Ralix's game Reviews on Newgrounds

[Corrupted World]

It’s okay, but the game would perhaps be more interesting if there were obstacles, or the remaining time affected the score.
The starting position is randomized, but after that, you can always use the same tactic, and unless you create a dead end for yourself or overshoot your move, you will always end up with the perfect 99% high score. After two or three tries, the game can’t show you anything new.

[A Game About Typing The Alphabet]

It's a very straightforward game, not much to talk about.

The visual and sound response to typing is nice, the objective is clear.

After a couple of restarts, sometimes the game didn't recognise me pressing a key, which is a big deal when you are trying to type as fast as possible, yet sometimes you have to press a key twice.
It might be laggy due to performance, since I have other stuff running in the background at the moment, so perhaps it would be more responsive if this were the only thing I had open (on the other hand, I can't imagine this game is very resource-intensive).

It would be nice to speed-type things other than the alphabet, though (e.g. a paragraph of text), because keyboard layouts try to make typing real words easier, not letters next to each other in the alphabet.

If you cannot display the GameJolt leaderboard, there’s also the built-in Newgrounds leaderboard you can use, as long as you can call custom JavaScript in DragonRuby GTK:
https://github.com/PsychoGoldfishNG/NewgroundsIO-JS

Otherwise, no complaints. Let me also appreciate the detailed description and credits.

P.S.: Did you really type the entire alphabet in less than three seconds? :)

iamBraska responds:

Thank you for playing and for leaving a review.

I'll definitely look into the performance. I should be able to optimize a bit more.

Thanks for the suggestion about typing other words. I'll consider it for the future.

P.S. I did type the alphabet in less than three seconds. When testing a game like this you type the alphabet a LOT. The less I think about typing correctly, and just let the fingers flow, the lower score I got. It's hard!

[Tower of levels (and also doom)]

I think you did really well, don’t sell yourself short.

There are multiple different levels, and most come with a new gimmick. I love that there is a custom close-up death animation for every hazard; that’s a great touch!

The game doesn't go on needlessly long, and even ends with a narrated boss battle.

The running animation could probably be a bit better; it doesn’t look very natural.

Collision detection is also the reason I almost quit the game – the cyan level requires very precise jumps over spikes, yet the hitboxes of either you or the spikes are too large, so I was constantly getting unfairly killed from touching the “invisible border”, not the spikes themselves. Even when you stand still, your legs don't always touch the ground.

Overall, if the hitbox happens to be a rectangle, it doesn’t have to be all around the sprite; often, it’s better for player experience to make it a bit smaller (so you can overlap a tiny bit without being killed).

I was wondering what you’re going to find atop the building, the reveal didn’t disappoint. Although you should’ve told Bob it’s a great experience, and he should go as well (for making you go in the first place).

[Island Of Mine]

This is honestly a very fun concept, I like the idea of expanding your tiny island; utilizing resources and filling it with buildings.

I only scratched the surface so far, so I don't know if I'll still be invested after let's say an hour, but your screenshots showing dungeons and various furniture say I most likely would.

At one point at the start my map had a ton of exciting shiny new resources but I could only slowly cut wood and sell it at that point, but that was soon over and I had a variety of resources. I'm still not sure if some things are scenery or will become harvestable later with the proper tools.

I think I'm eating too often, and if I didn't start with full pockets of bread, I would probably be in trouble. Not sure how to get new food yet after I run out, but I'll get there.

I was also looking for a way to upgrade my factory, but either it's not possible or will unlock later, so for now, I just built a few more.

The first fifteen minutes were awesome and very well polished, looking forward to coming back for more soon, and probably for the Steam release.

Island-Of-Mine responds:

I really appreciate your detailed feedback! 😊

It’s possible to upgrade factories once you’ve got the Town Hall unlocked.

I'm still working on balancing the gameplay over time, so player feedback like yours is super important and helps me make adjustments.

Thank you so much for trying out Island of Mine.

[Oblivion Lockpicking Sim]

Finally, I can play my favourite part of Oblivion in isolation!

