Kwing's game Reviews on Newgrounds

[I'm Outta Here (Game Jam Edition)]

Wow. I never would have guessed this was a downsized version of what you were planning on making. First and foremost the game is visually beautiful, with the animation being absolutely fantastic. The fire, the tears, the basement grinder... All of it looks absolutely incredible. I tried looking you up to see if you were in Hyun's Dojo and found nothing. I honestly can't figure out how you've managed to attain this level of proficiency (at SEVENTEEN???) without first being a part of some established animator group.

A few of the puzzle elements can be misleading, mainly the fact that the water can be used twice (I'm really used to items disappearing from inventory after a single use.)

Code-wise the game is tight. Items combine just fine and I never noticed a single glitch. The only issue I had was that performance in some rooms (using the computer) was rather poor. This wouldn't matter at all if it weren't for the fact that you have a custom cursor. If you simply removed that and let people play with their own cursor this wouldn't be an issue at all.

[alter Matricks]

For as simple as this is, it's surprisingly addicting. Unfortunately the puzzle element ends up being pretty shallow with only two colors - I can only assume that's why the viruses are there. Ultimately I found the viruses make the game more tedious than difficult, but once the difficulty ramps up I did find myself actually thinking and playing actively. I still think that, even with the Matrix theme, more colors would have allowed the difficulty to feel more organic.

Some of the later levels lag a little too.

Foumart responds:

Thanks for the feedback. It is being taken into account for the current and upcoming updates.

[TANKMEN : THE GAME (tech demo)]

Damn... It's way too bad this is incomplete, as the art looks absolutely phenomenal. Gameplay-wise, the acceleration is a bit slow and it strikes me as unfair that some of the platforms you need to reach are off-screen. That said this could have easily been a 9/10 game if it had been finished.

Blounty responds:

Life sadly gets in the way of game jams ;(

[Randy Learns Science]

OH MY GOD the aesthetic for this is soooooo good! Up until the creepypasta stuff started happening I thought the game was literally a port of an existing 90s game. It's that authentic. the graininess, the crude 3D, even the compressed audio quality and voice acting.

All that gushing about the theme out of the way... The games are solid. The quiz is, well, a quiz. The painting can be a bit hard as you can't just click anywhere on the periodic table to change color (I don't get why some elements do nothing.) The rearranging task seems pretty basic. The organ minigame is super hard, since there's a tiny bit of cursor lag.

The final boss and ending were a bit of a letdown. The boss doesn't keep with the aesthetic of the rest of the game, and its motivations feel a bit too generic. The fight is also just kind of a bunch of frantic mouse waving... Not very interesting. Part of what makes stuff like Sonic.exe so effective is that you don't really get an explanation other than the game just being "cursed" and I think that ambiguity could have helped more here. I also didn't like how some games are more "cursed" than others, as the most effective thing to do would be for the game to get increasingly cursed with each playthrough (this game still gave me goosebumps though.) You could either make several versions of each game or force them to be played in a linear order, but for maximum horror impact I think it's important.

Dungeonation responds:

Thanks for the thoughtful review! The ending was planned to be a bigger minigame, but time constraints of the jam and life happened. I feel ya there!

[Maestro Nav]

It's an okay game, but pretty basic. The things you have to avoid come pretty slowly and often it obstacles are clustered in two lanes while one remains wide open so you can just sit there with no risk of hitting something. The different hazards sliding around would probably feel a lot more like music if you had some kind of guide lines indicating which quarter/eighth note they were inside of. That, plus a more aggressive layout of hazards, could force the player to tap along to the beat. Finally, some kind of pulsing from the sprites is a great way to immerse the player in the music. Right now I can imagine it would be pretty easy to play this without sound at all, which is never a good sign for rhythm games.

Balance-wise the ability is kind of weird. I used invulnerability a couple times and restored a heart like once, but since the game is pretty easy these mechanics mostly went unused. There's one really hard section near the beginning but the rest is all pretty easy to do without hitting a hazard at all.

