Lengthy review of version 0.7 of Guilseo Spirit

Review of version 0.7 of Guilseo Spirit
This is quite negative, but I hope I've made it constructive enough. This review might or might not be applicable in 60 days after I've posted it. If more time than that have passed, play Guilseo Spirit yourself before reading further.

Long have I traced this game. Ever since the topic asking for a new name for the game "Ghoster", I've been more or less aware of it. Unable to play it, though. When I finally got an USB memory and the ability to download games to text and rate them, the first game that came to my mind was Guilseo Spirit. So here it is, a review I've been looking forward to write for a long time.

The following is the breakdown into star points in a vast number of categories. My following reviews will all have this new cathegory system. This is also where I move focus from my relation to the game to the game itself.

Graphics: 2/5
First impression: Hmm... the shaded parts of the text "GUILSEO SPIRIT: Main Menu" was very ligth, and made the text hard to read since it didn't contrast with the white enough.
The story effects look AWESOME. I cannot deny it or describe it in less generic words. It's simply AMAZING. Animated backgrounds! It kinda lowers the frame rate, but it's OK.
Hmm... the main character's sprite being very similar to the included Pacman Ghost sprite breaks a bit with the other amazing things like e.g. the font. You should change that to a custom, new sprite... As well, the healthbar on enemies taking more than one hit to kill was a generic standard one... With some gradients and without the black outline, it would look much better. Well, the graphics are wery unbalanced. Very nice backgrounds get ruined by generic sprites and blocks in soul-less lines. Font and particle effects clash with stale healthbars. The overall impression is very blurry. It's hard to keep track on where you character are.
Overall, the game has two sorts of graphics: placeholder-like stale graphics, like the main character's default resource pack-ripped sprite, enemy healthbars with default colors and outline, tiles with no variety whatsoever in the level... on the other hand, there's animated backgrounds, amazing particle effects (especially the one when charged energy of the Ghost Ball comes together is really delicious), health shown as the screen getting a bloody outline... the bad thing is, mixing bad and awesome graphics tend to give off an impression about the game designer just taking nice graphics and putting them together... which looks, as the saying goes, noobish.
The different "types" of graphics doesn't feel connected to each other. The style contrast is too big. The game doesn't really have a style on its own, and the contrast in styles between most objects (buttons looking like shapeless blobs VS the amazing intro effects) simply feels wrong. The beautyful graphics feel wasted, thanks to the bad ones. Even a game where all graphics are ugly (such as Legend (SNES)) feels all right since the game at least follows a style, a Game Design Plan. Just putting nice stuff together won't make the graphics nice.

Art Value: 1/5
The graphics of Guilseo Spirit doesn't really come with anything new on the style front.

Sound: 3/5
Loading 4 external files took some 15~20 seconds. Being used to XM files, it told me that this game's music will be quite grand. Stopped to listen at the main menu theme for a while. It's kinda nice. It sounds cheerful and gives me the urge to play. Not to the levels of Cave Story's theme Cave Story, but the sadder part near the loop makes this game feel like it's about ghosts and spirits, yet compassionate and fun.
Ths music in general is quite nice, but sound effects from the default resource packs - and lack of SFX variety - pulls my grade down. Playing sounds pow-pow-pow-pow-POW!-pow-pow-pow *SPLADOSH!* "Ouch! Try better next time"! The music is quite enjoyable to listen to, though having four files to divide over 16 worlds with different themes seems to have the potential of being repeating... though Super Mario Bros had Overworld theme in most levels, Castle theme in 25% and underworld theme in every 16th level, so many tunes aren't really a demand.

Story: 2/5
Nice effects to the intro, otherwise it's a generic token plot. "There's a bad guy. Stop him." You learn details about the main character, which is a nice addition, and the plot also is revealed little by little. So it's a 1-point complexity plot, but it's done quite well. One point of advice: talking with an invisible (not being in the area you are in, e.g. talking over a radio connection) character isn't the best way of getting people to feel interested. There's of course exceptions, like Portal (but Portal has a better plot, I'd say. There's not really happening anything, but you slowly understand that something is wrong here...).
Revealing key plot points right in the beginning of the game is also a dangerous thing. It can easily backfire. It's better to give the player vague hints. For instance Castlevania: Harmony Of Dissonance (GBA), the first time you go trough a portal, the protagonist says "Strange. Things seem to look a bit different from before.". About 30% more progress later, you will discover about the two "Layers" of the castle, and that the portal moved you to the other layer (by studying the map). But it also moved you to another room, shaped like the other but connected to another place, and the first time you play trough the game, of course that's what you think Justy's talking about. But on the second playtrough (preferably on Expert Mode), you suddenly understand why the room looks different... You've moved into the Red Layer.

Interface: 2/5
Click-hold to charge, use mouse to aim, move with WASD.
Not much to say here, the interface gives you what you want. Doesn't stand out or so, but got what you will need to play. What's bad however, exits and entrances for levels are hard to see since they're just text. There's no real telling where the exit begins or ends... Also, the HUD health, flying and yellow bars tend to hide things, like for instance the main protagonist. And those bars are placed in the middle of nowhere, instead of at either side of the screen. At first I tought THOSE were the entrance to the first level...

