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(1 edit)
Pros:
  • Interesting mechanic and take on basketball 2.0
  • Colourful, energetic and mechanically sound makes a quite engaging experience
  • Nice introduction to a narrative which establishes the use of theme
Cons:
  • Camera angle is a tad steep and at first makes distance or coverage difficult to gauge
  • Music a bit repetitive for length of the game as a whole
  • Can't move through holes in the ground while selecting, have to traverse around them
Here & There:

I really like this take on evolving basketball into a dunktacular (in contrast to basketball's trend of the last few years) and the turn-based strategy mechanic really suits it. I lost my first game because I couldn't stop the other team and so we tied, but I managed to get a shut-out by game three which I was quite happy with. By the end of it I was totally used to the controls and had strategy in mind thanks in part to the very simple and straight-forward tutorial at the start. In what I know cannot be intentional because no one knows about it, this reminds me a lot of a certain Ukrainian cartoon I watched several times in my childhood called the Like the Cossacks where they played futbol against national stereotypes and was sorta implied turn-based. You can watch that here if you want, it's a thing... no dialogue. Anyways, ignoring that weird tidbit this was a solid entry with clear goals and mechanics that made sense, and despite the CPU surprising me a few times with its intelligence, they were also predictable enough to figure out how to beat and that was satisfying. Very well done!

Thanks for the write-up! 

Originally this was going to be more like basketball. So, like, any given time you had an X% chance to score if you take a shot minus X% from nearby defenders, etc. So I had that totally coded out before I realized, wow this isn't fun. So I ironed out the game rules with a friend on a checkers board. 

Wish we could have had more narrative. That was a run-out-of-time issue. I don't think we leaned into the ridiculousness enough. 

Totally agree on the camera angle. We used Final Fantasy Tactics as a camera angle base, but I think it doesn't work super well in a game where it's totally flat. Makes you realize how much those games used terrain verticality. Early on I was cursing that isometric decision, but we already had so many sprites. We tried things like making the tiles larger, but nothing really alleviated the issue. If I had a magic wand I would probably do a top-down view. Make it more tactical, or whatever. 

I would have totally added a cursor "jump across holes" feature, but we added that stage literally on the last day, and I was scared to, ha.. 

The AI I think might be too cruel on newcomers. I thought about making it a little stupider on offense turn 1 level 1 because, as is, they will go absolutely ham and you basically have to make 0 mistakes on defense. The AI isn't quite as good when holes or lava are involved, though. I may have coded around the level 1 too much.