Fault Line

By: Derek Yu

On: July 1st, 2010

[This is a guest review by Peevish. If you’d like to write a guest article for TIGSource, please go here.]

This month Fault Line was released.

I don’t know if you’ve been following Nitrome. I know I sure wasn’t. Their game Tiny Castle got a plug on the Indie Games Weblog as well as the AV Club’s Sawbuck Gamer column. And it was an interesting game, more for it’s idea that for how well it pulled it off.

But Fault Line has got me digging into their backlog.

In Fault Line, you play as a small and at least partially robotic hero working through a series of test chambers. Your primary ability: you can grab nodes on the walls and drag them together, compressing the Cartesian plane between:

It’s a really interesting mechanic. Compressing nodes can be used to attach separated rooms, to redirect lasers into breakable glass boxes, make elevators move through two levels at once, make mines disappear, and break connections between boxes that shoot deadly beams between them. It’s a small number of elements that yield a lot of puzzles. And the game does like to goose you on occasion, offering complex rooms with deceptively simple solutions.

Beyond that the game simply feels good to play. It has impeccable sound design and tuning, from the clang of every jump to the small amount of momentum your character builds up after running a half-second. While the flaunting of Euclidean geometry and test chamber environment does ring a bit of Portal, the game keeps a distinct and unique flavor. (It’s actually kind of interesting how many puzzle games are being repurposed into platformers and FPS’s.)

Fault Line isn’t perfect, largely since you can breeze through its thirty levels in as many minutes. Its mechanics are well explored but the game ends just when you start following its logic; many levels can be solved by grabbing nodes at random until a solution presents itself, and I only felt like I was mastering it by the second playthrough. Which points out its only glaring flaw: it would kill with a level editor.

Posted in Browser Games, Platformers, Videos | Tags: Nitrome

http://daintyrhino.com Dave C

I've been following them off and on. The usually have really good ideas, decent gameplay execution (nothing spectacularly inspired), cute pixel graphics, and amusing music. Their polish alone puts them near the top for flash games as far as I'm concerned.
xot

This is a really neat idea!
Nope

Well it's cool exept they seem to have taken the idea from “Kirby Epic Yarn”.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JP3slFnGIDw at 0:40

If they did take it from there, that wouldn't be the first time they did that. Anyway that would mean that they are either crazy fast with making these games, or it's just a coincidence.
Abaleth

Bloody Nitrome, they've always got genuinely good ideas, but back them up with mediocre execution, and a dearth of love. They're an incredibly prolific producer of games which could have been really great, but are merely so-so.
SirNiko

I really think it's unlikely this happened, since Fault Line was released prior to E3 (and obviously was developed even longer before that).

I think this was a genuinely original idea on the part of Nitrome.

-SirNiko
bateleur

I suspect the reason for the faults you find with them is that they have to pump games out fast to stay profitable. That's the reality of free-to-play games.

Nitrome have some skilled designers. I bet they'd love to spend twice as long polishing their titles.
PhasmaFelis

Nitrome to me stands for incredibly polished graphics and design, ginchy gameplay ideas, and paper-thin execution.

I would *kill* to see these guys do a full-length Metroidvania platformer.
anthonyflack

Okay, this is tangental, but damn, Kirby Epic Yarn looks hella styling.
Peevish

Messing around in Nitrome's catalogue, it seems there last few games have actually been pretty cool. Chisel is pretty neat as well (http://www.nitrome.com/games/chisel/). They've got a fair number of squandered ideas but they're starting to put together some respectable stuff. Fault Line holds up with some of the better browser games I've seen. But that's just an opinion.
Rockidr4

I reeeeally like nitromes stuff for the most part. It all seems to tie in with a theme of inventive ideas, cute graphics, and casual game play. Were I a better programmer, I would want to apply for a job with them. Should I get such job, I would be proud to tell my friends that I was on their team.
AGuy

All of there stuff is so polished, and yet so… not very fun. They take unique / interesting ideas and great artwork and just fucking MURDER the damn ideas. I haven't played a game of theirs I haven't found boring as hell.
http://twitter.com/jrjellybeans Jr. Jellybeans

I've been a huge fan of Nitrome for at least a year. They produce high quality, simple games that have tons of polish.
I do think that they're games are a little on the simple side, but there's an obvious ton of hard work in there that you can't help but respect.
http://glitchedgames.blogspot.com/ Ashton

great idea botched with terrible level design. the first few “test chambers” are kinda cool, but as they get more complex they seem more based on guess and check instead of actual puzzle solving. I think this is in part due to the unorthodox level design, and how unique the puzzle system is; the more complex levels would have benefited more if instead of having a bunch of useless (though cool) platforming challenges beforehand, we had more time to train and learn how to react in certain situations. it's a shame that they ruined such an awesome concept though :(
http://johnman.myopenid.com/ Johnman

Nice idea. Decent gameplay. No storyline at all.

