MUTANT BROTH

Mundane, yet eerily serine.

Jalopy is a game that primarily about the casual driving experience you get from something like European Truck Simulator 2, but it’s not quite that game. Jalopy is about casual driving, but with roguelike elements built in and with a more granular system of interaction.

In Jalopy, you get a… Jalopy. A pretty shitty car. And you’re tasked with driving it from one town over to the next. And since your Jalopy is a Jalopy, it doesn’t run real well. It’s parts are of low quality, and they tend to wear down quickly into a state of disrepair.

While the game has a (somewhat slow) tutorial that teaches you about car maintenance, they don’t really tell you about the dynamics of the game. Yes, you’ll know that your car’s parts have health, and you know that you need to repair said parts to keep it running, but they don’t tell you about the reliable part in the game’s loop where you can purchase and how you get to the money to buy repair kits reliably.

SO, the structure of the game is like this:

Start → Route → Town

You get to choose one of three routes, and on your route you may come across boxes. Pick them up, put them in your car, and sell in town. At town you can repair and upgrade, but what options there are also randomized. Bad luck can result in your car inevitably breaking down and then you have to choose to “drive back down” (which doesn’t make any sense.)

That may sound simple. And it is a little simple. But it’s the granularity in the mechanics that breaths depth into the game. Every button in the car’s cockpit can be used, every tool functions like a good “gamified” version of that tool, not too complex where it becomes work but enough there where it feels like you’re actively using the tool. Every item takes up physical space and has weight. You need to use keys to start your car, you need to use your wallet to pay for goods. 

There is something about having a trunk filled with wet meat and Vicodin that gives me pleasure.

And all that makes the game feel very breezy but compelling. It presents interesting experiences like figuring out the most efficient way to change tires, playing inventory tetris because you just found a crate of smuggling liquor, rolling down your windows because they’re caked with mud and you need to make sure no one is passing you, and many other experiences, and many others. The inventory management is a big part of the game. I enjoyed the car storage mechanic in it’s “inventory tetris” sort of way, but you can’t rotate objects and I really wish you could. When you’re outside the car you can only carry a maximum of three items in your arms regardless of size, and I have a problem with that. It makes selling mass amount of items potentially an extremely tedious experience. You can use a crate to carry items from the car to the store, but you have to individually place each object into the crate. There driving works. I mean, you’re always driving a shitty car, but the game excels in changing how your car feels due to the numerous attributes. Whether it’s obvious stuff like your air intake breaking down, or little stuff like how much oil mixture is in your fuel, you can “feel” out what’s right and wrong with the car. And this feel extends itself towards when you start buying newer and better parts, and how your experience is not just smoother but how freeing it feels to not have to worry about your parts wearing out quicker.

There’s an ebb and flow between finding and selling smuggled goods and using said money to keep your car from breaking down.

But it is still pretty barebones. That structure I described is all there is, really. And eventually you can upgrade out of ever having to worry about maintaining your car, and once that happens there’s really nothing else to do, consider the game beaten. (I hit that mark about 12 hours in.)

But there is stuff the creator could fix with the content right now to pad that time out. There are a lot of upgrades, but they are all sorta clumped together in price, different tiers of quality that’s just a few dollars a part. So what happened with me (and I assume other people) is that once I had the money, I just bought the best thing because it’s not THAT much more expensive. And then that’s it. So the progress ceiling is lower than it needs to be. Also while I’m at it, I wish there was more tension. Smuggling goods is pretty much carefree, I just wish that sometimes I could get robbed, or that a checkpoint guard decides to inspect my carriage.

It never feels too janky, but it has weird bugs… It feels nice. But sometimes an item just disappears. Or an item you bought doesn’t move down to the pickup booth. Or sometimes a store will think you stole something (when you didn’t) and then lock you out, ending your run prematurely. Oh, and all the time if you walk with the pump past it’s maximum distance, it goes back to the pump but you can never pick it back up again. 100% repeatable every time.

The game also has the problem of many PC driving games where using the keyboard is obviously worse than a control stick while it’s still designed with using the mouse in mind. So you can either choose an inferior driving experience or an inferior UI experience. Or you use a Steam Controller. But even then there are numerous interactive objects so you really want something precise.

But it’s a pretty good, and it’s a game that can only get better as it gets more content. It reminds me of No Man’s Sky, with how it’s one part a traveling game and another part a gathering game and these mechanics follow a repetitive pattern. But thankfully it’s more successful due to it giving it’s mechanics granularity. 

