Mission Creator
To see Sploder's mission creator in action, I played
Countown to Destruction and
Help Your Father. The mission creator is used to design top-down shooters with multiple levels. Both games had simple a basic narrative, which appeals to me in games. I also like that the multiple levels make it possible to increase your character's power as the game progresses, even if only by picking up new weapons, giving a sense of growth during the game. I found the controls in the mission creator difficult to adapt to. In these games, the player moves using the arrow keys and rotates their view with the mouse. I've played plenty of shooters that use a similar control scheme, but only from a first-person perspective which felt much more intuitive to me. In the mission creator games, I frequently ran into walls or had trouble turning to face an enemy as I adjusted to the controls, which I found frustrating.
Platformer
By playing
Game1 and
Pirate, I was able to get a sense of what Sploder's platform creator can do. Both games have have many archetypical platformer elements, such as lots of jumping, which, in spite of years of trying to play platform games, I've never managed to get the hang of. Unfortunately for me, since both games do more vertical than horizontal scrolling, there was a lot of jumping involved and I did a lot of falling and getting stuck in traps built into the environment. Both games took advantage of Sploder's ability to add options not always seen in platform games, such as the ability to acquire new weapons and even vehicles, which added some fun elements to the game. I also enjoyed the ways a player can interact with the environment, breaking blocks by walking across them or shooting out walls.
Physics Puzzler
Sploder's physics puzzler makes it possible to create simple puzzle games, such as
this one where the goal is to knock a block into a coin and the
Sploder Physics Olympics. As a confirmed physics nerd, this type of puzzle appeals to me. I liked the simplicity of the gameplay. I also love that this type of game also encourages the player to experiment with the different elements of a level on their way to a solution to a given level. There were a few elements that bothered me. First, in some of the later levels, it became nearly impossible to correctly time a shot, making success feel more a result of luck than skill. To maintain my interest, I need to feel like my success is primarily up to me, not random chance. My other frustration was when the physics wasn't quite right. This made it difficult to correctly anticipate what would happen under given conditions.
Top-Down Shooters
Sploder's shooter has two main skins, space ships or robots. A more striking difference, however, were the different possible goals.
Trutah Survival, using the space ship skin, is structured as a survival game, where players must stay alive for a set amount of time. The space-themed
very easy and the robot-themed
Defend the Emprium 2 both have a goal-based gameplay, where players must collect a particular item to defeat the game. I wasn't a big fan of Trutah Survival; I like to do some planning, but the sheer number of enemies that appear as soon as the game begins felt overwhelming. I much preferred very easy and Defend the Emprium 2 since it was easier to take in what was happening on the screen. All three games had various power-ups scattered around the level, a feature I enjoyed. The power-ups add an element of strategy to what could otherwise be a purely twitch-based game. Defend the Emprium 2, however, illustrates why it is important to be careful with power-ups. The game includes a power-up that makes the player invisible to enemies, making you essentially invincible. This potency requires the invisibility power-up to be placed with significant care. The first level, however, has several invisibility power-ups in a row, making it possible to remain invincible for what felt like a significant length of time. When the game becomes to easy, the enjoyment fades.
Retro Arcade
Haskell's Test Game provided an example of Sploder's arcade game creator. The game takes after classic platform games such as the Super Mario Bros. series. The gameplay was very simple and intuitive, in part because of the familiar format, making it easy to dive right in. I really liked that new skills in the game were introduced as they were needed, rather than requiring a player to read a long tutorial. In the second level, I found myself tantalized by the bits of terrain I could see when I reached the peak of my highest jumps. This made me eager to explore the level and find a way to the top. Finally, the I appreciated the very simple feature where the player selects their own avatar. This choice made it easier for me to identify with the character on the screen. The end of the levels, however, felt very anticlimactic; the game simply stopped scrolling to the side. I longed for a little more fanfare, even if it was simply something in the terrain to suggest I'd reached my destination, at the end of the level.
