Let's Review Your Games — Ep. 016

Um, hey, it's going to be a fun fun day playing your games and we're going to be I'm going to do my very best here to not be sarcastic because if I'm sarcastic, it could come across really really really really awful. We don't want that. I want to encourage you guys. I want you to feel uh yeah, encouraged about your game. So, we're going to be playing three games today. Uh, come on in, guys. Welcome, welcome, welcome. Hey, Sheamus. Is that Hey, Sheamus, Michael, David, come on in. Welcome, welcome, Bogden. Welcome, welcome, welcome. Come on in. Let me get this chat rolling here. There it is. Okay. Yeah. Um, yeah, let's jump into Steam and play some of your games. And the best part about this is we're going to review the games while we play them, offering constructive feedback. You guys can do it, too. I'll do it. And at the end of today's live stream, we're going to be review or I'm sorry, what

are we doing? Doing a poll to see who won. Who won out of the three games we're playing. By the way, this video is sponsored by Bezy. Bezy, I'm really appreciative of Bezy, honestly. They keep the channel rolling, they keep the podcast rolling, they keep the live streams rolling, and they help fund my studio as I continue make games, which is awesome. So, thank you so much to Bezi. So, we're going to roll a sponsored video for Bezi. The link is in the description, but let's go ahead and roll this thing. Before we continue, I want to say a big thanks to this video sponsor, Bezi. They have just launched the beta of their new feature, agent mode, which lets you create and modified code directly in your project at your approval. You can now update and iterate everything from within the Bezi app and it makes it very easy to pinpoint and validate all the suggested changes in the context of the code. Bezi also keeps track of all the changes you make so it's easy to revert at any time. Bezy can be considered your development

assistant as it has a full context of your entire project and is great for answering questions, writing code, or giving you a deep understanding of your projects, which especially can be helpful when onboarding new people. Bezi automatically searches all your assets, scripts, scene graph, Unity Docs, and the web to give you the most accurate assistance tailored specifically to your project. The best thing is that it's completely free to try. So, if you haven't already done so, I definitely recommend you check them out by simply clicking the link in the description. Thank you, Pre-recorded Thomas, for that wonderful message. Come on in, guys. Let's go ahead and jump into the first game here. Let me pull my stream over here. Good. Over there. Chat's right there. Let me increase the size and let's get started here. Hang tight. Hang tight. There you go. Hey, guys. Come on. Come on. Come on. All right, guys. First game. First game is called Hick in Hell. Wait,

what? Kick in hell. Kick in hell. I would definitely consider changing that font. That is really I thought honestly when I downloaded this game, I thought it was about a hick in hell, which I think is a great hook. Um, but it's kick in hell. So, let's go ahead and play it. And I think what we'll do is we'll also take a look at the Steam pages and review the Steam pages, see kind of what how they're being marketed. But I'm just going to go ahead and play this game and get started here. That's fine. I don't know what's going on with Steam, but a lot of the uh cloud save data is completely screwed up for me today. But this is fine. Let's see if we get some uh sound here. Okay, good. Okay, good. Okay, we have sound. Uh, failed loading all game features. You can restart to try again. What?

Let's see here. Okay, let's first review the menu. Let me turn this down for you guys. Okay, what is what do you guys think the first thing that I would be critical of for this menu? But before we Thomas, start with the positives. I love this pixelated filter. I think it's awesome. Um, menu is clean, very fresh. Um, what's the first thing you got? I I love that the coloring as well. Really good color theory here. Awesome. Oh, there's a countdown up here. That's really cool. That's awesome. I really like that. Okay, first things first. First things first, I like sounds to play whenever there's something that happens. Give the player feedback. So, even just a subtle

that could feel so good. Let's take a look at the settings here. Very nice. Good sounds. Clicking sounds. How's the sound, guys? Can you hear? Okay. Everything looks very blurry. Um, I don't know why the text looks blurry, but that isn't blurry. So, let's take a look at the graphics and see what's going on here. 1920 x 1080. Let's do 3840 x 2160. What? Okay. Yeah. So, it was it was 1080p by default, which, you know, I wouldn't do that if I was I'm not doing that for Twisted Tower. I'm going to do the native resolution. Okay. Does arrow keys work? Arrow keys don't work. So, that's going to be a whole ordeal getting arrow keys to work for and in and gamepad to work unless I'm I'm just I need my gamepad installed. Okay. Anyway, let's go ahead and hit play

here. Um, very nice. This looks great. Apprentice champion. Play with checkpoints. Recommended for new players. All right, let's go. Complete your Oh, move to start. The circle of fraud. That's awesome. Are you the one who thinks he can defeat our lord? Well, time to get creative. I heard you were known for your powerful kicks. See that skull over there? It's got a squishy brain sticking out. These can give you a powerful boost. Kicking it will propel you backwards, so make sure you aim well. After the kick, turn around quickly. This way, you can see where you're headed. Good luck. Okay. Oh, okay. You click. That's awesome. This looks great. Whoa.

really cool movement feels really good. Nice. I love the pixelated look. I'm actually a fan of the the the text being clean um and not pixelated, but the art is pixelated. I think that's great. I don't really have a problem with it. It's really It's done really well, especially the UI. That's really fun. That's so fun. I wish there was a kind of a wind sound. Okay, what's that? Oh, someone's getting burned alive. This feels great. You know, I love that I can see my feet. That's so funny. Okay, good so far.

