Survival Ball and Rockbyte Softwares - Indie Game Reviews

Hello All Indie Gamers. Well, more Like “Poor, Hipster, Cheap A** People that play these games in order to be a part of that underground community of Douche bags so they can play games 'That No one has ever heard of before.’”  Yeah I can’t stand you!

But maybe some of you actually appreciate the underdog. They make you feel proud to be low on the corporate food chain of Game Development. Many of you that play Indie games probably appreciate them so much because you are in the same exact boat. Well, today I am going to talk about an Underdog and his work. This is about RockByteSoftware.

RockByteSoftware has three titles under its belt right now. AlarmZen, the first one, WikiQuiz, and Survival Ball, which we did a video review on.  As told in the video review “RockByteSoftware is a hearty little team of One.” At the beginning of January of 2012 RockByte launched with its first finished project called “Alarm Zen.” 

- "How long did it take you to make that app?"
- "A couple of days?"

Oh yeah, the founder’s name is also Pedro. Now when I was talking with him I was going to ask him the question “How long did it take you to make that App?” and hope for the reply, “A couple of days.” You see what I did there? I made a Napoleon Dynamite reference…oh come on its funny. But I decided not to because I figured that it probably took longer…and that I would have been a little racist

Alarm Zen is a very nice android alarm application that’s designed to…well…wake you up. But there is more to it than that I swear! Okay let me explain it like this. When we sleep our mind goes through different stages.

- Those beach whores aren't going
to seem so pretty are they?

After about one and a half hours, we fall into a deep sleep, and shortly after that we achieve a stage of REM (Rapid Eye Movement) sleep and then it fluctuates back and forth for a while. During our REM sleep stages is when we dream and thus forth closer to consciousness, so in this time frame waking up will be more pleasant. I know you may think the opposite of this because you are having the best, most amazing, dream ever with motorcycles and volleyball girls and steak! But say you just did a closing shift at work and you now have to do the opening shift right after, those beach whores aren’t going to seem so pretty are they.

You can choose a time based off of a sleep stage chart.

With this app you can just simply type in the time you want to wake up or you can actually look at a chart of sleep patterns and find an optimal time to wake up. What even adds to this madness is that this app can detect the energy levels of you music in your library and use it to slowly put you to sleep and to smoothly wake you up.

So that pretty much covers the basis of that. Now to talk about Pedro’s first android game which is… dun…dun..dun… WikiQuiz. Now I’m sure you can guess what it’s about. So let us talk about its variety and functionality. On the Google Play description, Pedro claims that ten questions are added every day. I’m not really going to doubt it. I haven’t run across a redone question but once.

The questions are all very interesting. Someone made a comment on the Google Play Store taking about the answer choices, “The answer choices don’t make sense, only one of the answers even seems logical.” It was at least something along those lines. What I would say in response to that is “Well, if you know the answer to the question, then it makes sense that only one of them would make sense.”  But I am way too Internet shy to go off and start a fight on the Google Play Store, so I kept the thought to myself.

Now when playing this I started to ponder my interests and saw how I should be learning more sophisticated and relevant things. If I can answer these questions:

Who wrote the episode Hide and Q in Star Trek the Next Gen?

What Native American chief learned to smoke cigars, and use eating utensils while living in Denver with White people?

But don’t know something important like “Who, in 1903 was the general superintendent of education for the Philippine islands and was instrumental in the total reorganization of the educational system.”  Then I’m pretty messed up. (Answer is David Prescott Barrows)

After you answer a question, right or wrong, two new buttons show up at the bottom. One is to continue to the next question, and the other is a link to the Wikipedia page about the person or event or whatever proper noun you are being quizzed about.

So this man David Prescott Whatshisname intrigued me. So I poke at my unresponsive touch screen that my cheap phone has, and after a few tries I am now able to take a gander at who this man is.

I found out this man was an archeologist, an explorer, and an educator. Every summer he would spend studying culture with the “American Indians.”  I know a lot of people say that Wiki has a ton of their stuff wrong, but I disagree. I’ve learned everything that I know from almost only Wikipeda. There are no such things as those so called “Native Americans.” White people were here first and then those people from India came over here to take our land. But we sure did show them who the boss is around here.

I know I’ve never qualified for a college scholarship, or made very high scores on my ACTs, but I know that I’m well educated. Everyone at my 8.00/hr job at the Yogurt Place and my girlfriend lets me know that I am. Although my intelligence may be up for debate, we are going to move on.

His next project was Survival Ball. Now if you watched the video then you then the gist of what’s there, but I’ll have a little more here.

In Survival Ball you’re a sad little ball living on a very sad and apocalyptic platform governed by an invisible God that loves to make your life as short and miserable as possible. 

You try to stay alive on the platform that you are set upon while enemies, or maybe their considered obstacles, or maybe…Dang It…their trying to kill you. Either by pushing you of the side, blowing you of the side, bouncing you off the side, or knocking the floor off.

The game is continuous. The “levels” increase as the timer rolls on and as you survive the waves of enemies. The platform never heals and it only gets more aggravating. If you don’t like aggravating then you can make it kind of frightening. If you get the “Theophany Majora’s Mask Music Remake” and play it in the background with some headphones on, you actually can feel the eeriness of the malevolent forces that govern your life.

Like in the video review, this game is for android and for the PC. Now on the PC there is a local Two-Player-Mode if you have two controllers or just a controller and a keyboard.

Now in case I haven’t instilled into your head that there is a video review and that you should watch it, go now! There a girl that actually plays video games reviewing it. So go!

But before you do! (If I haven’t already lost you)  I want to add something to the end of this; a conclusion if you will. Making games is hard. But the process is very intriguing. Things may start out one way and turn into something else even better. A team may have never even though to make a certain project but they did. A person may have never even dreamed of getting into a certain hobby, but they flourish in it now.

Now I want to interpret something I attained from Pedro’s Spanish Bible:

Yo no hablo españoles

“I started to grow curious, to dig deeper in an area of expertise that I was very fond of: gaming.”

“I started the RockByte Software with the AlarmZen app, one year ago, in order to have a "brand" that could house some posterior titles/apps. I made it that way because you never know who might join you for the journey, but for now, the team is just me.”

“Survival Ball was never meant to be in the first place, it was result of many fortunate experiences…. After doing a (YouTube) tutorial on physics, I placed a ball on top of a surface, and wondered what I could do to make it move with a gamepad.”

Sometimes we can’t just jump into our biggest dream, we need to slowly build up to it. Having a portfolio will help attract someone to work with you on something, maybe even your big something. And the last thing, if an idea comes from nowhere and it seems like it will work, try to at least pursue that as well. So that’s all I have. All those apps are worth a play/test. Remember to stay Indie!

Okay, Bye.