Play my… “game”?

Hello, BLAEO! It’s been a while!
I’ve been busy. In case you haven’t seen the reason for that already, please come check out..

The Cake Factory

…over on SteamGifts and– oh… right, we’re fighting backlogs here, not adding to them.
Hmm…
Well, you gotta have a backlog to fight to be able to fight the backlog, right?! …right?… right!

“The Cake Factory” is styled after the classic adventure game format, and is entirely text-based and self-contained within SteamGifts giveaways and SGTools (SG level 2 is required).
There’s lots of reading, and a horrible time-consuming thief puzzle right near the start. (Pro-tip: check out each giveaway’s comments to see if there’s Hintbook entry!) If you make it past that thief puzzle though, there’s lots of stuff afterward that you may or may not want to add to your backlog, and even if you don’t find the thief, there’s still a few decent giveaways in the Cake Factory’s offices.

So far, eight people have fully completed the adventure, and I’m quite happy with the positive feedback I’ve gotten!

There’s just about two weeks left before the giveaway ends and the average time to finish the adventure is around 4-6 days.

I hope to see you on The Cake Factory tour!
And feel free to ask me for help (here or wherever) if you’re stuck.

My SG Backlog…

It was nice to “finish” The Cake Factory (I won’t really be done with it for at least another two or three weeks), since I could finally play some games after crunching to finish the project up “on time” (just a few days late!). So I went through four of my more recent SG wins and managed to beat two of them…

• A Girls Fabric Face is not bad for a horror thingy. I don’t usually play these, but this one seemed more polished than some of the jump-scare crud that comes out. There are multiple endings though, and thus far I’ve only finished the (worst?) bad ending. Still, it wasn’t bad. Worth the hour and a half I spent playing it.
• Mad Combat Marines is pretty dumb. It’s like someone wanted to make GTA and decided to take the laziest route possible for everything. It took me less than an hour to get all seven achievements. Being able to drive in it actually came as a surprise, but like the rest of it, it’s just… clunky… I’d be proud of making it if I were ten years old, and I’d show it off to friends then, but I wouldn’t publish it on Steam. Except that Steam is a store full of garbage already, so why not?

…and thought I’d also mention the two that I didn’t beat, but were surprisingly good!..

• Eternal Maze doesn’t look very good from the store screenshots. It looks like a fairly boring game where you walk through corn fields. But playing it… it would be right at home on a smaller handheld system like the Nintendo DS or similar. It’s cute, it seems to actually have good gameplay (although I’m only four levels in of around 20), and the challenge is pretty decent. It’s actually worth a look for a simple puzzley time-killer game.
• Andromeda Wing looks and plays exactly like some of the better scrolling shooters of the 90s. The graphics are that pre-rendered smoothed-out “3D” goodness that was all over games of that era. And it’s neither too easy or too punishing (so far… only one full level in). Definitely enjoyed it.