Bring Me to Earth by Katherine Gnus

Categories are rated from 1 (excellent) to 7 (poor).

Sound and Music: 6

• Song matched and I liked it. Only 1 song, no interactivity, and author didn’t create.

Graphics and Art: 1

• Fantastic! Failure screen came as quite a shock, given the completely different art style.
• Guessing that was the intention or you ran out of time.
• Can’t believe you took the time to make an ending with the frog legs coming out of her mouth.
• While there was no animation, the high quality artwork/paintings more than compensated.

Adherence to Theme: 3

• While the writing was excellent (technicalness), story felt forced.
• While I liked the writing, the story was stretched to incorporate the theme - somehow, someway.
• As a result, I feel the theme didn’t really help the game.
  • I’m a frog from a distant planet (fine).
  • I dream of earth, and build a spaceship to get to it (fine).
  • I arrive at earth, but find a strange alien lady (as opposed to an earthling). Now you’ve lost me.
• Why is the lady an alien? It confused me and I was already kind of confused.
• Would have been better if less things were explained (since some explanations made little sense anyways).
• I really liked the unexplained potatoes (on the side). There were just there, and seemed to fit within this weird world.

Originality and Creativity: 2

• Loved the core gameplay. I’ve played tracing games before, but never a tracing game that wanted smooth flowing lines.
• Combined with the atmosphere established by the art, drawing those lines felt great (as opposed to 90 degree turned required by some other tracing games).

Technical Achievement: 6

• A fairly easy game to make, the effort appears to be the artwork which I’ve already awarded.

Overall: 3

• I would LOVE to play this game on a tablet or Wii.
• I will play it again using my mouse.

Comments:

1. Liked the fact you only highlighted when I hit the line.
2. Thought I would hate the invisible Level 2, but found I could follow the smooth flowing lines
3. Level 5 - very ZEN. Thought i would hate it but it felt freestyle. Like the game was judging my own custom smooth lines. I know it wasn’t, but that’s what it FELT like. I would make the last level a freestyle level and ignore the rules. Just watch what the player does with the mouse movements and give him points.
4. Disliked the intro screen key switching (space, enter, down). Stick to one consistent key. According to your readme.txt, you like this. I believe you couldn’t figure out how to stop enter or space from being held the entire time.
5. Did not like Level 3, removes feedback, feels like my mouse isn’t working. It’s like making a racing game where in a level I can’t see my car. Did not like Level 4 for the same reason (I realize you probably had no choice with the scrolling).
6. Would have preferred some movement/animation on the screen, beyond the line itself.
7. Some indicator of my time limit (a countdown or changing colors or sound effect) is needed.