You have to kind of look where you're going. What an interesting concept. I'm kicking brains. Okay, let's go. Let's see if I can hear the ambience. Oh, ambience sounds good. Okay, so far the um game feel is really nice. Um, by game feel, it's it's reactivity. So, when I click, it's immediately uh kicking, which feels really really good. It's not too slow. Oh my. Whoa. This kick requires a low angle in order to fly high. Take care of this brain will make you fly even further than

previously. Oh wow. Okay. Come on. A low angle. There we go. What? Okay. Sweet. So, you'll notice, guys, that even with these pixelated games that, you know, they they they're trying to mimic the '9s. We've got real-time lighting which is influencing the normal maps of the um textures. So, you're getting a bunch of normal maps which is not, you know, that's not typically something you'd see in the '9s. Um, but it's it makes it have this nice modern sort of polished look. We've got emissives coming through the cracks, which is really cool. So, great use of texture work. It feels retro, but it's also got some modern stuff in it, which is really nice. Horizontal kicks require you to kick more in front of you, but remember, always account for gravity.

Okay. Oh, I Okay, I need to aim for that little I don't know, nipple. Woo, that felt great. I love these call outs. Reach the first checkpoint. Progress to the first checkpoint. Progress to the first checkpoint. Once reach, respawn anytime using the button in the pause menu or keybind. Okay, cool. So, where's the first checkpoint? I think it's right there. Thomas. Okay. Okay. This is so much fun. It feels great. I don't love these particles. It It feels like these this trail here. It's cool, but it just feels like a lot. I wonder if you could do a nice clean line. I don't know. It just feels like too many doesn't really match the style of the game. Okay, here we go, guys. Yes, checkpoint reached, baby. You, as

you get better, you will learn to sprint and jump to go faster, but most importantly, you will learn to strafe to recover those optimal kicks. All right, so we got our first checkpoint. Whoa, Thomas, let's do it again. Let's try again. I don't know what I did wrong there. Okay, let's see here. Really nice use of volutric fog. Do you guys see that? I wonder what it looks like with it off. Shadows high. Okay, there's no volutric fog kick trail. Cool. You can turn that off. All right, let's keep going.

So, I'm going over there, I guess. Nice music, too. Hey, skeleton. What are you supposed to be? Are those robes you're wearing? What a freak. Oh, that's great. That's exactly what we needed. Just when I was getting a little bored. I love it. Woo, dude. If there's like a bunch of different biomes, that would be so much fun. Okay, so what am I doing here? low angle kick, baby. No. Oh, nice. Feels great.

All right, what do we got, guys? I guess I need to go over there. Yeah. I don't really like those trails. Oh, right there. Okay. All right. Here we go. Here we go. Yes. I'm at the tippy top. All right. We got one more here. I think I need to jump over those or something. Okay. Whoa. Oh my word, guys. This is great. classic. I love these kind of games. Okay, what's that game tied together? I was watching that with my kids the other day. It was so much fun. No, no, no, no, no. Please tell me I got to Oh crap.

Don't rush it, Thomas. I love that this uh this is one of those rage games where you climb stuff. I don't know what you call them, but it's got a really nice different sort of theming and aesthetic. It's really interesting. Actually very very impressed with this game. I think it's pretty good. Okay, here we go. I love that it's focused on like a singular mechanic. It's really great. Okay, so I think we've seen enough of that game. Pretty cool. I really like

it. Um, let's go ahead and jump into the next game. Um, what did you guys think about that game? What are your thoughts? Hey, Matias, how are you now? Closing it. There we go. Okay. Um, let's open up the next game here. This game is called And by the way, don't vote. Do not vote just yet using don't don't vote. Let's watch all the games. Um, actually, you know what? I want to, if you guys don't mind, what I want to do is open up that game. Wait, where'd it go? What was it called? Kick. Kicking hell. Okay, so let's take a look at the uh store page, guys, just to see how the store page promotes the game. And there's one big issue here with this Steam page. I'm going to pull it up here in just a sec. There's one issue that I

