Ralix's game Reviews on Newgrounds

[Ducksplosion]

It's a neat little game and a cool idea, but it's over too quickly (but I can see more levels are coming soon).

I felt everything is maybe too close together, making the screen seem a bit cluttered, giving the duck less space to manoeuvre. Perhaps try zooming out (and speeding up the rockets to compensate), it would also open you more options for new enemies for the future levels.

The difficulty scales up well in the three available levels. The rockets are homed in on the player (good, otherwise you could probably hide near the edges to avoid everything), but it also makes the screen edge very important, as the ultimate tactic is to lure everything to one side of the screen, and then flip over to the other where you have free rein. The other tactic is to destroy everything before they shoot too many rockets.

Perhaps the rockets could turn towards the duck?

There is no sound whatsoever, which hurts the enjoyability somewhat.

If you get killed after winning before, it relocks the Levels menu. This probably shouldn't happen.

The Newgrounds resolution doesn't match the Unity game resolution (+32 for the bottom panel), which adds a huge, unused black rim around the game. The “Back to Title” button in Levels and Credits also isn't anchored properly to the screen border, so it is cut off slightly until you go fullscreen.

I like that you can play with the duck in the main menu and it loops around as well. I wanted to say perhaps the duck could be visible on both sides of the screen while it's halfway through, and while moving it very slowly, I noticed it does happen – for a single frame or so. Also, the duck becomes half-transparent and disappears when the screen loses focus, so now I'm not sure if it's intentional. Either way, you will never notice a single frame during gameplay while moving fast, and all those frames when you can only see half of the duck don't have the same transition effect.
So if you would like the players to notice it, add it to the other transition frames as well.

An important rule of pixel art is also to make sure all pixels are of the same size, i.e. you don't mix different sizes in different objects. It's not as noticeable here, but looking at the main menu, the grass definitely has larger pixels than the duck.

Winning should also probably do something more interesting than just kicking you back to the main menu.

PikaconYT responds:

Wow ty for taking your time to write this and leaving feedback. I will start to improve on the suff you have said. ty again.

[Lupa]

It's a pretty okay game, and certainly a better version of the original Lupa, if I remember it well. There's a clear goal, a timer, gradual difficulty increase.
And since it seems you'll still be adding new things and improvements judging by the main menu (version 0.1, shop coming soon), it'll get even better. Well done!

As for things you might want to consider:

– Interactive gameplay elements should be distinguishable from the background. Here it sort of blends in. I'd try making the coin and rockets shine more, or have an outline. Before I went fullscreen, my first thought was “a little shark”, not a rocket.

– The player is visible well enough since nothing else is white, although using a plain cube might feel placeholder-ish. Perhaps think about visual style you want to go for, i.e. overall art direction. A fenced grass area evokes a farm or a suburban house, white blocks evoke a heavily stylized game, and rockets warfare or technology. All together, they don't exactly match.

– Regarding jumping, it would be helpful if the cube had a shadow directly underneath, so you can accurately judge your height and tell where you'll land.

– The absence of any sound effects hurts your 'game feel'. You could make picking a coin feel much better if there was a little jingle, perhaps a mild screen shake.
The same goes for a rocket hitting you; now it simply resets the game without much else (e.g. death effect, showing you your coin/score total etc.).

– The game is shown in perspective, but you're not utilizing the perspective for gameplay yet (e.g. by having obstacles, or anything where things can get behind each other). But it makes coins in front harder to see (since you're viewing them from almost the top), and things in the back appear smaller.

– It's always a gamble to go near the edges, as a rocket can spawn anywhere instantly and you can't tell where, so you're betting on being lucky enough for the moment you need to be there. Some games deal with this by showing arrows near the edges a few moments before the spawn happens, or by spawning missiles further from your playable area, so you have always have time to react.

– You can hide the 'Exit' button in a WebGL game, pressing 'Exit' will simply freeze the game until you refresh the page, which seems like a bug, and it's unnecessary to be able to quit a web game when all you need to do is close the entire tab.

