we ROASTED your games

you guys loved roasting our game back when we made our video where we went to our financials and you know it always left me a little bit bitter because I always was like oh yeah sure you can say whatever you want show me what you've made and I thought well let's make a video about that a while back in our Discord server which if you're a game developer or you're interested in this Channel at all you should join I asked our viewers who were also game developers if they wanted to send me like what they were working on it could be a released game that they already had or it could be something that they're still working on my only requirements were it had to be a PC game and you needed to have a steam page because I also wanted to review the steam page a lot of people sent me in their games and I picked four for this video completely different genres really to well just talk about and then I also like you know played them and I wanted to give the developer some feedback but then through a video form I'll also send them like my longer thoughts in like a message as well so keep your eyes open if you're one of the developers of the games in here and I also wanted to know showcase their games to our viewers because I know how hard it can be to Market and basically in exchange for me roasting their game they get some extra visibility so here's the deal if you like what you're seeing the games or even if you just want to support the developers go ahead I'll link them all down below and you can either wishlist them two of them aren't out yet two of the games or you can go and pick up a copy for yourself so two of the games are also released now with that out of the way let's get into the first game and this first game is called pixel Dash This is actually a game that I've been involved with I guess you could say for already a while back when I made a video where I told you guys to just send me a demo if you wanted to and I would give feedback on it I already had some first thoughts on this one and then once I asked it in Discord then the developer was like hey this is a coincidence I just put up my steam page so he supplied me with like an early build and I went to town again so what is pixel Dash It's a speed running game and I personally had never played a speedrunning game before I don't really play other games that often as you may have noticed and especially something like speed running thing is always weird I liked watching speedrunning content there was like this one great GTA 5 speech run like the series at some point I watched that one but this is a game that's all about speed it's also a very competitive game and the point is very simple how I like to describe it is it's just a platformer but it's really fast paced and there's a scoreboard and a timer and you can race yourself or you can race your friends it has team leaderboards and everything like that and the goal is just to keep getting faster and faster and faster they also feature a like custom level editor although I don't think that was implemented in my build yet similar to you know all of those crazy Super Mario Maker worlds where like there's like only 0.01 of people can beat this so that's the game basically I'm going to be splitting up like all of my game reviews by the way in three main parts what did I like about it what didn't I like as much or what would I change if it was up to me and then also I want to just go over the steam page as well what I think is good and bad there so I think what pixel Dash did really well is entered just me to the world of speedrunning games when I first heard the concept I was like this is who plays speed running games you must really hate your life for that well I do play them now and I do like the concept I am not a speed runner though so my skills were quite low and you'll see that in the gameplay as well I'll probably switch up with like some of the gameplay from the dev itself because man I am still really bad at this the first time I tried out the game as well I was playing with a keyboard and mouse don't do that this is the kind of game you should play with a controller because man the controls for keyboard and mouse were really not optimal I talked to the developer about it and I was like yeah we never really tested it yet so I was the first person who got the tested with keyboard and mouse once I then connected one of my controllers I got the hang of it much easier and don't get me wrong I'm still really bad at it but I thought I was already quite decent until I finished the level and then I suddenly saw that like the developer had done it at about like one-fifth at the time I think that I did and then I just felt a bit bad but overall I still really like the game what's better even is I like the visual style we'll get onto the visual style of the sake because there's still a few things that probably will need to be ironed out but the bass like very simple shapes and like but still there's like a bit of attention to detail like the animations how there's like Shadows being cast are really polished I think already and they fit perfectly with a genre that is just about speed and you don't really care that much about how beautiful it looks because all of those things just distract you from going fast you can tell that developers also put a lot of time in speedrunning other games most likely because there are these 12 visual cues that just show that they know what they're doing one of the best examples of this is for example how you see if you can still Dash or Not by default your player is just a white Cube but if you've dashed you get this like more