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Rated M for the Devil's Nuts

DIE2DANCE is a short game made by Calunio for RMN’s Weekend Gamemaking Binge Q1. It was started and completed over the course of just four days. The themes of the contest were disco and fire, and this is what Cal came up with.

Seeing how it was made in such a small period of time, it is expectedly un-lengthy, but that’s hardly a problem. Who has time to play games these days, anyway? j/k

The premise of the game is that Hell’s Disco Club has gotten very boring. Satan has selected you to find some dancers to liven things up. Fail to do so, and you PERISH IN THE FLAMES. Fair enough. Catching the dancers in limbo is kind of a pain, but you can skip it as part of the intro. They pretty much run everywhere constantly and are just as fast as you, so it’s one of those RM things where you run around mashing enter until you catch them.


I just knew TFT could dance.

Luckily, there are only three, and like I said, the sequence can be skipped. The game starts once you have them all where you want them.


Dance, maggot!

Though the description at the start explains what you need to do pretty well, it’s a little tough to understand until you try it yourself. You approach each dancer and press enter to give them their moves. You push directions on the arrow keys to tell them what order to do their moves in, and they’ll continuously perform those moves in that order once directed. The goal is to get all three of their directional moves to line up with the directions in the top-left corner. But they each have a different number of moves, and they hold the moves they’re performing only for a certain amount of time. For example, in that first screenshot, TFT’s stats show that he’ll do two moves and hold each one for four seconds.

The dancer stats blink by rather quickly in the intro, and there’s no way to access them while they’re dancing, so you’re really best off just experimenting than trying to crunch numbers. You can change the moves the dancers are performing at any time, so you can try to adjust it finely. You won’t really succeed, though, until you find a good duration in which to instruct the dancers and get their moves in sync. At which point you may as well have won the game, because once you’ve got it, there’s almost no stopping you! Though the time limit to line up your dancers’ moves gets shorter with every success, so you’re bound to fail eventually. The goal is to maximize your score before then. The game even keeps a top 3 scoreboard for you.

From a design standpoint, this game is pretty solid. The custom sprites for the devil and dancers look good, even against the hi-res overlay backdrops. Auditory cues are given so you know when a dancer has received a move, or you’ve tried to give them the same move twice. When a dancer is performing the correct move, the box beneath them indicates it. I encountered very few bugs. There were really only two that I noticed. Sometimes, after giving a dancer his moves, the sprite would flicker to that of one of the other dancers before returning to normal. Not sure what’s up with the charset there. The other was that, if the dancers were all doing the correct move, but the moment in which they did them was too brief, I’d get the success noise without my score increasing or the game progressing like it should have. It’s no big deal, though. Its happenings were negligibly few, and the game’s length makes it more than forgivable.

So, if you have ten minutes to spare and aren’t put off by pudgy naked devils, this game’s worth a look. Pretty good work for just four days!

4/5

Posts

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Thanks a bunch for this review!

I'm glad you gave this game an honest shot. I know it's hard to get the hang of, but it makes sense after you do, and it's clear you got the hang of the game quite well.

Well, I guess you were very benevolent about it. I think the game lacks some visual indicators that would make it clearer... like cycle and duration visible on the screen, as well as the programmed move sequences. I guess they wouldn't make a huge difference on the gameplay, but they would make it easier to understand (for those who aren't as patient as you to try to).

About the bugs you noticed, the first one I was aware of, but the second one never happened to me. But I understand how it happens. Programming issues.

Out of curiosity: did you enjoy the game? And do you remember your highest score? :D
halibabica
RMN's Official Reviewmonger
16873
I did enjoy the game...for what it was. It's not something I'd play daily, but it's fine in its current state. It'd need more variety and content to be more than a passing thing, though.

I think my lowest score was 8 and my highest 134, but that's just a guess. I forgot to check.
Craze
why would i heal when i could equip a morningstar
15150
-3 stars for devil penis
Craze has a poster in the shape of a giant dick in his bedroom, but still he's bothered by a 2-pixel long penis. Weird.
Yellow Magic
Could I BE any more Chandler Bing from Friends (TM)?
3154
well you know
it IS the devil
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