Game: Dead on Delivery
Developer: Dudeeki
Where I found it: X

This game is a standard VS-like, you shoot enemies, pick one of three upgrades, gain gold, use gold between runs to become more powerful. It is a formula that does not excite me, however it does one thing I like, which is that the map is fixed. The VS-like formula already induces a certain feeling of meaninglessness in me that is exacerbated by an infinite map, so it's good it doesn't happen here.

It is fairly competently made technically, I would have done quite a lot of the juice in it differently, but it is very juicy overall. What I like most is the art, it has this thick outline pixel art style I love and is what I tried to go for with the emoji art style present in Horse Game. Very hard for me to not enjoy art that uses this style, unfortunately most artists who like drawing this seem to have a sense for character design that is very unaligned with mine and thus I rarely see a game that evokes complete visual passion in me, and this game is no different. But look at this, look at these cards and how beautiful they are:

Wonderful. However, despite being technically competent, it is just not a very interesting design. It has an additional mechanic of delivering pizzas which adds nothing useful, the upgrades + weapons are all standard, it does really nothing new at all. This aligns with the point I made in the indiedev creativity post, gamedevs are increasingly good at the technical portion of making games, now even more so with the rise of AI, but design progress is a lot slower, and games like this are a perfect example of it. So I would not consider it to be a high quality game that is just waiting to be discovered, it is high quality in many aspects, but not in the one that matters most.

It is unfair to say this without any context on the developer, though. From what I gather he's a Brazilian young man who has released a single game before, and to have a handle on visuals + juice this early is a pretty good accomplishment. It reminds me a lot of what I felt when I saw Gagonfe's earlier games. As I said in another post too, I don't remember which, if you're just starting out, it's actually not a bad idea to go for easy and well-settled designs, making and finishing a game is already a hard task, trying to do unproven designs on top of that can make it even more challenging, so I don't hold it against him for choosing a rather safe game to make. At the same time, what was the quote I just heard... ah, here:

Lord Naoshige said, "The Way of the Samurai is in desperateness. Ten men or more cannot kill such a man. Common sense will not accomplish great things. Simply become insane and desperate."