Dustforce is a game where it feels good just walking and running. Then you throw in air jumps, sliding down slopes for bursts of speed, samurai-style ultimate attacks, and running upside down on ceilings and it feels amazing.

Dustforce is a platformer with dozens of beautiful levels. There’s no story that I can see other than “The world’s a mess and as a super-powered janitor, it’s your job to clean it up!” The music is incredible (reminiscent of the water stages in the original Donkey Kong Country games) and just the thing to calm the player after they’ve messed up on a hard spot yet again. The character animations of the four playable characters (each of which has slightly different attributes) is fluid and enjoyable.

Dustforce is a score attack game. Merely reaching the ending of a level doesn’t accomplish much. To gain the keys necessary to unlock additional laters in the game requires a SS rank in each level. This is gained by cleaning everything that needs to be cleaned and maintaining the combo counter (it resets to zero if you take too long between cleaning or attacking something). Beyond gaining SS ranks, the game also features online leaderboards for each level where your completion time is taken into account as well.

Dustforce isn’t a hugely varied game. There are no boss fights and level gimmicks are rare. It’s a focused game and too much variety would ruin that focus.

Dustforce is the time trials of Mirror’s Edge turned into a 2D game.

Dustforce is a solid contender for Best Platformer of 2012 and it’s only January.

Dustforce is glorious.

Dustforce is available on Steam for a mere $10.

For a baseline, before the price drop, we were selling about 20-21 copies of Cthulhu Saves the World a day on average on the XBLIG platform.

Here’s the first week of sales since the price drop (I left out the 4th because the price drop was only in effect for a short period of time that day). I’ve also posted a couple notes on relevant events that happened on specific days.

And now for some thoughts.

Since the price drop, we’ve been getting more sales a day than trial downloads. The game has gotten good reviews from a number of sites and from user ratings and it’s only a dollar so it’s understandable than many people would decide to buy it without trying it out first. It’s also possible that some people may have downloaded the demo in the past and with the price drop finally decided to buy it.

Although it wasn’t always like this in the past, now a game’s position on the Top Downloads chart is an average of a week and not just the most recent day. Hopefully, what this means is that it’s much harder to get in the Top Downloads list but once you’re in, it’s more likely that you’ll stay in. Cthulhu Saves the World was at about #100 before the price drop and started improving with each new day. With January 11th sales data in, we now have a full week of sales since the price drop and our rank is at #18. EDIT: I was just told that the Top Downloads chart is a day behind the most recent data we receive directly on our sales which means that our rank should go up tomorrow since that will be the first day that the chart reflects a full week at the lower price.

Top Downloads ranking is determined by adding sales & trial downloads together. Not sure why they do this – basing it just on sales seems like it would reward the higher quality games more. Note: this is just an educated guess based on data I’ve seen since becoming an XBLIG developer; Microsoft hasn’t actually come out and said that the ranking is sales + trials.

If you assume an average of 21 games sold a day before the price drop, the price drop has increased our average daily revenue on XBLIG by about x3 so far.

The price drop doesn’t seem to be affecting our sales of our games on Steam or the XBLIG version of Breath of Death VII either positively or negatively. Both are about what they were before the CSTW XBLIG price drop.

Not sure why our stats jumped so much on the 11th. It was a jump for all countries so I don’t think it was a specific website. Maybe we passed some sort of critical milestone and now we’re more visible or being offered as more recommendations on xbox.com or the Xbox dashboard.

So all in all, it’s been a big success so far. Keep in mind that we were able to get a fair bit of media coverage on the price drop (the fact that we bundled in an announcement about upcoming ports didn’t hurt things) – just dropping your game’s price won’t do much good if nobody knows about. Hopefully, sales will continue to do well over the coming weeks and months and this won’t just be a short-term boost.

It’s amazing how important seemingly small changes can be to a game’s overall quality. Uncharted 2 is a good example – it’s mostly the same as Uncharted 1 but by making a few tweaks here and there (blind fire, better grenade controls, smoother stealth & melee, more locale variety, etc.), they turned a pretty good game into a great one.

Final Fantasy XIII, on the other hand, was a much more divisive game than Uncharted was. It’s understandable that they might make more drastic changes to the formula with Final Fantasy XIII-2 in order to regain fans they lost with the first one. However upon playing the demo, I was impressed that not only were there the bigger changes we were all expecting, but that they had also made some smaller but no less clever changes to improve the overall feel of the game. Therefore, I present my list of 10 Ways that Final Fantasy XIII-2 is better than Final Fantasy XIII, full of changes both big and small.

