justdaveisfine

Against the Storm.

Its a ‘roguelike’ colony builder where you’re basically starting a colony as quick as you can, then once it starts to get established and run well, you leave and move onto the next one.

I was thinking it was something closer to a city builder where you’re managing something from start to finish and didn’t expect to like the roguelike aspect but I think it works well.

Its just got a neat little art style, a bunch of fantasy races with particular quirks, strange biomes with pros/cons, and has a bunch of lore tidbits sprinkled throughout.

I think for 95% of Nintendo first party games, they’ll be a kid’s (or someone trying out new genres) first introduction to the genre or play style with added depth/challenge for people that are older/more experienced.

When you consider Luigi’s Mansion as someone’s first horror game, Mario Kart as someone’s first racing game, BoTW as someone’s first open world survival game, or Pokemon as someone’s first RPG - Looking at this ‘aimed at a new player’ angle, then their design and accessibility decisions make a lot more sense, and that generally makes the game popular because its so easy to play.

And of course a popular game is influential.

That also being said, post-BoTW, the glider has become pretty much a staple for the genre. I don’t think it was the first game to do it but you can definitely tell that many games copied BoTW’s implementation.

Sort of - I made a janky multiplayer game where a few players were shapeshifters and could turn into objects they found in the level, and the remaining players had to try and hunt down all the shapeshifters with firearms. The shapeshifters could only melee so the goal was to blend in as something and wait for the hunter players to walk by before you bop them. It was popular with my friends during testing but I didn’t realize it was potentially an actually good idea and thought they were just being nice.

I don’t think it was a totally original idea within the game space (I think CS 1.6 had something similar?), but at the time , it was one I personally had never seen before.

It was a few years later when Garry’s Mod had a ‘prop hunt’ mode that exploded and then I realized I kind of missed a big opportunity. That being said the game I had (poorly) constructed had similar base ideas but was very ultimately very different so even if it managed to hit it big, it wouldn’t have been the same thing really.