Ralix's game Reviews on Newgrounds

[Princess or Dragon]

It's a lovely Choose-Your-Own-Adventure kind of game, well done.

I have never seen the choices in this genre done using cards; that's a nice spin on the format. I also love how the cards start moving when you hover over them and how the continuation of the story is on the other side when the card turns around.

Sometimes, I wished there were three options to choose from, mostly because it's usually easy to mentally eliminate the one worst option, but it takes more thought to pick one out of three.

I don't think the game uses the inventory well so far… The only item I really used was corn, and I acquired corn just moments ago. Then I “lost” horses but probably didn't get to use them much, and I didn't see the use of any other item during the demo. You probably shouldn't be saving all items for some epic showdown with the dragon, you should be using those regularly to get used to it.

I couldn't get gripped by the narrative. I knew where I was and what I had been doing, but it jumped all over the place without a clear sense of direction or main goal. At least that's how I perceived it during my first and only playthrough.

1) You leave your village home, and guards need you to come with them
2) No red flags that I recall from the guards. You can even be polite, but you decide they're suspicious and need to flee (only a single option in two flavors)
3) You start stealing in the market (no option to avoid it)
4) You decide to go see the king after all. You go where the guards were taking you.
5) King tells you the story, instantly accepts your help offer, gives you resources
6) You revisit your home again, and leave immediately after you grab a fairly generic item.
7) Forest, marsh, village… end of demo

At this point, there are so many detours which don't contribute to the main story that I barely recall there was some dragon and a princess – most of the time, I focused on anything but that, so when the pinnacle moment comes in the final game, I worry it won't feel great because there wasn't much of a preparation, foreshadowing etc.

Also, you should link your Steam page directly in the description and in your profile; it took a moment to find. I think your thumbnail picture is needlessly erotic – I had different expectations about your game and was pleasantly surprised it wasn't, in fact, a cheap thirst trap; but a pretty nice adventure game.

The princess also looks somewhat younger in your static picture in comparison with the trailer, and wears different footwear. The short description itself looks a bit lazy – with emojis and a missing full stop. The long description also needs more pictures – you have a beautifully drawn scenery, use it!

There's a popular free course with tips about making a stellar Steam page that draws players in, consider taking a look; it might help:
https://howtomarketagame.com/courses/

In any case, good luck with the ongoing development, and I wish you a successful Steam release later on.

[Polycity]

It's a cool game, but perhaps just a bit fast.

Something to consider: What is my incentive not to shoot all the time?

My best run was sticking to the 2 o'clock position (which has very few obstacles), and just keep still and hold the spacebar. Only very infrequently did I need to adjust my position.
Enemies are too fast, and bullets aren't reliable when you move around (they're spaced out and not too large), so moving around is risky.

Is that the intended gameplay?

You could slow the enemies a bit, and perhaps ensure at least 1 obstacle in 5 will be heading towards your position (forcing you to move).
Possibly do something like “the score doesn't increase when shooting” or have bigger bullets with a longer delay.

vertette responds:

My hope was to make moving around a risk between staying alive and getting score, which is why the waves get semi-random at a certain point to disencourage sticking to one position for too long. Maybe "homing" enemies and walls would've also been a better solution though.

[Charisma]

Actually quite nice. It's smartly written so that the best way forward isn't just endless praise but engaging in conversation and returning compliments.
Sure, half of the game also involves simply selecting the option mentioning art, cats, or anime, but the game isn't long, and you have to learn these details first.

If you plan to add more dialogue, you could try to play with both aspects. I.e. keeping up an interesting back-and-forth instead of repeating the last word she said, also perhaps weighting in your latest responses (e.g. she thinks you're insincere if you compliment her 3 times within 5 conversations).
And with more dialogue, there's the choice if you want her to have the same hobbies and interests every run (so players can learn), or randomize them, so you need to learn and make associations during the conversation (but that would require a much kinder timer).

I don't know what the timer is based on, but it seems tied to the number of questions asked rather than your progress (or perhaps both?). Unfortunately, it means it keeps speeding up, so a couple of times, I was close to the end and made a mistake, and then it was so fast that I could barely even read the question, let alone the options or make a choice.

The “persist” option after she rejects you and leaves sounds a bit like being a stalker, though.

