itch.io

I was also going to mention all the wooden board lines too XD.

Got that pushing thing happen too with a gurney on top of a gurney but whatever.

Alex’s sprite has got a proper front lean on, yeaaah XD. At one point made me wonder if you were ever a fan of Lee Chaolan from Tekken. Some outfit similarities from like one of his T5 costumes maybe.

Please finish this! : D How far is left for the full game?/what percentage of the full game comprises the demo? I assume you know where the story’s going to go already. That nurse is the most adorable!

I don’t know if it’s an expected standard for RPG maker games but for players who don’t usually play those games, I would suggest making a reminder pop up after you select ‘new game’ which tells you to save in the menu and also to hold shift to run. I didn’t know about the manual saving. So when I met the nurse after the gift shop and immediately got instakilled back to the main menu with 0 progress, I did stop for the day(I went back the next day and explored the rest XD). From our experience as devs seeing player feedback, I’m sure other players would be done for good at that point. Most improvements we make to our games now is to push further and further back any moment that the player will have as an excuse to stop playing. lol even when the fix to the problem makes us go ‘ohhh come oooon, couldn’t they have just figured that bit out themselves? Do I reeally need to hold their hand that much?’ etc.

Other than that, I should’ve recorded my reactions cos a lot of good stuff to say. It’s got genuine character and atmosphere and the effort and personal connection to it is on display. Original soundtrack great too and some actually effective tense moments. But also, got that charming cheeky tone too.

Robotron https://kadormazing.itch.io/robotron

and

Killing Machine Movement https://kadormazing.itch.io/movement

For Free!

I mean.. other people promoting their own so…

But genuinely do think this one is fun, addictive and I guess underrated. Others seem to think so too. If you can persist to try again. https://kadormazing.itch.io/robotron

We’ll spare you our other pretentious joke experimentation game XD

Is free btw

What are your accounts?

You still doing this? Here’re two of ours. They’re both free. https://kadormazing.itch.io/robotron https://kadormazing.itch.io/movement

sounds like this https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sRZzYVqxkVQ

Ayup, posted ours on your other post: https://itch.io/t/3535732/taking-on-games-to-post-on-youtube

Both free!

Weird ass funky slice of life: https://kadormazing.itch.io/movement

Quick legit arcade shooter with different modes: https://kadormazing.itch.io/robotron

You still doing this? Got two free games made in the 2010s

https://kadormazing.itch.io/robotron A legitimate game.

https://kadormazing.itch.io/movement Some comedy parody art thing

Well what do I do now? Nah but really good pace. Nice one keeping me addicted depsite knowing S rank is dependent on R&G. It’s a good balance for games, to get that slot machine feel of lucky draw as well as having strategy make a difference.

Oh come on!! >:(

Hey, thank you so much for playing and commenting! Hope you enjoyed it and hope you’re on the high-scoreboard. If you keep with it, you’ll notice yourself get better, 100%. Don’t forget the alternate modes in ‘Zone Select’. Cheers again, nice one!

That’s really really good. Thank you. Nice one

Aww man, Super Hawash is pretty generic then. I was loving the originality of the unexplained J. Would mind F people.

Production question. Are you using a 2D wrapped image for the panoramic? Where/how/did you illustrate that? Also for the transition to looking out of the window, come to think of it?

One of us attached to this account is planning one of their next short projects hopefully to be completed before the end of the year. Right now, they are at a crossroads, considering whether to make it 2D or 3D.

3D is intimidating because it will involve more time spent crafting every object in the game and also because time will be spent learning programs such a blender. I’m up for it, but have to make that one first step over the barrier to finally start that.

Do any of you have any imput for this or any lessons you would’ve already rather known back when you first started using 3D?

Cheers

I love Jsuper Hawash

Yea bwoiii do that

It might change in 5 to 10 years when the babies who are being brought up with ipads in their hands - already seeing and using AI to make stuff - grow up and become the newer generation of game devs and ‘normal’ changes. But as it is now, generally audiences are both sincerely - and also projecting their fears of the diminishing place for their talents as artists and as such are - against AI use in games for any creative category. I think maybe you already know this and were hoping for some validation that there are a large amount of people who don’t mind? XD The number who are indoctrinated and don’t care will probably grow in the future. IMO, AI art when it’s obvious - or is the core of the imagary - is pretty bad. Voice acting too. Actually, one of the people who use this account worked on a side project as a voice actor for a dev because their game got poor reception in regards to the AI voice acting in it. In general, I do also wonder whether Itch audiences at least or streamers want voice acting in general in their games at all or would rather read aloud with their own flare. Either way, they don’t want too much being said.

