*FIRST TIME JUDGE ANXIETY INTENSIFIES*
I will update this soon, as I've asked for some clarification from Zuppon about judging.
6: Gameplay
I can't judge this yet as I don't understand just
what this category pertains to. Is it the range of stuff from the rules we see in the game? Is it how creatively the rules were used? I don't know and I don't want to just make up my own definition and skew your score.
7: Photography
A lot of these are really good. Like this.
The subject is crystal clear and in focus, and with nothing else to distract me a whole lot. Buuuuuut...
Others look like that. There's this recurring problem I see where when one of the shots is blurry, it's blurry
all over. I know in my shoot I had issues where the wrong thing would come into focus, but here it's just a blurring across the image.
Then some shots look like this, where sunlight was reflecting off something in the shot. The result is this bright streak that distracts my eyes from the ossum.
Yet these issues are minor, so after tearing myself up over it I deem it a solid 4.2/5.
8: Violence
Good in terms of the effects you used.
In particular I liked that.
However, there were some things that detracted from it for me. Mop-man was boring to me. I guess because I'm not as immersed into the Brikverse as most, seeing the guy closest to a protagonist kill enemies with a mop instead of, say, a fuckhueg somethin-or-other 9000 didn't raise my eyebrows. My bigger issue is that none of the kills felt visceral. What do I mean by that? Nowhere did I find myself imagining the sounds of people getting ripped apart, blood spattering, etc. Saying this gives me a feelsbad because I don't know how to describe in what way(s) it could be corrected. I think a combination of more aggressive figure posing (attacker pose + victim reaction) and different camera angles would have done it for me.
Like this shot. Cavegirl looks bored while skeleton crossbow looks like he could be doing a 1000-yard stare. The violence would have been more compelling if, say, the shot was over cavegirl's shoulder with the club on the skelly's chest or head. Skelly could have his arms back and head to one side, and cavegirl's bored look would be hidden due to the angle it was taken.
Overall, straight 4.
9: Writing
It's a small scale story meant to set up an otherwise gratuitous brawl in a public place. It does that well. Also, the little Lechranger arc was undiluted ossum. I got grabbed by that subplot more than anything because it felt like such a badass Halloween story about two kids who get to live out their heroes' deeds
in the fucking costumes! And then the payoff with the frozen mom was brilliant. The problems I have are a few spelling/grammar errors scattered around that made me blink and reread the text, and a few things don't make much sense. For example, why would the vampires show up to a place where the 'umies are krumping serious undead 'eads? That, and some things feel like wasted potential. Like the setup was there but no payoff (more on that later). I.e. we get introduced to cool characters but little gets done with them. Nothing happened with the band when it would have bee interesting to see if they were demons or not; maybe they side with the skeletons, maybe the skeletons demand the demons help them only to find out they're just musicians. The cavepeople also provided good setup. I honestly thought at some point the caveman was gonna thump a skelly before saying, "I toldja, babe, that we'd be the biggest
hit."
But returning to my initial point, that the writing effectively sets the stage for what's about to happen, it was good. Great setup to have everyone in costumes. 4/5.
10: Overall Appeal
It's such an anticlimax. There's this ossum setup that's genuinely one of the cooler set-pieces I've seen here, with all the little characters and whatnot, and the good violence that follows, but the payoff is just "one side pwns the other, then the army arrives and pwns some more."
If you look at the last setup overview shot, the skeletons are surrounded by their enemies, which seems to have setup things to end this way. I don't think you intended this to happen since you commented on it at the end, though.
This thing actually reminds me a lot of the famous 4chan battle, right down to the civvies pwning so much face that the army guys are basically not needed.
That said though, I love the colors here and the attention to detail you did with the environment. Every few shots I'd slow down and just enjoy the colors and the scene.
Overall, 3.5.
I'll be updating this with a new post to jump it back to the top when I get word from Zuppon about gameplay. Sick work for something thrown together out of boredom.