Hook: 1/5
Well, the Main Menu was kinda good at hooking a player. Nice Music, a cool font and text-highlight effects and sound being quite nice as well. Though, a penta-star mouse pointer felt slighlty misplaced within the cheerful theme...
However, when experimenting with different keys since I didn't know what was my character, what was Beggar, and what was walls, I entered the 1st level instead of the tutorial. The game had me hooked until gameplay began. After successfully dispatching all enemies and trying to enter the exit, there was no green glow! It was very annoying. I did save BEFORE I killed the final "Purple Creator", but failing to do something like that shouldn't make an level impossible to clear OR RESTART. Making the player having to close down the game usually makes them put down the game. So big un-hook. After hunting down all all the corners of the map for enemies, I tried dying and resetting.
Speaking of dying, as well, it strips you of all Score, all Coins, all pushed buttons... All progress at all! That is very annoying. You'll have to explore levels, every one with a single tile to construct the level (which makes orientating difficult), over and over to get to save points and clear them. With no good advice on how to activate the shield the Fruit Dungeon signpost talked about you're stuck in a meaningless battle. Why kill enemies that respawn from one million places faster than you kill them, to get score that'll unlock something nice in the end, when you have a 90% chance of losing it all when progressing to try and find another save point! It really put me off, and I quitted playing for good halfway into the second level.
This game won't hook you, you gotta stay determined to get trough it.

Gameplay: 2/5
Invisible walls... Well, not everybody likes them. Having a warning sign and having them in the very first level is of course nice. Having them in the end of the game, together with invisible spikes, is not nice. Glad such is not the case with this game!
The gameplay is kinda interesting, with the ability of flying left or right for endless amount of times (after practising the flying for some time, and making sure to never use more flying power than will recover when you relase the button).
The view doesn't feel nice. The border around the character is very small, so when moving forward you're in constant danger of being attacked. Combined with the fact that all progress is lost when dying, it makes progress into the game a "Nintendo Hard" (expression from TvTropes) struggle against your own patience and luck. As well, having to stay and wait, with nothing to shoot, for your flying power to recharge so that you can get upwards, is real boring. In most other games with jetpacking, like for instance Bunguru-Wa or Megabot, your flying power increases faster if you're standing still on the ground. Something like that would be nice, since you usually only can afford standing still if you've killed all the enemies in the vicinity.
The game might have "creative gameplay" (for a normal GM user, that is...) but it isn't fun. You don't get hooked, and the gameplay feel more punishing than rewarding. A 10Mb game should be able to do better than this.

Replay Value: N/A
Lost the will to clear the game, so I can't really say anything about this. Having a lot of collectibles to collect usually cuts replay value, especially if collecting them takes a lot of time. A game doesn't count as cleared today if it hasn't been cleared to 100% (some games to 200%, like Super Mario Galaxy for instance. Oh, why can't you play trough it as Peach and Toad as well?), but it of course gets more tedious the more collectibles there is. Especially grinding collectibles, like "Get 50 000 score and 600 coins"... Take a look at the 64 Pieces of Heart crammed into LoZ: The Minish Cap's world, smaller than the NES Legend Of Zelda... it's a very good example on how not to do. Linear games are much better in such cases. So it's a good choice making one!


Overall rating: 2/5
A Saurus clearly feels like a programmer new to Game Maker. The game is full of the jumbly mix of beauty and stale commonly found in newbish games. Something like deactivation would be nice to keep the framerate going, it is clearly not intended for 16~19 frames which my computer managed to muster at the most bad times. Killing many-hit-surviving, steadily respawning enemies without keeping ANY goodies should you die is tedious and annoying. So is waiting for your flying power to recharge so that you can get up to the next step of the stairay of blocks you're standing midway in. The game is simply not fun. HOWEVER it is actually better than most of the games available on YYG. YYG should have some demands on what people can upload, but even with the demands I (and I'm, as you should by now have noticed, a quite grumpy person when it comes to fun games) would like YYG to have on the games they store on the site, Guilseo Spirit would be suitable.
Hope that that sheds light of what I think about the game: it's full of effort and so, and has a quite good quality level, but I still don't really like it, and there's some rough corners that should have been polished sereval months ago.


Yal's opinion:
Let A Saurus have some more work with this game, which is, after all, an WIP. Tastes may differ, and if you enjoy the point-and-click feeling of a mouse controlled shooter game, have a lot of spare time to spend while regaining lost progress and waiting for flying power to recover, have a go. There's some stunningly beautyful animated backgrounds waiting for you to discover.

What can be improved:
1) Look up deactivating instances. It's possible even in Lite games, and when your levels are squeezed into one room, it's your friend when it comes to save processing time and thus maintain an acceptable framerate. Framerate can dip on certain people's computers, don't assume the game is always so smoothly flowing as you experience it to be. For instance, my game Professor2 (that's gotten tons of 1-star ratings since it runs in around 3 f.p.s.) ran perfectly smooth on the computer I made it on (my brother Matt's one), with around 25000 instances in one room.
2) Polish graphics. If all graphics are as stunningly beautyful as the intro's animated background, people can cope with bad gameplay (Polishing sprites is easier than polishing gameplay, so it's a good start). Just look at how well Donkey Kong Country (SNES) did. Also, try to add tile blocks of different sizes in the levels, preferably fill areas you cannot enter with tiles instead of having them hollow. Tile more with care, to summarize my advice.
3) Let flying recharge faster when standing still on the ground without holding any buttons. A platform game where you can't even get onto a 1-tile big block is EXTREMELY annoying, especially if you're safe from enemies and only waste time waiting to get further into the level.

And remember... the reason I didn't go trough the tutorial was that I didn't understand where the entrance to it were located. Making that more clear would be nice.