SAGE 2024 - Demo Sushi Tree (Demo 0)

Gonna be honest this is pretty rough.

To start, It's kinda weird to see pizza tower not mentioned anywhere in here despite the very clear references to the game, not seeing no acknowledgement makes it feel less like references and more like the game's trying to steal jokes and cover it's tracks enough so that people don't notice, while also missing the point of some of it. (Sinko being purple fried chicken when snick in the original PT was a reference to Sonic), and it's especially suspicious seeing the entry mention both Wario and Sonic as influences but not PT. And if this was meant to pretend PT doesn't exist, that's a weird choice to make considering the game got popular thanks to the event, especially when there's other entries related to PT.

Regardless I wanted to give this a fair chance but I ran into several issues, the controls are way too slippery and hard to control, you go from 0 to 100 with no easing between those speeds, and straight up climbing the walls is broken, every time I tried to climb a wall on the right the player would start clipping into the wall or simply just unducking under a low hanging ceiling would clip the player. I was going to give the game a full playthrough but the game just randomly crashed when I was trying to make it to the end of the first real stage.

I hope this does come back, I did find some of the original jokes here pretty funny and the players constant neutral face is pretty funny. with some polish and proper fixes to get the game more solid I think there might be something fun here, but as it stands it still needs work

Sharb said:

Gonna be honest this is pretty rough.

To start, It's kinda weird to see pizza tower not mentioned anywhere in here despite the very clear references to the game, not seeing no acknowledgement makes it feel less like references and more like the game's trying to steal jokes and cover it's tracks enough so that people don't notice, while also missing the point of some of it. (Sinko being purple fried chicken when snick in the original PT was a reference to Sonic), and it's especially suspicious seeing the entry mention both Wario and Sonic as influences but not PT. And if this was meant to pretend PT doesn't exist, that's a weird choice to make considering the game got popular thanks to the event, especially when there's other entries related to PT.

Regardless I wanted to give this a fair chance but I ran into several issues, the controls are way too slippery and hard to control, you go from 0 to 100 with no easing between those speeds, and straight up climbing the walls is broken, every time I tried to climb a wall on the right the player would start clipping into the wall or simply just unducking under a low hanging ceiling would clip the player. I was going to give the game a full playthrough but the game just randomly crashed when I was trying to make it to the end of the first real stage.

I hope this does come back, I did find some of the original jokes here pretty funny and the players constant neutral face is pretty funny. with some polish and proper fixes to get the game more solid I think there might be something fun here, but as it stands it still needs work

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I weren't trying to cover tracks, there are no mentions to Pizza tower since i just didn't want to be associated with it in any way for a bunch of reasons like Pizza tower fans not being able to see the difference between inspiration and stealing.
The sinko joke was from the era of this game when it was a Pizza tower fangame and i just didn't remove it from the title card, it's going to be removed in the next demo. (Snick is not even a part of the final Pizza tower game, it was just a joke character from the SAGE 2019 build)

The controls are not sliperry, you are just not supposed to use mach run with platforming. And there is really not much platforming for it to be a problem. I have no idea what is the problem with wall climbing since i don't seem to find any of your complains. The ducking is kinda broken but that's something that is not easy to fix (i tried)
The crashes is also just something i just couldn't fix in this demo. It was a pretty well known issue with Yellowish temple and i tried to fix it during the development and i didn't make the crashes happen less often. This is probably going to be an issue with yellowish temple that can not be fully fixed unless i remake the whole level and i'm going to do levels differently from now on.

This game has been in development for close to 2 years and the final version is probably going to be much better with a lot of issues fixed. The previous demo was a lot more broken than this one. I pretty much already made most of the hard stuff in the game and now only making new content and fixing moveset remains. The game will come back with new content eventually it will just take some time.

This game was extremely fun to playtest.

DogIsSus said:

I have no idea what is the problem with wall climbing since i don't seem to find any of your complains..