gray shade and then once you can Dash again so when you like touch ground again it turns white again it's really easy to see and it just makes sense from like the second you play the game it's really easy to pick up but I think it's truly hard to master this this game and especially if you look at like the the real speedrunners doing it man I am not good enough for that now there were some problems I had with the game as well and I think this could be me not knowing how speedrunning works but I feel like the game was still unpredictable which is not something you want I feel in a speedrunning game so there's if you like I'll put up some gameplay of like the developer right now and you can see he does these really long jumps and like really fast and I almost never was able to reproduce that it happened a few times in my own gameplay but I couldn't figure out what the magic formula was what key combination I had to press or like what was the exact trigger that suddenly I flew three times as high I sometimes did and then I was just surprised like oh I did it but I could never reproduce it so that one was a bit harder it felt like I didn't understand all of the mechanics so I would see if it could either be a bit more clear or maybe give a visual effect if you like do something special that like you can trigger it but that's something that I really missed out on especially is something like a speed running game you really want to be able to predict I would guess what will happen if you interact with a ball for example and you jump at the right point in time also the music I don't know if it's permanent or not some of the songs are very Bassy and crunchy I would say so especially when playing with headphones I find it really distracting and I ended up just like turning it off imagine listening to this whilst you keep on dying for like 15 minutes Non-Stop yeah I'd I'd go crazy and that's what I ended up doing basically I just turned off the music and listened to my own songs which is a shame because some of the other songs in the game are much better already I don't know if they've been like composed by the team I don't think so but still I would make you maybe a bit less Spacey and then lastly there's also a bit of an inconsistency in the art style like I said I really like the Simplicity but then for example you have like a launch pad which is a very like you can see the pixels pixel art whereas all the rest of like the platforms and the spikes are really smooth and like very basic principle figures so that just feels a bit off of course this is still a very early like build that I was playing so I assume that they're gonna solve that and make it more consistent at some point like make the launch pad more you know basic overall I think this is a pretty solid game and if you're interested in it I think you should wish list it now when you wish list it you'll have to go to their steam page so let's quickly talk about that one there's a few things that I like to see in Steam pages and we actually had our own steam page reviewed by the legendary Chris zukovski as well and I've learned a lot from that and I think they do a lot of stuff great already things like for example they use GIFs which I think if your store Page doesn't use GIFs and you'll see that like coming through later on you're really missing out on engagement and when people actually understanding what your game is about because these gifs if a potential like buyer or wishlister doesn't watch the trailer it's really hard for them to really grasp what the game is about if they only have static screenshots and especially for a speedrunning game you want it to go fast and you want them to really be able to see what's going on that's Bond really well here the store Page is a bit light on text however I would add a few extra sentences about what the game is about Not Just Dial A lot I think that's a bit too basic I missed some of the features even such as how much levels are there play with like however many controllers or like input support things like that I missed that one a bit but again I think this is something something that can be sold quite easily once you're like further into development and you know what your game is about and then also the short description I like the picture above it I like the promo art but I think the short description is a bit too short maybe and another thing that I learned from Chris is that you should add a lot of verbs to it because it really makes your short description more Dynamic so use verbs like dashing jumping evading falling whatever racing put all of them in your short description because the more verbs you have the more like you tell your player already what will be the different things that they're going to be doing in the game overall I would give this steam page a 6 out of 10. next up is Project apocalypse which is like an apocalyptic base Builder game where you have to make your own base with like survivors in it and then you have to protect it from the infected who will try to attack you and you just want to expand it I would almost describe it as cozy even I really like the art style but I'm probably biased because I have spent like too many hours playing unturned in like back when I used to play a lot of games and it has a very similar like crude but still like polished art style I don't know how to explain it correctly but it's like what we wanted for Forge industry they actually like managed to deliver upon it I think like the main concept Wise It's not that like crazy it's like the setting is different it's post-apocalyptic but you know it's like you know you have plenty