Ralix's game Reviews on Newgrounds

[Pixel Odyssey]

Honestly, this is a large and ambitious game, entirely let down by the framing and intro sequence.

Before I have any clue what the game is about, you're in a room, manually starting a PC game. Will this ever be relevant in the game, or support its core gameplay or narrative? There are mentions that you've been trapped inside, but unless it has a proper payoff later…
The room is okay; nothing special. Plain walls and ceilings, default Unity skybox outside, a chair you're not sitting on, a light that flashes as you look up and down, a very thin table, a perfectly reflective ball and a bunch of props. Weirdly you can't turn a full 360° angle, but you can turn further to the right.
The in-world Options menu is very interesting, the gun prop is also nice, as you get to use that gun later in the game.
But overall I don't see a reason to keep this in, as this will decide the first impression of people going into your game, and it's not what the game is actually about.

Then you start playing and get a lengthy intro and explanation of many mechanics and again, I don't think you need it.
Firstly, an infodump like this without experiencing it in the game is not something players will remember, and some things I believe people would intuitively understood right away or soon after encountering them in the game. Like red blob = health. Or you could have a brief onboarding level at the start (so you begin with actual gameplay, and learn the purpose of the items by seeing them in context and using them – e.g. see something like the Half Life training room). Or pause the game and show an explanation the first time you collect something.

So I believe I would have a better first impression if I just appeared in a room with many portals without the explanation and learned as I go. Remember this is a web game, and when you let people go for five minutes without experiencing gameplay, many turn away.
I wonder what would the player drop be if you used the Newgrounds.io API for events and added analytics for "started game", and "entered first portal".
https://www.newgrounds.io/help/components/#event-logevent

The goblins' level is the first one with proper gameplay I'd say. It's when I started to have fun and when I realized the scope of the game. It took a moment before I realized I need to select my weapon AND reload before being able to use it, though.

My main takeaway is that I'd prefer fewer, but smarter, more tactical enemies with different attack patterns. There's too many for the starting weapon you have, so you either stand in cover so you shoot enemies coming only from one direction, or run around in circles with an ever-growing horde of enemies chasing you around.

The goblin level at least had more types of enemies and status effects and a clear goal, the night level with zombies (?) and wendigos (?) was all about running in circles until they gradually took me down.
Then I somewhat lost interest to try again for the time being and never got to unlock a new weapon or an ability. Perhaps later.

Other things:
– the glyphs in the pirate level are bugged, I cannot pick them up with 'E' as suggested (luckily you can return to the Hub via options)
– the projectiles shot by the goblins look weird, at first I didn't realize they're supposed to be arrows
– the orbs can appear inside each other and overlap
– it would feel nicer if the enemies had some kind of hit reaction, a brief recoil. There's the on-hit particle effect, but it doesn't *feel* like your bullets are truly affecting the enemies.

As I said, this is a very ambitious project, with a lengthy intro before you can experience the gameplay – which is pretty fun, but has its own flaws and space for improvements.

EDIT:
Thanks for replying with the explanation and considering my suggestions.

One thing many games do and you could maybe try, is starting with the core gameplay already in one of the levels, and then showing the intro and explanation as a flashback when you first return to the hub area (“Don't you remember how you got here?”), when people will be more receptive to hearing more information.

In any case, good luck, I hope you get to finish this and turn it into the game you envision.

leoinpharoh responds:

Thank you! This is a fantastic feedback and we appreciate it. This is our first iteration of the game that we have gotten up on the web and it is a project that has taken up a lot of time. It is definitely not perfect in anyway, and I think your feedback is very helpful in getting us in the right direction.

I'm going to be looking at adding a new tutorial that is more engaging than just an info dump and with more implications on WHY you start in that room and such later down the line. It is part of the lore it just isn't put in just yet.

But thank you so much for at least trying our game!

[Pico Clicker (Pico Day 2024)]

The clicker itself is fine. There are goals (to earn all medals), the click differences between them are well-designed. The next step always feels “achievable” and “close” so you never feel like now is a good time to close the game because going further is not worth the effort. The final threshold isn't too bad (it's not some insane stretch that would take hours, or force you to get an autoclicker).
There is visual feedback to clicking and even on hover, so it feels fun.

