LBR - Side party

Played 149 times

Uploaded by: bluelegend

Upload date: 2/20/2025

Description:

Live Blue reacts/rants: where I give my honest views on a certain topic, program game or otherwise. Sometimes I'm fair, sometimes I'm not.
This is unfiltered me so be warned when clicking the play button!
If this appeals to you, welcome. Lets enjoy some Brannish criticisms, shall we? Oh and also, feel free to suggest things for me to react to!
In this one, I will give my thoughts on the game Side Party, created by Mason.
You can acquire it here: https://masonasons.itch.io/sideparty

15:10 is a great example of my least favorite thing about audiogames, in general. Why does this game have HRTF? It's a sidescroller. All that does it make the audio focus disorienting and unnecessary. Clasic example of 'add it because you can'.

agreed with the machine. an other example is simple fighter
as for reviewing things, you should do one on websim.ai. not sure if that will be your thing though.

Not sure what that is but I will take a look. Also as for hrtf, we are able to turn that off if we wish. I just don't because I don't mind it.

You should review the International Friends Network next.

hehehehehe @sweetdaddyriz

I dislike the HRTF, I dislike the plank parts, I dislike how many things can just instakill you, I absolutely HATE damage scaling. But my biggest issue. Biggest huge issue. Is the tedium that is the plank game. It's so boring. So uninteresting. So unfun.

Sadly side party gets old after one run. You pretty much see all there is to see and one thing it needs is more variety imo. So yep, tedium becomes a thing quite quickly.

Why is it that this guy always has to make a game that is either inspired by or outright ripping off another game, an unoriginal concept, or just lacking in actual fun/creativity/gameplay in the somewhat original ones? Because they either aren't fun or are just repetitive. At least come up with cool names, bro, lmao—if you can't make cool games themselves.
Runner, Crime Hunter (title literally saying what the game is), Scrolling Battles—the fuck does that even mean? The act of scrolling is defined as text moving up or down a screen, or it's something more related to magic and fantasy stuff.
You know, there’s a realization that hits people when they see the reception of what they put out: "No, this isn’t good." "No, this could be worked out." "No, this is not for me, I should move on to other things." Not everybody who’s a programmer can be a game dev as well. Saying "Oh, let's do this, it would be cool and fun to play with!" only counts as an experiment—something to mess around with for your own sake or to learn new things. It takes a lot more for a public release.
There’s a reason big corporate teams have separate people for development and for design. Tech nerds get caught up in the cool technicalities (yes, I include myself as a victim of this) and forget that most people don’t give a shit about any of that. Either it won’t even be seen in a compiled build, or even if it is, they simply aren’t interested. They want to play the game for what it is, not to hear about how "randomly generated" or "procedurally generated" works, how some sound effect changes, or how HRTF sounds cool with certain sounds. They care about whether the game actually has content, whether it is fun.
That’s why you’ll often find that game devs are just that—game developers—and don’t do any other kind of software development, so they can actually study the field. Because it’s not a joke. Anybody can code a game. That’s not the same as making a good game.
And no, there’s a reason I said most—I know people who do other software dev work and are also excellent game designers. But that’s because they’ve actually studied the design field, and it shows. Not just in a theoretical sense, but because they grew up with games that they are now trying to replicate.
Blind devs have played mainstream games, seen them played, or at least heard about how they work. Because, I’m sorry, most blindie games don’t set a good precedent to learn from, especially when you’re young. And the ones that kinda do weren’t advanced enough at the time, so we simply don’t have enough to learn from in most genres in the audiogame industry.
In all fairness, this particular spinoff actually had a cool concept behind it—randomly generating CP things and getting the player to figure it out. But that’s about it. Cool concept, proof of concept... then it falls flat on its face. I can’t think of what exactly could improve it because I don’t count myself as a good game designer either, but there was possibly potential to make it even better. More content, more variations, more mechanics. But nope, that’s all there is to it.
Why would any player want to replay such a game?
Not to mention all the bugs, which just make the issue worse. On their own, bugs aren’t a big deal since they arise and get fixed. But typically, that should happen early on in the testing phase—or at worst, during public beta. And then maybe one or two things here and there in a public stable release. But that’s just my opinion.
And then all the strange design choices. Not listening to users and just doing your own thing further proves my point. If you just want to make your own thing, run it your own way, and do whatever sounds fun and cool to you, don't have any more creative ideas—then just do that, lol. Maybe release it as a proof of concept or a personal project, but don’t call it a game.
G00n rant in lbr rant lmfao because I felt motivated this morning or something.

Also, by no means am I discouraging people from making games that may not have some unique, pioneering mechanic. Everybody starts somewhere. There are devs who are well-known in this community whose first game was "Guess the Number," and they shared that with us—even though there were so many of those, and it was something easily coded. But they had their own unique spin on it. They wanted us to be involved in their game dev learning and growth process, so they shared them with us.
But you know what else they did? They made incrementally better games as they went along—complex mechanics, good mechanics, unique mechanics even. Games with replay value.
And this is by no means a new dev and by no means a kid either, as far as I know. So I could maybe excuse some of the older games, but now? Dude is literally putting out games on Itch.io. Is this the kind of precedent we want to set for games for the blind?
Sure, Scrolling Battles was old, so maybe it gets a free pass. But it was revived recently. Scrolling Battles Online/your world was literally renamed to Sketchbook—which, of course, it was, because Scrolling Battles made no fucking sense. Forget scrolling; there isn't even a battle element in it it's a building game, and then we had another scrolling battles battle game called sbp or something that lasted for a grand total of 4-5 months I guess. But we're not gonna open up that can of worms surrounding the drama, not sticking to projects, attitude problems since if you know you know; but it certainly doesn't help the rep or any of the points I've made. It's like he came up with this weird algorithm/lineup in his head and just went with it, never mind what the world says or how logical it is.
And I thought I was bad with names lol

Nice.

I don't know if you covered this in your rant, I didn't finish it, but here's something else dumb. You know how, at higher levels, there will be electrical ladder segments? Yeah, so, the game won't tell you that part and it'll act like you can drop safely because the length of the ladder you're on is short enough. So I took a 200 HP draining fall today because of that. Stupid design.

I actually do touch on that very problem lol. Thank god its not just me who experiences it.

@G00N I absolutely agree with you!