Additionally, in a pixel art game, it's important to ensure all pixels have the same size, and your world pixels are much larger than your text font pixels, for example.

Very well done for a game jam game, though. It's a reasonably scoped project that feels complete.

[Hunter]

I think this is unfinished to the point that I don't know what to “review”.

What are your goals with this demo playtest?

Are you looking for feedback? I could write a page of problems, but I wager you likely know about them.
Do you want to get the game in people's minds early? This won't help, there's not much to place the game in the back of your mind or get you hooked.
And what tips regarding design can I offer when the only gameplay is walking out of a room and shooting a few stationary skeletons?

I'm going to rattle off some notes.

– First impression, it's *way* too dark. Even for a dark, horror game, you should have some light somewhere to mark the path or provide contrast. The fires are the only bright thing I found, and they do not provide light. The skybox is pitch-black, too, and no real sky is like that; there's always a bit of light.
Perhaps check the game “Witchfire” which seems a bit similar to yours conceptually, it might give you some inspiration.

– Movement inertia. You're sliding over a wooden floor as if it was ice. It should stop you quickly (check the Physics material assigned to the floor or player).

– Skeleton AI and animations. They are the only enemy I found, and therefore the only example of gameplay. They are happy to be shot from a distance without aggroing on you, they move without animations, and when they start attacking, you *will* get hit no matter how far you stand as they perform the animation (seemingly no hit on impact, rather when they start the animation).
Why am I killing enemies, anyway? A rhetorical question to make you think about the design. Do they block my path forward? Do I get rewards or experience from killing them? Otherwise, wouldn't it be preferable to go around them?

– Jumping something feels weird. Trying to jump onto tall objects often blocks me from moving forward, even though I jump above them (can I change my direction mid-air?).

I started writing examples of missing collisions, minimap feedback, and getting stuck in a table (and the burning cart) I tried to jump on… but really, this is no time for that amount of detail because most things need work to become functional.

Of course, I wish you luck, please don't take it as dismissing the game out of hand. I hope you continue with the project, but at the moment, it still isn't in the state when people would actually be “playing it”, let alone enjoying their time.

[Pants Trouble: A micro-adventure about pants]

It's a lovely and creative game, but ends way too soon. Definitely understandable for a game jam game, though!

As for feedback, I struggled for a while to find the input keys to advance dialogue (X/C) and interact with items (Z/C). I probably pressed every other key (Space, Enter, arrows, WASD…) first.
Probably because the dialogue input prompt looks like a down arrow, and the interaction input prompt looks like a circle. Which doesn't help you to find the correct keys to press.

Then probably the battle with pants started too soon (I know it says Think Fast, but I was still in “reading dialogue” mode), I had almost no time to prepare or realize what was expected of me. Ideally, it should at least pause for a moment.

Love the melting Castlevania-style game-over screen!

The score is mostly indicative of the length, otherwise I think the game is a very good start if you plan to continue with the idea.

Congratulations on your first game on Newgrounds!

TeamCardboardBox responds:

Thank you for your feedback! We've officially decided to continue working on the game, now that we see there is a "market" for it.

[Arcane Board]

It is actually a very unique game with a cool mechanic.
Like Tetris meets Slay the Spire.

I played for a while (almost reached the boss), didn't really discover any “strategy”, and mostly went by luck and trying to match non-empty tiles. That sometimes led to blocking myself from completing a line with a lot of items because I left 1 or 2-tile gap, otherwise surrounded.
But that's part of the game, and I imagine I would've developed a strategy eventually.

Mainly I'd say the text could be larger. All the on-hover texts seemed to be quite small, hard to read, and tucked in the corner, so I naturally paid less attention to what the text said but it is quite important. It's small even when I open the tile summary on the map.
It looks okay proportionally in your GIF in the comments, so I don't know. Does it scale appropriately with resolution?

Otherwise, it's a pretty cool game.

Edit: My resolution is 2560×1440. So big screen, too. In the game window, the text is too small to read comfortably, with fullscreen it's better but still I'd say small (especially compared to the coin numbers or the "End turn" / "Skip" button).

FancyReckless responds:

Thanks for the feedback!
Some friends complained that the on hover is too big on big screens, so I just made it constant pixel size. I guess it's too small now on other ones. Can you tell your screen resolution? I will try to adjust it

[Julia's Basics and Early Development and Learning]

There's really not much to do at the moment.
If there's something hidden somewhere, I didn't find it. I imagine that will be the case of most of your players now, because I spent a while looking but everything looks so uniform with no clue as to where to go.

