This is my first pvp blog and I have chosen to use Cameron Chodan's famous game Hover Tank. This game has been known as the claimer of souls for it's extremely challenging gameplay. His game teaches patience with really simple mechanics, smooth controls and decent aesthetics.
The objective of the game Hover Tank is to reach the end of the level. As anyone who has already lost their soul to this game, you will know that it is a side scroller game. This game has more objectives as you progress through the level. It begins with teaching simple mechanics like moving and moves on to jumping. Then when the platforms start moving it will teach you timing and the biggest lesson of the game, patience. The key to victory in Cam's game is timing and patience. Later in the game's level the objective graduates to activating triggers to open doors so you can move on to the finish. This is a simple to understand mechanic and it works well in a side scroller game.
Game objects that can be found in his side scroller would be the turrets that try to prevent you from completing your objectives, and triggers that will open doors. In his next level he adds pits with spikes at the bottom but for this level he just has bottomless pits.
In terms of difficulty, it has been made clear of how difficult this game can be. There is only a handful of other students who have actually beaten the level. The learning curve is too steep in the level. Although he does teach the all of the mechanics one at a time, which really helped make the game not be impossible, you get to a point in the level where you are stuck for majority of your play time because the difficulty is too high. A suggestion I would have made for this to improve the gameplay would have been to split the problems into smaller segments rather than having to do it all at once. This gives the player more relief knowing they don't have to do the same easy part of the problem every time they fail the hard part in the level.
The feedback in the game was very lacking. To start, there is no auditory feedback or any sounds at all for that matter. It would be nice to know by listening if a bullet is shot out of the turrets or if I need to hurry because something is on a timer. I did like the ant lines that were attached to the triggers in the level which gave you feedback as to what door or object they affected. He also has the ant lines change color when they are activated to give feedback. The lines also blink for timed triggers which is great feedback but I didn't realize this on my first playthrough. If there was even a picture with words saying that is what a blinking line means I would've got it. Another good form of feedback he could've added if he had controller was a vibration when the hover tank got hit by the bullets.
The controls are very simple. The player can use 'a' and 'd' to move left and right as well as 'space' to jump. These are standard controls for a side scroller. The controls were smooth and responsive. The only thing I would suggest for improvement is that the controls didn't have physics properties attached. The momentum that comes from jumping off of a platform can really cause problems for timing with jumps. This could just be a feature for Cam's level to add to the difficulty but I think this is a feature that this game could do without.
In conclusion, this game is very challenging. It is almost extremely frustrating, but it's just frustrating enough to want to beat it. Once you do beat it you feel very accomplished. I didn't really say too much about the art but I will say that it did not hinder the gameplay. If anything, the art worked well together and everything was very distinguishable. I would give Cam's level an 8/10 would play again. Well, I had to play it again for screen shots but I would probably play it another time.
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