see with this Steam page and it it called out to me um immediately when I saw it. What do you guys think about this cover art here? Do we feel like it matches the game? Yes or no? Do we feel like this cover art matches the game? Yes or no? Answer the freaking question. What do we think? I think I don't know. I I feel like it looks it doesn't look horror and the game has a very horror vibe. It's very very spooky. It doesn't look like a a retro cover art. So like let's let's see like um let's search for Doom original cover art and see if this has that same vibe. Okay, because I I feel like that's what

this developer was going for. Um, here's the Doom uh cover art. Here's Kicking Hell. So, you can kind of see that they were trying to go for it. Um, but there's a couple issues. The first one is is the font. The font just does not feel gothic enough. So, what I would do is I'd go to defont and I would look up Gothic and then let's type in kick in hell and see what we can find. Okay, we're almost there. So, I would say the logo is honestly the the worst thing about this game. Everything else is awesome. It feels really good. Let's just download this one and I want to show you guys how in

really quick we can make this feel like it matches the game. Um, let me show you really quick while we're going to do this and then we're going to jump into the next game. But just let's hold tight here. Open up Photoshop really quickly here. And we're going to go ahead and paste in the cover art for this game. Let me pull up the game's cover art really quick. Where did it go? Yes. Okay. All right. So, first things first. It's It looks very playful, very kitty. Um, so let's go ahead and paste this into Photoshop here. And I'm going to just go ahead and get rid of this. Okay, I understand exactly what the goal is showing the um karate dude here. So, that makes sense. I I like that he's there. And it, you know, there's part of me that thinks this is this is salvageable, the

artwork. It's not bad art. It's good art. Um, I think it might be the logo. So, let's let's go ahead and use that new font we got. What was it called? Gothicum. Kick and hell. Kick and then hell. Kick. And let's find some uh cool grunge textures. we can do to make this feel way more gothic. And then also, we're going to obviously do golden beveling on this as well. So, this is kind of what I would do here. I would even consider doing some kind of a a warp to make it feel more like Doom, just to hearken to Doom. So, we could do upper arc. There we go.

Something like that. Right. And then don't be afraid. The the era of skumorphism is probably back. Um skumorphism from a UI and graphic design perspective is making things look beveled and shadowed and shiny. That's a sort of 19 1990s early 2000s vibe. And Apple was one of the first companies to get rid of that. But we're kind of moving back into skumorphosis. Skeumorphism. Even Apple is um they're calling it newphism and it's a graphic design. Um hang on one sec here. Let's do a a gradient overlay. It's a it's a type of graphic design where things look uh skumorphic. They look textured, right? But um it's more minimalistic.

All right. Kicking hell. I feel like we can probably crank up the brightness and contrast entirely of this logo. Let's go ahead and give it a smart object here. There we go. And then we're going to do a little bit of grunge on it as well. Let me let me look up a grunge texture really quick. Now, I use a website called Vectzy for like royalty-free stuff. You have to pay for it, but I'm just going to Google search grunge texture really quick on Google. Hang tight. Hang tight. Um, let's copy that. Paste. Give me a sec, guys. Give me a sec. And then we're going to do a screen or a multiply. There we go. probably change the color of that.

There we go. Kicking hell. Um, and then this right here, you could probably get away with a little bit more sharpness to make it feel a little bit more grungy. Sharpen it like this. See? Do you guys see kind of what we're trying to do here? Hard to see. So, let's do a black backdrop just of a little bit of a gradient. Blur it. Caution blur. Very subtle. There we go. Yep. And then we could contrast this and then do a saturation. Uh remove saturation of the red. No, no, no. The red's fine. It might be the yellow.

Go to the yellows here. There we go. The reason I'm doing a saturation reduction is because you want the the logo to pop out even more. So, you can look at all the different ways to create contrast. You can do with color, you can do it with sharpness, you can blur things. Um, let's go ahead and sharpen up the logo as well. There we go. All right, let's see here. That actually looks better, honestly. So a saturation shift you can use to create contrast, but we're not going to do it. Then a little bit of a vignette here, right? You could do a overlay as well of like you could do um embers overlay. There we go. Hopefully we get a There we go. That's great. Let's copy that. Paste it in. And then we're just going to do a screen

filter. Look at that. So, there's that. And let's compare it to the other one. Um, let's see here. Compare it. Where where did the other one go? Here it is. Okay. So, let's what we do here. I'm going to screenshot the Steam page. Open up Photoshop. So, there's this one, right? Feels a little too playful. This is kind of how I'd approach it. And watch this. You can even do a saturation shift uh just a little bit. So watch this. If you do a remove the reds or maybe even shift you watch this. This is so much fun. If you shift the reds towards yellow, you can create a gradient shift from one to the other like this. So it creates a more dynamic look. Do you guys see that? Do you see the difference? So, I wouldn't say one is better than the other, but I'm going to go with.

