So I'm guessing he did it as self promotion under the guise of interest, wait..I'm getting ahead of myself. The creator of a mobile game contacted me on Instagram (or rather said that one of my pictures was "neat") and I think he did it just to get me to notice his game. Quite honestly he probably wasn't even targeting me, he probably just went to the gamer hashtag and commented on random photos, but I'd like to imagine he specifically came to me. (I swear I'm not full of myself)
So anyway, I went to his profile after he commented and that's when I found out he had made a game and was self promoting. The name of his game is "Arrow Ambush" and I know it's in the Google Play Store although I don't know if it's in the ITunes store or not. (That's just in case you want to check it out yourself)
So I humored him and checked out his game. Now I'm here to be the game critic that I've (not) been trained to be.
You can very easily tell that this was one of this person's very first games and that it was also most likely a single person rather than a team because the layout is very basic, rather than similar games that have artwork and graphic designs that are made to draw the player's eye to specific areas of the screen. But for a game designer's first game it is decent. Basic, but decent.
The point of the game is to shoot arrows (by tapping anywhere on the screen) at a target area which is spinning. If you hit any arrows that are already in the target, then you lose. So it is a simplistic game, but it has potential if it is worked on and improved. My first change would be the art. I'm sorry that I'm acting so serious about the art but people don't really realize how seriously colors and lines can affect what people notice and are drawn to.
As I was playing, I noticed that my eyes, no matter where I forced them to look, drifted back towards the center of the screen. That's perhaps the worst spot for them, because the target is above that, and the arrow you're about to shoot is below that so you're focus is drawn to a point that is irrelevant to the game itself. I find that to be a huge drawback from the gameplay because if you have trouble focusing on the actual aspects of the game, how are you supposed to enjoy playing the game?
Another complaint I have is that this person needs to get more specific with hit boxes. For those of you that may not know what I meant, hit boxes are the area around object in a game that the program checks to see if anything is happening to that entity. Let's take a common game entity, a human. Picture a human in your head, in any stance you'd like. Now draw a rectangle around the human so that every part of the body is included. Just one rectangle. If that was a hit box in a game, then if an arrow was shot at your human, as long as the arrow made it in the box, it would count as a hit, even if the arrow didn't hit the body itself. (I'm not sure if I did a good enough job explaining hit boxes. If I didn't let me know and I'll dedicate an entire blog post to them)
That's what's happening in this game. The hit boxes on the arrows are slightly too big, so if you time it just right to get two arrows next to each other, as close as possible without touching it reads as if you hit the arrow and you fail. So the hit boxes could be a little more fine tuned than they currently are.
But that's not to say that this game is bad! It certainly has potential. The developer just needs to keep working on it and it could easily become a great game! Just keep improving.
Well this has been another Mythical Review (I'm to pick up the pace of these, and maybe video reviews too in the future. But neither of those will happen until after this semester ends, some point in mid-May so just stick with me! I'm not giving up on this!) Thanks for reading, and I will see you guys next time! Buh Bye!!!!
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