Nomolos: Storming the Catsle

Nomolos: Storming the CATsle is being ported to PC and is now up on Steam Greenlight! Please give it an upvote! Nomolos: Storming the CATsle Steam Page

Nomolos: Storming the Catsle has been released as a free ROM download. Op updated as well.

Thanks for sharing!

Awesome! Looking forward to playing it.

I played the demo. I'll have to check out the full version.

Okay I got around to playing the game and here is my review.

I might say some positive or some negative things, but at the end of the day just take everything as constructive criticism.

Here is the video. The video is about an hour and 30 mins because that is the life span of my camera's battery. After the battery died, I then finished and beat the game on the easy setting.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h_LLGOG ... e=youtu.be


Okay here goes.

- I have some issues with the title screen. The way that I believe that the title screen should work is that there are the two options. Start and then difficulty. There should be a cursor next to the option that you are currently on. The difficulty should only be changeable while the difficulty option is selected. Currently the difficulty can be adjusted at anytime and starting the game can happen at any time. I believe that these should be two different options.

- Story screens. When the cat gets kidnapped and the story is explained, I can not read the text fast enough to keep up with the changing screens. In other words, I can't read the text because there isn't enough time given to read them. You could make the screens last just a little longer or make them change at the players pace with a button press to advance to the next screen.

- The difficulty. The difficulty in this game is insane. I consider myself to be an expert player yet I could only manage the game on the EASY setting. This means that NORMAL and UNFAIR were settings that I didn't even want to try. Even playing on the EASY setting was incredibly difficult. Keep in mind that I am playing on original hardware with no savestates. I wouldn't expect an average player to be able to beat the game.

- Respawing enemies. While you, the creator can make the game anyway you want as its your creation, it is one of my pet peeves to see respawing enemies. Do the power-ups, extra lives and hearts (mouse) respawn once they go off screen? No they don't. So how come the bad things respawn, but the good things don't?

- Some of the artwork (objects) in the game were hard to understand (recognize) what they were and how they interact with the player. For example in one of the castles I thought I was walking on some red carpet and it turned out to be spikes. The game could also benefit from blocks where the player can pass through from below, but be solid everywhere else. There were many instances where I tried to jump onto a platform from below only to realize that its a 100% solid block. Remember that cloud tile from Super Mario World and SMB3. You can pass from below, but its solid from above.

- Level design. There were some jumps like 3 of them which were pixel perfect jumps and they were every unforgiving. There were some sections in the game which seemed to repeat previous sections almost exactly. Almost as if there was some copy and pasting of level code in some levels. Like I literally got deja vu a few times in some levels.

- There was some enemies which didn't have gravity coded for them nor a sense of the end of a ledge so that they just walked in air off of platforms. When I first encountered them, it was a little hard to get used to because they were defying the laws of physics.

- The mouse, which refills your life bar, it only fills you up 1 heart in easy mode. This small increment is often not enough incentive for me, the player to actually go for in many cases. Many times I will be low on health and see a mouse, but since it's so easy to get hit, I often get hit while trying to get the mouse. This makes going for the power up, not even worth it sometimes. Now if it refilled my entire life bar then that would be something to go after.

- No score counter in the game. While not every game needs to have a score counter if you put one in or even a time counter for speed runners, you encourage people to play your game for other means other than just beating the game. You can even do it such that the score is only displayed at the very end if you don't want it being shown during the majority of the game.

- When you die and get the option of continuing or quitting the UP and DOWN arrows on the d-pad don't work. If I am playing a game and I see options listed in rows, the first thing that comes to my mind is that I need to use the UP and DOWN arrows to pick what I want. But this doesn't work here.

- Saying the word "catsle" instead of "castle" makes me feel silly.


Now some positives.

- Boss battles seemed to be fun to figure out.

- You allowed the player for unlimited continues with no backtracking.

- There seemed to be some check points in levels so that you didn't have to start from the beginning when you died.


In conclusion, if you were trying to create a really challenging game that is hard as nails then you did it. The game is indeed really challenging. If you were trying to appeal to the casual player this one might be a little too extreme in terms of difficulty. But you can always do things to try and appeal to everyone. For instance make the EASY setting actually easy.

Let me know what you think about my feedback and thanks for reading.

Does Kirby's Adventure have the same problem?


I had the same problem with Super Mario Land. That game repeats whole screens so much that the first time I played it, I wondered if it was repeating because I took the wrong path, like the "maze" levels 4-4 and 7-4 from the first Super Mario Bros.


Likewise with Super Mario Bros. 2?


So does watching the movie A Gnome Named Gnorm or any talk by Richard Stallman about the GNU operating system.

Not a close comparison. Kirby benefits from respawning enemies because he absorbs enemy abilities. You can go back and get a specific one. (Except UFOs, perhaps. I forget.) Kirby games in general also sometimes bar your progress if you don't have a specific power. Killing the enemy whose power you need would be quite annoying.

Lots of games "benefit" with drops, but that gives less reason for specific enemies to come back. You could just progress further in the level to kill stuff. Unless you wanna grind for health.

So: Kirby benefits by not keeping track of enemy state. You do have to backtrack if you accidentally kill something. You don't have to do so potentially more than once to get the benefit. (Unless you accidentally kill the thing multiple times, but then it's the player's actions rather than a random number generator.) I eat the enemy, I get a guaranteed power. (Yes, unless two enemies are eaten at the same time.) One usually has to run the slot machine a few times for a health drop. It could be argued that allowing respawns gives the player more tokens for the slot, but... could just make it consistent like Kirby if allowing the reward was really what you wanted.