There’s so much we’d love to talk about here! But first off, must say thank you for the support here and for enduring through the parts you had problems with - especially despite the protestations of our number one biggest fan in the comments! XD The game was a collaborative circle jerk, so there are multiple contradictory indulgences put into the sogginess from different individuals, to the extent that all of us each likely have a criticism of yours which we agree with. Hatters will say again, though it’s likely uninstalled by now, all about ‘that Keliss conversation’ since that makes some intentions unmistakable. Justified? That’s a different question. For the most part, you got that and thanks. Though we’re surprised how some people still seemed to think we were playing it straight. A commenter even mentioned Sealab later on, which was a big influence (And I don’t just mean the animation style ; ) ). Not that they were always in this order, but the priority was usually comedy/parody/humour first, then irresponsible free(MURICA!) experimentation, then functional game mechanics after that. If it made it on the list at all, making a mass appealing product would go to the bottom, but our solitary mission statement was that whatever we were doing, we weren’t going to be doing that.

Like you say, we’ll see if it can find its way to those few who would connect with enough of it to like it and so far, there has been some enthusiastic reception here and there. We probably wouldn’t bother if the prevalence of games like Cruelty squad or Juice Galaxy hadn’t set precedent lol.

If you want to suffer a bit more and see how off-the-wall the game can go and hear some behind the scenes stories and lose the mystery, we have a dev’s playthrough here https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLdDVcRANDwqtZGX5Fgf33xvunKFVbjupx

Should also mention, if we make another patch, we’ll address the old 1024x768 resolution text issue, but the solution’ll be pretty limited by the engine unfortunately.

Thanks again Sniffhow!🙏🙏🙏🙏

<3 <3 <3 <3 <3

Ahh! What a great review! Thanks for playing, happy you enjoyed.

LOL that video. Amazing. Could’ve brought a bit more energy to it though… Xp

Wow, just scrolled down the leaderboard to see. Took less than a second. Ah when it all comes together on that run, it’s pretty good. Believe me, it’ll happen again. That’s crazy good. Dang, we gotta think up some prize now.

lol yeah for sure that old version tutorial isn’t the best at conveying the information to the player. We released our updated version since then though mainly because of that reason. So, the tutorials and first few levels should be a liiiitle easier to understand.

Still gotta move your mouse away from your character’s body to shoot though : /

Hey, you should take a look at our other game Robotron! That game is way easier to understand and… probably more fun if you want a pick up and play game. Seriously, I recommend that one to you. 100% https://kadormazing.itch.io/robotron

Cheers so much for giving the game a go. lol I uh.. was.. uh… I.. uh.. was.. uh-uh… laughing a lot along the way at that lol XD

So it’s been a few years since releasing KMM and since promoting the release of ROBOTRONhttps://kadormazing.itch.io/robotron, we began to promote KMM more. We’ve got much YouTuber footage and player feedback in that interim and have finally returned to KMM to make changes to the game based on what we saw and thought should be changed.

Here is our recent Devlog covering some of the first changes that a player will encounter. https://kadormazing.itch.io/movement/devlog/1373834/new-killing-machine-movement-update

The new version is up and ready to download. So, if you tried Killing Machine Movement https://kadormazing.itch.io/movement before and found it too hard or unintuitive, this new version has had its introductory levels redesigned to help you understand a bit more. However, we’re not compromising the essence of KMM, and you still won’t be spoon fed. It was a slow incremental retraction back from the intended difficulty.

As a bonus, here’s a compilation of some players encountering one of the game’s early cutscenes.

Thanks Monty! Simple to understand, hard to master is probably how we’d put it too. Glad you agree. Still gotta see your highscore at stage 10. Wonder what your fav power up is/most hated enemy. Wonder how you did on the other modes - just as hard. Hope you enjoyed! Thanks for solid review as always 🙏🙏🙏

Just released our first update to https://kadormazing.itch.io/movement friendlier to the new player.

oh my bad, saw a comment elsewhere saying how.

Erm excuse me, how do you get that?

Those are such nice things to say about it! Thank you.

We’ve just started our first update. We won’t spend any longer than a month maximum on this one hopefully. We’ll keep the brutal difficulty but we’ll be fairer in terms of giving the information to the player about what they’re able to do in the game and the tools that they have available. Will help them to remember and remind them as well.

