Ralix's game Reviews on Newgrounds

[Throw Rocks at Boys]

Well, I see two really bad flaws in this game. If you hold space bar, you create a "rock wall" and instantly dispatch of a column of boys. There's no time interval between the rocks. So all it takes to win is to hold space bar right at the start of a level and wait for the enemies to crash into it.
And the second problem, the difficulty is increased by adding a row of boys every level. But there's no limit either, so if you reach level 9, you die. Instantly. It's because the grid has grown too big, so right at the start of the level, enemies touch you.

As for other things, there is no sound and the graphics are too simplistic (rocks have a black background, boys' sprites have a green border, the white lines behind the rocks are unnecessary and at the end of the level, rocks fly above the "Level Up" button, not below it). Also, screen boundaries are a little off, so both you and the boys can move off the right edge of the screen, but you can't reach the left edge.
Then I could probably say there's a little variety, e.g. there could have been more than one kind of enemy, power-ups, anything. But shooting the target at the top every once a while is a nice idea.

If you are a beginner, don't worry and keep learning, perhaps with a different tutorial. Everybody must create a hefty amount of inferior games before being able to create the great ones. Good luck.

shawndabob responds:

Thanks for your honesty, and yes I was trying to learn at the time. I am now slowly trying to learn more... maybe even see if there is a course I can take at a local facility or something. Thanks for playing it though.

[Bleep Sheep]

Now that's a creative use of one room! Good job!
On top of that, the transitions and your movement are really fluent, and although I usually dislike time limit, here it forces you to take risks, which – with the fact you can't stop and everything around you shifts – creates a constant flow of challenging action. There's also double jump and air dash which can help you but also kill you. I'd say that was very well spent twelve hours. :)

Aaants responds:

Thanks!

[Amelia]

Quite short, but good enough for a LD entry.

There's just small problem that the recoil from shooting can hurl you through walls (especially in the narrow corridor). The movement animation is quite shaky, too.
And I wasn't completely happy with the AI either – you can shoot each enemy in the game from distance and the bystanders won't react at all, and will wait to be shot too. On the hand, if you do come close enough, everybody will instantly turn in your direction and shoot directly at you, even when they can't see you. All of them shoot together at the same time, and then again after a fixed period of time.
Not to mention there's only one kind of enemy.

But I understand there is only so much of what you can do in two days. :)

xinelu responds:

:) next time i eill work on a proper AI, but thamx for the review!

[Witness]

Is there any content in the game so far? I walked all around the place twice and found nothing to interact with. Also:

– Why is it so hard to walk a straight line? You bend slightly to the right when going forward. The camera's also not positioned at the height of an average person. And when you tilt the mouse up, you can turn it around in full 360° circle, so if you want, you can walk upside down. Jessica must be a cool art teacher.
I'd recommend you to save yourself a lot of trouble and use the "FPS Controller" from Unity Standard Assets/Characters. You just drag the prefab to the scene and there you go, flawless movement and camera control (just disable jumping if you don't want it).
– Is there no ceiling? I'm not completely sure, but it looks like it. Either way, there should be a ceiling.
– "Press Space to continue…": Well, pressing space didn't do anything.
– The gate to the gallery protrudes out slightly
– The window blinds disappear if you go near them
– Even though it looks "more decorative", there's no purpose of a door if there's a big gap right next to them (door to the hallway with lockers)

I apologise if I missed some of the game's content, but if there was more so far, it should be a warning indication to you that somebody can play through the game twice without finding any interactive thing at all. Good luck if you develop this further.

adglenn94 responds:

Hi there,
Thank you for the feedback. This is a first project of mine so I was expecting several problems. However, with feedback such as yours, I can take some notes to work on a patch that I will release later in the week! Thanks again for the feedback and I would love to hear your thoughts later this week after the update happens!

[Tilt Christmas]

Yes, as people have already said, it could have been a neat, simple game, but it's lagging too bad. I don't know why, though. Too many objects? The snow in the background? Time-consuming methods in Update?
When the lagging is gone, you could probably add some more variety to the levels (currently, the only obstacle are the walls, the only danger are the dark blocks). It's Unity, you could quite easily add e.g. a steep slope and a pitfall behind it, so it would require some manoeuvring ability to survive. And other things.
But the lags are a crucial flaw, so that should be your priority.

BlastOffProductions responds:

The FPS problem has been fixed. It used to be around 30FPS, now it can be around 60FPS. However, if this doesn't work please tell me. Thank you.

[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!

[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 :)