The graphics (specifically the player) are cute but get old very fast with basically no background and only four sprites (player, two hazards, carrot.) The song also feels longer than I would have liked. For something short like this, it might have been more fun to have three 1:30-2:00 songs with varying difficulties.

Technically speaking there are a handful of bugs involving things that should be deleted (the heart and transition animation.) Are you trying to use unloadMovie on these objects? Ruffle doesn't support these yet, so you have to swapDepth to a positive value and then call removeMovieClip.

Intrapath responds:

Yeah, I definitely see where you're coming from with your notes about the musical aspects, especially making the player tap along to a beat; there are a couple points where the player has to do that, but it isn't really consistent enough to get a player into a good flow, I think. I'm getting mixed feedback on the difficulty, funny enough; people playing on mobile think it's super hard, and the people on PC think it's super easy. It might be that the mobile buttons are too small to hit reliably, so there's some artificial difficulty in there; I'm gonna make a note to make those buttons bigger, and see if that evens things out. The pulsing is a great point too; there actually were pulsing animations early on, but I took them out for the sake of getting the game to run more smoothly. I'm planning on untangling some of my spaghetti code that I cobbled together to hit the deadline, and I've got my fingers crossed that that'll get things running smoothly enough that I can confidently put the pulsing animations back, and not worry about lag throwing off the rhythm of items spawning.

Balance-wise, funny enough, the abilities used to be switched (invul was 1 carrot, recovering health was 2). I think the way it's set up now is a little more interesting in terms of the mental "should I/shouldn't I?" play of when to use your carrots, but yeah, I could see PC players not using it that much. Once I get those mobile adjustments in, and I tweak the level design, that might even things out and make the abilities feel more valuable.

Definitely 100% agree w/ the note about the background & art getting old, fast- a scrolling BG of a motherboard (so it looks like you're actually *traveling through a stereo*) was in the works but had to get cut. That's one of the first things getting put back in. As for song length, yeah, I definitely see what you mean. I'm not totally sure if I'll add another song in a future update (maybe an encore kind of thing?), but if I do, it'll definitely be significantly shorter than this one. 5 minutes is probably pushing the upper limit here.

Surprised to hear about the deleting bugs; I didn't see any of that in my testing, but I'll definitely have to take a look again, thanks for pointing that out! Funny enough, I had no clue Ruffle didn't support unloadMovie for a while early on, and I was ripping my hair out trying to figure out what was up when it didn't work. Everything here is using removeMovieClip though.

All that said, I wanted to say thanks for writing such a thorough review! It's really great to be able to get clear feedback like this. Thanks a ton for taking the time to do that, and for playing!

[Arcane Maiden]

This is definitely one of the more polished looking games in the jam. The art is fantastic, and more importantly, consistent even with the UI (the pixelated fonts work really smoothly with the rest of the game, making the UI blend pretty well with all of the other elements.) Parts of this look like an authentic SNES experience. I also really like how well the mechanics translate for mobile play.

The gameplay is something that has a lot of potential, but ultimately suffers from a lack of balance. You can mostly stun-lock enemies with delay strike, to the point where they almost never get a chance to attack. Early in the game this isn't a huge issue, but as you get abilities that buff your mana recharge rate, it becomes a dominant strategy for any fight that's too hard. Particularly when it comes to the drain compound skill, you literally never need to do anything else. I eventually caught on and started using level 3 attacks (and limit breaks) during encounters with tankier bosses, but this was never a necessity so much as a convenience for bosses that had enormous amounts of HP.

The 7 abilities that the character uses could be more interesting if you could equip an ability as a level 1 or level 2 ability, buffing or nerfing it in the process, or maybe if the uses of an ability were situational. What if instead of delay attack, you could cancel an enemy's heavy attack only after they committed to it? This would allow the player to have more back and forth interaction with enemies rather than just whacking away at a damage sponge. Ultimately I felt like this game could have used more novel mechanics than the ones that were present (I couldn't even tell what the status effects such as burn even DID... they never had enough of an effect for them to influence my strategy.)

