Thoughts on games, work, and… well, mostly games

I just purchased Mega Monster Mania, a recently-released Xbox LIVE Indie Game produced by Daniel Steger of Stegersaurus Development.  The demo showed a game mechanic very similar to Square Off (and even I MAED A GAM3 W1TH Z0MB1ES!!!1), and what can I say: I’m a sucker for love letters to Gauntlet.

Mega Monster Mania is a very well-made $1 game that scratches that itch I have for playing games with randomized components (e.g. levels, loot, etc.).  That mechanic, when executed properly, is probably the most important contributing factor in a game’s addictiveness.

The art direction is a testament to the fact that games can be fun even when its visuals are limited to iconic representations.  The game is fun to look at.  My only complaint is that hits don’t “feel” like they make contact with the monsters.  I wonder if a “freeze-on-contact” effect would have improved this or wrecked the game’s pacing.

The movement and combat controls are intuitive enough, though I confess I didn’t discover what auto-attack actually did until Depth 2 or so (’cause I didn’t feel the need to aim with the right stick).  Where the controls don’t deliver, though, is in the use of items.  There are so many buttons on the Xbox controller, you’d think that each special item could have had a button dedicated to it.  Having to cycle through tools before finding the health potion was frustrating because it required me to take my eyes off the action.

(Speaking of combat: swords are the way to go.  Bows are pretty useless, but they’d benefit from some auto-aiming assistance or increased rate of fire.)

The frenetic, electronic music lends tension to the game, but not atmosphere.  (Good music is the one thing I dread having to find for my own indie games.)  The music was drawn from 100% royalty-free tracks available at McFarland Beats.

The sound effects are simple, but they remind me of classic coin-op games from the early days.  Nostalgia FTW.

Two-player competitive play is available, but I haven’t experienced it.  Not the competitive type, myself.

What impresses me most about this game is that it was made in 30-40 days (albeit with an existing engine).  Steger posted a series of YouTube videos chronicling the game’s development to the Stegersaurus website that illustrate the progress he made from start to finish.