Thanks so much again for including the variety content on your channel. You say you’re not the most patient. If you say so. We’d say you did well getting that far, especially beyond the first level. The first level is definitely designed the weed out those who don’t have the tolerance for the long term.

Note to players: alt-tab to see if another KMM window’s open if you get the same sound issues.

As said above, devs know what they’re getting into when they make a game and most often don’t expect revenue from it. But yeah, we’d be happy with people playing and sharing them. Good to rate, give reviews and spread the word.

But actually, if you do want to put a little more in, perhaps according to cynical metrics, post on Reddit about games you like. Badger YouTubers, commenting on games they should play. Sometimes it’s taken by them in a different way than a developer asking a YouTuber if they’re interested in playing their game. YouTubers may often be doing it for the views and won’t play a game unless there is demand for it. And smaller devs get more exposure if those YouTuber’s audience grows as well, so supporting them is supporting devs slightly.(YouTuber/streamer letsplays, video essayists, top ten lists.) like and reply to comments you see praising games you like and amplify them. It’s derisory but it all contributes to a little wind in the sails on the digital profile etc.

Hey, thanks.

Yeah it was totally my conjecture there. In discussions above on this post, it could be more likely that the overall messiness and abrasiveness of the layout may be more to do with the correlation of change in DL rates.

XD

Hey, cheers again.

We’ve got some better directions to go in now. Most of them subtle as you suggest. There’s still a selfish part of me that wants to convey the huge cast of characters and elaborate lore(though obviously, we expect the smallest minority of people would often gaf) and I could switch to more actual game imagary to do that. But the problem would still remain that in order to showcase that wide variety and amount, images would still be quite small and overloading. How to convey a large volume of diverse components without being affrontive?

As posted elsewhere on here, I’ll try something out with that. And if things don’t work well like that, we’ll slowly retract backwards to simplicity.

tyvm🙏

Hey, thank you so much for taking the time to go through all of that. That’s really appreciated.

I think I’ll take your static(from the website) suggestion to heart and if not that, can always revert to the block coloured background from before. Same with the change to title text. I won’t make changes immediately. Plus, I think I need to ensure gifs are working on the page. So far they seem to be inconsistent for me. Will look through that properly when I have some more time.

Selfishly, I still do want to try to get the feature of a labyrinthine story that is told through a huge cast of characters over to the viewer of the page through the imagary on it. And I may give that a quick attempt too. But Through that, I suppose I should choose images specifically from gameplay as you say.

Funny you say about things being hidden at the bottom of the page. Unless it’s a genre that I know that I won’t try, I usually scroll down to the bottom of pages to see comments around that area. Ah we’re all so different XD

There’s another hypothetical way, which I won’t do. We probably wouldn’t be doing much with this game at all anymore if Cruelty Squad hadn’t set precedent that something so traditionally unnappealing in so many areas could have so much traction. I wonder how they got out there from the start. Is part of it because the abrasiveness of their game was unmistakable from the outside? All of that is to say, go completely the other way in terms of subtlety for our page and make it as obnoxiously overloading, abstract and confusing as possible so it’s unmistakable what’s inside. But nah lol. Would probably require a lot of gifs too lol

ey cheers

😂😂😂

Hey thanks for the feedback Huges Ross!

Yes it was the Cello person. Come to think of it, the person blowing a kiss kind of pose is also in that territory in a different way.

Ahh I see. So you’re saying I should draw her with LESS clothes and more revealed attributes. K nice. gotcha. : P K, maybe I’m making that joke that’s too reliant on inside information again there as you say.. Yeah I suppose one would only know after they played the game I suppose. But that brings up an interesting follow up question. Were you so confused as to why it was there that it prompted you to download and find out? I guess not. Has that ever happened to you? where you’ve been like wtf is this I’ve got to dive in more to see…

I mean, you can go to Itch’s browse tab and search top rated / top sellers if that’s your success metric.

Happily, I’d say there’s a diversity of genres and areas of focus there.

Cynically, if I were to appeal to the lowest common denominator, we’ve got a range of choices there:

Romantic sims, something friendily/charmingly horny, hot/cute anime guys/gals, short-form easy-to-play easy-to-understand simple-control browser shooters with fast restart rates, cute cartoon/animal/undead characters/settings, first person short horror (liminal space or monster jumpscares), emotional non-voice acted(so streamers can read the text with their own flavour) pixel art short adventure games that seem emotionally profound but aren’t that really, naratives that focus on depression and break ups in the rain, something that seems politically and philosophically profound but isn’t really, deckbuilding roguelikes, a short game that’s based around a funny easy to understand concept like a king on a throne that has to stop shitting himself or something. LOL I mean I sound like I’m bitterly judging these but I’ve played/watched all of them and they’re all great! lol Off for some more : D

I mean obviously ‘should’ and ‘must’ only apply when talking about the best way to make as widely appealing a product as you can. Beyond that, you can do anything.

