Let’s talk about Child of the Ruin, made in 72 hours, by a group within the Indie Game Academy!

This is a perfect game to kickoff this series with because this is a game that came together so quickly and impressively which I got to see unfold on LinkedIn. Please keep in mind this is a three day turn around, and to see what elements were prioritized is the goal of my analysis. What came through well?

Intro To pixels+

This new series, pixels+, will be a game review series. It will live on as a subset of my ongoing series pixels + progress. I want to highlight game jams games, and indie games and talk about what I love about them from a game design perspective. What could be added? What is impressive for the scope of a project? My hope is to give back to the community some understanding of all it takes to put games that you play in front of you.

Back to Child of the Ruin, a quick turn around of a game, and a wonderful experience. Here are some of my favorite things about this game:

The Itch Page

I wanted to start off with the attention to detail and layout of this itch page. The understanding of what a player would need to see to understand this game, it’s world and characters, immediately comes through with this page. Not only is the art amazing, we get screenshots of gameplay, and detailed descriptions straight away.

Cohesive World Design

The art at the beginning, along with the character design, UI design, and environment design did a good job of sticking to the world building theme. The color scheme, and animals selected all gave the vibe of a fantasy, whimsical world.

In terms of UI, I believe there was a template used, and so not all of the sprites fit into the character bubbles all the time. There were a few empty ones, but the font was readable, dialogue options wrapped in fantasy-esqe boxes, but still a very cohesive theme.

Music/Audio

The music was kept dynamic the whole time. It changes enough that you really feel the thought put into it. Perfect for an adventure RPG, didn’t feel repetitive, was new as the story progressed. Calming, encouraging. The voice acting was top tier for the statues you came across, revealing the lore as you went was a great way to tell a story. Props to the voice actors, they really nailed the fantasy voices.

What I Would Love To See

SFX: I would have loved to see some sounds on the dialogue scrolling or button presses.

Dynamic Camera: I would love to see a moving camera, or at least a camera that I can change/adjust, because there were some portions of the game were my view was obscured. I could not see particularly where I was going and maybe that was intention, but the camera angle being fixed (outside of the dialogue driven portion of the game) was difficult at times.

Pause Menu: The ability to at least reach other parts of the games, for example, settings. The ability to pause would be great. I do not think the game is long enough to warrant a save feature, but a pause menu would be a good halfway point to that.

Combat Clarity: It took me a minute to understand the combat system, this could have been me, but this also I believe can be quickly fixed with a color code of elemental attacks. My reasoning for this is that it took me two turns to understand that there was advantages/disadvantages to certain attack because it was elemental based! Perhaps a tutorial or more simplified UI would suffice.

Overall, I am extremely impressed with what this team was able to spin in three days. People don’t realize how much work this takes, and for the short time, was insanely impressive. Props to Indie Game Academy.

Go check it out here: https://trensharo.itch.io/child-of-ruin

See you next time ✨