Kwing's game Reviews on Newgrounds

[Ruffy the Shelline - Prototype version]

It's surprising this is where you chose to stop, because most of the game (collision and physics) are already there. Even the menu has some nice polish to it and the graphics are really cute. This game could still be solid even without coding in enemies or new mechanics, a simple timer and actual level design could have made this a fun game to speedrun. I look forward to seeing the final product.

mebrouk responds:

I'm working on the full game, with my friends on Discord.
Hopefully, You're gonna like it more than the prototype version

[Paint(Flex 2/3 WORK!)]

This is a pretty cool drawing tool. Most of the important options are there but it would be nice if there was some kind of transparent ghost or outline of your brush so you could see just how wide it actually is before you start drawing. Modifiable background color would be nice as well. While more complicated, it might be cool to save the user's last action as a vector so that it can be undone, and only baking it into Bitmap data after they draw something else.

Neat idea but missing several key features.

[Lip-Sync Microphone]

Even with Newgrounds Player this thing seems to be bugged; you can't make it past the screen requesting microphone permissions. I downloaded this locally and ran it, and all it really does is echo what you say back to it; the sound level never actually influences the mouth animations. It's a cool idea, it's just too bad this was never finished.

You should work with the guys in the Ruffle Discord to make sure support for this kind of stuff is working by next year.

[Blocky's Funny Doings Interactive]

The animations are okay but rely too heavily on tweens and easing. The buttons have seriously messed up hitboxes. More animations or even just a higher quality of the ones already present would be appreciated.

SuperGibaLogan responds:

the reason why the animations are a little wonky is because i wanted to finish the game as fast as possible
also the hitboxes are messed up because i used masks to make the symbols

[Flex 3 example]

It's not clear if Flex is something you made specifically for Flash or if it's something you ported over (I assume the latter since your Github repo has a bunch of XML files.) As a demonstration this is okay but it would be nice if the user could tinker with some of the options, like create their own area, bar, or bubble charts. I also find it strange that the button bar has tabs but none of them show content. The data visualization only really lets you see the sample data you've supplied, so for something like a bar graph we just have to accept on faith that you didn't just paste in a still image of a graph without actually implementing what is implied.

Some kind of intro or explanation would also be welcome.

[SMILEY clicker :)]

This was way more engaged than I thought it would be and I nearly quit before unlocking the actual game at 50 clicks. By the end it's not exactly *hard* but damn does it get tiring beating away all three enemies at once!

For a first Flash game (in 2024!) this is impressive as well as surprisingly engaging.

As far as criticism, the crude brushstroke art works in some places, but in other places it genuinely looks bad. It wouldn't take much effort for the graphics to still be simple but at least have an acceptable level of simplicity. I also think it would be nice if the gameplay had some kind of an ebb and flow so it's not just a constant barrage of attacks form the enemies. As it is, it's both physically and mentally tiring to fight an uphill battle the whole time with no breaks.

It's a shame it looks like there are no other features before 50 clicks because I'm sure a lot of the low scoring votes are coming from people that never saw the actual game.

DrDevGuy responds:

thanks! i really appreciate the criticism! although i dont really see where the crude artwork doesnt work (i might just be blind or something) i'll see if i could do anything about it (if i can also still update the game after the whole flash forward thing lol).

and also yea i think most people probably didnt get to 50 clicks which sucks cuz there obviously was a bit more to the game, i guess bait n switch (or whatever its called idk) doesnt work well with clicker games or i might've just done something wrong in general with the start of the game lol

[WINDOWZ XP 2012 EDITION]

I came into this expecting a Windows parody, and by those standards, this is pretty lacking. After reading the description, I see that this is really an archive of old animations. Some of them are good, some of them aren't so good. Most of the things that were funny in 2012 were pretty boring, but the nostalgia factor is definitely there. If Dom Fera still visits Newgrounds I'm sure he'd appreciate all the lazer references.

A couple animations are surprisingly well-done, most aren't. Overall I think this is a good format to deliver a collaboration like this.

Kolumbo responds:

thank you! to address some of your points:

i'd say most of the animations aren't good - even included a medal referencing that! that's the point, though, we were all kids at the time & we had no idea what we were doing!

have to disagree with the 2012 thing - that stuff's hilarious

[Lampyrinth]

The production value and top-down puzzle mechanics remind me of some of the old school Miniclip games (Acno's Energizer comes to mind.) The light effects are the standout feature and look absolutely fantastic, but the graphics themselves are no slouch either. The walking animations look great and the lerping on the menu UI is unusually smooth.

Mechanically the game is simple, but made more difficult by the darkness mechanic. Early on the game is actually pretty linear. Sure there's a decent amount of backtracking, but there are only so many places to go, so even without seeing the entire level you can intuit where to go next.

Later on, the darkness becomes more of a nuisance than a mechanic that encourages problem solving. Sure, the player knows that the green/red floor switches toggle floor grates and the pull levers toggle the walls, but once the darkness makes distant obstacles impossible to see, the player never truly knows the consequences of pulling a lever, especially since even if they can see a grate or wall moving, it's always possible that a different one is also moving somewhere else. The result is that there's a ton of trial and error, which is made all the more tedious by the player's slow movement speed (it's not actually that slow, but when you have to traverse the level 5+ times it becomes really noticeable.) I'm not sure exactly what the big O complexity of these levels is but it feels like it's at least polynomial complexity. Perhaps if there was some message that said "N platforms moved" or visualize little sound waves coming from everywhere that walls moved it would make it easier for the player to understand the consequences of their actions and plan accordingly.

