Ralix's game Reviews on Newgrounds

[Campo Afuera]

There's a surprising lack of laughing dogs. :)

I love the pixel art, but the gameplay is too simple to be enjoyable.
I probably can't avoid comparing this to Duck Hunt.
https://youtu.be/x-daxzVxrQI
Notice that in that game, the ducks come in waves, you have to react quickly and their fly trajectory is unpredictable. It keeps you on your toes.

Here, the ducks follow completely predictable straight lines, there's a lot of them and you can take as much time as you need. I don't even need to move the crosshair and just wait for the ducks to come in the line of fire. And it is a full line, so you're almost guaranteed to hit something as your bullet moves across the screen.
I wouldn't say it's boring, but certainly very casual.

Also, there's no animation for shooting the ducks (they just blink out of existence), the crosshair should be pixel art, too (since everything else is) and the score panel (and the score count itself) isn't aligned properly (outside of full-screen).

Be7ruvio responds:

Sure, I know I still have a lot to do, like making the ducks follow a certain trajectory and adding more animations. The crosshair is actually pixel art but it turned out to be a lot smaller than I tought so it doesn’t seem like it is. And yes, I always loved duck hunt so I tried to make something similar lol. I will definitely improve it, thank you for all the advice :D

[Sarah]

Really incredible.
It's quite short – completely understandable for a game jam – but not without a proper (and pretty interesting) conclusion. I like the art style, too.

Figuring out the phone combination was the hardest part. I knew it had to do something with Sam, I just didn't know what exactly. Their dinner date (time/month/day), West Side fair date, birthdays, team shirt number…
I like the subtle clues leading you to the right direction of the solution though. The lock screen picture was a heart – great. You also know the date format should be MM/DD (and not DD/MM) because that's how it was written in the diary (and the newspapers), and the phone also didn't have a zero digit button (nor visible letters) which did eventually help to narrow the selection down. Kudos, if these were intentional.

It's a pity there are no sounds or music. It'd make the game instantly better and help set up the mood. Especially the sounds (taking items, phone digits, lights on/off, the rustling of paper…); you're not as immersed into the game as you would be otherwise.

Some way to determine which part of the background is interactive would be nice too – for example by showing the object's name as you hover over it, or gentle outer glow, or changing the mouse cursor. Now you have to click on every single cupboard and drawer in the kitchen just to determine they're, in fact, not interactable. I also didn't notice the electricity plug for a long time because it's simply not very noticeable.

A neat little piece for a game jam – and the ending is great.

JinxSpell responds:

Hey Rallyx! The consistent date format and lack of zero was intentional, thanks for noticing!! Yeah I agree that it's unfortunate we didn't have time for music or sound effects. We barely got it in time for the jam. Changing the mouse on hover is a great idea. Originally, everything was going to be clickable, and did some useless action, but we ran out of time completely. Agreed on the electricity plug point as well. Thanks for your thorough review!

[Race_Game]

I like it; it's quite fun, although there's a couple of problems.

First, and mainly – the game does not restart when you lose (making 'highscore' pointless). Whether you crash the car or run out of fuel, the game does not restart. Now, I later found out you can restart the game with 'R', but it's not written anywhere. You shouldn't rely on people's ability to 'guess' the controls. What about a restart button on the screen when it's Game Over?
When you crash, you can also potentially get hit twice immediately afterwards (e.g. when hitting a wall). There should be some temporary invincibility.
I also did not see a single powerup until the 20k checkpoint (or weirdly, after I died). If you stand still and wait, some do appear,

I was quite thrilled to see a "boss battle", but I can't get past it. The car becomes invincible, drives in random directions (no matter which keys I press), bounces and you're also no longer colliding with items like spikes or powerups. I'm not sure what you're supposed to be doing (high score: 20,003).
And AGAIN, I later figured it out – the boss which looks exactly the same as your car (!) spawned and killed me before I noticed. I thought I was healed before the boss battle, instead, it spawned while I was close to the centre and "replaced" me.
But I think the checkpoint and especially the zoom out is a good idea. I'd at least make the enemy car blue to make a distinction.

As for other things:
– I'm not sure if 'Boost' is useful. It just makes you more likely to crash.
– Not sure what the "crowned bean" powerup does.
– The boss probably should get hit by spikes. Also, I feel your fuel runs out too quickly during this phase. You have to evade his attacks, but doing so makes you lose when you run out of fuel.
– Why do we need the compass? Surely we can tell which way the car is headed even without it…
– The whole page scrolls when pressing arrow keys, especially when you have the compass powerup. Try the workaround as described here:
https://www.newgrounds.com/wiki/developer-resources/unity3d-webgl-support#wiki_toc_4

DerpGio responds:

I will try to fix many of these. First, I actually can't believe I forgot to mention the restart button, I know about the double crash and I think your idea is very good and I might implement it. The powerups are very random as they have a chance to spawn after a certain amount pf seconds, and I had to nerf them from spawning to much. The compass was implemented because one of my friends/playtesters found it hard to tell which direction they were going in and I will try to fix the page scrolling thing too.
(Spoiler alert)
The bean stops the car from acting for 3 seconds.

