Hi! Like I mentioned last month, this post will primarily be about my favorite games from this most recent Next Fest, in no particular order. If you like my games and also looked at games in the event, you may have found these already, but if not, here’s some new ones to check out maybe :). I’ll also give a general update on OASIS II at the end.
First, I want to mention some stats about the demos I played this time around. I was originally planning to just link the spreadsheet, but since its linked to my personal gmail account, I’ve decided not to. I played a total of 49+ demos this week, there were some I played towards the end of the week but ended up not adding to the spreadsheet if I didn’t like them and/or had nothing really to say about them.
In terms of engines, 21 of them used Unity, but 9 of them used Godot! This is a relatively decent improvement compared to previous Next Fests considering the types of games I typically download, typically I’d only find at most 5 games made with godot. 12 used Unreal and the rest were some other engine or no engine. As for demos I enjoyed, I rated 34% of them a 4 or higher (out of 5). 36% of them sit in the 3 range - I thought they were ok. 8 of these demos I played for an hour or more.
I’ll also directly mention some honorable mentions here that I also really liked that I will not include: over the hill, ReStory: Chill Electronics Repairs, Drone Sector, Sublight, and Picky Numbers. These will also not include any pictures (I didn’t really think about that until now…), so you’ll just need to visit their pages to see them :)
Brazen
(unreal, rated 4/5) Really nice arena shooter survival-type FPS roguelike. It weirdly kinda reminds me of Ziggurat. Definitely needs a bigger map though.
As a side note, I ended up finding this while scrolling the infinite games list on the main page on Friday, which is strange because I specifically checked the arena shooter tag during the first few days and I’m certain this wasn’t in there. I’ve noticed there are definitely games that don’t show up initially and are missing despite being counted in the game count for a tag and then show up later, I wonder why that is? Isn’t it supposed to remove games that don’t have their demos published by the time Next Fest starts? What other reason would they not be visible on the page but counted in the count for the category?
Escape from EloHell
(godot, rated 5/5) Very satisfying gambling roguelite based on the concept of a competitive ranked ladder. I like the meta upgrades being upgradeable based on feats in your run. I picked a “-99% on loss” buff (not really a buff but lol) at the beginning of one game, and went on like a 40 game loss streak to max out one of the upgrades which was kinda funny. The highest rank I was able to reach in the 2.3 hours I played it was Diamond 4.
DarkBazaar
(unity, rated 4/5) Fun case opening roguelite, with some design from CloverPit (maybe?). Most of my issues with it are minor UX issues, like having to wait through the dialogue each time you clear the quota. It has an AI disclosure, but to be honest it seems fairly well implemented - I didn’t see it had that disclosure until after I had played (and the main page doesn’t have that disclosure?). While I was playing I didn’t notice anything that was blatantly AI art (though now that I look again, the portraits on the contract givers look a little suspicious lol).
SPRAWL zero
(unreal, rated 4.5/5) FPS inspired by 2000s FPSes, very smooth combat. Didn’t really have any notes on it aside from hoping the full game has some kind of infinite wave survival/rogue-like type of thing, as I think that’d fit this combat extremely well.
Iron Nest: Heavy Turret Simulator
(unity, rated 5/5) Interesting artillery simulator. Initially saw this on twitter a few months ago. I’d very much like more games like this. No real notes.
OASIS Update
The page is almost ready. When it is public, the aformentioned OASIS: Tokyo update will also go live (also announcing the page is public). The aformentioned gameplay video will also be uploaded. My goal for this is before the summer sale starts, but it may be a few days late as I’m cutting it extremely short lol.
I’ve also recently published a roadmap page to this site. It’ll be updated as I make progress. That’s about it for this month, see you next month when 0.2 on that roadmap will hopefully be complete!