There we go. And then I'm going to make sure that it's just Yeah, there we go. Something like that. So, there's that, which I feel like matches the tone of the game a lot better than this. So, there's that one. Let's compare the two. So, I like to overlay my thumbnails onto a screenshot of Steam and just want to see the differences. So, what do we think, guys? You liked the blue? There is a lot of blue in the screenshots. We could take a look at that and then let's move on to the next game. Okay. Yeah, you can do like a green greenish blue. Kicking hell. Maybe even drop down the And by the way, when I look to the right, I'm looking at a smaller version

of it that I can see. It's It's really good to have a really small version of what you're working on in Photoshop. And you can see both when you're working because you can see it at a small thumbnail size. That to me feels really good. Watch this, guys. This is one final thing I wanted to show you. I can't stop and I won't stop until I'm satisfied. I'm going to blur this. Watch. This is so cool. If you blur this like that, you can create subtle blooms. Watch this. This is going to make it look more dramatic. So, I masked out the bloom. And I just do this. So, the bright spots, you just add that bloom to it. You could also add a shine. So, shines are easy. They're just diagonal lines. Hold shift when you're using the polygon lasso tool. Grab the gradient tool. Hang on one sec here. There we go. And just do this.

You can do a small one as well. Keep always keep it the right angle though. There we go. These really should go on the not on the um blur or on the drop shadow. They need to go on the and set it to overlay. There we go. Yeah, they need to go on the object itself, not on the drop shadow. There we go. It's a little too yellow. So, what we're going to do is do a gradient or um a hue shift to go a little bit more orange. There we go. Something like that, guys. Something like that. Very colorful. I think that matches the mood of the game significantly more. There's the original. And that to me matches the vibe better. But that's just me. That's just me. That's my only feedback for the Steam page. I think I think the rest of

the game is awesome. Honestly, I really do. All right, you guys ready to move on to the next game? Oi, Matt, how are you? All right. Very, very good. Let me open up the next game. The next game is called How do I get to There we go. Crazy holes or cozy holes. Okay, let's go. Have I finished the cut scenes for Twisted Tower? No, I got I got stuck doing UI stuff for the last two two weeks. And again, guys, just as a reminder, there's a link below to check out Bezi. Bezi is it's kind of like chat GPT but

like on steroids. Um it um basically allows you it knows the entire context of your Unity project or Unreal project or yeah those two game engines and basically you can have it running all the time and just say okay what's going on with the character controller or what kind of scripts are in this project and you can instead of just working in the context of a single script you're working in the context of your project with AI coding which is so so cool. So, check it out below. That is the sponsor of today's video. And thank you to Bezi for supporting this channel. It always means a lot to me. Okay, this is a great menu. It's super quiet. It's super quiet, but let's let's turn it up here. Okay, come on. Uh-oh. Do you guys hear that ping? It's delayed. You can't have a delay. That ruins game feel. It needs to be

or or Okay. Cozy Holes. It sounds like an inappropriate website. Let's click play here and get started. At dawn, you stand on a shore, echoing your tribe's laughter. A fallen stars cataclysm, yeah, sleeps beneath sands, its tail carved on tablets. sink your blade into warm soil, uncovering each tablet and unraveling their whispered saga. It's hard to read. I would I I would shrink this down significantly and do something like this. This this this is um it makes the game look unprofessional when the text is this big. And it's even going outside the bounds of like what console, Xbox or PlayStation says you have to do. You cannot be it's I think it's within 200 pixels of the top, right, left and bottom margins. So really what I would do here is something like this. Get a really clean sans font

and just have story is here. Story is here. Check one two. One, two. I would have it very simple and clean. That was too much to read, too. I would make it it's it's a really simple thing to say which is you know collect the tablets. So I just do something like this really clean and small outer glow like this of that blue. You can do this with um you could kind of do it with Unity's text mesh pro. But then what you do here is to make it feel flourishy because I know that that's the goal of the font. The goal of the font is to make it feel magical. So what I do is I go to noun project and I find uh

flourishes. Let me share my screen with you guys. You can find something like this. Um let's see here. I think that'll do. donkey. What do you guys think? You just paste that in color overlay white with that glow, right? And you can just do this something like that as opposed to that big fat text on screen because this is that was breaking a lot of rules. Okay, let's go ahead and play. Okay. Biome discovered. Whispering sands. This is cool. I can dig, dig, dig.

Whoa, the music just stopped. Explore a tougher biome. More magic needed. Okay. So, there's not a ton of clues here. I'm getting a lot of frame hitching as well. Yeah, there's not a lot of clues here on what. So, these look like they're ready to be used. Um, but they're not. So, I would make them not glowing. I'd make them blue but not glowing. Make that blue but not glowing so that I need to dig deeper. Okay. So, what do I need to do here? I think the music is a little too aggressive. I'd make it much more relaxing. A cozy game needs to have really relaxing music. So, what am I doing here?

