As its gamepage tells you, A Bit of a Little Dinghy is an MV game, created for the Ludum Dare 38 with the theme of A Small World. That contest began on April 21th, opened submissions 3 days later, and the judging will commence tomorrow as of the time of writing, on April 30th, while the results won’t be announced till May 16th. However, none of this had deterred the developer from already submitting the game onto the Steam Greenlight, with the promise of creating an enhanced edition to sell for 1-5$ on their storefront. I can see how this might look reasonable when given the impending termination of the service, and the potential increase of the Steam Direct submission fee. Still, having completed the game as it exists right now, I would say these plans are ambitious to say the least.

Aesthetics (art, design and sound)



The game uses MV RTP graphics + a bunch of real-world ship images, all edited to keep black-and-white look. The developer calls this an “1-bit” aesthetic: apparently taking cue from Papers, Please creator’s description of his upcoming Return of Obra Dinn (since practically no-one else seems to use the term.) Either way, I’ve seen something like this earlier, when Infection also rendered its bleak world in black-and-white RTP. It was quite effective there, matching the subdued, industrial OST and doing a lot to help sell the otherwise unremarkable zombie apocalypse. Here, though, the soundtrack uses the cheerful/epic MV RTP tracks + Rebel Rapture pack: the latter are still pretty great during combat, but RTP tracks don’t really fit the weakly mapped hellscapes like the starting "Yes town", screenshotted above. (Weirdly, the developer would rather address some other areas first, even though I would say they often look considerably better than the above.) Potomac, while not a good game by any means, did do something right when it accompanied its own sepia photos with various 19th century music. Such music would have probably worked better here as well… but then it wouldn’t have matched the writing at all.

Storyline



A glimpse of the starting island under the menu here. To give credit where it’s due, it has nice compact mapping, and the looping world map itself is a nice take on the theme.

As you can see above, the main characters are Steve the Engineer, Steve the Medic and Not Steve/Steph the Gunner, who spend the bulk of their time riding Steve the Boat. This appears to be a shout-out to/desperate attempt to get noticed by TVTropes (there’s even a pirate named “Stevebeard” later on). Most of the writing consists of this kind of humour that has glimpses of depth sometimes: a fireplace at your house used to burn tax documents, while your only revival item is Narcotics, sold by a woman named Fun (whose vendor sisters are Gun and Lun and regularly address you as hun) who gives you the first sample of “bags of fun” for free. The rest, though, is utterly forgettable, whether the long & pointless arguments in your party at the start, or the main story itself: a chain of ~5 short & generic quests you do for the Princess, with literally the most predictable plot “twist” at the end, capped off by an underwhelming “Thank you for playing” in place of an ending.

Gameplay



A Ship of the Line flanked by two Longships. Perhaps the most threatening random encounter in the game, and I didn't know of its existence until I went back to the game to get more screenshots.

The one aspect distinguishing Dinghy from countless other rmk micro-efforts is naval combat, which makes up the bulk of the game. The only land battles are some random encounters on the two largest islands: while playing, I encountered 3 compositions on the starting island (hornet + spider, rat + spider & 2 spiders) and 2 more on the other one (2 bandits and bandit + swordsman). Swordsman has either the Poke skill that does basically nothing or a relatively strong attack, which is the only slightly interesting thing about land battles. Otherwise, they are all dealt with in 1-2 turns, should you just spam normal attack (1st Steve) and Special Attack (other two).

The naval battles are more visually interesting, as there’s actually a rather large range of ship types, encountered in a truly random fashion. When I started playing, I first got the pathetically weak Junkship, and then an encounter with 2 Ships of the Line (most powerful non-story enemy), which I obviously had to flee. In between, you have relatively weak Galleys, glass cannon Raiders, durable Longships, balanced Caravels, and quite powerful Frigates, most of which can be encountered in pairs as well. True to form, your three humans are utterly incapable of even scratching any of these ships, and so they can only debuff the enemy (Steff) or buff their trusty ship (two Steves) as it gets on with the business of winning. The enemies will practically always only hit your ship as well: I say practically, because on two occasions, I did see a shot hit one of the crew while the boat was still afloat, which is always a K.O. for them, obviously. I’m not sure if that was a bug or a feature, and same goes with the way having Steve the Boat sink is not actually a Game Over you might expect it to be: instead, the enemy ships will round on the crew, sure, but the survivors can raise the boat with the aforementioned Narcotics. It’s kind of funny to see this in an MV game, when both A Blurred Line and Iron Gaia, made in ancient rm2k, had separate items used for healing/reviving their respective robot companions.

