Ralix's game Reviews on Newgrounds

[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!

[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.

[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 [VERY EARLY BUILD]]

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