What's down here? I don't think that water matches the style of the game. Okay, I can't. I got stuck. I can't go in the ocean. Biome discovered. Undigable. That's really cool. I really like this concept of being able to dig into the terrain. I wonder if we're just morphing the terrain at real time with uh Unity. Okay. Yeah, it feels great to move. I think it's a really cool concept. I think graphically it's a little kind of all over the place. Um, I think the coloring is there's a lot of color going on, but not a lot of color theory. So, we just dig dig dig. Huh. Ooh. What is that? New valuable discovered. Two of out of 30. Another one. Yes.

Oh, this is cool. Look at this. What a great system. I think the game feel is a little rough. It feels like when I run, it's really jagged. Look at this. It's kind of jagged when I run and very floaty. So, I would work on the character controller. I think that's the the main issue I have here is the Yeah, like that is really It needs to be really smooth if you're going to have me walking on terrain. If it was blocks, I wouldn't be bothered by it, but it's terrain, so I need it to be much more smooth. Yeah, the music needs to be really chill. Oh, I found a Can I dig on that? I got a cool shovel. Oh, it's starting to rain. It's got a weather system.

Yeah, it does feel kind of like a tech demo. Um, the digging can be really frustrating because it's very slow, but maybe it gets faster. Like that is just really slow to me. Got it. Whoa. Explore around and watch for the needle to move. What am I doing? Oh, okay. So, it's kind of like a a uh metal detector. Yeah, I should hear

Yeah, it feels very quiet. And I've got it at full blast right now. Bloom's intense. Clash two alike precious stones to fuse them into a mighty gem. Can I do it now? What's this? Some vortex. We've got ghosts over there. Yeah, I think the art style is a little inconsistent. Um, so art style and game feel are my primary concerns. I assume I'm not Whoa, that is so cool. Like I think that the technology here is really cool. Um, the art style and the music and the and the player controller are the problem, I think. Yeah, that's going to be tough to solve, isn't it? I guess that water just needs to go all the way over.

Yeah, it feels very quiet. We need And it feels weird that it's coming out of my chest. I would have it on the right side of the screen just like Minecraft. Okay. Yeah, I think polish is going to be the main issue here with this game. The the technology is really cool, though. I love this. Okay, let's go over here and see what this is. I'm getting some frame hitching as well,

which I I know all about it. I've experienced plenty of frame hitching in my games as well. Got it. Okay. Yeah. Let's take a look at the Steam page and see how it how it looks and how it's marketed. Um, but yeah, guys, I think I think overall the the main issue here is not is not the concept. I think the concept is really cool. I think it's the execution of Yeah, it's the art style. It's the character controller being kind of buggy and and and the hitching and the getting stuck on things is really frustrating. Um, the color theory I feel like is a pretty simple solution. I wonder if we can work on something really quick here and show you what I mean by the color theory. Uh, let's take a look at the marketing though of this of the store page. Okay.

Um, yeah, if if this was released now, I think that it would have plenty of negative feedback despite it being a great idea. Um, let's let's grab it and take it into a URL because I can't zoom in. Um, yeah, I think I think it needs a lot of polish. Okay, so first off, cozy holes. I'm not sure. It's It looks good. The the thumb the the the the artwork looks really good for the thumbnail or the capsule image. Yeah, I don't know if I would change that actually. I think it's great. Um, if the art style looked like that, that would be amazing. Um, let's see here. Let's let's mess with this image here and see if we can do some color theory adjustments.

All right, let's go into Photoshop here and take a look. But yeah, I think the Steam page looks good. Let's read this really really quick. Cozy Holes is relax a relaxing digging adventure where you play as Digby. I don't think I need to know that. A magical shovel. I'd rather play as a person. I don't think playing as a shovel is enticing. You want to be able to imprint yourself onto the to the character of the game. Um, and I can't do that with a with a shovel. So, I would I would recommend um, don't make me a shovel. Just make me a what? Oh, man. I was talking, who was I talking to? It's a podcast coming up soon. His name is Friedrich or Frederick. He made a game called Coreke Keeper, which is actually kind of similar to this. And he said that I can't remember what it's called, but it's a principle. It's kind

of a hack, which is all you need to do to make your your the player imprint themselves onto the protagonist of a game is you need to put them in a mysterious place and make them a generic character and have them affirm that they don't know what this place is. When you do that, it's so much easier to to feel like you understand and relate to the character. So, if this game started with text on screen and it said, "Where am I? It's a giant island. What is this place?" And that's it. All of a sudden, it's so much more exciting because you're like, "Okay, I need to find out where I am, what I'm doing." because at the moment you're a you're an inanimate object, a shovel, and you haven't really told me I don't think maybe I was too distracted when I was reading that text, but I don't think you told me that you don't understand

this place, right? Okay. Um, when it comes to the color theory of this game, we need to pick a palette. Okay. So, what I do with all of my games is I pick a color palette and I stick to it. So, let's make the color palette of this game blue with a low saturation brown, which is I think I can use that. There we go. And a pop of color like orange, which is this is the complimentary color of that blue. Okay. So, what we're gonna do is cut this stuff into pieces. I'm going to grab this here. I'm going to get this the the foreground elements. I'm going to do a really rough rough and dirty job here, guys. But we're going to grab the foreground elements.