That aside, the naval combat is not really that interesting either. You DO have skills at the start, and they are all free with no MP cost as well. Nevertheless, your options are still limited: slightly raise the Defence or Special Defence of your boat with the Engineer Steve, slightly reduce both of these stats on the enemy’s ship with Steff’s Targeting, heal the boat for pointless 20 HP (out of starting 4200) as Medic Steve and do either normal attack or a special attack that’s stronger, but unable to crit, as the boat itself, respectively. Rinse and repeat on every turn. Levelling up provides you with more abilities, but many are straight upgrades of existing ones (i.e. Logistics II), and the choice between them is rarely interesting, and with the low difficulty and actual percentages hidden from you (you only get words like “slightly increase”, “fair chance”, etc.) it rarely feels like it even matters. Should you try to do Targeting II to reduce both Defence and Special Defence at once, or would you get better results with first using Bombardment II (special defence only) and then Barrage II (vice versa)? Who knows!

Since all of these buffs/debuffs last for three turns, I generally just cycled through them: Infiltrate (reduces all stats, and hence the only ability reducing enemy’s damage) on the strongest-looking ship, then Targeting on the most vulnerable one, then Bombardment, repeat, while Medic Steve goes through Enhance, Logistics, Cover cycle and Engineer one buffs special and regular attack (until he unlocks Repair, that is.) Steve the boat’s choices are again to either try for normal attack in the hope it crits sometimes, go for reliable damage in the form of latest strong attack skill, or use the latest version of a skill dealing weakest damage but with a chance to set enemy ship on fire. It’s the same set of choices every battle, since the non-story ships differ only in appearance and stats, and lack special skills of their own besides Attack/Special Attack, so random encounters stop being interesting once you’ve seen most of the combinations. The only times I had to modify tactics somewhat was when I encountered Frigate alongside Ship of the Line once (the former deals more reliable damage and has less health, but the latter can occasionally do truly devastating Hull Break, so prioritizing is interesting) and the last two boss battles, where you have the boss ship and two support Battleships, which clearly ought to be eliminated first. (Especially since either boss ship, if left alone, is often prone to waste time on self-buffs, thus giving Steve the Engineer a turn of free healing).

In another attempt at lame humour, defeating the enemy ships pretty much never gives you anything useful. At best, you get Ship Wreckage, which is still vendor trash, but at least isn’t as embarrassing as a Rock or Ball of Yarn, etc. These things sell for 15 Gold on average, and you get 15-40 or so by defeating ships themselves. Meanwhile, the items in the shops invariably cost several hundred gold, and Princess doesn’t really pay besides 600 Gold you get at the start. Luckily, though, nearly everything that’s on offer (and there’s a ton of stuff from multiple vendors), are the items for your human characters to wear or consume in battle, which are thus totally unnecessary. Meanwhile, you only can only install one out of possible three weapon upgrades for your ship: Trebuchet, Cannon and Artillery. It looks like a straight upgrade path, especially since there’s only minor difference in cost between the three, but they change ship’s stats differently, and each gives a unique ability – something the game totally fails to inform you about. Thus, the first time around I simply went for Artillery as soon as I could afford it, which lowers both regular and special defence a bit, but raises all other stats, and gives Sniper ability (powerful, reliable, and often inflicts DOT sinking effect – my go-to-choice most of the time). In reader’s interests, I loaded earlier save and checked out the other two. It turns out Trebuchet raises just damage but weakens only special defence and its Spread Shot is awesomely powerful when it hits, and may reduce all stats for 3 turns, but quite inaccurate otherwise. Cannon, though, raises special attack, weakens defence, and its Saltpeter Shot is basically useless, dealing lower damage then even your regular attacks with no chance of critting, only inflicting a defence debuff that’s totally not worth it. I suppose that things like War Horns (increases everyone's damage for 3 turns) or Spy Glass (greatly reduces target's defence for 3 turns) come in useful during the boss fights, though I got through the last one without using any.

Conclusion



This RTP pirate is the one who sells Trebuchet, Artillery, etc. He also uses bedside tables with drawers in place of countertops.

I wouldn’t second-guess the developer when he said creating A Bit of a Little Dinghy was gruelling. After all, it's no shorter then, say, Live to Tell the Tale, yet was made in 3 days, rather then a month (though having hardly any maps certainly helped.) However, the end result is just not all that interesting or compelling relative to many other games on this website. A commercial version of the same is unlikely to succeed in any meaningful sense.