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It might be to do with the intro? when I started the first stage the player was stuck in a running state until I hit shift again, it might be to do with the intro cutscene and fix's itself when the game's reset?

Sharb said:

It might be to do with the intro? when I started the first stage the player was stuck in a running state until I hit shift again, it might be to do with the intro cutscene and fix's itself when the game's reset?

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There is an option in settings to make run toggleable but it's not turned on by default, i have no idea how the intro autorun can be a problem in the rest of the game

Sharb said:

Gonna be honest this is pretty rough.

To start, It's kinda weird to see pizza tower not mentioned anywhere in here despite the very clear references to the game, not seeing no acknowledgement makes it feel less like references and more like the game's trying to steal jokes and cover it's tracks enough so that people don't notice, while also missing the point of some of it. (Sinko being purple fried chicken when snick in the original PT was a reference to Sonic), and it's especially suspicious seeing the entry mention both Wario and Sonic as influences but not PT. And if this was meant to pretend PT doesn't exist, that's a weird choice to make considering the game got popular thanks to the event, especially when there's other entries related to PT.

Regardless I wanted to give this a fair chance but I ran into several issues, the controls are way too slippery and hard to control, you go from 0 to 100 with no easing between those speeds, and straight up climbing the walls is broken, every time I tried to climb a wall on the right the player would start clipping into the wall or simply just unducking under a low hanging ceiling would clip the player. I was going to give the game a full playthrough but the game just randomly crashed when I was trying to make it to the end of the first real stage.

I hope this does come back, I did find some of the original jokes here pretty funny and the players constant neutral face is pretty funny. with some polish and proper fixes to get the game more solid I think there might be something fun here, but as it stands it still needs work

Click to expand...

Actually now that i think about it i know way more about Pizza tower than you do pal. I completely understand every joke that i referenced from McPigs game that i referenced in mine. What you don't get is just how many references there are to other games and there will be a lot more once the game is finished. I never tried to steal anything and it's freaking rude to say that because i worked really hard to make this game unique and memorable. I tried to make fast paced games for a long time and pizza tower just gave me a perfect base for a game i always wanted to make. I'm not just cloning it.

DogIsSus said:

Actually now that i think about it i know way more about Pizza tower than you do pal. I completely understand every joke that i referenced from McPigs game that i referenced in mine. What you don't get is just how many references there are to other games and there will be a lot more once the game is finished. I never tried to steal anything and it's freaking rude to say that because i worked really hard to make this game unique and memorable. I tried to make fast paced games for a long time and pizza tower just gave me a perfect base for a game i always wanted to make. I'm not just cloning it.

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The thing is I actually don't like Pizza Tower, my criticism here is that if you don't want this to be pizza tower, aesthetically you have to do more to differentiate yourself from that game, if it was labeled as a pizza tower fangame or inspired by it then I probably wouldn't think too much about it.

But I understand that you've been trying to pull this project away from the pizza tower community because I can tell from your first response you've been hit with this criticism a lot. I understand from what you've said you wanted to remove the references so I won't hold onto that but the things that jump out at me are

With the protagonist, if you want my advice if you're still set on them being a chef then come up with a design that's more similar to a sushi chef then a pizza chef or come up with something more original.

The gameplay loop of your game has way too much in common with PT that it can't really stand out on it's own, the thing about being an indie game is that you can come up with your own ideas and own spins on gimmicks but with this it feels too much like a fangame, I guess my big question is, what is it about this game that makes it stand apart from PT? Controls, moves, powerups, enemies, level goals? I can argue that your game has things in common with wario land 4 but games like PT and Anton Blast also takes a lot of notes from WL4 and finds a way to spin that into it's own ideas.

I know criticism can hurt but I think you'll need to take a step back and think about why pizza tower seems to be a common comparison.

In a loop stuck is in my head 24/7 and I cannot get it out.