1. Large text option – How sad is it that in 2012, the option to increase the text size in a game is so rare that it caught my eye? Now I know my engineer friends are going to say, “Just make the UI so that the default text size isn’t a problem!” but that approach ignores personal preference. Some people may prefer smaller text so they can more easily see the visuals, whereas others may prefer larger text so that reading is easier and less of a strain. Plus some players may still be playing on an SDTV or may have visual disabilities that make it difficult for them to read small text. That Square-Enix has given the player a choice in the matter is to be applauded.

2. Fight the enemies rather than fight the game – In Final Fantasy XIII-2, the delay from animations when paradigm shifting has been removed and there is an option to make the cursor default to the Abilities line in combat rather than the Auto-Battle line. These may seem like very minor increases in speed (a few seconds here, one less input required there) but they make combat feel more fluid and over the course of an entire game save the player a lot of time.

3. Real-time cutscenes – Final Fantasy XIII was full of prerendered cutscenes which always seemed a bit silly to me considering how good the in-game graphics already were. In Final Fantasy XIII-2, most of the cutscenes are rendered with the in-game engine. This has a number of benefits such as reducing the amount of space required for the game (thus allowing it to fit on a single DVD in the Xbox version), making the visuals more consistent, and allowing for a variable character appearances in cutscenes.

4. Monster party members – Once you had the option to choose your own party members in Final Fantasy XIII, there was rarely a reason to switch members – just pick your favorite team, your favorite strategies, and use them for the rest of the game repeatedly. In Final Fantasy XIII-2, one party member slot is dedicated to various monsters. Since I assume that later monsters will tend to be more powerful than early monsters, the player is going to want to change their monster lineup over the course of the game thus adding variety and helping to prevent the player from getting in a strategic rut.

5. Goodbye tubes – The change from extremely linear maps to more open maps is the change that most people have been focusing on the most so little more needs to be said.

6. Items & equipment – Final Fantasy XIII had a very poorly designed equipment system where the player was supposed to pick one weapon for each character and then spend the entire game grinding materials to give that piece of equipment better stats. It required the player to lock-in their decisions at an early stage and was extremely tedious to maximize stats. Final Fantasy XIII-2 ditches that poorly conceived system for a more traditional item and equipment system.

7. Greater control over the party – Final Fantasy XIII-2 adds the ability to switch the currently controlled player both in and out of combat. It also adds an optional additional layer of control over paradigms with the ability to prioritize single or multi-target abilities.

8. Trust the player – One of the main complaints many players had with Final Fantasy XIII was how it felt like the game didn’t trust the player with comments like “30 hour tutorial!” being common. That does not seem to be the case in the sequel with a full 3-character party and most combat, equipment, and leveling options unlocked very early on.

9. Time Travel – This is hard to see in the tutorial but based on comments on the full game, it’s possible to make and remake decisions in the various time periods and to see their effect on other times, thus making the story more interactive than past Final Fantasy titles.

10. Improved Leveling System – Final Fantasy XIII’s Crystarium leveling system had the illusion of freedom with its various paths but in actuality, the game carefully gated the various ranks to the point so that just playing through the game normally usually gave the player enough XP to max out everything. Final Fantasy XIII-2 looks to have removed most of the restrictions as well as speeding up the process (just select the paradigm you want to LV-Up) giving the player much more control over how their characters will progress and develop.

It’s easy to overlook the importance of relatively small aspects of game design and focus on the big picture, however games are often made by their smaller aspects. Seemingly minor things like “The jumping feels floaty” or “the text speed is too slow” are all too often the only things that stand between a great game and a not-so-great one.

Here’s the design premise I wrote up several months ago for the game idea we’re going to try to make. Of course, there will no doubt be changes between my old design and what we actually end up doing.

Mob Quest Design Document

Basic Premise – Desktop Dungeons + Katamari Damacy

Story Premise – The big bad guy is terrorizing the world! The only way you can defeat him is through teamwork! Use the magic mob crystal to form the ultimate mob of heroes and take down every enemy in your path!

–Basic concepts–

The game is a turn-based puzzle game divided into stages. The goal to complete each stage varies from stage to stage (could be to defeat a boss, could be to reach a certain mob size, could be to reach a certain destination, etc.)
Transferring from stage to stage could be set up on a Super Mario World style world map. Achieving optional goals in stages could unlock new paths. There could also be an overall score (combined total of individual stage scores) that unlocks various bonuses as your progress.
You control one “character” – a mob of heroes & townsfolk.
In addition to your standard RPG stats like HP, MP, Attack, and Speed, you also have a stat for your mob’s size.
You also have mob stats. These include your recruit stat (how many people can be recruited into your mob in a single move), your current LV & XP, gold total, skill points, and any abilities you’ve unlocked.
XP is gained from finding treasure, defeating enemies, increasing your mob size, and adding new classes to your mob.
Leveling up increases your recruit stat and gives you skill points which can be used to purchase new abilities and bonuses.

