New games every week!
Player Thoughts - Sheriff of Cardington Blog
29th August 2017
Each week (or whenever I get aroud to releasing a game!) Players submit their thoughts.
I say players, but it's pretty much just RSKGames at this point.
Feel free to submit your own thoughts, and I'll add them to these posts!!

This week, RSKGames looks at The Sheriff of Cardington

RSKGames

Overview: Another week of giving a new twist to a very popular game. This week it is the turn for memory match up pair game. Adding action elements to a card game is a fun surprise.

-=-=-

I wouldn't ever want to make a plain ordinary "Match the cards" game, and there should always be something more interesting going on with them, if done as a videogame.
After all, if you just want to play "Match the cards" in a plain ordinary way, you could just grab a physical deck of cards and play it for real!

I wasn't actually sure this mechanic would work, as it wasn't very playable for a long long time! It wasn't until late at night when things suddenly fell into place, and the game suddenly became more fun.
.. I'm still not entirely sure what exactly I did to make that happen, but I'm glad I did

Title: Title is well thought out for a gun wielding hero fighting with monsters from cards. Title screen font perfectly fits the game.


That title font was previously a horrible mess!

Had to quickly scramble together a new logo on Monday morning, because.. Really.. Eeeuw!!

Gameplay: In this game just because you are given a gun doesn't give you the license to shoot at will. The player can only use the gun to shoot a card to reveal the monster and then to kill 2 monsters when they don't match.


I figured I might as well make the main button be "context sensitive". Shoot when there are baddies, Select a card when there aren't!
Works really quite well, but forward-thinking, it's still not ideal for touchscreens.
Touchscreens would require an entirely different control scheme, I imagine.

Player can only shoot horizontally, when the monsters come at the player from an angle it can get tricky keeping the gameplay challenging and fun.


I stole this from The Dangerous World Of Castles!
The main reason being I only drew one frame of "Sheriff shooting a gun", so unless I wanted to spin him around on the spot, it was obviously going to be just left and right!

Graphics: I think I have seen few of the monsters in the earlier game "The dangerous world of castles". The card flip animation and the monster sprites are very well done. Switching the gun from left to right hand and back on key press is cool.


All sprites were drawn from scratch, but, yeah.. Limited imagination results in a few of the creatures looking quite similar
"Switching the gun from left to right" was lazily just a sprite-flip
Thankfully we can still do Sprite-flips in HTML5! (Rotations seem to have gotten slower, lately, and I'm not sure why..)

Scoring: Shooting the monsters will give the players 30 points. I guess as time goes the monsters movement becomes more dynamic so player will not be able to just keep on killing the monsters to get high score.


Yes, the monsters gradually get faster and faster, so if you aren't matching pairs, there's a definite downside to things!

Matching the pairs in succession will give the maximum points. 350 for first pair match and 500 for the successive match pairs without break in the combo.


The more matches you can find in a row, the bigger your combo score gets.
Oooh! Highscores!!

Overall: A very fun game where the monsters can play tricks with your memory.


It is quite fun.
It didn't feel very fun for a long while, but suddenly "popped" into being a fun game, after a couple of minor tweaks.
Odd to think of "long" timescales, given the game only had a dev time of a couple of days, but it very nearly didn't make it!!
Views 236, Upvotes 18  
Player Thoughts
New games every week!
Site credits : PHP script, Blog posts, Games, Music, Pixelart, Poems and More : Jayenkai
(c) Jayenkai 2023 and onwards, RSS feed

Blog - Player Thoughts - Sheriff of Cardington - AGameAWeek