Grotlover2 Score
| Category | Total |
|---|---|
| Basics: | 200.0 |
| Art: | 18.0 |
| Writing: | 32.0 |
| Sound: | 23.0 |
| Concept/Design | 118.0 |
| Msc: | 16.0 |
| Admin Card Attempted: | 5.0 |
| Admin Card Score: | 17.0 |
| Patreon Card Attempted | 5.0 |
| Patreon Card Score | 17.0 |
| Community Card Attempted | 5.0 |
| Community Card Score | 6.0 |
| Total: | 462.0 |
Comments:
First off kudos for trying to make a town management game in RPG maker! It always amazes me to see how devs can figure out how to abuse that poor engine. Unfortunately, for such an intresting and ambitus concept (especially for a jam) the engine I feel has hampered the game preventing it from fully realizing its vision.
The overall game gives of some frost punk like vibes, being closer to a survival city builder as opposed to a standard city builder thanks to the ever-growing assaults against your village. This quickly makes the game about balancing your towns needs, with your dragons wants, and the security required to keep them in power. I also think it was really cleaver how coups are handled in the game. Each of the other two dragons can try to overthrow you if they feel you are not running the show correctly, instead of loosing though they instead take over and become the new player character. Due to the bonuses and actions tied to each one this can force you to have to change up your play style on the fly and be careful about limiting your options for please your current dragon in the event they get overthrown.
The art is also not bad, with a fair number of sprites with different weight stages. There are also some nice little cutscenes that play with some nice art as well. The only main issue with the art is most of it is the base rpg maker templates that we see in many games. There is nothing wrong with that but does make it weaker on the art front against games like Grreds End which uses custom sprites.
The sound design is also ok, but not anything that really stands out all that well. I do think it makes use of sound effects to help spotlight the fetish elements though with some nice stomping sound effects being used at larger sizes to help sell the weight.
The overall writing is fairly good as well, mainly with the dialog. It does get repetitive quite fast but I found the characters overall to be fun and the overall descriptions where also done quite well. It was also nice how their dialogs changed as they got larger though I would have loved to see that happen a bit more over time as opposed to what happens when they reach near their max size.
That all being said I think the biggest issue with the game though is, unfortunately, with its engine. While it is impressive, they used the RPG maker engine to make this kind of game, it unfortunately gets in the way more often than not. What can make or break these games is having proper access to the data you need to make decisions on how to run the town or what to build. Unfortunately, much of the stats are hidden behind menus that are not easy to access, requiring you to interact with certain objects to access them. You also need to interact with certain objects and characters to preform actions. This really slows down the game as you may find yourself going between object to object and navigating large menus to preform the actions you want or to get the info you need to properly plan. This is also not helped by the fact that it becomes harder to move once you reach certain weight stages, especially to access some menus or info you have to traverse between multiple rooms. This caused me to basically stop playing the game once I reached blob as it was just too much of a pain to move around to get to the items, I needed to interact with to be bothered with.
Overall though the game has a lot of promise. Though I think a different engine would have to be used or RPG maker modified very heavily to really get the most out of it.
Kilif Score
| Category | Total |
|---|---|
| Basics: | 200.0 |
| Art: | 20.0 |
| Writing: | 36.0 |
| Sound: | 28.0 |
| Concept/Design | 118.0 |
| Msc: | 13.0 |
| Admin Card Attempted: | 5.0 |
| Admin Card Score: | 10.0 |
| Patreon Card Attempted | 5.0 |
| Patreon Card Score | 5.0 |
| Community Card Attempted | 5.0 |
| Community Card Score | 10.0 |
| Total: | 455.0 |
Comments:
I really liked this, but I feel like your choice in engine has held you back. Given the style of game, you didn’t really benefit from having implemented it in RPGMaker, and in fact detracted. The UI was especially awkward, given that this is ultimately a city building/management game. That all being said, the sheer ambition of trying (and successfully) pulling off that type of game in 2 weeks should be lauded. I really enjoyed the overall design and would encourage you to continue on the endeavor, but definitely with a new platform.