Abducted Toad (Mario fangame)

[Geno]

Oh, a IRL friend of mine made a really neat Mario fangame, and he wouldn't stop pestering me until I made a topic for it here.

Still, it's pretty cool, and I show up in it at one point (I also made a whole ton of stuff for it)

Official the Website

here are some screenshots that are also on the website.

(click to show/hide)

yeah..

[Russel]

Well, since I went through and played the first world...

I guess the only thing I can say was somewhat decent was the mechanics. It has the makings of a pretty good platformer, but it lacks clarity in so many aspects of the game itself that those mechanics can barely even be considered positive. There is a number of enemies introduced at the beginning of the game that straight up cannot be damaged by your basic attacks straight off and while that's nice for the armored Goombas, it's kind of a negative deal with things like the first Kraacko eye.

This is the first set of stages in the game, it should be used for mechanics mastery, not assumption of mechanical mastery right off the bat. I'm not saying the first world was hard by any means, but I did feel like the game was punishing me for not knowing the mechanics like the back of my hand from the get go.

The weirdest thing to get used to was the controls. While yes, I am one of those people who uses a thing similar to joy2key and did indeed use a game pad for this, having to find the keys to map was one of the weirdest things to figure out. The first thing I did when I entered the game was look for a controls option and while I found one, it didn't respond to the basic arrow keys/enter setup, so I just went and looked around for a default mapping on both the game and the website and found nothing. This is very, very bad for first time players. Controls for your game should be as clearly listed as possible. For what little I've dabbled in Game Maker, I've always had jump defaulted to up because it's easy to remember and easy to find. Traditionally, I've seen things like mouse controls, space, wasd, z/x, something that makes for easy hand position...not shift and control.

With that out of the way, I guess I can go to the tutorial stage's design.
It's nice that you mentioned what the controls are after you needed them to progress dialogue. [No it's not I was being sarcastic.] But seriously, I'm actually ok with the level design of this stage. You're introduced to low level enemies [Goombas] who die from either your attack, jump, or a combination of the two, and it shows how certain enemies go down after multiple hits instead of one.
In the area where you need to use the attack to break the blocks, your view shifts when the arrow thing shows up, giving a relatively clear indication that below that section is actually not a death pit. From the way the view pops down, it doesn't appear as though the lowering of it was intended, but it helps with clarity anyway.
I guess this isn't a horrible tutorial, but it's still sort of mediocre. I suggest you take a look at the design of level 1-1 of Super Mario Brothers and then compare it to how your first stage acts. [You should totally watch all of that channel if you plan on going into gaming btw, it helps with things like this critique.]
hi there in text citations how are you

hoo boy this is already a lot of text and I'm not even close to being finished

Ok so next I wanted to cover color because I thought of it while writing the last paragraph.
Purple isn't the greatest color to use for the protagonist. I understand this is a story driven thing, but it doesn't really give a strong indication of what is good and what is not when both your protagonist and antagonist are both purple.
This...isn't a clear divide.
Everything in the game is the same shade of purple. You're purple. The first Goomas are purple. The fish are purple. The boss is purple. I don't have anything against purple, but there's just no contrast of the protagonist against anything else. I don't know, change the good alien dude green and make the protagonist's attacks green or something. Just...contrast it.

Alright, next I'll go into the design of the rainy cave...I won't be covering all of the stages in the first section, but I will briefly touch on the fact that you should not have turned the game into a shooter for the entirety of a stage in the first section of the game.

Now that that's out of the way, I like the overworld setup, it's actually kind of nice. You have the ability to choose where you want to go from a limited pool of locations. This setup seems to work quite well, but you're always transported straight back to the ship between worlds which is kind of annoying, and you can't see what impact you have on the area you go to because of it. When I finished the first three stages, I legit thought I was finished with world 1.


