Aztez – A Game of Conquest and Brutality
5Feb/124

Action Button Dot Net

Action Button Dot Net is a website that has been recently put in my lap by one of its writers. It is an absolute GOLDMINE of sharp and painful truth (monofilament blade sharp).  Anything that swims through their highly critical frustum is most likely to get exactly what it deserves, whether you think it should or not, and having absorbed a key collection of the site's writings over the course of the last week I can tell you I feel like I've been repeatedly scraped over a whetstone. It hurt at first! Very very badly it hurt. But after repeated scraping, the white hot part of my brain that obsesses about game design (which I already felt was judicious and pure, albeit crude) now gleams in the sunlight, ready to lacerate at a subatomic level. If your are a game designer, you owe it to yourself to undergo the same process by really paying attention to what this handful of people has to say about the "games" we love.

Choice morsels:

I have even created a new blog category which will be used to indicate the responses I have to their joyous and light-bringing words. The category is "Conversations with ABDN" (the very category this post is tagged with) and can be used to monitor our exchanges, if that's your thing.

Filed under: Conversations With ABDN Leave a comment
  • embarrassing

    The only good thing that I liked about ActionButton is that it use to have a link to Insomnia.ac, so I’m very thankful that I found actionbutton otherwise I would never have discovered the best site on the internet.

    • Oh c’mon. Why did you just make me read that comment? I don’t care if you don’t like ABDN.

      By the way, I sort of enjoy Arvoesine. I wish I could set the controller buttons (they seem entirely intent on maintaining their default mapping) but I mostly wish the second and third strikes of the the character’s adorable combo were meaningful. Since every enemy flies back when they’re struck you never ever hit with that second swing and only awkwardly hit with the third while mashing. Why include it (genuine inquiry)?

      • embarrassing

        Sorry dude, was just enjoying reading your blog untill the ABDN stuff.

        Arvoesine has a lot of design flaws and don’t really want to have to touch it again, I’d much rather work on my new better game than spend time updating it (but if I can be bothered I may do 1 last update). The advantage of killing enemies with the 2nd or 3rd strike is that you get better ‘score orbs’ (and these strikes do more damage against bosses). I didn’t do enough play testing to realise that people were just spamming javelins the whole game and not bothering about taking the risk to get better score orbs. Though if I was to update the game again I’d introduce limited javelin stock, and the ‘score orbs’ would also increase that stock (and thus killing enemies with the 3rd strike would have a more interesting value to it). Yeah I just realized the custom input wasn’t working like it use to, wonder how long it’s been like that lol, I guess I may as well update it now to fix the input at least.

        • Sorry about the late reply. Been grinding on the game over here and it’s been batshit. Anyway, thanks for clarifying. Do me a favor and let me know when you’re next one is done so I can check it out. I mean it. And if you end up fixing that input thing let me know, I’ll download it and play it again immediately.

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Aztez is being made by Ben Ruiz (Designer/Artist) and Matthew Wegner (Programmer/Business), formerly of Flashbang Studios. It's set for a PC/Mac/Linux release in summer 2017 (consoles to follow).

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