The leveling system is okay. Going back and grinding when a boss is too hard seems a bit obvious, but it's not terrible. I like the idea of the skill trees, but it's a bit intimidating the first time you look at it. The runic glyphs that show which skills unlock others isn't the clearest - something less aesthetic but more pragmatic would be much friendlier for a new player.

Beautiful looking game (especially with regards to sprite animation) but the gameplay could use some added depth.

MidNightMaren responds:

First, thanks for the compliments on the game. It was actually carefully thought out in terms of the vibe I tried to convey; from the graphics to the SFX, and Music (props to Hyenaedon).

The difficulty curve was left unbalanced on purpose, more or less, as I felt the game felt repetitive from a point; many things were left out. So it's more of an inverted parabola than a curve per say, with the second boss being the hardest on my opinion. Hence the 4th Skill on your companion to replenish your Limit, so you can sweep levels faster.

A lot of things on the gameplay were left out on paper unfortunately. Many ideas varied from having more action skills that you could switch on a 'Equip' type of thing, add elemental damage on your attacks, compounds having multiple levels instead of giving everything on one go etc. Who knows it can be improved on a second instance if it ever comes to it.

Thanks for playing

[Throw Rocks At Shit GOTY Edition]

I notice the SWF for this game is titled "Throw Rocks at Zombie Mayhem." I'm very curious to see a chatlog between the two of you where someone said, "You know, zombies are kind of played out... I mean, I like the concept of throwing rocks at shit, but could it be something other than zombies?" and then the other person says, "Hey, you just gave me an idea." And of course leave it to D-Sun to pick hilariously unfitting music. The sappiness, the screaming, the crying... you played that straight.

Anyway.

The art looks fantastic. Similar to my comment about the music, the sunset and the posture of the player are really dramatic and add to the tone (anti-tone?) that the game is aiming for.

Gameplay-wise the game is simple but addicting. I found the keys sticking a bit in Ruffle but worked fine in Flash. The difficulty only ramps up for a bit and tapers off really fast; I found myself getting a score of 1200 on my first try while playing offline. Different enemy types would have been nice. I liked the concept of trying not to hit the big shit, but there should probably be a more severe penalty than resetting your power beam, as you can play just fine without the beam anyway.

I'm curious why you didn't try to make a mobile compatible version of this. The game only has four buttons and there's enough unused space on the screen to add touch controls.

[Tonight we hunt Revenge]

Interesting game. The elephant in the room is the art, which looks phenomenal in terms of style, animation, and color scheme. It's clear a ton of work went into the animation and it has a great Devil May Cry flair to it. Unfortunately, the music is compressed and distorted so heavily to the point of being really distracting. Similarly, I found this game lagging quite a bit with Ruffle. Put together, these two things really broke the immersion.

The actual levels between bosses struck me as unnecessary. They're short, the mob enemies are annoying, and the platforming is stupidly easy. I can sort of understand that they're meant to tutorialize the jump attack and rolling, but you could just as easily have had one tutorial introduce all of these mechanics and then had a boss rush. The player's moveset isn't that big to begin with and the bosses really are the meat and potatoes of the game. I never quite understood the healing mechanism. It looks like you can heal twice per level, and an infinite number of times during boss fights, but with cooldown? It looks like the thing that flies around you indicates if you can heal, but it would be nice to know how many heals you have left, or what your cooldown is rather than just having a binary "canHeal" indicator.

