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What does a good game consist of? (part 17)

Game Analysis - Gem Craft

Let us continue our journey into figuring out what does a good game consist of, and therefore make an attempt to save the world suffering from less than 10/10 games. It is indeed a threat to all human kind-it would not be an end of the world, but entire world would suffer lack of fun which comes from not having classic games. To me everything that is below 10/10 rating(or 100/100) is not optimal, no matter how "good" the game is. This lack of fun could soon affect the other types of media which take inspiration from games.

This blog post is about Gem Craft, a tower defense game and it's analysis.

Chapter 1 - The Forgotten
This is not the first story chapter but the first part in the Game Craft series. It is the easiest part in the series, but still challenging for some. It has a score system for advanced and hardcore players, cool bosses and unique spells to upgrade. You have gems of different colors which you socket into towers and traps

Chapter 0 - Gem of Eternity
If you're not a hardcore gamer, this will be way too hard and too long to solve. Better check out other parts of the series. I will congratulate the authors however for their great knowledge of mathematics and how they applied it to the scoring system.

Lost Chapter - Labyrinth
A very cool and different set of levels. You make your way through the levels until you reach the middle, final level.

What can I say about the series? It is long with good story, but it becomes too hard very soon. It's fun of course but last levels are even harder than the middle ones.

What can we learn from that? Well first of all, another game which has a steep learning curve, is bound to be made soon. But what about casual players?

One solution would be to make easier games as well, but then hardcore players wouldn't play them.

Another option would be to make lots of content for beginners, but hardcore players would skip it.

We'll discuss good difficulty settings in the next part of this blog series.

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