8/10

Added “Dev Diary” section for longer posts on games/music/etc that I am working on or have worked on. It’s currently empty!

Enabled the “Archive” feature.

Listen/purchase: Rumination Music: Oros and Key / Another Dead Satellite by Odd Mutant

1.Key 1: Grotto 01:53 2.Oros 1: The Light of the World 09:14 3.Oros 2: The Wind Blows Through There Now 07:04 4.Oros 3: The Witness 04:23 5.Key 2: Prisoner 01:53 6.Quag 03:54 7.Under to it 02:37 8.Brothers 03:58 9.Oros and Key: Your Funeral 18:16

Listen/purchase: ∞ ECONOMY (Remastered) by Odd Mutant

1.[̲̅$̲̅(̲̅∞)̲̅$̲̅] 01:05 2.The Weather Channel 04:30 3.∞ Pt. 1 (Modern Fracturing) 08:02 4.∞ Pt. 2 (Artificial Stability) 06:48 5.[̲̅$̲̅(̲̅X)̲̅$̲̅] 01:59

Added a “Dev Notes” section where I will be storing all of my notes on designing things such as my games and this website.

Added a “Videos” section where I will be storing my videos, which will 99% of the time be footage from the games I am working on. Might put up compilations of “sick” and “rad” footage I’ve recorded in things like Overwatch or Battlefield 4. They’re just kinda sitting there on my hard drive afterall. Also might put up some real dumb shit too.

Play or Download Abaclickus! here.

Support the game on Greenlight!

My entry for my very first Ludum Dare (Ludum Dare 36, Ancient Technology Theme.) Abaclickus! Is one part edutainment about the Abacus and one part clicker. 

Solve increasingly bigger and more complicated math problems while earning money to hiring others to work on Abacuses along side you, or buying cheat tokens to reveal answers to problems that are stumping you, or simply just invest it into earning bigger rewards for solving problems! 

So dust off your clicker finger, ready your *glances at wikipedia* ...Intraparietal sulcus... And crunch some numbers!

Download the Project Skully Prototype here.

Download Ms. Petman Here. 

Although maybe you shouldn’t.

It is a product of over-ambition, bad time management, and not fully knowing the certain “quirks” of the Clickteam Fusion engine.

It’s functional, it works... Although it almost didn’t for a while.

“It’s a great, well written survival game”, I was told by someone trying to get attention towards the title. This isn’t a survival game. It has survival elements, but the general mood of the game isn’t survival. What Eidolon is though, is a walking simulator pushed to the extremes. You begin in the woods with nothing, and you just start… Walking. And walking. And walking. Until you see a cube, it’ll either be green or white. If it’s white, you get a tool to aid your survival. If it’s green, you will get a page or two to various stories that are scattered across the vast landscape. The tools add up, but you’re not spending most of your time working to survive, or even thinking about it. Food is plenty and it takes a rather long fall to injure yourself, and if you do, you’ll still heal over time. Animals are scared of you and I’m never witnessed an attack on my 4 hour playthrough. What you will be doing, is walking. And walking. And walking. And hopefully you’ll come across another cube. Now, the green cubes seem to be the purpose of the game. The stories they hold are really well written, some are captivating while others depressing and melancholic. From brain damaged cultists to people just trying to survive whatever happened, the stories draw you in and makes you want to read more.

Don't be fooled, despite there being mechanics the game is very little a survival game and more of a open world “walking simulator”.

Now, you can find tags under said bits of stories to generate a green spectre that will point you to the next part of the story, but that’s about it in what the game tells the player to do. And even though it will point you in the right direction, they never indicate how long the trek is, and they can be long. Super long. It’s vastness may be the biggest thing I have against it. Now the idea of exploring a vast landscape is a great one, I grew up on a farm that owned 100 acres of forest, most of my childhood was spent exploring these woods, discovering things that resided in it. But Ice Water games have stretched themselves a bit thing to make this landscape so vast. I can dig a simple art style, but it’s concern about the big things result in a lack of detail in the little things. Flat surfaces and large, tall trees make up so much of the land and it’s lack of threat results in being unable to “believe” these woods.

The game does have it’s fair share of rich color palettes and gradients that can make distant areas look ethereal and gorgeous. However they do not hold up when you’re near them.