– If you use the 'Default' Unity template which adds the bottom fullscreen bar, you need to add +32 to the vertical resolution here on Newgrounds, otherwise, it gets cut off.

– The “Shop” in the main menu hints that you'll perhaps be able to purchase upgrades and other items with collected coins, which would definitely be a huge plus. After that, I wonder what the end goal of the game is supposed to be.
Is it complete X levels? Collect X coins in total? Beat your best score? Make sure the shop items tie into it and help you “get better at it”.

– Also to help you attract more players; one almost guaranteed way to do so is to introduce medals and scoreboards to your game. Medals also help you show what the goal of the game is (there are many players who hunt down games with medals to unlock them all), and scoreboards will give you a simple way to record the best score of players, and have them compete with each other (to some small extent).
See here: https://github.com/PsychoGoldfishNG/NewgroundsIO-Unity

So congratulations on releasing the remastered version, it *is* a pretty big improvement over the original and I hope you'll really get to add the things you wish; so that eventually, we will see the version 1.0 you envision.

Elooke responds:

the shop is working

[Potatype [The AI Game]]

The models are great and look fun. It's my first time seeing a vegetable ship or a broccoli horse.

The dance battle aspect is not something I find enjoyable, there's just not a lot of fun in “smash as many keys as fast as possible”, especially if you need to do it for a while, and with all characters.
I suppose it would be more interesting if there was e.g. some pattern to follow, or another gimmick in the fight you can learn to do “well” and perfect with skill or experience.

But I admit I was most curious about the AI dialogue.
Kudos for implementing it, it's impressive. I was mainly trying to find out how well it works – e.g. if all the characters have a unique personality and how well they react when asked about the world and situation they're in.

The Chill Tomato is aware it's a tomato (good) – even when asked for its Latin name, says it's chill and chilling at *every* damn opportunity, and the dialogue looks like it would match its personality (“hey bro”, “I legit laughed hard”).
I told it I'm a tomato (“glad to have you join our ranks :)”), asked for my middle name (“Tater Mash”) and then full name – which seems to be “Potato Tater Mash Tomato”. Nice.

The problem is trying to get anything of substance out of it. Asking what the goal of the game is (or what I should be doing) gives you a very emotionless speech about finding happiness in life and making every day count.
Asking about other characters to beat gives you a list of various vegetable gangs, asking about other *tomatoes* to have a dance battle with gives you a list of made-up tomatoes, none of which are actually in the game. “What's your greatest fear?” gives you a philosophy essay about losing loved ones and being forgotten and I get no interesting reaction when I reply my favourite meal is a tomato. I feel it says “I see what you did there” or “I laughed hard” whenever it has trouble coming up with an answer.

But I'm impressed that I asked Redbeard about the name of his vessel (Scarlet Scallywag), and if he wants to change its name – he agreed and came up with Red Rogue, and correctly referred to the ship as such when asked later. Oh, and he says “we be sailing through stormy seas” when asked about the weather. But it might just be him losing his marbles.

So I think it's a very impressive gimmick to play with for a while, but it mostly gives you unique random banter, as long as your questions stay on topic with the character you're talking to.
The characters might benefit from an expanded shared set of instructions that tie them together, e.g. what are the other characters, what the world around is like, what are you all doing here, what the player should be doing etc.
I wonder what it would look like if you had to question the AI about a potential crucial piece of information you need to progress in the game. I imagine it would be either very easy or very hard depending on the line of questioning used.

I think I encountered a bug that stopped the “Thinking” label from appearing, so the game always looked stuck for a while after clicking on “Speak”. And the fact that characters repeat their last line when you talk to them later also doesn't seem quite right.

All in all, it's amazing what you managed to put together within the scope of a short game jam, and I've been curious to try a game that utilizes AI dialogue for a while, but beyond this simulation aspect, I don't think I would have a lot of fun playing the game in its current state for long.
But for a while, it's very interesting to be able to explore every little conversational cul-de-sac you can come up with despite the sometimes mixed results.

Luckythespacecat responds:

Thanks yeah, it was hard since I only had a week to do it. But I'm excited to see the results. It was definitely more of a expirement about the AI dialogue then a game by itself.

