Kwing's game Reviews on Newgrounds

[Lotsa Bots]

I have no idea how this would control on a phone, but it feels pretty damn good on desktop. The biggest issue is that it's a little dull. The enemies are all basically the same - even though some are melee and some are ranged, you deal with all of them the same way in that you can't do much other than run up to them and kill them before they get a chance to attack. The shotgun and SMG allow you to do this faster and at longer range, making them unilaterally better than the club (breaking bricks with the club is mostly useless.)

Despite adding in new content as the waves progress, the fact that all of them are dealt with the same way makes it feel very redundant. This game could have been much better with the inclusion of enemies that had slower but more powerful attacks, allowing the player to actively dodge and punish enemies. Perhaps some kind of rushing attack with a cooldown, or bosses with multiple phases. Any or all of these things would have forced the player to approach enemies with some kind of specific strategy.

The graphics look nice and it's cool that you got custom music also (the menu theme is a slapper.)

DJRahimAli responds:

Late ass reply but yeah, a lot of the things you described were similar to what I initially wanted to do with the game, but with the project being made for a game jam obviously a lot of things were to be scrapped for time. (Also I rushed to program every enemy in one day at the very end of development due to lack of time.)

There was a "DX" version of the game I had planned to develop after the Game Jam Version where weapons and the inventory were supposed to be a lot less annoying, with the ability to switch between melee and a gun and enemies were to be as fleshed out as I had initially wanted them.
The roomba enemies were to charge up and launch towards the player, which the player would be able to dodge, causing them to bounce against the walls like the balls in breakout and the bat enemies were to enter a crazed state when at low health where they chase the player at a higher speed.

There's improvements to the weapons, camera and other stuff too that I planned but in the end my passion towards the game went thin as I couldn't really draw yet so I would need the help of an artist to help develop the game, and they would be busy and I would also be busy and so on.

In regards to programming, I have since moved on from the GameMaker Engine to go and learn the Godot Engine, as a fair bit of limitations were really detrimental to what I would want to do in my games (For example, actual true pathfinding which I wanted to add to enemy ai in DX).

[Stella Pro Skater]

When I first started playing this I thought it would be boring, but it actually turned out to be a lot more interesting than I thought with the moving obstacles. I like that the camera is zoomed out enough that you can properly respond to anything coming your way - a lot of games like this zoom in too far to show the character art and the gameplay suffers as a result.

I wish there was a bit more going on graphically. The clouds that pass by are just for decoration, so why not a few more things in the sky or in the foreground on the bottom left half of the screen?

My biggest issue with this game is how random it is. I lost at about 600m the first two attempts, then made it to 1300m (easily) on my third attempt. Sometimes the obstacles that are thrown at you look as though they're literally impossible to dodge, and sometimes you go long stretches with no obstacles, or only very easy ones. This makes the scoring system feel very arbitrary. On the other hand, I've clipped through obstacles and been fine, so the collision seems rather generous, but it can also be weird not knowing what is and isn't allowed to hit an obstacle.

[Mini Musou]

The most obvious thing to mention here is the art, which looks absolutely fantastic. The theme is consistent and reminds me a lot of Okami.

The gameplay shows a lot of promise but it feels like it's missing something. The movement and attacking are logical and make sense, and the combo attack feels good to use, but something about the base capture feels off to me. The fact that the main character hits a large area when they attack makes the quantity of enemies irrelevant, so the difficulty doesn't scale the way you might have intended. This is exemplified by the fact that enemies don't really attack - they just kind of bumble around and deal damage when they're close enough.

I found a very dominant strategy was to do a quick sweep of each base from top to bottom, then heal at the home base until 2-3 bases were recaptured before doing another run. This allowed me to pretty quickly unlock all of the character skins, but it felt cheap, and waiting to heal at the home base was kind of boring. What if while you were in the home base, your other bases were converted 3x as fast, but the player also healed 3x as fast? This would keep the game balance the same but also allow the player to spend less time waiting around (this is a 30 second fix - you should definitely have time to handle it before the due date tomorrow!)

One strange thing that happened was that while I was doing a sweep, enemies swarmed the home base and gave me a game over, even though they hadn't captured all of the bases. Your instructions imply that you have to lose all of the bases before they attack the home base. Even if this isn't the case, I do think some kind of warning or indicator should pop up showing that your home base is under attack, or even just show a health bar for your home base on the UI at all times, because it was very frustrating to lose without even realizing it was happening until after the fact.

cheesycoke responds:

Wow thank you so much for all of the detailed feedback and suggestions!!! I can't stress enough how much I appreciate it, I wasn't planning on making any changes before the end of the jam but I pushed an update with some stuff based on your suggestions

For the part about the quantity of enemies not mattering too much, I will say that's sort of a fact of the gameplay style I'm trying to implement here. The number of enemies is more about spectacle while the difficulty stems from having to jump around to make sure they don't invade your shit. I did try to remedy this a bit, though, so now enemies in keeps spawn in a slightly wider area to hopefully make it more difficult to hit all at once.