[Zapper]

Great idea, although it's not very much right now.
At first, I didn't know how to zap because it doesn't work very well long-distance, but once the robots get closer, it looks cool.
There's little point of giving you constructive criticism right now, since everything is probably going to change, but well…
– I'd pick better ambient music than a six-second loop – it works initially, but gets annoying quite quickly.
– The game window is quite small; consider adding a fullscreen mode without the IndexedDB part at the bottom.
– I'm not sure if the zap ability works on multiple robots at once; perhaps it should.
– What about jumping? There's a lot of obstacles which would help you slow down the enemies if you could jump over them
– You can fall off the world boundaries, but who cares at this point of development…

I think this would make a really great horror game, especially if the environment was darker and you didn't get the zap ability until later. At one point, I was cornered by the robots and even though they didn't harm me, I was completely unable to move until I blasted my way to freedom. Imagining that, in the dark, with creepier robots; running through a maze of dimly lit corridors, until you reach a large room where you're completely surrounded, panic and learn to zap through – I'd personally consider it far more interesting (and with a story-telling potential) than if it was a simple shooter about zapping hostile robots until they get close and kill you.

Good luck!

Trell13 responds:

Thanks for the ideas. That does sound cool. I'll probably do just that.

[The First Anomaly]

Is there any content so far besides the initial corridor? I tried to run in all directions but the "mist" is faster (presumably because sprinting doesn't work). If you're supposed to do something once you reach a dead end, I didn't figure it out (or didn't have the time). Your walking speed is a bit slow either way.
I didn't encounter any interactable objects. For a first time player, having ~3 seconds to *guess* what you're supposed to be doing, after which you get killed and have to replay the game is quite difficult.

A fullscreen mode would be nice and as JeffreyDriver said, 1.5GB is quite a lot, especially since a single corridor is all I can see. Heck, the demo you linked on the forums last week had a third of that; 522 MB.

Trell13 responds:

There's a couple rooms you can enter but without the sprint system the game is broken. I dont know how to lower the file size any lower but I can try. There are switches that you have to hit in different areas to unlock an exit. I'll have to test it more.

[TypeandJump]

It's fine, but I think the choice of words is sometimes quite odd ("dialoguesystem", "teamexplorer", "monobehavious") and they have a good chance of repeating themselves.
I also don't think it should be case sensitive (at first I thought the game is broken).

But I like the idea of jumping; it's more clever than just typing with a timer alone. Perhaps if you type your word really fast, you could jump higher/further. I'd also show how many steps remain to the top, otherwise, you don't know until the last moment.

hoanglong12 responds:

Thanks!!! I'm really appreciate!! :D !!! You really give me some feedbacks for my game

[kill asdf game ver.2.0]

There are only three options, currently, also there's no way to come back to the selection after picking "shoot" or "i like trains" (or it takes forever).

Also the fun of the original asdf was in how random and unpredictable it was, so selecting an option which plays out exactly as you would expect isn't all that enjoyable.
And since the train animation loops for a long while; then the sound should probably loop as well.

JeremyGonzalez responds:

Yes im fixing a lot of that in version 2.0 and about the looping thing. I did try to make it loop but it aounded very annoying and just bothering also i am fixing the shooting thing as we speak but am having a few coding problems

[snake 2.0]

Nope, sorry, doesn't work again.

Is that Unity WebPlayer plugin? That won't work (it has been unsupported for years).
If it *is* a Unity game, export it as WebGL, which will work.

However, from the source code I see you're embedding "my-first-game.py" written in Pygame which almost certainly won't work through Unity. But I can play it if I download it, though.
A simple snake game, although the movement is too slow and it's harder to change directions.

To embed a pygame game here, you'd need to build/export it in a HTML5 compatible format which is going to be a hassle, but seems possible (Pyjsdl):
https://gatc.ca/projects/pyjsdl/

Or you can use Repl.it to emulate Python online:
https://repl.it/languages/pygame
If you then put the "share/Embed" link inside a index.html file. This approach does seem to be working but looks ugly as hell because the rest of the Repl.it editor will be embedded as well.

If you can get Pyjsdl working, it should be technically possible to upload it here, too; but if you want to focus on web games, I'd really suggest using a proper framework/engine which supports HTML5 directly instead:
https://www.newgrounds.com/wiki/creator-resources/game-dev-resources#wiki_toc_1
Especially if you've only just begun.

Phaser or GDevelop are both pretty simple; on the other hand, Godot has more possibilities and you can use GDScript which has a very similar syntax to Python:
https://docs.godotengine.org/en/3.1/getting_started/scripting/gdscript/gdscript_basics.html

Third time's a charm, eh? :)
Good luck.

animaes responds:

Thank u so so much really I was trying to do something for ages and u helped me so much really

[Wall Clip]

I think it's a great game. A very interesting idea, very well executed. I love all the little details like tilting the screen, freezing time when you break a wall, recolouring the player when you're fast enough etc. A lot of simple things like these together make the game more enjoyable.

I'm not sure if it's currently possible to return to the menu during the game (e.g. to switch from Hard Mode to regular mode). There's just the pause.
You could also add NG medals or global scoreboards to attract more players and keep them engaged for longer: https://www.newgrounds.io/
Also, you probably intended the Hard Mode to reset your score upon death (hence the "0") but collecting any coin afterwards restores your score to the previous value. Therefore people who suck at the game and die often will be able to get a much higher score than those who complete it on their first attempt. And for this reason, perhaps your total time should also be factored in your final score, otherwise everybody who collects all the coins will have the same exact score.

Prox276 responds:

Done! You can now change the Mode in the Pause Menu!

I have already added Medals in previous games but thanks for linking me to
newgrounds.io, I'm definitely going to take a look at it! :)