[BlockJump (UNFINISHED)]

This platformer unfortunately breaks apart two seconds in, because the camera doesn't catch up with the player.
So you get across the first two platforms and then you have to move outside the screen boundaries and guess where to jump… which will either get you killed instantly or you get lucky.

Either way, it's not a fun gameplay.

ScuffedGames responds:

Thanks for the feedback I might fix and redo the game tho :(

[Mincreft V3.7.10]

I couldn't get it to load at all after waiting ~5 minutes (Windows/Chrome, and then Edge).
Does it load properly for you at least?
If the loading is really that long, consider adding some sort of preloader with a progress bar, otherwise, you're bound to lose a lot of potential players before it even finishes initialization.

Alanthecat07 responds:

That has been fixed, thanks for the feedback

[Ezra's Art Quest]

The platforming in this game is fairly basic (so is the level design), but as an art project, it's quite unique and each level is very different – we go from hidden feathers, through chopping down a tree to collecting imp skins (!).

– I think the first level is the weakest one because there's no hint or visual indication as to where to look for feathers, so I almost thought I saw everything there is to this game, but I just needed to find more feathers – by methodically jumping over every accessible pixel of the screen. Not very fun.
– The shift to the tree is amazing, I would have never guessed the second level would be this after the first one.
– I would recommend not simply vanishing enemies when they are killed, that feels cheap. Ideally do some disappearing effect afterwards.
– The boss can be fought and defeated in the same way as the other imps (that's good, it's consistent and you can use what you learned before), although the one-hit-kill would be pretty annoying if the boss was harder (the fireballs are nearly impossible to dodge, so you learn to pogo on the boss’s head and expect when it turns)
– I would not end the game with the corals, but rather with the imps and the boss battle (for pacing reasons)

But it's really awesome we get to see the finished art project at the end in its full beauty.
Thanks – it's not the greatest platformer, but certainly an interesting and memorable one.

Edit: Updated the rating. Thanks for listening to feedback. :)

hhponygames responds:

OK thanks for the input, I changed a few things.

[Pumpkin Dash]

I think it's a fun game at its core, it just needs better balancing and tweaking here and there.

Aesthetically it's stellar, and the spooky Halloween color palette + pixel art is what has drawn me to the game in the first place (but you shouldn't have different pixel sizes for various assets, because then something looks “pixelated” and something looks “smooth”; breaking the consistency)
The update system is awesome and would definitely be what makes me keep playing for a while – if I didn't have trouble with actually collecting the coins at a satisfying pace.

The main flaw and the most frustrating part – in my opinion – is the unpredictability of the falling pumpkins. When they appear, you have very little time to react, let alone avoid other pumpkins falling in the direction you're running towards.
Then you're supposed to be primarily collecting coins to progress, but those are scarce and again, you need to be quite near to reach them, avoiding the pumpkins in the process.
All the while you're wondering why the ground has to take up so much of the screen.
Consider the following options:
– move the ground lower (this gives the player more time to react)
– show an arrow at the top of the screen briefly before a pumpkin or a coin is about to fall, so it's not a complete surprise
– it suddenly starts getting insanely quick around the 15 score mark, is it the difficulty curve you want? Or should the increase in speed and pumpkin frequency be more gradual?

Secondly, I gave up before unlocking anything because after several runs I had just about ten coins, but in fact, I would need twenty-five to unlock *anything*. You ideally want to give the first reward pretty soon, almost immediately, to keep the players motivated.
Consider increasing the coin frequency, or lowering the required costs, and perhaps give some small amount of coins for a good score, so you can feel you're progressing after a good run even when you didn't manage to collect an interesting number of coins.

And btw, using 'space' to confirm anything isn't very intuitive – before reading the Author Comments, I thought the game was stuck after either clicking on the button or pressing enter did nothing.

Nevertheless, it's a very solid Halloween game, pretty fun and enjoyable. Well done!

P.S.: Did you hear about the Halloween event?
https://www.newgrounds.com/bbs/topic/1528553
If so, and you wish to participate, you may need to use the tag “halloween2023”.