I found the bosses to be frustrating if only because of the lack of telegraphing (however I did really like that each boss had two phases.) For instance, I didn't even realize it was the head that was damaging me during the first boss fight for quite some time. I kept taking damage when the enemy didn't seem to be attacking and got confused. The 2nd and 4th bosses were fairly easy after recognizing this, but the 3rd boss in particular can be quite annoying. He has a tendency to teleport right on top of you, and the flame pillars that shoot across the bottom can sometimes activate right after you jump, making it such that you don't have time to jump again before they activate. The telegraphing is also pretty subtle, especially if you're looking at the boss rather than the platform on the bottom.. Why not make their eyes have a bigger glow, or some other more obvious effect? The lightning attack can also be confusing, as the warning strike looks like an actual attack. It took me a while to train myself to remember that the small strike was a warning for a larger strike. Perhaps if it were a single beam instead of two separate ones this would be clearer to the player?

Overall a pretty fun action game. With better framerate, crisp audio quality, and a clear boss rush mode, this could feel a lot cleaner.

FsebastiamL responds:

thanks, I agree with you, when I saw about the flash jam I worked in this game in 2 weeks but I feel that I can improve the audio and music also I will add the indicators for the heal mechanic.

I will keep in mind all the critics that you made, Thanks :)

[Virtual Pet Rock DX 2000]

For a joke game this is actually pretty decent looking. I really do like the art, and the animations (specifically the poke) look pretty good. The buttons have a nice hand-drawn style and the music is fitting. The only thing that's missing aesthetically is a background (or two.)

The drag and drop is probably my biggest issue with what you have here. Some of the small objects are going to be hard to tap and drag on mobile, and having everything on-screen at once can feel very cluttered. Given that there are really only about 6 categories of things to add (ears, eyes, nose, mouth, hat, glasses) this could have looked really clean, especially if you kept the buttons to toggle items hidden inside of an alternate tab.

PegasuTV responds:

Hey thanks a lot for the thought out review!! Nice to hear you like the art, and all hand drawn UI stuff. I only kinda disagree with the background thing, because I was always thinking of the zoom out thing, and I couldn't think of a way to make it work with a bg smoothly like I wanted.

Now, about the drag and drop, you are absolutely right about the clutteredness, I actually tried doing draggable tabs in which each category would be in, but that didn't work so I just scratched that all together and threw everything on screen at once. It could really make things cleaner, but I am super limited when it comes to programming, all I know is stuff I've learned on NG tutorials from like 10 years ago(I might have gone through a few hoverman platform tutorials by a certaing Kwing user)

[Spacewar Championship]

If nothing else, I really enjoyed how smoothly this game runs in Ruffle. The controls are responsive and everything works without an inkling of slowdown.

The biggest gimmick of this game - that being the different ship types - is honestly not that interesting. Most of the variants are objectively bad, such as the random teleporter, the bullet going toward the center, or short-range rapid fire. On the other hand, I found the rockets and long range "sniper" ships to be significantly overpowered. These are things that should probably have some kind of tradeoff to make them all competitively viable against each other, or perhaps to have some kind of rock-paper-scissors where certain types have an advantage over others.

The map itself is very odd. The gravity well in the center is a neat idea, but it's way too strong and also doesn't matter for the AI players at all. What if your bullets didn't damage ships, but instead stunned or pushed them? Pushing an enemy into the gravity well would feel really satisfying. Having multiple arenas would be nice, too. What if the map was larger and had two gravity wells?

A couple other balance things are in order, I think. First, the ships need to loop around from one side of the map to the other faster. Too much of the combat happens completely off-screen, partly because you have to go far off screen to respawn on the other end, and partly because you can't spend as much time as you'd want near the center because of the aforementioned gravity well. Speaking of map balance, there seriously needs to be some invulnerability to prevent spawn killing.

The basic engine for this game feels great but this needs some pretty serious rebalancing.

IamJonathan responds:

Thanks for the detailed feedback! The map is the way it is because this is a remake of the original Spacewar game form the 60s. The idea behind the different ships was to have opponents of increasing strength for the singleplayer and I only added the option to play as other ships at the last moment. That being said, these are some great suggestions that I'll definitely consider if I ever make a sequel.