of games even like mobile games like Clash of Clans for example is one that I played a lot as well where you know you build stations you need like people to be in those stations or to build them and then you like go out and explore get more resources to make your base bigger nothing too crazy but I really like it and they have a job system because of course who's going to build all of these buildings that you want to place down for example or if you have a water purifier someone needs to actually work at that water purifier well your survivors work there it makes sense but there are some issues with that one I'll get into those in a second but first I need to tell you about probably my favorite thing about the game the sounds oh man this game sounds amazing I don't play like that many games anymore but man this game I really love the sound I feel like I think in the credits also two or three people worked on the sound and you can really tell they've got really nice Dynamic Sound the ambience is great overall just playing it I felt so immersed in the game even though like the graphics maybe aren't too crazy the soundtrack really makes it feel like wow I am like this feeling of like I'm a survivor in like an apocalypse and what I like as well is that this game is out and it's fairly priced I think it's 5 Euros and 89 cents honestly if you like what you're seeing here I would pick it up this is a really solid game I like playing it I enjoyed it as well even though there are some issues with it I really like it and especially for the price I think it's even a bit underpriced for the amount of content it delivers now what would I improve the UI still has a few bugs here and there I know the first time I was like playing with around with my resolution like I just broke inputs for some reason so I had to like four squid and restart the game also when I exited the game after like my first playthrough I was stuck on like not the full main menu screen like some parts of the screen weren't loaded yet but I also couldn't interact with anything so once again I had to force quit the game and then also some of the text is really really small to read so you have the inventory system up top but then like for example in the stations there's like very small indicators of quantities for certain resources you need I was playing this game on a 24 inch 1080p Monitor and I really had to squint to be able to see sometimes what they were talking about this games also says that the game is playable on Steam deck but I can't imagine like how small the text must be on an 8 inch screen or I think seven inch I don't know how big the steam deck exactly is but I think it's almost unplayable text twice there I mean they don't call it verified so that's fine but apart from that there were some things about the gameplay that I didn't fully like but honestly I still like the game in general and the problems were you know this game is a bit similar to forge industry so I have a much deeper understanding of how how this genre of games work so that's probably why I'm more nitpicky here as well but the job system I found doesn't really make that much sense so let's say we have eight survivors then technically you should be able to do eight jobs at the same time now these jobs are dynamically assigned or like automatically assigned so it just takes a Survivor and puts it on job there's no way you can be like this specific worker now has to go to this station and like purify water for example on top of that some of the workers also just sleep at certain points so you can't really see how many workers am I currently putting to work how many are sleeping and how many do I have like available to go and do new stuff for example this is something that I also really missed because I wanted to then maybe explore like a new region but I was like oh everyone is doing something already but it was really hard to really see who was doing what and how much survivors did I have available to like send out I also missed that I couldn't like pin the jobs page that just like shows you who is currently working on what I had to always open it and then if I had that one open I couldn't open any other UI elements whereas instead I would want to like pin it to like the top right or top left of my screen to always have an overview of who's doing what really I also felt like the inventory system was a little bit weird I feel like there's a global inventory because I can just like click unlike any building they don't have a local inventory it just gets crafted automatically but then when I sent out survivors to like getter stuff the resources they were gathering didn't come immediately into my inventory I felt it felt like the workers still had to bring them back first and yeah just was a bit weird I didn't fully understand it and I think the biggest problem this game has is that sometimes it felt like what you were doing and what was happening in the game didn't actually matter that much for example throughout your play time you'll have survivors in your camp and they will sometimes well I just have to say like this analyze themselves because they just can't deal with the apocalypse anymore and you get a little notification like this person has unalived themselves killed themselves do you want to bury them or eat them and I get what they want to mean there they want to like make you think oh should I eat the remains because I'm really low on resources or should I just bury them first of all I was never really low on food maybe just because I made a bunch of farms in the beginning already and second of all it didn't really feel like it mattered