DARKRGB'S PROFILE

Thanks for the review! I agree that 3 is the better game, mostly for the reasons that LordBlueRouge mentioned. I asked people for more gameplay oriented maps and that helped this game a lot (I like Kazesui's puzzle submissions in particular), but there were less people involved and the community wasn't as active as it used to be.

One criticism of Alex games was that some maps would be too long or break the flow. It's not fun to get stuck on a difficult map when the spirit of these kind of games is to be able to see what everyone else contributed. The first game suffered from this (aside from a few choices to skip maps), and the second one usually had a skip button. I felt the skip button was also against the game's spirit because some people were skipping entire submissions because the mapping looked sparse or it used RTP. That's why I thought the world map could help by giving people some context and freedom without forcing them to play everything.

Now that I think about it, the reason this one went back to being a 2 day game instead of 3 was because some of the maps in 3 were so long and elaborate, that I worried it might discourage less experienced people from making smaller and simpler maps. These maps were nice to break the pacing in Alex 1, and by 3 people were trying very hard to impress others. It did result in a better game, but I also like the simplicity and randomness of some Alex 1 maps.

For this game I only contributed the intro, world map, and the ending (mostly a spoof of Hideo Kojima writing). That was good because in the other games I barely had time to work on my own submissions and they'd usually end up pretty boring.

Thanks for the reviews! I was playing Alex a couple of years ago and was surprised by the general quality of some maps, so I ended up fixing some things and uploading them to RMN. I'm glad people were able to discover these games and appreciate the creativity of the community that made them.

These projects were a logistical nightmare, but very rewarding once you put them together. I actually like the factory map for example, but when I received it it had several game breaking bugs and was much more unforgiving (I replaced several game over screens with resetting sections). It was also quite long compared to most of the other maps, which breaks the flow. For future games this was mitigated by either a skip button or open world map design.

There are only 3 games (ALEX, ALEX III, and ALEX IS). There was a 4th one: ALEX JENQ, named after a member who made a much-hated map in ALEX IS consisting entirely of rap lyrics and no gameplay. Even though it got some very good submissions, the overall quality of maps was lacking (a trend that started with ALEX IS) as much of the community spirit was lost and people were moving on to other game engines or forums. Additionally, using the game title to make an inside joke about a member resulted in some mean-spirited and borderline racist submissions, so in retrospect it was a very stupid idea on my part.