When it comes to a game made by one person, what first impressions come to mind in everyone here? In my own case, the first thing that comes to mind is "small and fine" or "one-man miracle.". In a more recent example, like Last Year's Bright Memory: Infinity, the picture quality is hard to imagine being done by one person. Further afield like "Under the Legend", "Stardew Grain Language", "Go to the Moon" are all gods that are basically developed by one person alone, which also makes me more or less produce a "stereotype" of "one person produced, must be a fine product". Recently I saw a game called Rabbit: Immortal Warriors, which was also developed by one person. From the name, you can see that the game content should be similar to a wolf, and the words Hollow Knight can be seen in the titles of various game-related articles, which made me a little surprised that this game can actually combine the elements of two well-known games.
Coincidentally, Wolf and Hollow Knight are both games that I like and have completed, plus it is still "one-man development", which makes me very interested in this game, wondering if this is another "one-man miracle" work.
As soon as we entered the game, our protagonist "Rabbit" crawled out of the coffin-like container, and then introduced the fairly straightforward operating instructions, without even making some simple UI to slightly modify it. However, this is not a big problem, the game is still in the early access stage, indicating that people can understand it. It's a bit of a shame that although the game supports gamepads but doesn't fully support custom buttons, the developers provide players with a total of 4 modes of operation, and then the player can fine-tune them in the fixed keys.
After all the adjustments are completed, we will meet the first BOSS, but there is basically no strength to speak of, mainly to let us familiarize ourselves with the operation, and the status of this BOSS can also be seen from the achievements we have obtained. In order to take care of the player's first experience, the author also intimately provided the player with an additional 3 blocks of life (he was too gentle, I just cried to death). The reason why the rabbit is called a combination of a wolf and a hollow knight in the previous title is mainly because the game has a bounce counter mechanism, and it is a 2D flat game plus the map design is also a galaxy castlevania map. Other than that, there are no other particular similarities in my opinion.
After eliminating this unfortunate soldier, we came to the first town, the village of Koni. Through conversations with various NPCs, we can roughly piece together the background of the game of a rabbit, in the past there were two sects of the moon and the moon, the moon faction believed that the moon existed in the sky and the moon faction believed that the moon was buried in the ground. After that, the two factions broke out into a war over the issue of faith, and finally the Moon Sect of Tu Ke was completely destroyed, and the princess of the Moon Sect was also captured by the Moon Sect. So the main line of the rabbit should be to defeat the Moon Faction BOSS, save the Princess, and possibly reforge the Moon Pie Glory.
This is the traditional king story in my opinion, there is nothing particularly outstanding, but the art part of the game I personally feel is quite good, although it is a dot structure, but there are still obvious differences in the style of each region, and the three towns I have explored in the game: the village of Koni has a Western medieval architectural style. The costumes of the Gutter Gang characters and a large number of wall paintings highlight the hip-hop rap style, and geographically, the Gutter Gang is in the sewers, and the authentic underground gangster rap is undoubtedly there. Kaz Village has a large number of cherry blossoms, and the architecture is also oriental, which will inevitably remind people of ancient Japan.
Koni Village
Gutter Gang
Kaz Village
The internal structure of the building can also be called meticulous. The thought of a rabbit with only one developer really has to admire the author.
In terms of music, the BGM in Kaz Village is my favorite, the tune is a more oriental style, and the sounds of Xiao and Yangqin can be heard more obviously. The BGM of the Gutter Gang will be faster and will be more in line with the feeling of underground rap. However, the music is found by the author on the music material website, so I will not introduce it more
In addition to these, the author also added a large number of Easter eggs and various memes that Chinese players are more familiar with, and the author is also a fan of Jay Chou.
If I just look at these parts, I think it's a good game, the art and music are all above the passing line, and the story is old-fashioned, but the traditional king story is a theme that will never go out of style. But this is not a story-centric RPG, but a relatively hardcore action game. In the core battles of this game and the part of the Galaxy Castlevania-like map design, I don't think it's particularly well done.
The big difference between a rabbit and a hollow knight is that there are very many bosses, basically there is a boss every two areas, mobs have it, but there are very few, and the strength gap between the bosses is very large. Due to the existence of the bounce counter mechanism, as long as your stamina bar is not exhausted, and the boss does not use a defense-breaking attack, you can always block. In a rabbit, some bosses do not exist at all, which makes your duel with it directly become a turn-based game, it attacks you to block, and then draw him a knife, which can consume the boss to death.