I do have issues with the upgrades.

First of all, balancing. You have three available upgrades
– the first one gives you +1 for 100 (+5 for 500)
– the second one gives +2 for 250 (+4 for 500 (!))
– the third one gives +5 for 500 (+5 for 500)
Usually, the idea is to give more click power for costlier upgrades, so you get more value for powering through with less power and saving up.
Here, there's no reason to wait for +5 (it saves you four clicks over clicking +1 five times), and you actively get less for +2.
I'd expect something more in the range of: 100 → +1, 250 → +3, 500 → +7, so it's always advantageous to save up.

Then you can't actually purchase the upgrade when you have “100”; you have to have at least 101 to confirm.

But the bug with not unlocking medals sucks, and I imagine will be what will annoy most people, as you will achieve the goals, but don't get the reward.
I was unable to unlock 2500, so I restarted and bought only under ten upgrades and pushed through to 2500 and much further beyond, only to not unlock anything again. So what actually does “excessive clicks” mean? Surely it can't mean ten upgrades is too much.

Well, I reset the 250 medal a few times to figure it out. You have to hit the number exactly.
I purchased +1 at 101 and nothing else, and therefore eventually went 249 → 251. But when I did the same at +2, I went 248 → 250 → 252 and the medal unlocked.

If I'm right about this, then a significant amount of people (pretty much everyone who doesn't follow rounded values with multiples of ten) will eventually miss a medal.
I don't know how the conditions for unlocking a medal are implemented, but since you know all values (clicks, click power and medal threshold), you should be able to check for the exact click that will unlock a medal even if you don't hit the exact threshold.

This is the most annoying problem I had with the game, but otherwise as I said, everything else is really fine and it's a good clicker.

[amazing clock!!11!1]

I like that it uses the actual time in your time zone.

You could include the ticking sound as a premium feature. And different clock colours.
And a pendulum.

Edit: I understood premium was a joke. :)

EuropeanRat responds:

Premium was a joke, and i already tried to change clock stuff (pendelum and clock coluors) but it got too much lag/delay/fps drop. :(
Edit: It was meant to look like a crappy play store app with every second 297 ads. Thats why i put premium joke ofc

[cool kalculator!!11!1]

Wow, a free calculator with no ads! Bookmarking immediately!

It's a calculator, we've all seen one, so I'll just list some observations:

– Dividing by zero gives you Infinity, and 0/0 is NaN. Wow, impressive. You should probably have a syntax error, too, if you enter no numbers at all and just the operand, it still gives you the result.
– Having no operand and just a number should give you the same number (now it does nothing)
– Entering decimal numbers is broken
– There's some weird spacing when entering subtraction and division
– There's no way to enter negative numbers
– If you get a result, and press an operation, it should use the result as the first argument. That way, you could get around the absence of parentheses and the inability to enter multiple operands, now you can't, so you can only perform a simple calculation

Edit:
Updated the rating; most things were fixed and I also noticed it works on mobile, so that's pretty cool.

EuropeanRat responds:

Im done with the most of them now, but 4 cant be fixed. Thats a problem in the programming language, not the code. Edit: It can work on mobile, but emm, you would need a fast one since i tested it on a phone, we dont talk about speed and lag right? Okay then nevermind

[Ducksplosion]

It's a neat little game and a cool idea, but it's over too quickly (but I can see more levels are coming soon).

I felt everything is maybe too close together, making the screen seem a bit cluttered, giving the duck less space to manoeuvre. Perhaps try zooming out (and speeding up the rockets to compensate), it would also open you more options for new enemies for the future levels.

The difficulty scales up well in the three available levels. The rockets are homed in on the player (good, otherwise you could probably hide near the edges to avoid everything), but it also makes the screen edge very important, as the ultimate tactic is to lure everything to one side of the screen, and then flip over to the other where you have free rein. The other tactic is to destroy everything before they shoot too many rockets.

Perhaps the rockets could turn towards the duck?

There is no sound whatsoever, which hurts the enjoyability somewhat.

If you get killed after winning before, it relocks the Levels menu. This probably shouldn't happen.

