So I made my first Let’s Play style video for Felis, which you can see here.
Anyway, I quite enjoyed making the video, and I’m keen to try making a few more. Feel free to send me a private message if you have a game I might like. Especially if it has some unique design elements for me to talk about.
In the interests of full disclosure I don’t have a huge amount of visibility at the moment, and my existing subscriber base is mainly devs rather then players. So I can’t promise any huge increase in visibility. I’m also not in a position to buy the games to review.
But if you are giving away free keys to YouTubers, keep me in mind.
It’s doubly useful. There’s the gamer perspective, you can see where the player connects with the game, and where you lose him, because of confusion/irritation. And the technical aspect, where BoredMormon will give you insight from a developer perspective, regarding game design or game mechanics. Very nice.
It’s interesting to hear people looking at these things from different perspectives. As the cat was sliding down the hill my first thought was about the shift in art, from being warm and soft and safe looking to being cold and hard and scary looking, where you were looking at the design implications of the concepts, objects and characters being introduced.
Well for one thing remember you can use the Input Manager at the Unity start window to reconfigure keys more to your liking. That is what I did setting jump and action keys to x and c. That might help.
Honestly though - most devs are gamers and generally support other devs who they like/respect/enjoy there creations. Nice job.
Commentary - I don’t think I’ve ever listened to a lets play by a developer. You add in some interesting points of view that I generally haven’t heard from other lets players, who are more used to the journalistic point of view of games. Nice touch imo.
Check out the dark souls play through by the extra credits guys. It’s a pretty slow play through, but they do a lot of design talk.
Dan is an animator. At one point they stop at the black smith and spend ten minutes discussing his arm swing. James is a level designer, and is constantly pointing out the framing, foreshadowing, and the like. He also talks a lot about how the game designs encounters to reuse the terrain, enemies and animations.
The respawning barrier after the cliff with the bees seemed to have an explicit purpose - any bee that fell down was deflected into the cave, so that you could see things going in and out. You clearly knew that the shadowing indicated a cave, but someone new to platformers might not, so having the occasional bee fall down and go in and out was a good indicator.
Not sure yet on the breakable barriers in general. It could turn out to be a balancing consideration - maybe you get a more powerful attack later and the walls need to be significant, or maybe they’re important to combat/puzzles and the intent is to avoid accidentally breaking them.
I suspect that having to manually carry cats over gaps is also to allow you to separate your cats from dangerous situations. From memory, the first time you had to do that there was a rat on the other side of the gap. It didn’t attack your cats, but later on other foes might, or as you saw later they might set off traps. It also gives the opportunity for puzzles where you need to use the cats as pieces to solve things, putting cats on triggers to activate platforms or deactivate hazards and such.
Read through the reviews currently there. Probably won’t hit that one up unless I can get a free key from somewhere. I enjoy doing this, but I’m currently low on disposable income.
That’s entirely plausible. However it wasn’t the only respawning barrier.
I actually thought a breakable barrier might have made sense at the final boss. You would then be presented with a choice between fighting, and trying to escape through the barrier. It might be present at a latter barrier.
That is a consideration I missed. I could actually use that in a replay of the level to prevent the boss rat eating up my cats.
The whole need to pay attention to the cats did add another layer of interest that wasn’t in the normal platformer. You had to pay constant attention to make sure the appropriately stupid cat AI wasn’t breaking anything. I can see some puzzles where that becomes important.