that much because once a Survivor did end themselves you know a new one would just appear anyway because you always got these messages of like hey a new survivor has like appeared do you want to take them into your camp or do you just want to send them away I never sent them away I don't really know what it does I just always accepted them and I was like fine it just felt a bit pointless almost to have it I get where they were going for with the like whole sanity system the implementation just isn't fully there I think nevertheless I really like this game I can't stress it enough I really enjoy this I like their short description it has all of the verbs that I want to and it really captivated me to look further into the game once I clicked on the steam page they also used custom headers in their main text so instead of using the steam default ones I really like that one as well I was just missing some gifs as well now I know for this kind of genre it can be harder to get these engaging kinds of gifs but even something like a day night time lapse could help a lot in showcasing how you like play the game and how the game progresses because right now it's just some text and some static headers and that's it not even like images from in the game in the main text of what's the game about they also even put like a small roadmap of what do they plan on development I think this is really good as well because it showcases that you as a developer still want to do a lot more with the game even though it's already out I think it's also something really inspiring for when someone new looks at the steam page because they know even if they buy it now it's still probably gonna get improved upon at later points even if it's not early access I felt like there was almost as much space dedicated to the future plans than to what the game already is I would have spent a bit more time as well on seeing why should you buy the game because it has just a very dry list of this is everything you can do right now but it didn't really convince me to buy the game that's why I really wanted to to make this video so to tell you to look into it it's a really good game and especially for the price overall I think I would give this Stone page a 7 out of 10 as well next game is caved in and it's a metroidvania platformer it's nothing too crazy but I do also enjoy this one it's set with like very low poly pixel style graphics and I think they really nailed a charm that this can have I also asked the developer at first is this going to be the final Graphics or is it more placeholder it's final and I think that's perfectly fine as well I don't know what it is but it makes it feel distinct in a certain way because there's not that many metroidvanias with this specific style of art now of course you can look as pretty as you want but if the game field is off especially with something like a metroidvania your game isn't that great and I like to say that the game feel of this platformer has been some of the best I've ever played I don't know what it is but everything just feels weighty but also not heavy at the same time everything has like a cute little animation everything moves that little bit but it's not over over the top it's really well balanced already even in like a very early stage of the game the sound effects were also really clear when I was shooting something I really felt like it had impact even though you know this looks at first maybe like nothing too crazy like just a simple Unity tutorial almost you can tell that there is actually much more depth in the game already now I only played a very limited demo that was sent to me the the full game should be much longer I think I played around 10-15 minutes to finish this demo but I already liked what I had there there was a big boss fight and it also showed me like some of the metroidvania aspects although of course it's like the more default oh you unlock a double jump things like that I think metroidvanias are also a pretty good genre to appeal to a lot of people so I think this is a pretty solid choice of game now there were some things that I also didn't fully like first of all man the controls were not that great or at least I missed rebinding I'm not someone who's used to the more Hollow knight style of controls where I use the arrow keys and then you use like z c and V or some something like that to actually interact with everything now I asked the developer about this and there will be like rebindable controls or like some kind of different kind of controls as well in like the full game so I'm not going to go too deep on that I do think also that they were going a bit too hard in certain animations the texts unlike the dialogues was just a bit too wobbly making it almost hard to read again of course this is also something that should be a relatively easy change but I hope they implement this one and then also just some like General bucks I did get soft locked a few times in the dialogue system because I like click too fast to it because I had accidentally restarted a whole lengthy conversation with the same character and then I couldn't play the game anymore so I had to like restart it was a bit awkward but hey it's an early build so whatever and then it's time for their store page again I think this page was nothing too crazy but also not bad at all again the short description lacked a bit of verbs and it also lacked the genre usually for a short description you want to start with your name of the game is a and then whatever genre it is here in this case it started with welcome to cavedin that welcome to get rid of it it doesn't add any value