Couldn't play for more than 3 min.
Nikica

Finished the game some weeks ago when it was posted on RPS, it's one of the best Nitrome games.
kris

Nitrome is amazing. Perfectly stylish 2D pixels and genuinely amazing games.
Vania

Its a nice little game.
As a programmer and designer though, it must be hard to accept that after all your hard work people will only play your game once.
Thats the thing about making puzzles, you must have great productivity, got to make them really fast so you dont put too much work into something with no replay value.
Jay

yeah seem to be the problem with nitrome.
the games look stylish as hell and have intersting play mechanics, but the levv+el design sucks and the games bore you to death.

this game could have been really great…. :-
st33d

it's almost like we were sitting in the office and going, “shit, we better release this before everyone accuses us of ripping off epic yarn”
Guest

Oh come on, they didn't RUIN the concept. I played through the game and enjoyed it. It could've been better, but it's not terrible either.
gamecreator

Beat the game. Enjoyed it. I got a 75% at the end and I'm not sure what that meant.

What boggles my mind is how you would code something like this, especially in Flash.
http://twitter.com/snoozenstein snoozenstein

I really, REALLY want to like Nitrome's games, but I never feel like I'm actually having any fun when I'm playing them. There's just no momentum or you're too focused on “how do I use the core design gimmick to get from point a to point b” to actually enjoy yourself.
anthonyflack

It seems like a lot more thought is required to design the levels than to solve them. I can see how the designer has been clever, but when I'm playing I'm NOT being clever; I'm just doing the obvious thing and that's where the problem lies I think.
gamecreator

Agreed. Guesswork will get you everywhere, sadly even in the later levels. But I'm not sure how to avoid that in a game like this.
anthonyflack

I suppose by removing the dependence on fixed nodes, limiting the mechanic in some other way so you can't just spam it, and letting the player find the right spot themselves, so you feel more creative when you solve it.

Much like the way you get to feel creative when playing Portal, even though the solution is just as predetermined.
Xhunterko

“What boggles my mind is how you would code something like this, especially in Flash.”

Really? Try this. They are simply moving the tilemaps together. Then in between the node points they call a visual effect in the center. Then every thing that is in that visual effect is in they're own background layer that would simply be covered up/ destroyed by the foreground layer. Now that the area is safe, the player just simply walks across. See? Not that hard at all.
Anang4214

It seems a bit more complicated than 'simply moving the tilemaps together'. Especially considering some of the diagonal connections.
Xhunterko

“Especially considering some of the diagonal connections.”

Still wouldn't make a difference. If you can have tilemaps move vertically and horizontally, they can move diagnolly as well. Just like a sprite would be able to. Basically, that's what they're doing. Having they're tilemaps behave as sprites, and add a neato effect to it.
http://twitter.com/CymonsGames Joe Larson

I said this thing needs a level editor when I commented on Bytejacker. Thing could live forever with a level editor.

I can't believe folk's poo-pooing the mechanic, saying it's simple. Slicing tile planes like that and then allowing you to run up or down them is not simple at all. You try it then get back to me.
st33d

It actually uses a stack of co-ordinate systems for each fold. And then the tiles are rendered using a combination of copyPixels and draw. That's what the programmer told me at least. The tilemaps suggestion doesn't take into account the moving platforms does it?

For a level editor we'd have to have a server that could hold them all and a full time webdeveloper to remove all the penis levels.

If people keep playing the games then maybe we'll get big enough to do that.
Peevish

Ha! That Bytejacker comment is where I first found the game! And I wholly agree with you. We've come full-circle… and now it's on Indie Games and Sawbuck Gamer.
JimmySH

I do wonder if companies like Nintendo get inspired by games like this, thinking of how innovative the idea is and the recently announced Kirby's Yarn.

It seems to have happened with the shadow physics games at least.