Kwing's game Reviews on Newgrounds

[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.

[Jaded Slasher]

It was honestly kind of painful to finish this. At first glance it looks like there's a lot of content (60 rooms!) but the whole game is just clicking to attack. There's no resource management (health potions are useless since you can always run back to a town and heal without taking damage) and the best way to grind is usually to find an area with a high spawn rate of chests and just click endlessly (especially as they respawn on their own.) The whole game can be beaten with a pretty simple formula:

- Click enemies until you meet the quota to unlock the next room or get low on health.
- Proceed to next room when possible.
- Heal when necessary.
- Spend excess money on stat upgrades.

The quests are generic "kill X of Y monster" and the lack of equipment or abilities really takes away from any variety the game might have with regards to actual gameplay. Combine that with basically no story and me mowing over the witch without taking any damage (not really interested in going back to kill the ogre superboss) and you have a pretty forgettable game.

Steps to improve? I think having the spatial element of the rooms coming into play would be nice. Right now you just kind of teleport from enemy to enemy and the positioning doesn't matter at all. What if there were some kind of stamina system and moving farther distances exhausted more stamina? What if enemies had an attack radius and attacking ANYTHING caused you to take damage from any enemy if you were within that radius? Stuff like this would make the player think more carefully before they acted. Also make it so just traveling from room to room carries some risk for the player.

If possible, try and discard any system that functions around making stats go up in favor of novel upgrades such as abilities. When the only thing that changes is a number indicating the damage you inflict or receive, it can really take away from the sense of progression because that progress is only represented in an abstract way.

Better player feedback would be nice, too. I'd like to see damage numbers by the characters when they attacked, and maybe a notification or pop-up that indicates when you have unspent skill points. Lack of player feedback made this game feel pretty obtuse.

Graphics are vibrant and colorful but get old fast, especially given how long (and padded) this game is. A shorter, more condensed game experience would have worked a lot better for this project I think.

Performance is also kind of weird on Ruffle, I had a much easier time playing in Flash.

applessmillion responds:

Thanks for the feedback! I'll see what I can do to improve upon the idea in the future. I will admit the current game has fewer elements of strategy than what I intended. There are two types of quests (kill X of Y; Collect X of Y) and would totally be open to a 3rd type, just couldn't figure out what that would be.
I'll definitely keep in mind your suggestions for the update I plan to release end of March/early April. Thanks again!

[Bullet Heaven 3 [Prototype]]

Pretty solid game here. Having played Realm of the Mad God for the past few months, I felt right at home with the bullet hell mechanics, though obviously there's a decent amount of other stuff to talk about.

I wasn't a fan of the upgrade mechanics. It introduces too much power creep to the game, to the point where there's really no point worrying about your rank as you can S rank the levels with better upgrades later on. Introducing a money multiplier based on your rank would be nice, as it would give incentive for players to get higher rankings earlier in the game, as well as add more options for grinding money other than repeatedly failing the hardest level they've unlocked.

There are a LOT of enemy types here, and while the variety is pretty cool, it seems like there's a lot of potential for mixing different types that you didn't use at all. In most cases, dodging becomes very easy if you just get far enough away from the enemies. This creates a pretty redundant pattern of clearing a corner or side of the arena and then wiggling around in that area while clearing the rest of the room. It works, but there aren't many (if any) enemies that really punish this strategy or force other types of play. The other side of this is how enemies may spawn en masse before you're done clearing a wave. This is interesting and can keep the momentum going, but in some cases (particularly when there are still plenty of enemies left) it can feel really unfair, as the act of clearing enemies ultimately results in more appearing on screen. It can feel like the player is being punished for doing nothing wrong (it's also annoying when you rush in to grab some coins only to have to retreat immediately.) It would be more fair for only weaker enemies to spawn in these kinds of situations, and if your intent is to prevent players from camping in "cold spots" this could be done by a certain enemy type rather than through the game's spawning mechanic. You could also do this with more than just bullets; obstacles such as walls or traps (Amorphous uses puddles of things like oil or acid) would be a creative way to increase the skill ceiling of the game without just taking a "more is better" approach to the bullets.

