CorgiSpace

You're a busy person, you haven't got time to read more than one paragraph: This guy made a bunch of games meant to be played in a short period time. They're small. Like corgis. Many of them are kind of annoying... like corgis. But these games are very, very human-made, warts and charm all, and the Pico-8 engine is great if you like your pixels chunky and your bloops bleepy and your gameplay simple. But I do have a lot of other words I want to write, so if you're patient, pour yourself a cool drink and sit down somewhere comfortable. This is a whole parcel of games, made over a period of time. As you play each one, you unlock a small designer's note for the game so you can read whatever the developer wants to share with you. Usually it's the genesis of the game, what inspired it and what he was aiming for. I like to think I saw him gain in confidence and design chops over time. The first game was clunky AF to play. The second was playable enough for one go (a handful of minutes). The third and fourth I didn't even remember, but he did a mention of UFO 50 which... well, more on that in a bit. But the fifth? I don't know what happened, suddenly we got somewhere in a hurry. Someplace good. And that, in a nutshell, has been my experience here. Some real moments of brilliance, and some moments of vast irritation. It brought Anne Rice to mind. Yeah, listen, wait, I have a good point here. Anne Rice was famous for a battery of novels, none of which I read. And, having made a fortune, decided she no longer needed an editor. What resulted was ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥, supposedly. Does she even write anymore? She fell out of my personal awareness ages ago. My point was that every creator needs an external set of eyes. Authors need editors. Game designers need testers. In the same collection you can see examples of excellent onboarding (Sebastian's Quest) and absolutely incomprehensible action (the gem game, the card-roguelike-thing, off the top of my head), or amazingly awkward control schemes (the very first game). User Experience is really key. Corgispace drove that lesson home but hard. If I were teaching game design instead of programming, I'd be making Corgispace part of the curriculum. I'm not hating, here. I just think that, were these my games and I were to do a postmortem, making player actions offer immediate, useful feedback, and ensuring the player knows what the game wants the player to do, that stuff is critical, and it's here this falls down a lot. Yes, it's true, some of these games were just written on a lark for a gamejam, so they're kind of rushed. And some of them were written during illness, or simple explorations of a concept. I don't think I'd be buying the software equivalent of a man's doodling in a sketchbook most of the time, buuuuut the quirky commercial on Steam got me and the price was fine. Most importantly, though, this has been an object lesson to me. Yes, the UX thing of course. But also that a game doesn't need good graphics if the game itself is fun. It probably won't sell a lot of copies, perhaps, but something made simply, for fun, doesn't need to sell well to be worth it. Simple mechanics, simple graphics, basic sounds, just a few controls, there's something for me in there too. Corgispace has been inspiring. I think I didn't like nearly half the games and I didn't understand how to play a few, and it doesn't matter. This awoke something in me that I hope I can push forward. I wonder if Pico-8 supports networking on some basic level? Hmm. I don't even know where I'm going with this review anymore. I mean I write these off-the-cuff and do a quick edit to remove egregious typos, but I know that when I'm talking about how this game pack made me want to do my own game, it's time to wrap things up. I had some fun here. I can't reccommend this to just anybody in good conscience, unless they wanted to get some retro on, or they wanted a good object lesson in both good and bad UX, but for me, Corgispace was well-worth the money. Even if I'm much more of a cat and German Shepherd kinda guy. Oh yeah, I stream and stuff. Curator. You know all that. Details in my profile. I can not bring myself to putting URLs in here.

You might find something in here you'll like. You might find nothing you like. Would I recommend it? Yeah, but if the trailer and screenshots didn't make it obvious, you're getting a lot of really short games that a developer put together over a period of time of very various genres. Some of them are easier to figure out than others; a lot of the time, you'll spend figuring out the controls. It's not a bad thing, just know what you're getting into. I ended up enjoying Prince of Prussia; it took a while to understand the movement, but after that it made for a good time. If you want to throw five bucks at a bunch of really small games that you really can explore in an hour-ish, this would be the game to do it.

Lots of fun little games! I enjoyed about half of them, which is remarkable quality given how picky I can be with my games. I think either Dust Bunny or Dino Sort *was* my favourite, but the newly released Space Corgi 2 might take the cake. Pick it up if you like puzzle games!

A brilliant collection of gems -- this is what indie games/game design is about! Beautiful thoughtful design and presentation, tons of clever ideas, and everything is presented in a joyful bite-sized way. Highly recommended! <3

I've only played the first game which was a stripped-down elden ring experience. true to the blurb on this store-page, the game took an hour to beat, but I was glued to the screen the whole time. admittedly, I am drawn to these small experiences packaged together, but I still think, if you only played one game in this package, it's still worth the money. looking forward to playing the other 15 games!

A fun collection of games for a great price

You get no clue how to do anything in this, not even how to launch the individual games. Checking the controls sort of helps, showing you the three keys assigned to the two fire buttons...? How does that work? Who the hell knows. Certainly none of the games bother to tell you. People tend to forget that real retro games always had a manual, and many of them also had explanations of essentials on screen as well. I find it frustrating at best when games try to "recall the good old days" and forget what actually made them tolerable.

I boughted this and was promised a collection of games for my PC instead I got wut looks like the developer's dairy and got absolutely (and this is a dealbreaker) brute-forced political issues on my screen shoved down my trout. I will not be standing up for this.

A wonderful compilation of tiny games. It's a great resource if you want to learn how Adam approaches game design, both from his in-game notes and the gameplay itself. I found it equal parts inspirational and fun.

Еще одна игра, повторяющая формулу UFO 50, с набором картриджей для выдуманной консоли (недавно проходил в таком же духе Last Call BBS от Zachtronics). Здесь эта консоль - не придумана специально для этой игры, уже была создана, как и средства разработки для нее. Pico-8 - крохотная, ближе всего к Game Boy Color или чему-то подобному. 16 цветов, квадратный экранчик, четыре стрелки и две кнопки действия - очень похоже. В коллекции - изначально 13 картриджей, потом разработчик добавил еще. Концепция - “корги-игры, игры на коротких лапах”, то есть попросту - короткие очень игры. Качественные и остроумные, но по продолжительности - от 10 минут до пары часов. Но это и здорово: я в итоге прошел намного больший процент игр до конца, и в целом - получил больше удовольствия. В UFO слишком велико было число игр, которые быстро бросал; много был картриджей с откровенно странной и вымороченной концепцией, слишком сложных, с слишком нестандартным или неудобным управлением... эксперимент ради эксперимента. Ведь все равно у нас такая чертова куча картриджей - что-то в этой куче обязательно найдется для нас. И это так - действительно находилось. Здесь же игры больше похожи друг на друга, большинство - так или иначе паззлы, нет откровенно странных тайтлов, в каждой игре, как правило - какая-то одна остроумная идея, вокруг которой все построено. Каждая игра стремится быть увлекательной и удобной. В общем, я бы рискнул даже сказать - игры Corgispace лучше игр UFO 50.