Looking at…Item Haver by Videochess

Hi gang, while I’m still chipping away at Ato, I’m gonna go ahead and do a post on another game that I thought would be cool to talk about.

Item Haver by VideoChess

 

It’s a lighthearted exploration platformer set in a world populated by cute humanoid animals and powerful elementals. In this world, the wishes of animals are granted in the form of treasures and creatures called “wishborn.”

That precious (penguin?) boy is Item Haver and is a wishborn. And they gotta collect all the loot and equip cool toys.

It gives me vibes of kirby, paper mario, super mario, …uh…cavestory?…uh……call of duty?-…

 

 

Basically you would find treasures in the form of equipables and there would be two types, Gear and Arms. Gear are passive and Arms are active tools. Mix n’ Match and have a ball.

I love the sound of this, in fact it reminds me of a more in-depth version of Frog Hop’s charm system.

Frog Hop's Shop

Frog Hop’s Shop

In Frog Hop you could only equip one active charm and then almost as many cosmetic ones as you’d like. (Though as I look back on them, I would have done something similar to Item Haver with having passive slots and an active one (Though I probably shouldn’t say that or else I’ll get sued just like how Cuphead sued me and used my charm idea TM))

 

…Anyways, the code animation is very appparent with this game, it really reminds me of Yoshi’s Island with how the enemies will squash and stretch even though it’s a single frame of animation.

 

The dialogue system itself has some really great motion tween work too. The character portrait aesthetic is very Paper Mario esq. which is pretty awesome. Even the UI has that Kirby 64 look to it.

Just want to point out too that animating things through code can be a huge pain vs animating with an actual animation program. (At least for me coding animation through Game Maker is pretty tedious since there’s no visual real-time feedback)

 

 

The twitter feed itself is just fantastic because you really get to see all the little moments of compiled gameplay development progress. And yeah, 95% of the time you’re fixing stuff and 5% of it is actual content.

From my own experience every time you work on adding new stuff like a weapon, ability, feature or enemy, most of the time is spent trying to fine tune and fix any issues (Think of it like, you’re building a tower out of playdoh and then you decide you want to add a new section to it, well you got to make sure the new part is stable and doesn’t fall off or cause the whole thing to fall over).

Anyways, Item haver has another neat feature, a dialogue system. It’s got some really nice flavor text like shaking and sparkles.

Some great dialogue…

 

 

I enjoy the game’s twitter posts because of how you see some moments are created simply to just be fun for online viewers.

Oh yeah I did find the music for the game, but I probably shouldn’t disclose that…(don’t ask me how I got them, top secret C.I.A. classified stuff)

What I love about Item Haver:

  • Art style
  • Quirky Dialogue system
  • It makes me think of Kirbeh
  • It makes me think of Mahrio
  • It makes me think of call of duty video games.

I’m assuming it’s put on hiatus as Chess is helping out with Deltarune (it’s that unpopular game that very few people know about).

Anyways, I thought it’d be cool to talk about another random game I’ve glanced at in my spare time (which is 20 hours everyday of only looking at item haver GIFs and then 4 hours for the rest of the day contemplating my life decisions)

Thanks for reading,

-Brandon

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