Ralix's game Reviews on Newgrounds

[A Simple Quest]

Don't feel bad for publishing this! For a first game, this is pretty amazing. You should see some other games that get posted here in all seriousness. Short doesn't mean bad and you really put some good work into this.

Although the story itself is quite simple (it's A Simple Quest after all), you do show a storytelling talent – in the dialogue, distinctive characters etc. That's probably what I enjoyed the most.
The graphics and music are also quite neat.

My major complaint would be probably about lags. I am not sure what you can do about it, but sometimes the game plays without any problems, and then, after visiting a village or a castle, moving on the world map becomes terribly slow and laggy. When that happened (about 50/50 chance), I wasn't really in mood for exploration and just took the shortest path to the next objective. That hinders the gameplay quite a lot.

Then, just some suggestions:
– A "shortest path" could be another thing to improve. When moving with mouse, you walk in L shapes, so if you need to go diagonally somewhere, it is quite noticeable and you follow much longer path than you would with arrow keys. It might be better to do something like "imagine a line between you and your destination and walk through all squares it crosses". Perhaps. I don't know how it would work out in RPG Maker.
– Balanced combat. I know this is because the game is short, but just in case – throughout the game, I never felt like using my special abilities or choosing anything else than "Attack", because all the enemies both on the mainland and in the cave fell with one hit.
The only exception was the Demon King who had his difficulty set just right (he's the final boss, after all), but he was the first enemy who required the use of anything besides the basic attack. So after loads of "super easy enemies" you meet a "hard boss".
– During combat, you should probably see your action right after you select it, or it gets confusing. You should attack when your turn comes and you click attack, not later with all the others. The prime example here is the Demon King – I see I am running out of HP, so I select Heal, but before my character has even a chance to cast the spell, the Demon King cast a Fire Pillar and kills her.
It should probably go like this: Demon King casts Fire Pillar, then I get to choose Heal spell when I see the actual number of HP I have – and it gets cast immediately, so I am ready for another attack from the King.
– Since the enemy sprites flash, you probably don't have to append "A" and "B" (Slime A, Slime B) to them. It might slightly break the immersion. And it could be handy to be able to attack an enemy by clicking on its big flashing sprite, not just on its name (I caught myself trying to do this a couple of times)
– And lastly, if your characters are both fine at the end of a combat, you shouldn't probably mark them "Dead" when they run out of HP. "Defeated" might be more appropriate.

I am not really a fan of this style of turn based combat and enemies popping out of nowhere (but many people are!), it was your story that made me wonder how the game ends and finish it despite of the lags. And if this is just a practice you feel "a little bad about", then I know when you make a game you'll be proud of, it'll be awesome. So good luck with that. ;)

[Panda Love]

It's a good a game, challenging and enjoyable.
It could have been a bit longer though, because you start as a panda jumping on platforms, collecting coins and avoiding spikes, and the only new mechanic that appears during the game are the disappearing platforms. There could've been wall jumps, water; that sort of stuff, just to throw in some variety.
And I usually don't comment on music, but this one was really beautiful.
Also I get you are Free World Group, but does your logo really need to appear on every background, every screen transition? And the link in the top corner? What does that have to do with the pandas' world? It sort of kills a part of the mood.

[The Sky is Falling]

That's a good start. Simple idea, interesting pixel art graphics, but there's still space for improvement.
At first, the controls feel a bit rough. I'd add a bit more force to the drag, so you wouldn't need to drag that much. It's a good thing you can click anywhere on the screen, or else it'd make you unable to jump whenever the angel is close to the bottom edge of the screen.

The game needs some sort of force indicator though, to inform us whether we are dragging the character or not. Either a bar in a corner somewhere, an outer glow, a directional arrow or a dotted line indicating the full trajectory. That's up to you, but in some way there should be visual difference between "now I'm dragging", "now I'm dragging A LOT" and "now I'm doing nothing".

But more importantly, wouldn't it be better if we were able to pass through clouds? Now you can get into unsolvable situations when several clouds in a row appear in a vertical line and you have to jump even though you know the bigger cloud above you will block you.
With one way platforms (since you said you're new to this: in Unity, just adding Platform Effector 2D component → One-Way should do the trick) the game would still remain challenging, but won't force you to commit suicides on a regular basis.
You would also get rid of the "sliding under clouds" bug which saved me a life a couple of times, I admit, but isn't exactly according to the laws of physics.

As for the score, I wouldn't subtract it below zero, nor deduct points for losing a life (but the latter is up to you). And since the main goal of the game is beating your high score, I'd save it somewhere here (you can create a public scoreboard with NG API, so players'll be able to compete with each other: http://www.newgrounds.io/get-started/).
Or at least keep track of your highscore in-game.