and it only like breaks down the patience that your readers have until they actually learn what the game is about also it didn't say the genre which was a bit weird only once you went into the main text does it say it's a Metroid failure so actually when they're not fully knowing what the game was about but I quickly discovered oh this is a metroidvania very easy to prevent just add like the little wart also add more verbs was also something I wanted to hear double jumping dashing shooting any of the other abilities that you unlock in your metroidvania exploring add them to your short description the more verbs you have the more actions your player can do in the game the better and the more engaging it is for them to read as well now the store Page already uses gifs which is really good it shows more of what the game is about but I would add one more GIF at least and that is of a boss metroidvanias are really big on like the boss fights and you'll even have one in your demo I would just add that in there as well it really shows it conveys more of the metroidvania aspect and the epic boss fights and things like that also I would add some transparent headers instead of using the steam default header so that's just like make some own art style and then have like a transparent background make it 600 pixels wide and just slap it in your store Page this also does a lot in making it more engaging and you can do things like Center it horizontally and yeah it just helps I would give this store Page an 8 out of 10. there's nothing too crazy but for the kind of game it is and with the Arts analytical face I think it's a pretty solid match and then our last game is Stellar solvers it's a space-based Forex turn-based strategy game so mouthful but I think personally I've played a bit of Stellaris and that's about everything I had of experience in this genre but I have to be honest this is a genre that's not for everyone and it'll get more clear in a second as well what I mean by that now some other things that I want you to know is that this game is made by one guy if I remember correctly and also it's out keep that in mind but I like about the game well first of all let me say I don't have that much experience with games like this like I said only Stellaris but I am a really big like sci-fi and space nerd and I love the setting probably that's like the main thing you can really see how much care and attention to detail the developer put into like the whole world setting and making it as realistic as possible and like in-depth as possible it goes crazy in depth of course that's normal with these 4-H kind of games but thinking that just one person made this is really crazy now there's only so much one person can do so we'll get into that in just a second but I quickly just want to say I like the game as well you can really see also how much gear went to like all the ship models they're all beautiful they all have this like really good style and they're all distinct but they also still look really realistic it's more like the hard sci-fi that's something I can expense also would have I really like this also the the whole galaxy building system is really in-depth and we can tell yeah the developer knew what he was doing there there are some problems however there's also has only mixed ratings on Steam and there's it's a mix of you know this game was based upon an other game more like a reboot Vamp of that but it didn't fully get that so some of the reviews are also people thinking it was going to be another game than it really was that's fine but some of the reviews were also correct in that you can tell that it's only one person working on the game and there's only so much one person can do this is things like books a really great example is this this is your resolution drop down screen and the same resolution is displayed multiple times and I felt like I knew this from somewhere and this is like a pretty basic bug we had it at Forge industry at some point as well and it basically comes down to Unity giving you resolutions but then like hidden behind it is also the refresh rate that's how we solved it but it shows that you know even though this game has been out for a while things like this it was the first thing I saw basically when I opened the settings when I was configuring the game and I was like oh that's a shame also default the FPS is only 45 kind of weird I could run this game perfectly on Ultra with my RTX 3070 at least and still I would just put it on 60 by default also some small quality of life things such as for example pressing escape to open an escape menu aren't there once again these are things if you're so focused already on building all of the mechanics baking all the models and like making it as beautiful and in depth of a game as it is these things can slip out if you don't have anyone else working on your project it's a shame but also another deal breaker honestly what is a deal breaker for most people and this is not by the fault of the developer it's by default of the genre is that it's so complex there is a tutorial system it's really dense it's really in-depth and I can live with that because you need to have a tutorial system this complex in a game as advanced as this the problem is the tutorial system talks about what's specific about this game it talks about like all the star stuff and all of the different kinds of ships and the weapon hardpoints they have and things like that it doesn't talk about the genre it doesn't talk about how do these kinds of games work to begin with so my guess is that a lot of people pick up this game not fully knowing yet what it is