But seriously, it's a pretty faithful representation, the graphics are neat and the animations are fluent, you even took the time to add backgrounds and write letters with instructions. And there are named levels.

My only complaint would perhaps be the number of levels (or more precisely, the pacing – I felt the difficulty took off quite soon, I barely had time to practice with easier locks).

But other than that, really well done!

P.S.: Have you considered medals or scoreboards?
https://github.com/PsychoGoldfishNG/NewgroundsIO-JS

adayofjoy responds:

Haven't dabbled with medals before so I'll check this out.

[Free Fall!]

The lifeless initial roll of the bird, and the blank expression when falling is pretty funny to look at.
The game works, 60 seconds is the right amount of challenge before you start getting bored.

I though the bird is too much in the center, you can't see much below you and the screen space above you is somewhat wasted. But you do get warnings in advance about obstacles, so it's manageable.

You can also slow down your fall significantly (and make the game much easier for you) by rolling against a wall, which is probably a bug or at least an exploit.

There are no other mechanics as far as I'm aware – so it's a great, quite polished game jam result, and can be entertaining for a bit, but ultimately it starts getting boring. Since it's a countdown with no score, once you win, you can't really play again to “improve” your result anymore.

[Break the Chain]

I think the game can be quite fun and challenging once you understand the concept, but initially, I had no idea what I was meant to be doing.

Your *demo* has a list of controls, but it's not here. :P
So my first steps were trying to click everything – the chain, the ropes, drawing “cut” lines across to no avail. Then I clicked the restart button, thinking it was a “Rotate” button; something to interact with the game. After some button-mashing, I figured out only left and right.
There's also the invert controls option in the main menu, but a first-time player will have no idea what it means, and you can't change it mid-playthrough, because there are no in-game options or going to the menu and back.

As for the game itself, at first, I didn't understand why sometimes it moves just a little bit to the left, and sometimes halfway through the chain. I got through several levels just by brute force.
I think I was just ignoring everything white on the grey background (hard to see), so I blocked out the arrows pointing out where you'll move, and definitely didn't connect them with the gap. Perhaps if they were blue as well, to match the gap?
Sometimes it felt like I made a mistake and the level restarted, but I simply ran out of moves which I didn't see (the restart and go back buttons are *much more* prominent than the actual elements affecting the current level).

All I'm saying is that the game would benefit from an in-game tutorial before the first level, showing you the controls and explaining the goal of the game with a primitive example.

A minor nitpick, the Level Select screen has a scrollbar which isn't pixel art, unlike the rest of the game.

Besides that, it's a very solid puzzle game.

P.S.: Do you know about Newgrounds.io? You could post the final score to the built-in Newgrounds scoreboard so people can compete with each other. There are several options for Godot; it depends on your version.
https://www.newgrounds.io/get-started/

ProctoredGames responds:

Shoot, I forgot to include the controls and the explanation for this one. My bad, sorry about that. :O
If you hit tab or escape a pause menu will come up, allowing you to edit settings mid playthrough
Happy you still enjoyed it!

[Crazy Slime! [w.i.p. | Alpha0.1]]

For a work-in-progress alpha, it's quite good. A solid Mario-inspired platformer, nice enough art, nice enough character controller and physics.

If this were a finished game, there are a bunch of things I would be frustrated with, though.

Primarily, the controls sometimes seem unresponsive. Like when you're jumping off a ledge, sometimes your jumps don't register (because you're chaining jumps, barely touching the ground, and possibly trying to jump just after you left a ledge).

There's a few solutions often used in platformer games.
– queue jump input if you try to jump close to the ground but still above it (jump automatically once you hit the ground)
– coyote time (if you jump 0.2 seconds after leaving solid ground, still allow the jump)
Otherwise players will keep hitting space during tough jumps and fall, and blame your controls because of the 20ms difference between being on the ground and in the air.
More in-depth explanation: https://youtu.be/vFsJIrm2btU

Then I'd probably say the protagonist lacks movement animations, I'd expect the slime to squash and stretch when jumping or hitting an obstacle.

Good luck with the game's development!

Blue-Carrot responds:

ok, this game will fix soon at version Alpha0.2 for improve and better.