of august, the theme was "Bare Minimum". I tried to think about something with pixels and 8-bit sounds to keep the game as minimum as possible. In the mean time I could not stop thinking about the kid poem's :

Fuzzy Wuzzy
Was a Bear
Fuzzy Wuzzy
Had no Hair...

So I decided to include bears in my game cause of the rhyme, I came up with a game where the player is making money by destroying the bears' home. I am not really an environmental activist, I thought that the metaphor of destroying someone's home to make money was just something that could make people think, myself included. So in regards to the minimum of the theme, I tried to keep all the controls as minimum as possible; walking and cutting. The same applied to the bears' AI, when you are close enough they will chase you otherwise they wander around. As for the bare part of the theme well, try to strip the forest bare.

Thanks Hades for the music.

I hope you enjoy the game as I enjoy making it.

Phono Alliance on Co-Optimus

That is amazing we got an article on the Co-optimus website.

Here the link

Phono Alliance in the Dream Build Play contest

Phono Alliance is now an official entry in the Dream Build Play contest. You can check it out here. You can also view all the other entries in the game gallery.

Gameplay Video : Phono Alliance

There is the video for Phono Alliance, it will be used as our entry for the Dream Build Play challenge.We hope the game will be well received by the XBOX community.


Music by Cyrerin.

Annoucement : Phono Alliance on XBOX

Phono Alliance is the first title of Soft Hope to come out on XBOX. It's a procedural music based platformer, single and mutiplayer game.

The player will have to prove to the village that he can be usefull, especially to the Butcher. The Butcher is the player’s first and last foe. The player will have to venture into an exotic dinosaur infested land, an oversized baby playroom, a port full of pirates and a quiet village. In every level, there will be something different to do like protecting the oversized baby from the oversized teddy bears, growing a dinosaur’s egg, protect the pot of gold from the pirates and etc. For more experienced players, the game provides an intense mode with more precise beats, more enemies and more things to do.

In other words the game can be resume as a sort of a Patapon meets Mario type game. It is a free moving plateformer, but for every action of the player (defence, speed, attack) the players have to push the buttons at the right tempo in a 4/4 structure. Well it seems hard to understand, but it works real nice. The game is coop game too, I think that where the game is a it's best.

Unexperimental Shooter : Metro Shooter

J'ai décider de participer à Experimental Project, j'ai fait un petit shooter qui a pour thème majeur le métronome, j'ai voulu explorer l'état de détente et de concentration qu'on doit avoir afin de bien suivre un métronome à un certain rythme. Alors dans Metro Shooter, il faut suivre le rythm donné, plus on tire dans le rythme plus notre vaisseau est puissant, si on est plus dans le rythme notre vaisseau se détériore. Afin de réussir le jeu il faut amasser 1000 points.

I decided to participe to Experimental Project, I did a little shooter using a metronome as the main theme, at first I wanted to explore the state of flow needed to follow the right rhythm. So in Metro Shooter, the player have to follow the rhythm in other to get upgrades on the ship, otherwise the ship will break up. However, the game is over when he reached 1000 points.

Download here : Metro Shooter

Vous devriez avoir besoin du framework 3.0 de Microsoft.

It needs Microsoft Framework 3.0.

Thank you Pierre for the help testing. Merci