A downloadable game for Windows

As a TV executive, you are in charge of an illicit game of Battle Royale. One island, multiple contestants, several houses containing guns and a gradually shrinking circle of death. Your job is to control the drone cam that hovers over the festivities and make sure you record the best moments for television. The second game in my 12 games in 12 months Dev Diary project.

StatusReleased
PlatformsWindows
Release date Jul 02, 2020
Rating
Rated 4.3 out of 5 stars
(7 total ratings)
AuthorYahtzee Croshaw
GenreSimulation, Action
Tags2D, battle, dev-diary, Experimental, Management, royale, television, yahtzee, zero-punctuation

Download

Download
BRTV for Windows 44 MB

Install instructions

Unpack the zip file into the folder of your choice and run devdiary2.exe.

Development log

Comments

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(+1)

This is one of my favorites of the 12. I'm not much into Battle Royale games, but this is enthralling. I hope Yahtzee comes back to this concept and develops it after Starstruck Vagabon. I could see an enhancement where we manage sponsorships for specific players and some fan interaction that gives sponsored players buffs. 

This was one of my less favorite ones in the series, to be honest. It's a great concept, but I think it needs a lot more development to do it justice. There's not actually a whole lot to do since there are far too many contestants to keep track of with the manual controls, and the events are so random anyway.

I think my biggest gripe is that it progresses too quickly. Most of the contestants usually die in the first round, and it's rare that fights extend more than one round. It makes everything extremely volatile, which combined with the randomness makes it very hard to drag things out as you're obviously supposed to.

I think the game would benefit from bigger maps, reducing the shrink rate of the safe zone (maybe not placing one at all in the first round to provide setup time?), and those healing/defensive items you mentioned. I'd also have liked more information on what the stats and various weapons do, even if you can mostly infer them.

(+2)

This is legitimately fun! I find myself replaying it over and over. This is great as is, but I'd also love to see it expanded some day.

I do wish I could read the drone feed after the round was over, it has some fun story potential that gets lost when things are happening too fast to read. I will applaud the game for being clear enough that you get the gist of what's happening ("Heroic drama!") even if there's no time to read every event.

I also found myself having some trouble with the revive/kill mechanics. Not only did I tend to accidentally hit them when just trying to direct someone, I felt like using that mechanic was 'cheating.' I had a lot of trouble with the season where you need a good guy with few kills to win because I didn't want to use the revive mechanic at all. Instead of punishing the player for using it to prevent abuse, I wonder if making it a reward would instead work better? Like maybe you get one revive for completing a certain number of objectives, and have the audience enjoy the twist if it's caught on camera. That way players might feel more inclined to use it happily (without being able to spam it), instead of feeling like they're admitting defeat.

All in all, I loved this game! Great audio, clear visuals, fun to watch the chaos unfold, and a nice sense of humor without going overboard.

The only thing I don't particularly like is how quickly everything happens, and how random success can be. There's no way to pause, slow down time, or  think about how to direct things.  The camera range also feels quite small for the opening rounds of later seasons. The ability to drop items to specific players would also be fantastic, as I often watch a marked character who's supposed to get a kill get boxed in by several villains with much, much better weapons. Meanwhile, a character who needs to die is the only one who has a weapon in the near vicinity, and there's no way to really get around that.

(+1)

Made me laugh right from the start. The game objectives are clear but loose enough, and the controls specific enough, that there are many ways to try and win - none too direct. What you end up causing accidentally is way better than winning. I like it when a game says "here's fun even if it means losing". Except when I lose. Then it is clearly a bug.

  • Should a character really follow my instruction to walk outside of the circle and immediately die?
  • Zoom feature would help after round 6 or so.
  • Too easy to abandon a season accidentally via right clicked.
  • Hard to find quest people (those without special icon, no "click to find").
  • No way to adjust or mute music or effects volume.
  • Can't abort episode in progress.
  • Works in linux under wine (use winetricks dxvk).

Love it! Extremely addictive! 

Deleted 3 years ago

I know this is a necro but Paragon and Bulletstorm were great