The Newgrounds resolution doesn't match the Unity game resolution (+32 for the bottom panel), which adds a huge, unused black rim around the game. The “Back to Title” button in Levels and Credits also isn't anchored properly to the screen border, so it is cut off slightly until you go fullscreen.

I like that you can play with the duck in the main menu and it loops around as well. I wanted to say perhaps the duck could be visible on both sides of the screen while it's halfway through, and while moving it very slowly, I noticed it does happen – for a single frame or so. Also, the duck becomes half-transparent and disappears when the screen loses focus, so now I'm not sure if it's intentional. Either way, you will never notice a single frame during gameplay while moving fast, and all those frames when you can only see half of the duck don't have the same transition effect.
So if you would like the players to notice it, add it to the other transition frames as well.

An important rule of pixel art is also to make sure all pixels are of the same size, i.e. you don't mix different sizes in different objects. It's not as noticeable here, but looking at the main menu, the grass definitely has larger pixels than the duck.

Winning should also probably do something more interesting than just kicking you back to the main menu.

PikaconYT responds:

Wow ty for taking your time to write this and leaving feedback. I will start to improve on the suff you have said. ty again.

[Lupa]

It's a pretty okay game, and certainly a better version of the original Lupa, if I remember it well. There's a clear goal, a timer, gradual difficulty increase.
And since it seems you'll still be adding new things and improvements judging by the main menu (version 0.1, shop coming soon), it'll get even better. Well done!

As for things you might want to consider:

– Interactive gameplay elements should be distinguishable from the background. Here it sort of blends in. I'd try making the coin and rockets shine more, or have an outline. Before I went fullscreen, my first thought was “a little shark”, not a rocket.

– The player is visible well enough since nothing else is white, although using a plain cube might feel placeholder-ish. Perhaps think about visual style you want to go for, i.e. overall art direction. A fenced grass area evokes a farm or a suburban house, white blocks evoke a heavily stylized game, and rockets warfare or technology. All together, they don't exactly match.

– Regarding jumping, it would be helpful if the cube had a shadow directly underneath, so you can accurately judge your height and tell where you'll land.

– The absence of any sound effects hurts your 'game feel'. You could make picking a coin feel much better if there was a little jingle, perhaps a mild screen shake.
The same goes for a rocket hitting you; now it simply resets the game without much else (e.g. death effect, showing you your coin/score total etc.).

– The game is shown in perspective, but you're not utilizing the perspective for gameplay yet (e.g. by having obstacles, or anything where things can get behind each other). But it makes coins in front harder to see (since you're viewing them from almost the top), and things in the back appear smaller.

– It's always a gamble to go near the edges, as a rocket can spawn anywhere instantly and you can't tell where, so you're betting on being lucky enough for the moment you need to be there. Some games deal with this by showing arrows near the edges a few moments before the spawn happens, or by spawning missiles further from your playable area, so you have always have time to react.

– You can hide the 'Exit' button in a WebGL game, pressing 'Exit' will simply freeze the game until you refresh the page, which seems like a bug, and it's unnecessary to be able to quit a web game when all you need to do is close the entire tab.

– If you use the 'Default' Unity template which adds the bottom fullscreen bar, you need to add +32 to the vertical resolution here on Newgrounds, otherwise, it gets cut off.

– The “Shop” in the main menu hints that you'll perhaps be able to purchase upgrades and other items with collected coins, which would definitely be a huge plus. After that, I wonder what the end goal of the game is supposed to be.
Is it complete X levels? Collect X coins in total? Beat your best score? Make sure the shop items tie into it and help you “get better at it”.

– Also to help you attract more players; one almost guaranteed way to do so is to introduce medals and scoreboards to your game. Medals also help you show what the goal of the game is (there are many players who hunt down games with medals to unlock them all), and scoreboards will give you a simple way to record the best score of players, and have them compete with each other (to some small extent).
See here: https://github.com/PsychoGoldfishNG/NewgroundsIO-Unity

So congratulations on releasing the remastered version, it *is* a pretty big improvement over the original and I hope you'll really get to add the things you wish; so that eventually, we will see the version 1.0 you envision.