And I'm curious if color theory could solve the graphical incohesiveness. It It very well might be just a color theory issue. Hang tight. We're almost there. We're going to separate everything into layers. Real rough and dirty cutout here, but hopefully you get the idea. this here as well. Cut out the foreground. I think you guys, we'll see. Sometimes this doesn't work, sometimes it does. I feel like I'm going to be able to show the value of color theory here. That's my hope.

Okay, there's the foreground. We got the foreground. Now, let's get the midground so that we can adjust that sky. The sky looks really bland, but everything else is really colorful, which I feel like is part of the problem here. We're looking at a variety of different kinds of saturations. It feels like random saturations. Um, and then it feels like we have variety of different hues as well. Okay. And then finally, let's grab this here. We're going to make some adjustments to that as well. Okay. Starting with the sky, we're going

to do hue, saturation, shift, or colorize. Uh, where's the sky? Oh, it's right there. Yeah. Wait, I didn't get that for some reason. Hang on. Oh, I need to get the inverse of that. Copy paste. There we go. Okay, let's start with the sky. Remember, this is our color. We're going to use this blue. So, we're going to saturate it. It's okay. You can also de or you could do a little bit of a gradient shift just slowly shifting away. We're going to do a little bit of a pink to make it cozy. You can just lift. If you can shift away from that color just by doing a subtle

shift like that. Okay, before after already looks amazing. Okay, but let's create some saturation contrast with the ground. Okay, you see this in uh Tears of the Kingdom. We're going to do saturation down. There we go. Good. Maybe crank up the contrast a little bit there. There we go. Okay, we're going to make this orange. And we're just going to stick to this palette for everything. Okay. Now, obviously, we can have other elements like these these um glowing gems. We can have those different colors as well, but we can fit them into sort of a pastel color theme if we wanted to. Okay, let's reduce the saturation here. I'm sorry. Let's let's change the yellow to orange.

And then this is a little hyper saturated here, the the wood coloring. So, what we're going to do is just take the red and bring the red red down. Crank up the contrast. Okay. Finally, we're going to take this. That's fine. I think the green is kind of killing the vibe. So, we're going to go to the green here and just adjust it to be that blue, the sky blue color. See? And then finally, these little colors here, we're going to try and match them to our color palette. Remember, if we have something orange, we need to make it that perfect orange. Okay. If we have something blue, we need to make it that perfect blue, the blue we decided on. You got to commit to colors like they're your constitution.

That's kind of the way I think about it. All right. So, let's go go ahead and do some hue saturation shifts here. This one here, we're going to do we're going to match that to our in perfect matching. Um there's something about it when you perfectly match it to your color palette. There we go. And we needed we need to perfectly match this as well. Go. Good. The blue. We're going to match that as well. Match it to the sky. There we go. And the purple. I think the purple is killing our vibe here. So, we're going to do a hue, saturation, shift. Oh, yeah. We'll do a colorize.

There we go. And then the green, we're going to give it a little bit more yellow just to make it feel more like kind of like Firewatch. Oh yeah, there we go. All right. So, there's our new color theme. Duplicate that back one so we can compare and contrast. So, here's what I've done with the colors. And here's what the old one was. This actually this right here. I totally realized this needs to be gray. There we go. Match the clouds, baby. All

right. Does that make sense, guys? We're using three colors to determine everything else. You just pick one color and go for it. Make sense? We could probably do a saturation bump entirely for the whole thing since it's a playful game before after. That's what I would do. That's what I would do. All right, let's move on to the next game. All right. This one is called the Lacerator, I think. Yeah. Let's Let's play this game.

All right. That's cool. As always, give me some hover sounds. This looks cheap over here. This looks great. This looks cheap. Why do I have There we go. The lacerator. What? Introducing Max, the man who loves sex. It was just another sexy job. All right, let's see here. Don't escape. Whoa, this is hard to move. Okay,

don't escape. Okay. I love how he's got a cigarette in his mouth. Oh, okay. I can move with my mouse, too. Nice. I love these fixed camera games. I think graphically it looks awesome. I love that he's got a ton of hair on his legs. Is that what that is? [Laughter] Will you take the bandage? Yes. Restores a small amount of health.