–Basic gameplay–

Each turn, you can move to an adjacent square. Gaining and using items and abilities do not cost a turn.
If your recruit stat is high enough, people will join your mob (increasing its size) when you walk onto their square on the map. Otherwise, you can’t enter their square.
Villagers are the most basic type of character and just increase your mob size.
In addition to villagers, there are also special class characters. If one of these joins your mob, your entire mob gains their stats and new abilities are unlocked for purchase with your skill points.
Your mob’s stats are based on the highest stat for all classes you’ve added to your mob. For example, if you had a knight and a mage, you’d have the Attack of the knight with the MP of the mage.
There is no separate battle screen. Instead, if you try to walk onto a space with a monster in it, you attack automatically and the enemy attacks back. (i.e. similar to Desktop Dungeons)
The bigger your mob, the more damage you deal. Likewise, as the enemy deals damage to you, your mob size shrinks and you become less effective.
Your damage dealt = Your Attack multiplied by your mob size.
Mob deaths = Enemy’s attack divided by your mob’s average Max HP.
If your speed is higher than the enemy’s speed, you attack first (thus taking no damage if you defeat them this round). Otherwise, attacks are simultaneous.
A mob is a fickle creature. If you travel across certain kinds of terrain, your mob size will decrease as people leave, never to return. The harsher the terrain, the faster the decrease.
Also, if you exceed the turn limit, X number of people will leave each turn. The turn limit and penalty per turn varies per stage (with some stages being very harsh).
Mob members lost in battle can be regained by healing. Mob members lost from terrain or turn limits are permanently gone.
The mob sprite would change depending on the size (have a few different versions of it and switch up or down as the size increases).

—Conclusion—
And that’s pretty much it for the basic gameplay concepts. Of course, the stage designs, special abilities, monster special abilities, etc. would give the game far more depth than the basic design suggests.

Note: Although most of the characters on this list are primarily physical warriors, I did make a few exceptions for some hybrids (characters that are good at both physical and magical combat).

Top 20 Best JRPG Warrior Heroines:

In celebration of the game’s one year anniversary on Xbox Live Indie Games and in light of recent improvements made to the Xbox Live Indie Games service, Zeboyd Games is proud to announce a permanent price drop for Cthulhu Saves the World for the Xbox Live Indie Games service to 80 MS points ($1 USD) effective today, January 4th, 2011.

Cthulhu Saves the World was originally released on Xbox Live Indie Games on December 30th, 2010. It was later ported to the PC on July 13th, 2011. Since its release, Cthulhu Saves the World has sold over 150,000 copies and has garned critical acclaim from multiple gaming sites including IGN, RPGamer, Gamesradar, Joystiq, RPGFan, Eurogamer, and others.

With Cthulhu Saves the World’s new low price, complete and utter insanity has never been so easy to obtain!

Zeboyd Games is also pleased to announce a partnership with Tinkerhouse Games to bring Cthulhu Saves the World to a variety of new platforms in early 2012 including the iPhone, iPad, Android, and Mac. More details to follow in the coming weeks.

“It still boggles my mind that a random thought of mine while I was waiting for an appointment one day – hey, wouldn’t it be funny if Cthulhu was a hero in a Japanese-style RPG – is now an actual game that people are playing and enjoying. With this new price drop on XBLIG and the game coming to new platforms later this year, I hope even more people will be able to experience the weird adventures of Cthulhu, his own personal fangirl Umi, and the rest.”

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Zeboyd Games is a small development team with experience in creating high quality, amusing retro RPG including Cthulhu Saves the World and Breath of Death VII: The Beginning. They are currently working on Rainslick Precipice of Darkness Episode 3 in conjunction with Penny Arcade. For press inquiries, media assets, and review code requests for Rainslick Precipice of Darkness Episode 3, Cthulhu Saves the World, Breath of Death VII: The Beginning and Zeboyd Games, contact Robert Boyd at rdespair@gmail.com or visit our website at http://zeboyd.com.

For XBLIG figures, the format is Sales/Trial (Trial to Sales Conversion Percentage).

XBLIG - Breath of Death VII (April 22nd, 2010 release, $1 price tag)

And here are a few Steam codes for our games. Again, these are 1-time use codes so whoever gets to them first, gets them.

Cthulhu Saves the World:

Breath of Death VII:
J2F7R-9DNCL-DLLE9
NHZBC-AWE84-C2EG6
RGJKF-7ZKCW-CX9H3

Merry Christmas!

I know our games have been going on sale a lot recently (Halloween, Thanksgiving, and now Christmas) but there’s a dearth of major holidays in the first half of the year so I wouldn’t be expecting another sale for quite some time after this one is up. Of course, we may have other announcements to make early next year…