Also, a bunch of power-ups or flying birds you have to avoid or anything which diverts your attention from jumping clouds for a while never hurts. Or perhaps more detailed background, now it might seem a bit plain.

Now I noticed the text is a bit blurry (not sure why, perhaps it's scaled too much). It would also look better if your character faced the direction she's jumping. And if you jump very high right at the start of the game, you fall back off-screen and the screen doesn't focus back on you – that shouldn't happen, at least not until you safely land on your first cloud.

I hope some of my suggestions will be of use to you. Welcome to Newgrounds and good luck with this, or whatever you decide to make in the future.

MBelka responds:

Thank you! This was extremely helpful! I didn't know about the scoreboard or the tool in the unity engine! The text is blurry because I used 3d text on top of a sprite. I find that I really need to work on UI design from reading these responses. I am taking lots of notes though! Thank you so much for your warm welcome to newgrounds! I was a bit worried when I started, but damn this is an awesome community! I wish I joined earlier!

[Tanks Journey]

A jumping tank… quite funny concept.

The tank is pretty static and balanced even when you fly all around the place, but does crazy stuff when you drive on an edge. It also goes forward/backwards really fast in comparison to the rotation speed, but since it's a platformer, I wouldn't change it. The reason you don't see many tanks in platformers is because they're quite long, which is a downside if you need to land exactly on your centre of gravity.
– Try to shoot a pile of your on bullets somewhere and go over them (good place to do that is the red container in level 2).
– If you jump from a diagonal surface (the ramp in level 1, any edge), you stay askew even mid-air. The tank probably ought to have some gyroscope (= in mid-air you return to your default position). It'll help you make more precise jumps (for example, in level 1, try to jump from the ramp back where you came from to see what I mean) and avoid ending up like this:
http://www.newgrounds.com/dump/item/3c9a2ca6bcc34cb75a485556283206bd
– In level 7, I thought that was a wind at first, but it's actually a sliding platform. It should carry you along if you stand on it.

Your bullets should probably explode on impact with everything, not bounce (and kill you if you are way too close). Also, you can shoot through stuff if you are close enough (try that in level 1, with the snow covered trees). Good idea might be to deduct a point if you miss a target, so you don't end up with people all having maximum score which is now quite easy to get.

Colliders.
– The tank. It's good idea to ignore the cannon, so you don't get stuck everywhere, but the bottom/front/top turret should have more precise collider borders.
Also if you jump into the vertical side of a block (try the start platform in level 5), you can "hover" in the air for like a second as long as you hold the "forward" key.
– Level 1, "bark trees" right at the start have no collider.
– Level 5, try going straight forward. You won't be hit by the spinning fans unless you jump.
– Level 6, try shooting in front of the first lava pool. It will bounce, plus the bullets will lie on the flowing lava and not sink down/move/explode:
http://www.newgrounds.com/dump/item/fff86a1dca88d61c763cc62781163984

The shooting sound might be a bit annoying, especially if you need to shoot many times in a row.

You're probably going to change the environment, but anyway…
– The "blue" portal lies on a "blue" blocks, thus its borders aren't visible (in level 2 I first considered it to be a shadow or a hole until I drove over it)
– I wouldn't use yellow blocks as platform in order to avoid possible confusion, since you already use yellow as "win" platform.
– The background is also quite blurry, as it's probably a low-res, scaled up picture, but more importantly, the background is a box with quite visible seams.

I hope you'll find some of these helpful. Good luck.

[GATHER]

It's exactly as you write in the description – it could be good, but so far it's somewhat confusing. What I understand from the couple of minutes I played this, you use arcane words (or just their combination, perhaps) to order minions to gather (and combine?) stuff and carry it to the gods altars to make vines grow on them to cause a flash of light which does… I don't know.
Basically the only thing I learned to do on purpose and not by accident is to make minions drop their apples.
That was my trail of thought when playing the game.

Hunger for exploration works much better if you have a set of basic, clear rules which can then be used to create more complicated things. You should be able to see an immediate effect of things you do, not randomly mash buttons in hope it'll do something.

For example, you could have abilities like this:
(Let's start on blank grass with just altars, minions, bees and environment)
– "Green" rune:
Grow a flower underneath yourself. If a bee sees it, it flies to it, pollinates it and turns it to an apple (or whatever). If a minion sees an apple, he picks it up and starts roaming around.
Or if you already stand on a flower, it could grow into a tree (→ wood logs).
– "Red" rune:
Plants a totem underneath yourself. All minions in its vicinity will go to it (totem would then disappear and they'd continue roaming). Like that, you could lead "apple-carrying minions" to "apple altar" with a series of totems. Something happens (e.g. icon appears Apples: 1 – and you can use them later to create something).
You are bound to need rocks at some point. How to get them? Since you are an ethereal ghost, you could fly in the middle of a large rock and plant a totem there. Minions would of course go to it, but with the rock in their way, they'd mine through – gathering rocks in the process.