That's cool. I love this blue. It's so strange. My whole life I was lazy. Blah blah blah blah blah. [Laughter] Okay. So, I need to select my inventory. I How do I do it? Okay. Okay. This is honestly well done. It's very uh spooky.

I need something to open it. I love that. All right, what do we got? Honestly, I I love how this game looks. I think it's great. I think the the UI is actually pretty good.

Oh, you can punch. There's a sharp metal hook in his eye. Will you take it? Yes. I love that. That feels great. I love that blue. Really disorienting blue. Oh, we got a note there. Sorry, I just have to get used to the controls. Holy, this place has no exits. I can't believe I'm going to die here. Day two. All right, I found a way out. There's a hole behind cell E. If I get Okay, my whole body is shaking. Okay, so anyway, let's see here. We need to open up this with this Nice. You okay, sweetie? I worked with Stacy many times. She doesn't seem okay right now. All right.

I love the art style. Honestly, it's solid. Yes. Oh man. Golly, that's great. That is so good. This beauty has the power to kill. How do I equip it? How do I equip it? What's in here? Locked from the other side.

I love going into those holes. That's awesome. Super creepy. You all right, Stacy? That twist with getting your arm cut off was so necessary cuz I was getting bored and right when I needed it. That was great. Keeps you keeps you uh interested. How do I How do I use my gun? Let's see. Let's go to our controls. melee and shoot. Hold the aim is right click. Okay. Right click doesn't do anything.

Yeah. For some reason I can't right click. You can't hear game sounds. Let me turn it up for you guys. Is that better? The game sounds are great. I just wish I knew how to It's so disorienting. Okay, it's over here. Oh, that's how you do it. So, does anyone have any idea? Press tab

and equip. Okay. That's so great. Oh man, it's hard to control though. Uh, okay. So, what do I do here? Bandage the arm. No, I didn't do anything. Do I shoot Stacy? Put her out of her misery. No. Next to where you get your arm cut off, there's more. Oh, yeah. There's a staircase. Thank you. This is great. This feels really good.

I think the humor the humor is fine if you're into that kind of humor. So, I'm not going to recommend that we change the humor. I think it's fine. It has a It has a voice and a lot of games don't have a voice. It's not my cup of tea, but I understand the point. The wire seems to be connected to something. Okay, I want to see what this game looks like behind the curtain. I love going into those holes. That's so creepy. This is awesome. Oh gosh. Okay, I need to break that wire. Oh no,

it's so hard to aim. Give me some goods. Will you take the bandage? Oh, please give me some health, baby. Oh, this is great. I could play this game. I could play it for a while. The sound is awesome. It's so disturbing. So, yeah. What do we got? Resident Evil vibes. I managed to unlock my cell today, but this place is a maze. There's a box with a number lock. I didn't try the code. I saw on the news it was 86, but I know he got three. Whoa. There's math. The man on the wall told me it's the number of victims. Last time I saw on the news it was 86. So 90 90. Can you guys remember that?

So there's a lock that should be 90 or 89. Was it in here? Okay. No. The answer is no. Yeah. This has all the tropes of like classic Resident Evil games. This is great. Oh, I found a new spot, I think. They look fragile.

Uh oh, it froze. Okay. Woo! That was close. I'm out of ammo. I think Okay, it was 89. What? Wait, it's 090. Got it. Keeps freezing. Okay. Z. I would I would

recommend that this show 000. Okay. So, it's not 90. 89. Baby, this is great. So many fun little puzzles. Will you take the wrench? Yes. I can use it to adjust stuff. Was it over here? No. Can I do it to here?

Can't use it here. So, where do we use the wrench? You got any ideas, guys? Whoever made this game is a master of um ambience. It's really great. There's my arm. The pipe. What pipe? Keeps freezing.

Can't use it there. All right, hang tight, y'all. That giant thing that's right in front of my face. Is that what we're supposed to do? This looks great. Honestly, everything has such a strong level of polish. Look at that booty. Oh my goodness. It's hard to gauge distance.

I need both my arms to open the door. Okay. Yes. I love when there's just subtle sounds. Super simple. Didn't have to show anything. Honestly, I'm very inspired. I need something to open it. Can I use my wrench? Frozen again. We need to figure out what's causing the hitching.

Great music. Really good music. Very very creepy. Okay, so I can get back here. But did I get anything from that screwdriver and a wrench? What? Okay, I got I guess I got to do both. That's odd. Got to save it. Oh, I see. It's a It's a It goes back down.

[Applause] I don't know where I'm supposed to go, but I kind of wish that would save Does anyone have any idea what we do here? We have a gun. We have a wrench and a screwdriver. Go towards the camera. The music's incredible. You don't like the music? Oh, no. Stacy.

Yes. Thank you. I got Stacy's arm and a hatchet. Oh, I just got a hatchet. Okay. Okay. I got a hatchet. No, I can't grab my arm. Hey. Yes. This is great. Okay. What was that? So, that goes somewhere. It goes somewhere where music is so good.