and one of the top refund reasons is going to be that the game is too complex for someone if this is their first 4X game I had this problem a lot with Stellaris as well I had no clue what I was supposed to do and even here I was also like trying to figure out once I knew the systems it was all fine as well but what am I actually supposed to do now what am I how do I play the game sure I can research all of these things but how do I get more research points how do I invade other systems and things like that that was a bit unclear to me and I think it's really hard to solve this if I'm being honest because there was already so much text and so much tutorials it's just a genre I feel sorry for a developer this is a genre that's really hard to Market and even worse just starting a new game like the new game screen I had no clue what was going on I missed things like tool tips for example because there were so many little things I could tweak and like sliders but I didn't fully understand what I was supposed to do one of the biggest problems we had with Forge industry was that if people in the first few minutes didn't understand what they were supposed to do well they already left that's why we have such a low demo play time as well because our old tutorial system just wasn't good and I think this game suffers from a lot of the same problem if I'm being honest I have no idea about the actual stats but that's what I think I think it's a bit too overwhelming if you're not already deep into the genre also at 24 euros and a half it's a bit on the pricier side already for like the amount of content there is I think it's still a great value but this is not a game for everyone if you're right now you'll probably know who you are there will be a few viewers are like oh my God this looks like an awesome game how have I never heard about it get the game it's really good that but if you're not really sure about what this game is about and what you're supposed to do this isn't for you I'm sorry even with like so much love it's just a genre that's harder to Market than like whatever broke like or metroidvania or whatever game you make even we with like Forge industry which our goal was to be more approachable than a factorial for example struggled with how complex certain mechanics are now then the final thing is how's the store Page and I think it's solid I think it's really good it is a great short description it uses a lot of verbs which again I like to see and also the main text the main body is really good it uses chips it uses custom headers it's really in-depth and it's not just like simple gifs it's like edited and everything it's really good in that regards as well there's really content wise not that much I can like complain about there's only one thing that if I had to complain about it would be the trailer trailers are very tricky to get right and this is one where it looks really good but there's a few things that can put me off I think the big problem is that the first eight seconds isn't really anything it's just the name of the studio and the like genre of the game and like fancy Graphics I would add more actual gameplay to like the trailer yeah you have all these fancy Graphics was like there's multiple kinds of ship there's multiple kinds of Worlds all of these things but I never really saw the game first so it was really harder to see there overall I would give the store Page a 9 out of 10. this is a really good page still and the trailer you know it's nothing horrible probably people who are used to the genre know it but it's something that you know I would have changed a little bit if I could anyway it felt nice to like roast alric paints for a moment I'm really curious what is your opinion leave the comments down below check out all of the games if you want as well I think think all of the games are really good there wasn't really anything bad with them that like I was like this is horrible game honestly you guys sometimes sent me like acid flip games and the mechanics are good but sometimes I'm like hey I don't know if I could recommend anyone paying for this all of these games I think there is an audience for it and I think there are people who will really enjoy them so I think they're good in that regard if you have a game you want to show off at some point then I suggest you head on into our Discord where at some point depending on how good this video performs I'll make a sequel where I'm roasting more games maybe I'll roast a bit less though because 4 is already a lot if I want to give like in-depth feedback and if you personally just want like some feedback on your game you can always send me an email as well and I'll give you like an email back with like the feedback that I have about what did I like about your game and like what would I improve but you won't get the public roast like this anyways that's all I really have to say if you're new here we're game developers we make game development related content where we just talk about game design or we also try out some new stuff like what this video was where we want to like give a bit back to the community if that's something that interests you be sure to head down below give us a like and also maybe subscribe because we make these videos twice a week that's all I have to say thanks for watching and I'll see you guys in the next one bye

Channel: BiteMe Games

Views: 9,090

Keywords: gamedev, indie, indie developer, game development, unity, c#, blender, game design, game studio, devlog, development, startup, forge industry, flega, steam

Id: 6TGfYk4doDE

Length: 28min 59sec (1739 seconds)

Published: Fri Sep 29 2023