But yeah, either or. For example, we made Robotron, which pretty much has no story because it doesn’t really need it. While Killing Machine Movement is hugely about story - to the point where we’re parodying how important story is.

Personally, I’ll skim or even skip most notes or journals on a first playthrough. If I like the game enough to play it again. Perhaps the third time, I’ll actually read the notes with conviction. This was the case for me with Deus ex. When I did get around to reading everything in Deus ex, I did enjoy it. Extra character and lore and aha moments and those Chesterton exerpts were great. So dramatic. Funnily enough we also take the piss with this in KMM by putting in 400 page books for the player to find and giant 50 page lore dumps/fan fictions.

Dialgoue on the other hand is a different thing. I love dialogue. If there’s no voice acting though I may get impatient with it if it isn’t great.

If story is part of the game, I always have time for it.

I think environmental storytelling is brilliant and generally preferable to texts for sure. But I’m not one to shun dialogue or cutscenes. I don’t always necessarily agree with less is more or show don’t tell. Stylistically, the opposite can have its place and be pretty refreshing. But environmental storytelling is indeed admirable and something that should be pursued whenever attainable. Look for opportunities to do it. But don’t take for granted, this indoctrination to saying more with less is a result of industries trying to get their products to as wide an audience as possible. And if the largest audience possible must accommodate people with low patience and low tolerance, then you must tailor your product accordingly. That’s not to mention products are sold wider internationally. If you can connect with people’s emotions without words and thus circumvent the barrier of language, that’s more accessible and cheaper.

Are there games where the narrative really elevated the experience for you? Yes.

(btw multiple people use this account. I’m just one of them. Kador isn’t just one wanker)

Niiiice

Hey, thanks for the feedback.

Not that it’s a story you signed up to care about, but what do you think of the thought method behind it and the choices going forward?

So, multiple people use this account, so I’ll be speaking for myself only here. And I - the person typing - also take responsibility for this background change since I wanted to try out this direction.

We’ve had players play the game, but for some, the game did not turn out to be what the players were expecting from first glance; that the game would be a relaxing flow state simple uncomplicated flash shooter (that’s more our other game Robotron). So some were disappointed. We never intended our game to appeal to as wide an audience as possible. We were always aiming to connect with the niches who would - and so far have - connected with some of the game’s more anarchic aspects. So having had some player interaction under our belt, we wanted to break from attracting players who wouldn’t really like the game to its fullest extent and try to attract the players who would. Part of that was trying to represent aspects of what the game would be like at its essence. Part of that is showing that much of the game will be ugly, busy, noisy, rough and at other times elegent. But positively, also rich, punk, anarchic, layered, deep, a DC universe worth of characters and character, etc. Again, we’re under no illusion that the majority of people will be into that, but based on the precedents we’ve seen set by kindred games elsewhere - as well as the feedback we’ve already received from those who did enjoy our game - we can see that those niches are out there and do connect with the game. Getting out to them is the hardest problem.

In your opinion, do you think we should continue to be honest and showcase the sincerity of the messiness of the game at the risk of losing those won’t like it and those who might potentially like it if they unknowingly tried it, or should we not take for granted the privilege of having anyone play our game - regardless of whether they like it or not - and remove the background and go back to getting the trojan horse past the gates as it were?

Thanks again. Cheers for reading even if you’re not up for answering.

Hey,

I recently changed the background of our itch page ( https://kadormazing.itch.io/movement ) to include some of the concept art we made during early production.

I thought, ‘hmmm should I include the early character design for Keliss that I had drawn when I was 18?’ I thought I’d cynically throw it in to kind of jokingly reference how; though the sensible among us clearly can compartmentalise that real people are not sexual objects and should not be treated as such, sexual objects are engaging to many and will hilariously draw attention from eyeballs. I did this at the risk of offending those who either will not get the cheeky wink or those who would get it but react strongly in their stance that jokingly being objectifying is still being damagingly objectifying.

Maybe it’s just the Christmas timing with all the new anticipated releases and busy life schedules. But since uploading the new background, the views have remained at a similar level but the downloads have decreased compared to the previous average. I wonder if this particular concept art picture has had anything to do with it.

But regardless, what’s your opinion on it?