Elooke responds:

the shop is working

[Potatype [The AI Game]]

The models are great and look fun. It's my first time seeing a vegetable ship or a broccoli horse.

The dance battle aspect is not something I find enjoyable, there's just not a lot of fun in “smash as many keys as fast as possible”, especially if you need to do it for a while, and with all characters.
I suppose it would be more interesting if there was e.g. some pattern to follow, or another gimmick in the fight you can learn to do “well” and perfect with skill or experience.

But I admit I was most curious about the AI dialogue.
Kudos for implementing it, it's impressive. I was mainly trying to find out how well it works – e.g. if all the characters have a unique personality and how well they react when asked about the world and situation they're in.

The Chill Tomato is aware it's a tomato (good) – even when asked for its Latin name, says it's chill and chilling at *every* damn opportunity, and the dialogue looks like it would match its personality (“hey bro”, “I legit laughed hard”).
I told it I'm a tomato (“glad to have you join our ranks :)”), asked for my middle name (“Tater Mash”) and then full name – which seems to be “Potato Tater Mash Tomato”. Nice.

The problem is trying to get anything of substance out of it. Asking what the goal of the game is (or what I should be doing) gives you a very emotionless speech about finding happiness in life and making every day count.
Asking about other characters to beat gives you a list of various vegetable gangs, asking about other *tomatoes* to have a dance battle with gives you a list of made-up tomatoes, none of which are actually in the game. “What's your greatest fear?” gives you a philosophy essay about losing loved ones and being forgotten and I get no interesting reaction when I reply my favourite meal is a tomato. I feel it says “I see what you did there” or “I laughed hard” whenever it has trouble coming up with an answer.

But I'm impressed that I asked Redbeard about the name of his vessel (Scarlet Scallywag), and if he wants to change its name – he agreed and came up with Red Rogue, and correctly referred to the ship as such when asked later. Oh, and he says “we be sailing through stormy seas” when asked about the weather. But it might just be him losing his marbles.

So I think it's a very impressive gimmick to play with for a while, but it mostly gives you unique random banter, as long as your questions stay on topic with the character you're talking to.
The characters might benefit from an expanded shared set of instructions that tie them together, e.g. what are the other characters, what the world around is like, what are you all doing here, what the player should be doing etc.
I wonder what it would look like if you had to question the AI about a potential crucial piece of information you need to progress in the game. I imagine it would be either very easy or very hard depending on the line of questioning used.

I think I encountered a bug that stopped the “Thinking” label from appearing, so the game always looked stuck for a while after clicking on “Speak”. And the fact that characters repeat their last line when you talk to them later also doesn't seem quite right.

All in all, it's amazing what you managed to put together within the scope of a short game jam, and I've been curious to try a game that utilizes AI dialogue for a while, but beyond this simulation aspect, I don't think I would have a lot of fun playing the game in its current state for long.
But for a while, it's very interesting to be able to explore every little conversational cul-de-sac you can come up with despite the sometimes mixed results.

Luckythespacecat responds:

Thanks yeah, it was hard since I only had a week to do it. But I'm excited to see the results. It was definitely more of a expirement about the AI dialogue then a game by itself.

[BlockJump (UNFINISHED)]

This platformer unfortunately breaks apart two seconds in, because the camera doesn't catch up with the player.
So you get across the first two platforms and then you have to move outside the screen boundaries and guess where to jump… which will either get you killed instantly or you get lucky.

Either way, it's not a fun gameplay.

ScuffedGames responds:

Thanks for the feedback I might fix and redo the game tho :(

[Defeat The White Mushroom]

It's a pretty straightforward game in which you can only employ one single tactic if you want to win – move to the opposite side of the screen out of the range of the fire breath and keep shooting until the “mushroom” jumps into your wall of bullets. Given your limited moveset, no room for mistakes and the unchanging attack pattern of the enemy, anything else will get you killed.

To improve the game, it'd be nice if the enemy sometimes did something different (especially as its health decreases) – but if it made the game significantly more difficult, you'd probably have to give the player lives, so it's not just a one-hit kill. And possibly allow jumping to allow for some added complexity in the attack patterns.

But as a simple game you play, win, and forget (or as an early-game boss in a larger project), this concept works fine.