J4cko16 responds:

Thank you for trying the game. I am glad you enjoyed the game and will take what you said into consideration. Did you claim any of your milestones? After reaching a score of 50 you can claim a decent amount of coins for the first upgrades? (It only took me around 30 minutes to unlock every upgrade in testing) I recommend going back to collect your milestones?

[Scratchy's fun platformer]

This is actually pretty decent!
The movement is mostly fluent, and you have tons of gameplay mechanics. Spikes, moving platforms, enemies, locked doors, wall jumping, checkpoints, lava… quite a lot.

Sometimes, though, the cat is quite too big to navigate between various perils, so you lose lives quickly and ultimately I don't think three is enough.

The first screen especially feels like a mistake because it's actually the hardest one I found – with spikes that can be avoided only with a well-timed precise jump, after which you can still be killed by the moving platform. It actually made me think moving blue blocks are enemies as well, so I avoided them.
The second screen has an enemy that will always get stuck under the moving platform.

I think I explored quite a bit of the place, and took the checkpoint in the top right corner behind the locked door (why is there a checkpoint in a dead end in the first place?).

What ultimately killed me was wall-jumping where I wasn't supposed to and jumped into a wall from below. The same happened later by falling into an innocent-looking hole in the ground somewhere else. And that's where I gave up.
I think if you want to make something unreachable, wall the area off, and put spikes in supposed deadly pits because this feels like bugs.

Other than that, I'll repeat I was quite surprised by the amount of different mechanics your game offers, it just needs a bit more polish.

Cooljack2003 responds:

press up up down down left right left right to get 10000000000 lives ok
ps: i'll also fix that

[Isometric World Alpha 0.41]

It looks pretty cool. There aren't that many blocks, but the pixel art of those present is very charming. But I'm missing several quality-of-life tweaks.

– Select a block or slope by clicking. Cycling through all of them with a space bar is too slow and inconvenient.

– Some sort of mild snapping on blocks or working with curves between the current and last known position. I wanted to remove a big chunk of the world, but if you move the cursor too fast for the framerate to catch up, you'll skip blocks. Same with drawing too quickly.

– Moving the camera is clunky. I'd expect it to work like the Hand tool in graphic programs, this feels like you're using the screen as a gamepad stick with max speed around the edges and zero in the center, no matter if you're moving the cursor or not.

– Just two layers are somewhat limiting. And I can't always tell what the result will look like after I place a block. Especially with the tall building.

– Undo/Redo. At least remember one step so you can take back bad mistakes (a long line of blocks with a single stroke should still count as one step).

– Some sort of export option. Ideally not just a screenshot, but a serialized text version that can be used further (let's say you design a world here that you want to use as a base in a game engine) and re-imported in this world creator to make edits.

– The background clouds don't move fluently at all.

Overall it's a good idea and quite visually appealing, but I don't think it's truly usable at this stage yet.

Kehmicle responds:

Some of these things ive heard from folks and some I havent, very in-depth review I thank you greatly for it.

When I return to this project ill start by addressing these changes first!

[R-Cube 1.4]

I don't have much to say about the actual puzzle; it's a Rubik's cube, it's well-known and you made it work and visualize it pretty nicely.
Just a few notes since you plan to work on the project further and publish it on other platforms.

– It would be better if the “Solve” button had shown you the steps towards completion, so you can learn
– Equally, it'd be nice if you could (optionally) skip the mixing steps
– You can glitch the cube when you rotate while mixing is in process.
– I wasn't able to rotate the bottom (and middle) row horizontally; it always does a different move. If it's too tricky, consider adding an option to rotate the entire cube if you drag outside of it (you would also then not have to look at the same three starting colours all the time, and could inspect the finished cube).
– Players will love it if you included a switch between different backgrounds
– "Guide" menu is coming soon, but for now, there's no Back button, so once you go there, you're stuck

RCPython responds:

Thank you for response!! Thank you for writing large a comment!! Yes I am currently working on anthor project so when I am done with that I am straight coming to R-Cube 1.2! Bye and have a nice day!