Ralix's game Reviews on Newgrounds

[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.

[Crash Dude [DEMO]]

As a test of the character controller, I'm actually very impressed.

The character moves fluently, I never got stuck against an obstacle. Controls are responsive. The default movement is quite slow, but you also have running, so the default movement would allow you to be precise (no need right now, perhaps if there were dangerous obstacles like spikes).

I love the animation of enemies being punched off-screen. However, there's no point in which attacking is not the correct response. Your punch efficiently solves all enemies in one strike. I needn't dodge or run away. Perhaps if there was a timer or a need to get somewhere fast, jumping over enemies would be more efficient, since attacking stops you in place, but you also have headbutting (which is a great mechanic, by the way).

There is a shortcut I found by jumping + headbutting to skip a portion of the course, which again leans into appealing to speedrunners who thrive on moving at top speed and finding shortcuts.

Sometimes when running down a slope, you start gliding instead of sticking to the ground.

Art-wise the game certainly has space for improvement.
Right off the bat, the rule of pixel art is to have all “pixels” maintain consistent scale, which can't be said here due to the various scaled-up variants of the orange slope which often has huge pixels in contrast with the rest of the screen.
Then the player doesn't neatly stand on sloped ground, in fact, whenever you're on a slope, you're almost certainly hovering and your feet don't touch anything.
Then there's the fact that the environment is just geometric shapes, but I accept them as a part of the test level. I could even imagine them in the final game (if they get a more unified look and consistent size).

The primary reason for the lower rating is the lack of content. There are mechanics, and those are pretty well-made, but it's a looping track from sometimes randomly resized geometric shapes, so besides killing enemies, there's not much to do, no “goal” after completing a lap around.

Bubandstuff responds:

Thanks for your feedback! I will try to fix as much as I can.

[Madman's Maze DEMO]

I can't load the game (loading doesn't seem to even start); it seems to fail with:

[UnityCache] Failed to load 'https://uploads.ungrounded.net/alternate/6641000/6641108_alternate_308329_r1.zip/Build/DEMOMADMANSMAZE.data.gz' from indexedDB cache due to the error: RangeError: Array buffer allocation failed

This usually means the game is trying to allocate more than the browser allows (not sure what your WebGL memory settings are, but from the console, Maximum Cache Size seems to be 1GB which is a lot).

JoniHollow responds:

If the game doesn't works, you will play the game here:



https://dobleboyzomber.itch.io/madmans-maze

[ASTROboost!]

The game is fine. The gameplay is good, and the ship's controls are responsive.
There are several levels, each of which is noticeably different, and the difficulty gradually increases. There could be a few more, and the game could have some polish.
Mostly graphics; the effects and making moving objects + foreground stand out more – especially in the final level, it was problematic to tell what belonged to the background and what were obstacles. UI text also isn't very consistent – several fonts and colors are used, and sometimes it's a bit blurry.

But the worst offender here is the login flow. You are required to “register” to play (which will put off quite a few people), and it does not work well at all. The text input fields only react to clicks along a tiny line in the middle of the field.
Even if this was okay, I'd recommend allowing people to play even without registering. If it's only for the leaderboard, ask them for their name when the game finishes. Like this, a good chunk of people will close the game as soon as they see they can only Login/Register and there's no Play button.

Edit: The login flow was updated. Thanks for listening to feedback!

ubccbu01 responds:

Thank you for your value feedback. I am going to change follow your recommend.

[Platform Jumper]

It's an okay platformer.

The main problem is that the levels are mostly the same. I didn't even notice you start over from Level 1 again until after I died a few times. The distances to jump are getting wider, but other than that, there's too little variety (coins are placed haphazardly, there's only one kind of a platform, and it's all mostly placed in the same horizontal line).

It's hard to control the player's movement; you move very fast left and right, and even though you jump high, gravity is too much to really take advantage of it.

Also, since the entire game is controlled with the keyboard on PC, it's not very convenient to have to use the mouse in order to restart or continue to the next level.

All in all, it's a fine game, but despite being procedurally generated, you don't get a lot of incentive to continue playing past the first few levels (at which point it might yield better results to just hand-craft twenty levels that are actually interesting to play).

IdeiGenialeGMD responds:

im trying to fix that. i noticed that too. thanks btw ti works on mobile either

[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.

Edit:
The issue with everything being too fast right off the bat was a bug, and has now been fixed.

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.

[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