Kwing's game Reviews on Newgrounds

[Spot & Click]

I was surprised by how well a simple concept translated to a solid game. Spot-the-difference games feel pretty dead at this point but keeping everything in motion made this much more difficult, especially due to one or two differences that were only present at certain parts of the animation (like the birds.) The first two thirds of the game went pretty fast, but the last third starts getting ridiculous. Would be nice if there were a warning before going back to the menu, and maybe an animated (and quieter) victory screen as winning can be a bit jarring - you just click and instantly see a new screen pop up. The difficulty is also highly variable. It might have been nice to have a few levels ranging from easy to hard, but given how much work went into the art and animation what you have now is probably sufficient. Spam-clicking is too useful; it would be nice to have some kind of cooldown on clicking differences (even if it's like 2 seconds) to discourage it. Offering some kind of zoom feature would have been useful as a means of looking at smaller details up-close, though I can see this not translating well given that the entire background is constantly moving.

Last thing I'd mention with regard to the game experience is that performance is a bit shaky in Ruffle. It's not bad, but the jerkiness can make it a little hard on the eyes, especially when looking for small details. Swapping the graphics from vectors to rasters by exporting and re-importing as bitmaps would probably have improved performance.

Though it probably doesn't need to be said, graphics are beautifully drawn and animated, and the lo-fi music fits. These are definitely the highlights of this submission and it shows.

[Cookie Clicker: Cookie Awaits: Beta]

Even for a game made in Scratch, a lot could (and should) have been done here. A simple background for all of the items is probably the easiest thing you could do to make this look nicer. Experience-wise, having a mute feature is critical since the appeal of idle games is that you can leave them on in another tab while doing stuff. Last note is that your CPS shouldn't be capped at 99, it makes the game come to a dead halt after you reach it as there's really no point in continuing. Balance-wise it would be nice to have the three items do something different from each other, especially since the house clearly gives you the most cookies per second per cookie (in other words, the grandmas and city are useless.)

[Stranded on a Desert Island]

Point and click adventures are fine, but I literally have no idea what's happening here. Some of the earlier frames in the game have some nice coloring to them, but it quickly goes downhill, turning into pretty basic drawings done with a large-width paintbrush tool.

The UI could use a lot of work, too. Just draw one button well and re-use it in different positions. There's no reason to be clicking a bunch of unique (but ugly) single-color, deformed arrows for the whole game. The short animations that play after clicking the "click here" buttons also go by too fast to understand what's happening. It looks like maybe a stick figure is getting on a boat? But these animations need to be delayed enough for the player to take in what they're seeing, as well as showing the animation happening slowly enough to process what's going on.

A "click buttons and try not to backtrack" game is pretty basic, but it could be decent with a bit more polish.

[Drop Cannon]

Damn, Utah's artwork never ceases to amaze. This is easily the most polished looking game in the jam and it's clear he's the reason.

The first couple minutes of this game I thought it was going to be too simple to be enjoyable, but the mechanics are added in nice and slow and ramp up into a pretty fleshed out experience. The added mechanics were a mixed bag. I never once fell for the decoy vehicles until the last level, and the drone sequences felt a little tacked on, but I also really liked that the vehicle stopped for the drone sequence - it gives the player a bit of time to catch their breath in a game that otherwise doesn't stop moving for a second.

The random all-ATV level, surprise boss at the end, or crushing the robots with heavy cannons were neat ideas, I would have liked to see more stuff like that. Perhaps having a mismatch between the vehicles and the cannons and forcing the player to equip vehicles with weapons below their weight class would have been interesting, but as-is I mostly found myself only doing this toward the end of levels if I made some pretty serious mistakes earlier on.

For the fights themselves, the Cassandra-bot (I'm calling it that because that's totally what it is) is a bit simplistic; shoot out its eyes and you're done. Having it regenerate mid-battle would keep the player more focused. Also, having the drones fly in multiple directions would allow the player to purposefully let some of them explode behind enemy lines. Or, drones could explode upon death, making it so that you could shoot them down only while they're over enemy lines? There are a lot of ideas that could have been explored here that weren't.

All in all, there's a lot going on here and even more that could have been added. It's unfortunate that the bulk of the difficulty increase comes from increased speed, as it seems like the most bland way to increase the challenge. It can also make this game a bit overstimulating, as you're watching very bright colors moving across the screen quickly while not taking your eyes away for even a fraction of a second.

I'm curious why you didn't make this a rhythm game. You've been doing this for 20+ years so I KNOW the thought crossed your mind.

My last note would be that it's interesting to see how this performs with Ruffle. Some of the later fights can take a pretty serious toll on the framerate, but as the battlefield clears up it's usually not much of an issue at all. I can't help wonder if this game is the byproduct of a stress test that you decided to flesh out into a full game, considering how easy it is to arbitrarily add in objects.