The healing thing, I implemented your changes almost entirely and I think it's a great idea to help keep things a bit faster! I did, however, make it so capturing is tripled while healing is only doubled, just because I want healing to be a very risky move (especially when the enemies are, frankly, pretty stupid already so I'd rather players avoid damage in the first place)

Also ohh this last part is the result of an oversight with the enemy ai! So they do only choose to target home base if all the keeps are stolen, but there's nothing to tell them to stop targeting it if the player takes a keep back (unless they get bored), if that makes sense. I do, however, like the way this encourages heading back home instead of sticking to defending keeps all the time, so I did what you suggested and made the home health bar part of the UI.

Thank you again for the kind words and the fantastic ideas!!

[Lose Your Money!]

The character design looks nice, but that's honestly about it. The gameplay is frustrating and slow, especially because of how little the player is really aware of. It took a while to figure out that winning and losing ALWAYS happened in increments of $50.

The games themselves are too simple. RPS and the slot machine at least make sense because those games are as simple as they appear, but a bit of an animation showing the results of the game would be nice. Blackjack makes very little sense because you can't actually see what your cards are before selecting "hit me" or "stand." I also dislike that you default back to "rock paper scissors" when you're finished with a game.

The biggest issue is that there's no real strategy to speak of, or if there is, it's a single best strategy that is originally obscured from the player. I see that RPS is fast but has a 50/50 chance of winning, I see that the slots are slower but seem to make you lose money a bit more consistently, but among all three games one of them is going to have a highest chance to lose and once the player figures that out all they have to do is play that every time.

[Tinder Mobile NG]

It's a solid concept and the art is generally high quality, but something falls flat in execution. The UI is in pretty rough shape, and showing the finger and phone is unnecessary when the concept of the Game Jam is that this is already going to be on a phone. The formatting around the score just looks ugly. The experience also would have been much better if the art had all been a single style.

[Pico "OC" Creator]

Eh, it's okay. I dislike that the toggle buttons only appear when the mouse is over them, and that they have a different style from the rest of the game's art style. Too many of the different loadouts stray so far from Pico's original character that it makes more sense to call this a generic character creator that happens to have Pico as one of the characters. The amount of different options for a character creator feels about average but the UI just feels unpleasant to use.

[Hungry Knight!]

For a Game Jam game, this isn't bad. The instant death mechanic is punishing, but it makes sense in the context of the entire game being beatable within only a couple minutes; if you could take a couple hits before dying, it would be way too easy.

The graphics are cute and the game controls decently, but I do feel like the physics could afford to be a bit snappier, especially when compared to Hollow Knight. The dash feels more like running than dashing, and it would have been interesting if it consumed the hunger gauge rather than being free. It would also be nice if attacks had a bit of knockback, to give the game a sense of impact.

I have two main complaints for this game. First, the camera is too zoomed in. Nearly all of my deaths came from my dashing into an enemy because I needed to move quickly. The fact that this happened far more often than me actually dying to an enemy attack was very annoying.

Second, I dislike how much of the game is blind searching. The mask bosses are scattered randomly around the map and this can make the core gameplay feel very much like you're just wandering. You're not in any real danger if you can keep killing the respawning enemies, but it does drag on a bit when you have no clue where to go. Obviously the game would be too short if you knew exactly where you were going, but I wish there were something to make the moment to moment wandering a bit more interesting.

Gameplay is solid, graphics are great, music is pretty bland. Overall above average as far as Game Jams go.

[Mastermind: World Conqueror]

In all honesty, I wasn't wowed by this. It's ultimately a very easy clicker game. Plot, meeting, execute, repeat. I beat the game pretty easily without ever going on any missions other than steal cash and steal science. I was waiting for certain circumstances to necessitate the kidnapping, killing, propaganda, or brainwashing missions, or for there to be some utility to the world map and the bars for each region. The fact that steal science will bring you up the science tree and simply executing the final mission grants you victory makes so many of the other features completely superfluous.

The presentation (both visual and auditory) are fantastic of course.

[Bird On Bird]

This is the first puzzle platformer I've played in a LONG time that felt like a good organic mix of ACTUAL puzzles, ACTUAL platforming, and a concept that wasn't overly contrived.

The concept of "you can jump an extra time for every chicken you have" is intuitive and immediately understandable, and the way that each stacked chicken increases the size of your hitbox makes the game difficult in a way that feels logical and fair. The extra mechanics (such as the buttons or spiky chickens) add a bit of depth to the gameplay, but from a development standpoint what I like is that you don't use them to bloat the game with logic puzzles; virtually all of the logic required to beat the game deals with the same stacking logic that the core mechanics are built on.

The graphics and music are cute (and I don't want to take anything away from your collaborators) but the concept and execution really stand front and center.

I do have a few criticisms:

One, the main "level select" area is nice, but toward the end of the game it can be frustrating running around trying to locate the last few levels you need feathers from. Having a map (just for this area) would have been helpful for someone looking to get those last couple ones.

Two, the game can glitch a bit. If you fall a long distance while pressed against a wall, you fall through the floor. I noticed a chicken do this once or twice as well.

Three, the game's performance can get a bit shaky. Lowering the quality helps a lot with this.

Starblinky responds:

Thanks so much for the review!
Really appreciate the great feedback (and compliments)

And yeaa.. there's an issue with being able to fall through the ground. I discovered it like a few weeks before launch and with the amount of spaghetti I coded this game with I really don't think that will ever get fixed. At least it's not too bad.

A map would be a cool idea, I agree it might be a bit frustrating to have to find all the feathers you missed..

Thanks :)