So my only comment right now is really to think about texture tiling for your walls, so you can stretch them as you wish without having looong blurry bricks on the wide side, and thin squished bricks on the narrower side. The tiled picture in “skybox” I can excuse as a creative choice and doesn't bother me.
Looking at the gameplay of “Baldi’s Basics”, they actually seem to tile the wall texture correctly. The bricks look crisp, the only problem there seems to be showing partial bricks at the top and the bottom.

Movement and jumping work all right.

And that’s all I could really find in the game right now.

Good luck with ongoing development!

JackELad responds:

Merci, so this is like just a test to see if the game can run ok on Newgrounds, It's been having a few problems while exporting.

but yes this is just a really really early development of the game where everything is just you know start of everything, I actually got tons of things done and fixed some stuff that newgrounds for some reason couldn't support, that update will come soon.

As far as like some gameplay stuff it is supposed to be like you found your old computer from 1999 and in it you find baldi's basics floopy disk for it but unfortunaly the game isn't functionally working correctly.

As you play the game in a very glitchy state you collect notebooks as per usual but there will be secret codes you can find within them, with the codes you've collected (being there 2 in each notebook so 14 codes) you will be able to restore the game to it's normal state.

Unfortunaly I can't share too much because I have a really cool concept I would love to add later as a twist.

[Total Wingage (original)]

I believe the spawn rate of falling items has to be bugged.

Within the first second of the game, *everything* falls down (you usually lose a life), and then there's no gameplay anymore, with maybe a full chicken falling every five seconds or so. Past 120 seconds, for the entire duration of writing this review, nothing at all fell, so I don't have anything to do anymore besides watching the best time increase.

Other than that, and conceptually, it doesn't seem like a bad game at all, and I assume it's just a bug and the player is meant to be constantly dodging and collecting falling items.

It also took some head-scratching to figure out what “hs” and “bt” mean (high score and best time…?). It would be nice to have those more descriptive, because when you start, it feels a bit placeholder-ish and low quality.

Since the background is a very curved hill, have you considered moving along the curve left and right as well?

[Meteor Mayhem]

The concept is quite good and has potential, but it needs a bit more polish.

I like the idea of dodging meteors, and gradually speeding up the spawn rate.
The indicator of a meteor about to hit is good, it gives you a clear indication of when exactly it's going to hit. And there are three separate game modes! All in all, cool.

The issue is in keeping the player occupied. At the start when things are slow, I can easily stand still and just observe the dots. The beginning of the game is the most important to get people excited, and the player should have something active to do.
One way to encourage movement could be having things to collect. You could have a score that increases with time survived AND with noticeable boosts you get from collecting e.g. something like fruit or fish. That would keep players moving all the time even when it's not yet as dangerous.
Another option is to gently tinker with the randomness, for example, ensure that if three meteors spawn away from the player, the next one is guaranteed to spawn close.

One thing I was missing is some “impact” from the meteors. Now the fully red circle is just gone, it would be nice if it triggered a sound effect and there was some sort of “cracked ground” after-effect lingering for a few seconds.
When you die, it also instantly goes to the “game over” screen and you don't really get time to process what happened.

Regarding game modes, they were a pleasant surprise, but a bit hidden in a submenu. It's also quite awkward to have to always select something there, go back, and press play.
Why not just have all modes on the screen with the “Play” button underneath each of them? That way, you make them more visible and avoid having to needlessly navigate menus.

I thought I understood the survival mode, but maybe not. In my head, I simply have to outlast the other copies of myself to “win” – but something I think I lost when the meteor hit my clone, and I lost when it hit the last copy, not me. I hope you're not meant to keep them alive, because you can affect neither where the meteors hit, nor how the cats move.
Or perhaps there's the same screen for “win” and “game over” which I'd say would be a mistake.
There's also a bug in the survival mode that the number of cats doesn't reset when starting a new game.

There's certainly space for improvement, but overall good job!

CheddarChees responds:

Hm, I'll try to fix all those glitches thanks for making my job easier and thanks for leaving this review!

But I'll also keep in the bugs that I like because this was a passion project