Btw, you forgot to tag this with "flash-forward-jam"

[Torture the Blammer]

There's not a ton to write home about here. The graphics are pretty basic, and there's only a few things to click on. Clicking on the victim himself only advances a set of predetermined frames with no animation, and the ending doesn't have much more than a few basic tweens.

I get that AS2 is hard to get into if you're trying to make something quickly, but it would have been easy enough to have different body parts take damage independently from one another, and also to have animations advancing them from one state of injury to the next.

Little-Rena responds:

umadbro

[Knoss]

This is a super cool concept and makes me wonder how the heck you got this working with Flash. I'd be super interested in seeing how this engine works!

That aside, there are some definite weaknesses in the design. Being able to strafe would be nice; why not have two extra buttons to move left and right without rotating the camera? It's also too hard to navigate the map. I get that being lost is part of the experience, but it's so difficult to navigate that it really just feels like a blind rush until the static gets quieter, then another blind rush when it gets loud again. There's really no way to strategize, and the walls appearing/disappearing doesn't happen in a meaningful way.

A game like Slender feels like the natural evolution of this game. You have the added task of collecting notes, and can gauge your performance based on how many you collected. Even something as simple as a timer would be enough for a player to want to replay this game, but when you realize there's nothing more to the game than the maze and the red screen, it's hard to want to play again, or even to stay alive.

[FRIDAY NIGHT FUNKIN']

There's a lot of small things I want to talk about here so I'll break it down the best I can.

Positive:
- The attention to detail is phenomenal. I love how the girl's hair blows in the wind when a train rolls by, or how she points in the corresponding direction when saying up, down, left, and right. The animation really is top-notch.
- The music is fantastic, and while the call/response style of the songs is a little weird at first, it ends up working really well. Overall presentation with the Vocaloid-ish style is really slick. Blammed was by far my favorite track.
- Step patterns are intuitive and realistic. I can't stand the Stepmania patterns that are impossible with your feet, whereas everything here could easily be done on an actual pad. UPDATE: As of Week 7, some of the harder charts would be nearly impossible to do with your feet. The arrows also get annoyingly fast when it would just make more sense for them to be slower but closer together.

Negative:
- Performance suffers pretty badly. My framerate dipped into the high 20s at some points and usually seemed to hover in the 40s. This also seemed to be highly dependent on the song (which I assume means it has something to do with the background animations.) I get that the player character has to respond to player input, but could the rest of the animations be baked instead?
- The player doesn't get enough feedback! The score is really unintuitive, as you never really know if you're doing well or not based on a number unless you've played that specific song several times before. The original AAA-E ratings, combo system, and feedback (Marvelous-Boo) of DDR keep the player better informed of their performance. Personally I breezed through all five weeks on hard on my first attempt, but a lot of my button presses would have counted as "almosts" if the game gave feedback on how precise your timing was. Obviously I can see that my scores are lower than other peoples' on the leaderboard, but I'd prefer to have some feedback in-game that isn't just relative to how other players have done.
- I get why the arrows are colored the way they are; someone that isn't used to the left/down/up/right sequence will recognize the directions because they match the PlayStation's face buttons. That said, the original DDR arrows have animations matching the beat, making it easier to step perfectly in time, and the lack of color-coding makes this a bit more difficult than necessary. Having options to change arrow style would be greatly appreciated. Also, the freeze arrows need to be clearer - the transparent tails made me miss a good chunk of them.

Overall:
Fantastic presentation - both the animations and music are significantly better than anything I've seen from Bemani. Unfortunately, user experience suffers because of how little information the player has about their own performance.

[Week Demo]

The animation and color scheme are beautiful, and surprisingly enough works really well with the mostly silent nature of the game. What's unfortunate is that you really don't get a feel for the lore or story, and that's really what you want to get people excited about the full game. You can admit up front that this is short, but it really is TOO short. Even just introducing the main character would be a big step in the right direction here.

[Squicide]

Pretty simple, but also fun if you just want to collect a bunch of medals. Pretty impressive that there are over three dozen medals to collect from the concept of just clicking a square.

It may be a bit much to ask when the concept itself didn't really try to be anything more complicated, but it would be nice if the game itself logged which endings you'd gotten, especially because clicking around wildly and rewatching the same animations can feel tedious. I also dislike that there are no textures, as it means there's really no landmark to figure out where to click for certain endings (I got the camera ending and haven't been able to replicate it since.)

Some additional logic also could have made this a bit less of a "try random shit" game and more of an actual puzzle game. Having certain things in the background or foreground would have allowed the player to reason out certain things that could be done.