Wow. I'm just really impressed. Oh, give me some blood splatter. Come on. It's tough. The music, you're saying the music is tough in a good way. Yeah, it's creepy. So, where do I go and that is, I think, the vibes you want from these kind of games. You want to immediately or you always want to feel kind of like you're secondg guessing your where you're going. The cigarette is not realistic. Is anything else realistic? Okay. So, I cut the wires.

Okay. Where was that wire room? It's so disorienting. Oh, man. And I understand that's the point. Okay, I just got turned around. Golly, Thomas, what is that? He's aiming his hatchet. Don't change the blue menu. If anybody complains, if the developers listening, if anyone complains to you about the blue screen for inventory, keep it. It's

It's really creepy. It's weird. Where am I going? Okay, the wire room was somewhere. Thomas, stop it. All right, hang on. There's an interact button on the closed cage door. Where was the electricity? What? I'm like completely turned around. Over and over, Thomas. Over and over.

Find the door with the weak chains. I just don't know how to get back to the electricity. Where was it? Cell E. There we go. Okay, thank you. It was down here. Okay, I hatcheted that. Nope. Is there anything right here? No.

Hey, hey, hey. Did I just come through here? I think I may have. What? No. Oh man. I I I would say that's a solid solid title. The

logo is not my favorite. Well, it looks great there, actually. It just doesn't match in game, which is, by the way, that's classic for like Netflix movies. They always have a different logo um on the like Netflix page. And sometimes they I I feel like they alternate logos. Let's go ahead and share my screen here. Take a look at the Steam page. Um, well, that makes sense. We got Dread XP as the uh as the publisher. So, they get they found a publisher. Rock solid. Rock solid demo. Way to go, Games from the Abyss. Really, really good work. All right, guys. Um, I'm going to go ahead and let you click the link below to vote. Um, and then we can all take a look at the results. So, go ahead, click the link below and vote for your favorite game.

Vote for the one not that you like, but the one that you feel like has the most potential. Um, my guess, I'll tell you my guess right before we reveal the score. I'll tell you the guess in a minute is what I'm saying. I don't want to tell you just yet because I don't want to influence you. Um, but before we do that, before we reveal the score, I'm going to run one more ad read for Bezi. Bezi is the sponsor of today's live stream. They sponsor so many videos on the channel and it just means the world to me. Um, so thank you to Bezi and click the link below if you want to check out Bezi. Here's the the sponsored ad read that's pre-recorded because I'm lazy. and then we'll we'll look at the scores. Okay, so go ahead and vote and we'll jump right back in after this brief message. Before we continue, I want to say a big thanks to this video sponsor, Bezi. They have just

launched the beta of their new feature, agent mode, which lets you create and modified code directly in your project at your approval. You can now update and iterate everything from within the Bezi app and it makes it very easy to pinpoint and validate all the suggested changes in the context of the code. Bezi also keeps track of all the changes you make so it's easy to revert at any time. Bezy can be considered your development assistant as it has a full context of your entire project and is great for answering questions, writing code, or giving you a deep understanding of your projects, which especially can be helpful when onboarding new people. Bezi automatically searches all your assets, scripts, scene graph, Unity Docs, and the web to give you the most accurate assistance tailored specifically to your project. The best thing is that it's completely free to try. So, if you haven't already done so, I definitely recommend you check them out by simply clicking the link in the description. All right, thank you, Bezy. I will say

Bezi came in clutch um sort of helping fund, you know, any any sponsorships help fund the final production of Twisted Tower. So, it means the world to me. All right, let's go ahead and take a look at our final results, guys. Has everybody voted? All right, before I click show results, um I will tell you sort of my prediction. I don't know. I like to predict. Lacerator is going to be overwhelmingly the winner. Um then Hick and Hell and then Cozy Holes. I would say Lacerator is going to be 95%. Um maybe 90%. Hick and Hell 7. And then uh uh cozy holes is three. So let's take a look. Oh my goodness, I was way off. Lacerator 63%. But we've only got 39 votes. What are we doing, guys? The link is there's 713

people watching right now. Are you guys the same people who don't vote but then complain about who's in control with politics? Vote. What are we doing? 41 votes in. Very great game. Last Raider definitely is the deserved winner. I think it's going to do well. Um if if I were to tell the developers to do anything, it would be give me some jump scares at the beginning. And this is mainly for streamers. Um the the arm getting cut off was awesome. Give me more like characters. Like imagine like a brief silhouetted character goes across the screen or through a hallway. You barely see him or a crawling character or something as if you're you're surrounded by something devious.

But that's what I would do. But overall, great great work to all of these developers. And thank you guys so much for showing up. I love you. Click that link below if you want to check out Bezi.