Released Digging For Silver

Never_this_again · Aug 12, 2023

The randomizer wheel told me to play Digging for Silver so here's my two cents.

Gameplay-wise, I really enjoy the concept. Just you and your only Pokemon having to navigate whatever the world throws at you. No catching, no gifts, you just have to make due with what you have. Especially seeing you put in some fights that on first glance would be very difficult to win with just Togepi. (looking at that Tropius, which, by the way, does it really only have status moves or did I just get extremely lucky?)

But then comes your storytelling and boy do I have some things to say about that. And no, I don't mean to say that I don't like your story. The story you're trying to tell is great. "Criminal on the path for redemption tries to uncover the events leading to his sons death" is an amazing premise, especially with a villain as iconic as Giovanni. So is "Former Criminal, who lost his son, overcomes his grief and becomes a better person for it", considering that seems to be the route you're taking the full game down. My problem with it is how you convey it to us; Because you just tell us in the intro that he is a criminal on the path for redemption, who tries to uncover the events leading to his sons death.

I don't know how much of the story we get in the intro is things that people who played Nuzlockology would already know, but for me (who sadly hasn't played it yet) it just felt like too big of an infodump, which might also be a tad bit overwhelming. It felt especially strange considering you do actually make use of better ways to convey it; Giovanni discussing his backstory with Cyrus is, while maybe a bit heavyhanded, a perfect way to tell your player a story without directly telling them. And just from my point of view, learning things on the go is much more satisfying than just being told everything upfront. You could just trim down the intro to the very basic setup (Giovanni is in Unova with a vengeance) and then use the backstory as connective tissue between the different gameplay events, which actually segues perfectly into my next point.

After getting Junior (who is my big, muscular baby and I love him) I feel like you're missing some kind of through-line. We cannot get the train. We go to the next town. We go to the School to remove a roadblock. We battle the Gym Leader to remove a roadblock. We go to the next town. We kill a guy. We beat the Gym Leader (who is surprisingly chill about the fact that we just killed a guy) to remove a roadblock. We go to the bridge. We have a flashback and then the game ends. It feels that things just happen in sequence, but we don't have a proverbial red thread to guide us through it. What could that thread be? Maybe Giovanni is taking the train thing as a cosmic reason to visit places he had been with Silver before. Maybe his interactions with several people guide him to those different places and eventually on a road of self-reflection.

I feel like a lot of the problems I have with the writing stem from a lack of setup. Cyrus is in the school? Maybe have some people who got off the train in the beginning talk about the weirdo who sat across from them talking about the trainer school, so that Giovanni has a narrative reason to go into the school. Or maybe he wants to get some of Silvers belongings from the school, because he once went there, and he runs into Cyrus that way. Ghetsis is a terrorist and killed Silver? Considering that that makes him the main villain of the game, you need to set up his appearance properly. Maybe there's some Plasma Grunts orbiting the story? If there's a terrorist on the loose, people would be scared and would talk about it. That's another way how you can set it up. You don't want your player to move from situation to situation, you want them to move through one more or less consistent story.

Another thing considering Ghetsis, even though that might just be too nitpicky; Right now, he just walks up to Giovanni and is like "I killed your son because I'm EVIL >:D!" and then Giovanni kills him. If you want the full story to be about a father working through his grief and getting closure about his sons death, then yes, you can make his murderer into a footnote and disregard him, but the way the jam edition lays things out, it feels... unearned for Giovanni? I don't know if that's the right word. If you wanna put it plainly, he's kinda just taking a stroll through Unova and just happens upon a guy trying to blow up a museum, who then all but tells him he killed his son. And then Giovanni drops a rock on him. As I said, this might be too nitpicky and might also be a problem with time and game length considering this is a jam game, but at this point I'm on paragraph six when I only wanted to write maybe two, so who gives a shit anymore.

Now that I've written a lot of criticism, maybe more than I intended when I started, let me close this out by saying that I did not dislike your game by any means. I had fun for two hours which is all I want out of a jam game. I love Junior and I like the gameplay challenges you made, and the underlying story is really quite interesting, just to me it's not told as well as it could be. I just wanna give you some pointers into how you can improve your writing to convey said story in a way that's more exciting for the player.

Tomix9tomix · Sep 2, 2023

just finished playing this demo, some thoughts

first of all, congratz on making another jam game, I'm a strong believer in that making any kind of game for the jam is very challenging, and you've done it twice now!

I'm a fan of seeing people do their own takes on cannon characters and cannon locations from the maingames, so this was pretty fun. Although I do have to say, your giovanni was very different to the kind of person I imagined giovanni to be, but I guess that's what makes this kind of thing fun.

For the most part I think the eventing in the game was fine, however that very first convo between axis and giovanni drags on for a while and visually nothing really happens, the characters don't move and the scene doesn't change. And I felt that a lot of the info in that convo was repeated/could've been cut down. But yeah, otherwise all the other story events played out fine.

I did find it weird to find cyrus in school, I also just personally think cyrus and giovanni must be pretty damn stupid to believe that taking off their evil team badges will absolve them of all their previously commited crimes.

The new togepi form was really cool, and i was not expecting to see THAT at all, so kudos there. I do think that the whole semi-softlock when you get to the town where you need togeancient plays a bit weird, idk how you've really solve that though. Maybe if there was just an ancient move tutor in that town that you could use and togetic didn't learn it by level up at all? But even then there is still the problem that it doesn't make sense that the story waits for you to evolve your pokemon before the police men will let you talk to them.

But yeah a pretty fun and cute game. You've done a good job, and I hope to see you make something even better next time.

jeacky · Jul 24, 2024

i have a problem right at the beginning. I can not leave the house and i can not interact with the bed. when i go to the door it says time to get some shut eye

Released Digging For Silver

Never_this_again

Trainer

Tomix9tomix

The beetle is waking up

jeacky

Novice