Performance-wise, it honestly looks like you did the worst thing you possibly could. The number of objects moving on screen for a bullet hell is higher than potentially any other genre, and you did this while also putting glow effects on each of the bullets (since filters don't work in Ruffle, I'm guessing you used Soften Fill Edges?) I had to download this game and run it in Flash, and even then the game slowed down considerably. I switched the game quality to low, which worked for a few levels... and then, even on Flash Player and on low quality, I still experienced some significant slowdowns. Surely this game would run faster if your glow effects were pre-baked with PNGs?

Aesthetics-wise, the graphics look nice but it's obviously unfortunate that you had to re-use old assets. I thoroughly resented the music, but I'll admit that's a matter of taste.

Good game and engaging gameplay, but the content feels a bit padded.

matt-likes-swords responds:

Thanks for the feedback.

The bullets ARE bitmaps though!

[Ruffle:Another Mission]

Eh, it's okay. I like the silhouette-based graphics a lot, but the gameplay is in a pretty rough state. The first and most obvious issue is that J and H are pretty unintuitive keys for sniping. Given that this game uses WASD and won't have mobile integration, mouse aiming makes a lot more sense for shooting. The controls also feel weird regarding the platforming, specifically some of the jumps which require high precision.

Probably the biggest issue is the lines that you and the enemies have to telegraph where they're aiming. The limited range (both for the player and enemies) is inconsistent and makes it frustrating to know when and where you can be hit. Some kind of delay and audio telegraph would be nice, as it would give the player a chance to run the other way or try to quickscope enemies. The meat and potatoes of the game (running into the aiming path of an enemy, then sniping them before the line rolls over you) became intuitive with enough practice but never really felt enjoyable.

It's not a bad concept, but it feels clunky, as the actual challenge (timing when to come out of hiding and sniping quickly) feels pretty far removed from the actual concept of a run and gun.

speed8327 responds:

thanks for the feedback. ...really appreciated it.

And about the game controller layout, the game was developed with Mobile-first design approach ( arrows key movement and A/B button for sniping and shooting). So, it had to map the desktop controller layout.

But at the last minute of publishing because of this ruffle's GitHub issue ( https://github.com/ruffle-rs/ruffle/issues/1972 ), had to drop the entry for mobile device (for time being).

If on getting more request and follow, I might upload another version of this game using openFl and haxe, adding extra levels with some extra playable characters with different abilities that might make the game more enjoyable.

So, stay tuned.

[Stupid House]

Man, this game slays! The first and most obvious thing to point out is how well the different filters (transparent PNGs?) work. The illusion of a curved-screen CRT and film grain really amp up the atmosphere, especially with the strange TV character that gives you hints.

Speaking more on the graphics, they're kind of all over the place. Some of the textures (shown by the TV, mirror in bathroom, plant) look really high fidelity, whereas others (most of the exploration) have the trademark angular Flash game "feel" to them. The jarring switch between art styles sometimes feeds into the surrealist theme, but at other points feels like a discrepancy in quality. For example, the clock room looks gorgeous and simply feels like a different style, whereas the ladders you traverse really are TOO simplistic.

The puzzles themselves are actually substantive - the first one is fairly simple, whereas the next few (including exploring the different rooms) gets trickier. There are only two issues I have with the puzzles themselves. First, the piano puzzle requires you to tap some pretty small surfaces. On desktop this is fine but on mobile, players are going to struggle to hit the exact notes. Second (and also dealing with the piano puzzle) is that there are so many keys it can be hard to track which one is correct, especially with the 3rd note which is a lot harder since several of the keys make a similar sound and you really have to pay attention to the interval it makes with the 1st note to get it right. It's nothing too terrible, but I do think it might have improved user experience a bit to take away some of the keys on the keyboard, both to make the puzzle simpler as well as to make the keys easier to tap on a phone.

A separate thing I'd note about user experience is that some of the animations and game loops you get stuck in really feel like they take too long. Accidentally clicking on the TV guy and watching the hint animation, or accidentally clicking on the door loops can be really tedious. At the very least, a skip button for the hint animation would be nice.

The only other thing I want to mention is that I was waiting for all of this to mean something. Obviously this isn't the most fair question to ask, as many other games of this ilk don't explain anything at all, but the environment of this game is so different and memorable that it's hard not to want to explore this world further or get some kind of answers.

[This is the Only Level]

I remember playing this a long time ago. It's a cute concept, and the single level feels very Game Jam-ish in style. A handful of the puzzles feel pretty similar to each other but all in all this is worth the time to play. The friendlier version of PT, if you will.