Hadn’t realized the Downwell creator, Ojiro Fumoto aka Moppin, left the project in late 2017–to do some work for Nintendo.
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fumoto left nintendo in 2019. is it known if he returned to the project or not?
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Not that I’ve seen. The 2022 Steam comment in which I stumbled across the info earlier today – 2 1/2 years later... :: UFO 50 General Discussions – said just “all developers are still on board (sans Ojiro, who recently did the mobile Netflix-exclusive, Poinpy)” as far as his status as of 2022 went.
His credits on MobyGames Ojiro Fumoto - MobyGames don’t include UFO 50 currently, but that might not mean much.
I haven’t been following his Twitter and don’t want to log into X, but that might be more informative.
“Velgress” in the collection is kind of an upward version of Downwell, but I suppose that doesn’t mean Fumoto went back to help work on it.
This post UFOSoft Developers Possible Real-World Aliases :: UFO 50 General Discussions came up with a theory on the aliases of the game’s fictional design studio developers:
- Thorsen Petter is Eirik Suhrke
- Benedikt Chun is Derek Yu
- Greg Milk is Paul Hubans
- Gerry Smolski is Jon Perry
- Chiffon Bola is Tyriq Plummer
- Shayn North is Ojiro Fumoto
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I tried a few more games, and I’m impressed with the detail and the subtle modern sensibilities. Camouflage is one that I can see myself sticking with. It’s a challenging puzzle game that looks a little like Dig Dug 2 but plays absolutely nothing like it.
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… 4 You mean.
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wtf
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So this is a safe space and I need to get a hyperbolic rant out of me so…
(Skip if you want no raining on parades)
…I sorta hate some of how this game has been received at large. I’ve seen so many comments about “oh this is just like playing an old compilation/collection DVD” and if this is something any of these people actually cared about they could have done it at any point in the past 8 years. Many of these people bought one of those massive charity bundles, there’s a ton of games you can play for free/dirt cheap if one wanted to, hell you can just go pirate a bunch of NES ROMs, the only thing stopping any of these people from doing so was themselves.
The thing is they didn’t really want to, they want their hand held, they want someone to make sure there is nothing scary around the corner, they want the sense of discovery without having to worry about stumbling upon anything truly unknown, or gasp that they might have to play some games that aren’t that great or don’t have their harsh edges sanded off. Their vision of exploration is exploring a theme park, they only want to bother if it is a brand name. In the scene which this game swims it isn’t a plucky indie game, it is the 500 pound gorilla; this is the high budget Hollywood remake of the act it is simulating.
One of the top Steam reviews starts “If you have any interest in games as an art form there isn’t a better value game on Steam right now” and to me this isn’t art, this is gentrification.
…
Phew Okay now I feel better, feel free to resume your discussions.
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Sometimes when you open up the Terminal on specific screens in other games, you will get a little message. I’ve seen 3 of them so far, but I have no idea what they mean.
There’s a terminal in the pause screen. It changes based on game state and an 8 character input. Some of the terminal entries involve the history of UFOsoft. Metagame confirmed
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[spoiler]text[/spoiler]
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There is a seemingly quite confusing dinosaur/bird SRPG in here that immediately made me feel very tired
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I tried out Pilot Quest again. While I got some resources while the game was idle, apparently there are capacity limits (which I presume can be raised?). Anyhow, I guess I should explain some facets of the resource loop (as I understand it), since this is an idler:
Summary
- There is a gem in the middle of town that you can hit with your yo-yo to produce moon drops.
- The moon drops can be used to purchase flowers, which automatically produce moon drops (even when the game is idle). The cost of the flowers quadruples each time you buy one. Currently, the next flower costs 2560 moon drops, but my capacity limit for them is currently, uh, 2500.
- For the cost of 1000 moon drops you can get 1 moon ingot, which seems like the Real Currency in the game (at least for now).
- Moon ingots can be used to build building. You can build houses for friends. You can build workbenches to make those friends create moon ingots. You can also build a house for a friendly fellow who sells you meat for 500 moon drops.
- Meat allows you to explore the wilderness. When you go to the wilderness, your current meat is converted to time (1 meat = 120 seconds), which also acts as your health (1 HP = 30 seconds).
- The wilderness has a lot of things (drops, ingots, meat, coins of some sort, and presumably lots of other things), but unless you walk back to the entrance alive you lose everything you would have collected on your expedition (including meat that you could have used to immediately embark on another run).
- There’s a research station in town. Everything costs at least 100 moon ingots, in addition to requiring resources I haven’t even discovered yet.
Anyhow, this time around I was able to get into a virtuous cycle where I kept on getting enough meat in the wilderness to immediately go back there with enough time to collect more meat and ingots. I managed to get enough ingots that I could actually build some stuff in town.
Right now I have some friends happily slaving away for me making more ingots. We’ll see how many they’ve made next time I play the game.
I also messed a bit around with Mini & Max, but I don’t have much to say other than “this is delightful.”
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lmao
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I want a hack of Super Mario with Mooncat controls so badly that I might learn how to hack Super Mario.
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fwiw i don’t actually think the games do have “all their harsh edges sanded off”. some are pretty actively hostile designs and the majority don’t provide any instruction at all.
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well, i checked back in on Pilot Quest this morning, and it looks like I reached my max of, uh… 20 Moon Ingots
…all that gets me is the ability to build some more workbenches to hit that cap faster
lol. lmao
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it feels more like the world has caught up to tigsource game jams more than like gentrification. Derek yu may not be great or whatever but he has (tigsource has) been getting groups of people together to make games on a theme since before humble existed
like I’m usually the first person to get uppity about people being lazy about media consumption but UFO 50 is coming from the people who have been doing game jams for decades
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I think what many people lack is a good source of curation, even if they are willing to try games that are less polished and do something different. SB is good for this because it attracts people who enjoy sifting through history and catalogs and watching out for interesting indie projects that will never get the attention they deserve.
Earlier this week I was talking to someone who likes indie games and who bought some of those itch io bundles but still hasn’t even started combing through them, presumably because it’s simply overwhelming. (I recommended that they play Windosill.)
While the curation aspect of UFO 50 is artificial, the games themselves qualify in my mind as weird little indie titles. And maybe if this gets attention it will inspire exploration of other indie projects.
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extremely good observation imo
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I did end up sticking with Camouflage until I beat it. What a nice little game. I like how getting caught never stops feeling a little harrowing even though you can always undo your mistake with no consequence. I also like how if an animal gets stuck while chasing you and times out, they send a bonus animal after you.
Because I insisted on solving every puzzle completely before moving on, it was my first win and also my first “cherry disk.”
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This may be the most annoying game in the collection of those I’ve tried so far. You’re forced to carry all of your coins into the wild zone every time you go, so if you slip up once they are all gone. I didn’t even figure out how to use them before this happened to me. And the passive income thing happens only when the the application is running, and there’s a cap on what you can accumulate that’s too low to buy the next seed. But immediately after closing the game I knew I’d be back to try it again.
I wonder if the goal here is to punish you for wanting to make numbers go up in a video game. Indika did something like that but it was more playfully mocking the medium than being mean to the player.
Edit: Okay, I’ve warmed up to Pilot Quest now, after my frustrating first impression. I went into the wild zone with 4 meats and found a Zelda dungeon and a place to spend those coins. I also found the gear and barely made it back out with 8 seconds to spare. And now I’ve put two ducks to work.
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