Sharb said:

The thing is I actually don't like Pizza Tower, my criticism here is that if you don't want this to be pizza tower, aesthetically you have to do more to differentiate yourself from that game, if it was labeled as a pizza tower fangame or inspired by it then I probably wouldn't think too much about it.

But I understand that you've been trying to pull this project away from the pizza tower community because I can tell from your first response you've been hit with this criticism a lot. I understand from what you've said you wanted to remove the references so I won't hold onto that but the things that jump out at me are

With the protagonist, if you want my advice if you're still set on them being a chef then come up with a design that's more similar to a sushi chef then a pizza chef or come up with something more original.

The gameplay loop of your game has way too much in common with PT that it can't really stand out on it's own, the thing about being an indie game is that you can come up with your own ideas and own spins on gimmicks but with this it feels too much like a fangame, I guess my big question is, what is it about this game that makes it stand apart from PT? Controls, moves, powerups, enemies, level goals? I can argue that your game has things in common with wario land 4 but games like PT and Anton Blast also takes a lot of notes from WL4 and finds a way to spin that into it's own ideas.

I know criticism can hurt but I think you'll need to take a step back and think about why pizza tower seems to be a common comparison.

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So the thing about Wasabi's design is that he is designed this way on purpose. The idea was not to make him look like a chef, but like somebody who is trying to look like one. And this will have a bigger impact on the lore and the story in the full game. I use Tofy Dox in all of the marketing since Sushi tree is more about him than anyone else. The story will dive a lot in what happened behind the scenes, why he acts so weird and why he want those sushi pieces so much. Wasabi is not THE PROTAGONIST, Wasabi is just the playable character who pretty much just doesn't care about anything what happens around him. I am very fond of the story i have in my head and i don't plan on changing it. The design is just something that can not be changed now.
making more aesthetic changes is something i am working on right now. Demo 1 will feature a lot of changes to a lot of stuff that i haven't been touching in years. I have already reimagined some of the HUD elements to make them look more unique and to make it look more in the Demo 0 standard i have created.


The gameplay loop is already very unique and has a lot of moves that don't exist in PT. Like it's funny how everybody just ignore the fact that i had created infinite double jump that is not unbalanced and is actually used in the levels in some places as the intended solution. The main uniqness of the game is that every level is just a big stage that doesn't have any separation like rooms or screens (It's really noticeable how pizza tower has room transitions every 5-10 seconds and that really kills the phase)
My idea was to make the levels like sonic games did it but without the "acts" system. You have a full level loaded right at the start and most of the new mechanics are built to have non-stop speed in mind (Rocket jump is a lot faster than super jump, Special button moves allows you to skip a lot of stuff and trivialize a lot of tasks and etc.)
And all this time i wasn't even talking about the biggest addition in demo 0 everybody seem to just completely ignore for some reason: The item shop. Items allow you to change some of the gameplay aspects to make your experience more unique. Replace drop boost with a banana boomerang to collect collectibles through walls, have an explosive teapot to destroy copper octagons to never have to use the RUN button or make your violence meter drop when you aren't running at Mach 3 speed to make F running a lot harder. You can combine a lot of these and the final version (and demo 1 for that matter) will have a lot more items in the shop.

I wanted to move this project from the PT community not because i got "Criticized too much" but actually because that community was not very nice to me and pretty much bullied me out of itself. If the only problem was people criticising the game it wouldn't make me not want to make anything for that community as much as what actually did. Some of the people who used to be developers on Demo 0 (The demo doesn't actually contain anything made by them) have harmed the games development directly by quiting the team after making me trust them. The line from the final words after the credits "DESPITE A LOT OF PEOPLE TRYING SABOTAGE THIS PROJECT" was not added there for no reason. I had an idea to add these people nicknames to the credits as "No special no thanks" but at the point of actually making the credits i had already stopped caring about taking a "Revenge" on them so i just didn't do it.