And more and more uses you could devise with "clever use" of four basic commands.
While writing this, I figured out how to get minions to follow you using Z+C, but you if miss the info sign, you have a hard time figuring it out by mashing buttons, because there's not much of a difference between "minions aimlessly wandering" and "minions aimlessly wandering towards you" except for their thinking bubbles which do provide some help at least. And that's likely to be a key command.
In the way I suggested above, you wouldn't need to wonder "what the hell does this do?" that much because a flower/totem/… would always appear (using one button, not two), you would just need to think how to use them – in a basic way which would be clear and easy to find out, or in more complicated way which would need some thinking and "exploration".

Just a suggestion. :)
I know you want the ghost to be "powerless to affect the material realm", but in the end, that is likely the frustrating part which also summarises my feelings about this game. Good luck if you decide to build up on this idea.

Koobazaur responds:

Thanks for the detailed feedback all good notes! Yes non-verbal communication was a deliberate limitation I imposed on myself, and you bring up some good points on how this could have worked with totems to gather.

I dig the idea of planting and growing apple trees. In this case I wanted to focus more on interaction/exploration of the world rather than god-like world-building though. Still, cool ideas to expand the series if I return to it :)

[Princess Lilly Escape]

An okay game.
The shoes puzzle was a bit tough, but not quite in terms of "challenging", rather in terms of "hold Tab to find a tile and try to use every object on it, because who would've though a seemingly stone tile could be cracked with a shoe". The tile's description could've been more informative, e. g. "This tile seems weaker than the others".
The music is Queen Rutela's theme from Twilight Princess, I believe? It didn't feel like a good match here, because in that game it's used for a brief time during a pretty sad moment, here it's looping background music in a game which doesn't intend to evoke any feelings.
I liked the choice of language though; it was a good opportunity to brush up on my German. Just a slight "bug" here – if you change language mid-game, all items in your inventory keep the original name and won't translate with the rest of the descriptions.

[Turtles G4M3]

I have mixed feelings about this game.
On one hand, it seems somewhat childish: bright colours, smiling clouds, cheerful sound loop, giant font, handwritten text in background, typos, emoticons nearly everywhere…
On the other, it does show some potential: most of all the last sequence with the burning houses and broken city, also the diversity of minigames (the included Pong game is quite neat easter egg), and your sense of humour is also a plus.

However, you need to ask yourself, what is the true content of your game? If everything was gone and only one thing should stay, what would you want it to be? And once you answer that, add more of it in the game.
So far, the game is mostly about slow walking (or "sliding", since there is actually no walking nor jumping animation). Outside of house → house → computer → bus → riding the bus → outside the city → the city → a shop → YOUR ACTUAL MISSION and before you even realise it, you are back to walking. Imagine it as a movie or book – would you watch a movie that consists mainly of walking somewhere?
"Exploring" is fine, but even in exploring you have to put some gameplay, not just static images (e.g. opening drawers and finding something funny/interesting inside, new set of clothes you can wear in the wardrobe, "fishing" in water – any kind of interaction with the environment, really).

And the actual missions should be way longer. They are probably meant to be the core of your game, yet just when I though "yay, platforms!", I reached the end. You also don't have to put advice everywhere. Sometimes it's useful ("Click to continue"), but sometimes unnecessary ("Jump", "Try not to fall", "Don't use calculator").
As I said above, I liked how the city changed in the end. There are games which include repetition (= going to the city here), so you get used to something and then it turns upside down. That's good. Meaningless repetition should however be avoided.

There's quite some space for improvement here, but it is a good start for making a pretty neat game.

Oh, and I just noticed that you're fourteen, so it's actually pretty great you managed to start and complete a project of this size. Hopefully what I said above will help you to improve.
Good luck with this or anything you decide to make in the future.

[Comics + Games = ?]

Now, that's a cool, original game!
At first, I was afraid it would lack some sort of deeper interactivity and will be simply a "slow reading mode", but fortunately, that wasn't a case and the later stages shown that this has great potential.

I know this is a test, but if you decide to develop this further, it'd be thrilling to see more complex changes you could make. So far it's about creating a path to the other side, but usually with one small adjustment – what about combining more stuff? You could even allow more solutions to continue further (e.g. (1) get two lovers to meet, but they break up in the end (passable though), unless you go back (2) and give the guy flowers – thus creating "good" and "bad" solution). It even creates an opportunity for some sort of "time-travel".

Anyway, from the choice and diversity of the levels in this "test" it looks like you have a lot of ideas of your own; so – this is an amazing idea, please make more. :)