[Sound Maker]

So for a gadget like this the obvious tradeoff is going to be whether you want to lean toward useability (especially if you're only expecting the user to tinker around with your gadget for a few minutes) versus diversity of features. I think you largely struck the right balance here but there are still a handful of really important features that are missing.

First of all, what even is the scale you're using here? It's not diatonic or chromatic. Several times I went to add a note only to realize the scale you implemented skipped over the one I wanted. A single 12 note chromatic scale across one octave would have made this a lot more useable in terms of making it easy to put down the notes you want. You could also label the actual notes (and maybe tint them light or dark depending on if they're white/black keys on a piano) instead of just having colors.

Second, the scrolling is annoying if you want anything of significant length. You have to add notes bit by bit, and there's no way to copy and paste repeated sections or zoom out. For anything longer than a few measures this would be a real hassle to use. I would guess zoom would be a bit harder to do but just an input box that allows you to choose how many measures to add would be a huge QoL improvement.

Last, I don't think it would be too hard to have a couple different instruments you could choose between. Synth, guitar, and piano would probably be enough for a small scale gadget like this.

Really cool idea and the export/import feature is especially cool, but with the lack of QoL features I wouldn't want to use this long enough to create something worth exporting.

mtv129 responds:

I plan to transfer all this to Action Script 3 where everything will be much better, to be honest, I wanted to add a server but it didn’t work out

[Deeply Lost]

Aesthetically speaking this game looks fantastic. The visual style is unique and goes with the music to create a consistent theme. Not much more to say on the subject other than that you did a fantastic job.

The gameplay is where I found the game to be the most lacking. I like the level design and puzzle elements, but the intersection between graphics and gameplay is really messy. You say the collision with the player is a box, but since the box is invisible, the player is left guessing as to just where they need to stand in order to avoid enemies. Combined with how much larger the graphics are than their hitbox and certain elements that obscure large sections of the screen and the player is left really struggling to navigate levels that shouldn't be hard to navigate.

There are also instances where the collision just DOESN'T work. I noticed in at least one level, holding the down and left buttons allowed me to skip through a wall, and in another instance, having spikes activate while I was standing on them broke the collision and allowed me to move through walls until I popped out from inside of them. Combined with the aforementioned issue with obstructive graphics it made the entire collision system feel like an "anything goes" kind of deal, which would be fine in a casual platformer but is infuriating when navigating tight spaces and hazards that force you to restart a level.

I can't help but wonder if you either played and tested this game with placeholder graphics and added in the art at the last second, or if you didn't have any beta testers to warn you that this would be a major pain point.

I think the best solution to this would be to make the entirety of the game tile-based. This would preserve the puzzle and timing mechanics the game currently has and allow the graphics to largely remain the same (I suspect the messy graphics are part of your artistic vision so I don't think it makes sense to change them,) but eliminate the issue of being just a few pixels off while trying to avoid hazards.

It's a really solid concept and the integration of story, aesthetics, optional objectives, and solid puzzle mechanics showcase a very high level of effort, but unfortunately all the guesswork that comes with invisible collider boxes gives this a fatal flaw in terms of quality of life.

Alejandro-X-Azul responds:

Thanks for the feedback and the complements, Yes I knew that the collisions and hit boxes were going to be a deal because as you said, most graphics are bigger than their hitbox not way bigger but just bigger, the reason for this is because graphics change a lot and are a little fuzzy and have many shapes that just don’t go well with the structure of the game, see, To make the levels I used a square tile tablet, let’s say 4x6 depending on the level, this helps to settle a structure for the level, each tile is reserved to each object in the level, this is good until I add the drawings which have many shapes which make it confusing, I understand, for example the main character is very tall but his hit box is a perfect square so I placed the hitbox above his feet to make it appear as it is all about where he is standing at so the head and shoulders don’t collide with anything, I couldn’t change the character at much to be smaller for his hitbox because it would just look bad, legs are supposed to be larger then the stomach and lastly the head, I removed his neck to make it smaller but did not help much. Now to solve this issue I created a second character which is the blue guy (you unlock him with 18 stars or someth) this one is smaller and fits better because his head is close to his feet in fact, he is an alien octopus xd. Now, something I did not mention in the description is that the chracters hitbox square has a small circle inside, this circle is the one that interacts with the enemies, the enemies have their own circle as well, this is due because a squares distance from its corners to its center is different than from its sides to the center, so if it was only square to square then standing diagonally towards the enemy will make you collide with it easier than standing close next to him. So only the square is there to collide with the levers and the ground(clouds) but the circle inside is for the enemies
As for the rest, yes there may be certain bugs in some levels where you can pass above the grounds but it would be helpful if you stated which level is it to correct it
Thanks for your time
And also thanks for appreciating the effort it takes to make games on flash, some users don’t understand how limited is flash 8 and how painful it is to make games there