And some bosses, most of the attack moves are broken defense skills. Take the boss of the Gutter Gang Thug as an example, three of its four moves are defensive moves, and one move can even knock out two blocks of your blood in one go, and theoretically the more powerful the move, the longer the forward shake time. But when I dragged the gameplay video footage into the editing software, I found that the big move of this gutter gang thug was the same as the forward swing time of its other moves. And it will also let half of the body run out of the game screen from time to time, so I will not be able to see what skills it is releasing, so it can be said that this boss makes me play quite painful.
The two moves are exactly the same before you can react before you can listen to the sound
Although the boss of the rabbit and the wolf are very soulful, the feeling brought to me is completely different. Only the wolf in the BOSS all the operators know that there is a solution, failure can only blame their own operation is not in place, but when playing a rabbit will often feel that they are targeted by the game, boss fight is really not my own reason.
And even if you hit the BOSS, there is not much positive feedback. Most bosses play a role in the way, and winning will not gain new skills, but will continue to explore the area behind. Although Rabbit Learn Galaxy Castlevania regionalizes the map, the price of items leading to specific areas is often frighteningly high.
In a rabbit mob does not drop gold coins, gold coins only the boss and a very small number of jars in the map will fall, and a rabbit also like a hollow knight has a setting that gold coins will all fall after death, although there is a bank, but there is no long-distance means of teleportation in the early stages of the game, every time you have money to go back to save, so that the two ends of the run is really a very energy-consuming thing. Moreover, the weapon enhancement also requires gold coins, and in my opinion, the amount of gold coins dropped in a rabbit is completely out of proportion to the player's demand.
Bosses mainly drop gold coins and moon rays, which are used to level up and increase attribute points. Most boss coins drop very little
On March 28th, the author added a feature that allows you to return to the most recently saved save point directly from the map interface. But this feature out of the BUG can not be used, and this BUG to my article to the day of the release of the article is still not fixed.
Another serious problem is that the regionalization of some parts of the map is not very obvious. I came across a map that needed to jump the ladder without any resistance when jumping from the first floor to the second floor. However, from the second layer onwards, there are often cases where they are not attacked by monsters but automatically decline.
At first I thought it was a BUG, because in terms of visual effects, there is no difference between the first floor and the second floor, and this issue was also mentioned by players in Steam's comments.
It wasn't until I later found a prop that I realized that the original design was like this, and it can be said that rabbits are a bit bad at player guidance and map differentiation.
This rabbit experience actually gave me a more correct understanding of the development of independent games. Especially for a person's independent game development, the developer often needs to wear several jobs, and if the development is a game with complex mechanisms, the development cycle needs to be greatly extended. And it is possible that like a rabbit, the final finished product effect cannot be guaranteed. Although there have been many "one-man miracles" in the game world in the past, a closer look will show that there are more or less certain limits to this one-person miracle.
As a story-driven RPG game, "To the Moon" does not need to pay special attention to the design of the gameplay, the most important thing is to build the entire stage around the story. The action shooter "Bright Memory: Infinity" with the gameplay as the core took a total of five years to develop, and friends who have played it know that the content in the game can only provide players with a 2 to 3 hours of playing experience.
This is the limit of one-man development, and the more complex the game mechanics, the more time and energy invested will increase exponentially. The producer of the game spent a year and a half to complete the development, and the basic content he said himself has been developed, but from my personal experience, the game still has many problems.
And even after completing development and opening up to players for early access, there will be another problem: bug fixes. As I said earlier, the author has not updated any more patches since March 28th. One-person game development effort is limited, lack of skills, once the game has a problem, it is difficult to complete the repair in a short period of time. But for players, as long as the patch is not out, it means that the experience in the game will be greatly reduced, and the loss of players can be said to be a sure thing, which is a catastrophic blow to indie games that are not high in attention. And there are many problems with rabbits that I think are problematic from the design level, and the re-polishing of these game mechanics is often more time-consuming than bug fixes. If I were a game developer, I really wanted to borrow the cat's hand at this time.
I hope that this article can provide some help for some individual independent game developers, I am not saying that I am opposed to developers making games with complex gameplay, but I hope that every developer can be fully prepared in the early stages of game production and take every game mechanic setting seriously. Personal game development is a long and lonely journey, and I think every game developer wants to make a good game, so they should do a good job in the early stages, so that the follow-up development work will be smoother and the problems encountered will be reduced accordingly.