Anyway, Rainy Cave Area. [All of the places are called "X Y Area"... I mean I guess that makes conventions easy but...]
I like how the water mechanics were introduced. There are no enemies in the area that would sit in your way or anything, just a free swimming pool where you can practice doing the backstroke while the cool rain comes down on top of you. My only suggestion is to move the pit you have on the left side closer to the right side and extend the platform on the right to accommodate, just to show the fact hazards do exist in the water and you should look before you leap. [While writing this up, I played that section of the stage four times and even intentionally jumped into the pit to make sure it was indeed a pit.]
Oh look not purple fish. Guess those are safe to- nope those actually hurt you.
Erm...are you able to get through this section without getting hit and without absurd timing on your attack? Curious...

Alright these torpedoes. Bad. This is very bad. You can't damage these things, but you're given literally no indication that they're invulnerable and you have to turn around and swim out in order to get through here without taking a hit. This is straight up wrong. You're making the game slightly open where you can traverse these levels in any order. It is not your job as a game designer to punish your players for information you're not giving them.

Those blocks with the faces on them don't blend with the tileset, which is a good thing, don't get me wrong, but you have to hit them five times before mr-not-a-fish-drill comes and hits your face. Two things here. First, make it obvious that you're actually supposed to break the thing by making it crack or something and remove mr wall penetration over there.

There comes challenges in every developer's life where they have to show the player a mechanic or a thing they simply cannot do. This would be an excellent place where color comes into play. Let's say everything good for you is green, normal enemies are purple or yellow, and undamageable enemies are black. If you can find a way to prove that invuln enemies are black before the torpedo sections of this level, then those are gold.
...I don't mean the torpedoes should be gold, I'm just saying that those sections would be fine.

Notice how I didn't use the words "too hard" up to this point...the umm... the spike dodging section? I would say that's a bit high up there in terms of difficulty for first stage stuff...and that covers the rainy cave. For the remainder of this, I will be covering the boss, because that annoyed the hell out of me how unclear these mechanics were.


So you fight mr purpleton of the purple tribe. But he's also a king because he has a crown.
His capsule looks like a capsule from Mario Party, which I'm assuming was the implication. Visual design isn't an issue really, as I'm aiming more for mechanical clarity with this part of the critique.
Before I begin, and I can't stress this hard enough do not use dialogue to tell the boss' weakness. At least, not when it's this easy to see.

First, make the boss flash or something on the jump when he's about to open. I found it exceedingly difficult to tell when he was about to open and when he was not. When I say "or something," I mean you should make it obvious when he's about to open the capsule. Hell if you wanna go two for one, make the capsule jump higher and have it be on fire or something to show you shouldn't stand anywhere near where he's gonna land.
That pretty much clears that up, actually...I don't have anything else to add on the boss itself.

Lakitus are evil and should not be in the first set of stages.
At all.
I mean that's basic as hell, but an auto scrolling section in the first set of stages is fine. A lakitu in the first set of stages...is questionable, but it's acceptable. Having both? You're just asking to be called a sadist.
Again, don't punish your players for information you haven't given them.

Edit because I forgot to give this a closing:
It's an alright game, I guess. It's more than I've made in game maker, and the platforming engine is nice. It feels like you might have used the same base as AM2R because of how everything flows, but I can't prove that so whatever.

Good luck with everything forward and honestly I kind of want to thank you for releasing this. Thanks also to Geno for showing this off...it was fun to pick apart like that.

I almost feel guilty now but I hope he gets to see this and he gets good information out of it...though Extra Credits can explain things a lot better than I can.

[Geno]

Hey, Lego, don't worry. The creator of the game did, in fact, see this topic.
(In fact, ever since I posted it, he's had a tab open on his phone on the topic, refreshing once and a while to see if there are replies)

Dunno if he would recolour (basically) all of the enemies, but I'm sure hint boxes to at least warn the player about the hazards could be a possibility.

And, I agree on the Lakitu thing..

[Russel]

It would make sense for him to at least recolor the player and pickups to give a slightly more clear indication of what is good and what is not without having to use dialogue.

I was trying to avoid directly saying "Please recolor every sprite in your game" because that type of a request is ludicrous.

[Swordkirby]

I found it decent, but when I was finishing up the first couple of levels in the early alpha ( I had this before you posted this topic), my computer (not my windows 8) went into full compy 386 and had a crapton of viruses in it. I might try it again, now that I know I'm not the only one who knows about this.