BALANCE
This game really gets points for being the original creation of a solo developer. This game is so awesome and amazing that it would be a perfect portfolio piece to show for an aspiring game developer in the industry. I would hire you as an artist and designer off of this project alone.
MENU: There’s no real menu except for a little startup animation showing the name of the game on a CRT TV screen, which helps to set the tone for the game as an almost “wacky game show” minigame.
ART: The art is completely original and super addicting, with a style that reminds me of colorful assorted cartoon gummy candies in pack. This is where the game really shines in its animations, camera work, and art.
AUDIO: The game has fun beeps and boops and sounds for audio confirmation that points are counted and pieces landed as they should. It creates a very responsive feeling game.
GAMEPLAY LOOP: Quite fun but quickly loses its appeal after a few minutes. There’s very little strategy needed to play items as they seem to kind of stick wherever they land, and once you get a system going of bombs and multipliers, the game loses its scaling pretty quickly.
Written Review
The player turns on their CRT TV to see a fun interactive game show being displayed, hosted by BIRDNESSMAN. The player then tries to balance items on a scale for points and see how many points they can accrue, but watch out! If items drop, your points will continue to decrease until you have nothing left! Every so many items, the BIRDNESSMAN will offer a gamebreaking option for the player’s experience.
The art for this game alone made it a fun treat to play, but the actual gameplay loop loses its appeal rather quickly when it becomes apparent that the points can’t be used for anything and the upgrades make it easy to “cheese the system”. This would make for a perfect meta-game element of using points in an in-game shop for upgrades or other changes, or to add to a collection of minigames apart of a larger game.
Ways To Improve Game
Rather than losing points if you miss a scale, points should only be gained for items on the scale and lost if they happen to fall off the scale. Add more motivation for accruing points, like meta-game elements or a “game winning” scenario or a “competing enemy” you have to beat to win the game.