Kwing's game Reviews on Newgrounds

[Caretaker]

The graphics look good but this is obviously unfinished.

I recommend learning a bit more about how layers work in Flash (both on the timeline as well as the "depth" property you may be using.) There are some conflicts where world objects appear over UI, particularly the bunny appearing over the menu.

Beyond that there are some obvious issues (no confirmation upon buying food, food not costing money, feeding animals not bound by the amount of food in inventory, different foods not having any different effects, no explanation of why money goes up over time, settings button not working.) The cat walking back and forth also jumps instead of the cat walking back toward where it came before looping.

That said, I think this is an appropriate scope of complexity for a Game Jam game and it would be totally realistic to finish this at a later date.

EmeraldSquid64 responds:

Thanks for the feedback man. The bunny got added in RIGHT before the upload so Stevo didn't have time to iron out the bugs with it. We plan to get all of these issues fixed with the next update; Stevo intends to get it out tomorrow hopefully. Eventually this will get polished and it'll be a nice, playable little game, but for now this is mostly just a proof of concept I feel. Again, thank you for the feedback and for checking out this little project!

[saraOS]

"Choose your animation" Flashes are a dime a dozen but this one really surprised me. The presentation of a really well-drawn UI with all of the animations on the monitor having a consistent art style makes this really look fantastic, and small things like the lerping of the buttons as you scroll up and down just contribute to an overall professional feel.

The early animations are kind of a "meh" experience where you just scroll through one after the other, curious to see what's there. My first "wait, what?" moment was when I realized clicking toggled the timer display on Nyan Cat, which hinted that there might be more interactivity in these than I expected. Invader and Romance genuinely surprised me, though it would have been cool for Invader to have been slightly more involved. Romance on the other hand was perfect. The brain cancer line literally made me laugh out loud.

Minus half a star because only 3/10 of the animations had an interesting interactive twist. Alternatively, some of the plain animations could have been a bit longer, more interesting, or more funny. Still, well-drawn and well-animated.

Nabella responds:

Thank you for the review, honorable Kwing. It is not very often that I get thorough but positive feedback like this, so I appreciate you taking the time to type this out.

Adding interactivity or a small amount of variety whenever an animation plays was done late in development. It was around the period when I was working on Fishy when I realized I could nest more ActionScript into a symbol's timeline to make it do extra things, but by then I had already done most of the groundwork for the prior animations. Reworking each one to have a gimmick before the deadline wasn't feasible unfortunately.

For the later ones that DO have a gimmick, I discovered quickly that making an interactive mini-game with a punchline actually takes longer than doing a simple animation. Beyond attempting to make it funny, the interactive ones needed to actually function properly and give the viewer/player something simple to do. The trouble was worth it, though, because Invader and Romance feel like the most unique out of the 10 I did.

[Luna]

I really liked this. I came into this expecting Limbo and instead got something that felt closer to the music video Luna (by Moonspell.)

The music and animations (many of which were just for fun, without having a practical use for finding the candies) were cute and the spooky-cute aesthetic is just bursting with charisma. The actual candy hunting is the right difficulty (although I did restart the game at one point because I didn't initially trust that you hadn't accidentally put a candy outside the castle where you can't return.) It took me a while to realize you could click on the spider's dream but not the spider itself. Bonus points for making the candies not tabbable despite the rest of the clickable items responding to tab - this threw me for a loop when I tried to cheat.

It's not really explained why the final task is to kill the spider (or who Vampi is) but as a simple puzzle experience this game stands on its own anyway. Overall a short and sweet game showing off many of the simple game mechanics and cute visual aesthetics that gave Flash its approachability and unique homemade vibe at its peak.

[Stinger Flash]

It's not bad, but it does feel quite bare-bones. The simplicity of the background, bees' projectiles, and music are short, easy fixes and currently make a big difference in how limited this feels as a complete product.

Beyond that, the first time I started the game the bees didn't attack and my character refused to move. Restarting the game seemed to fix that but initially put a bad taste in my mouth. The inconsistency of the player's bullets also played into the feel of the game being unpolished (sometimes the attack happened really fast, and sometimes the bullets spawned really sporadically.) I also wish that the player autofired, since there's really no reason not to hold the fire button down the whole time.

My last major issue is that the hitboxes are unclear and the player flashing seems like an underwhelming way to indicate that the player has taken damage. The hitboxes being generous is nice but I think I'd rather have the bullets themselves look smaller so that they're more accurate to what the player is actually trying to dodge.

Flannelson responds:

Hey! Thanks for the feedback.

- I couldn't recreate what you were referring to but it sounds like you hit the pause button? That's a clarity issue & it's been fixed. Good catch.

- You have more movement speed if you don't shoot so that's the primary reason to let go of the button which is especially helpful during avoiding heavy bullet patterns in maniac mode.

- Your bullets spawn much quicker the closer you are to the enemies so you can point-blank them! It's a common technique in modern Shmup games.

- The hitboxes are extremely tiny on the enemy bullets so if I made them as accurate to their actual size, the player would have to physically move closer to their screen just to see them! I don't want to strain anyone's eyes.

[Courtroom69]

The writing, graphics, and UI all look fantastic here and make this feel super polished. I've never played a Phoenix Wright game but the options you give for presenting evidence or bringing up the names of relevant characters feels intuitive and usable.

My biggest issue with this as a game is that I honestly can't tell if it's possible to lose. In most cases where I picked the wrong character or item in discovery, I was immediately allowed to pick the correct option, which made this feel so linear it's almost like an interactive movie dressed up as a visual novel. The password save system does make me think there must be some way to fail (why even include it if the player can't get a game over and kicked back to the menu screen?) but again I don't know what would even cause this since the game is so easy. To this point it does seem a bit odd to use passwords as a save system - why not just have a scene select built into the game?

The length of this game feels appropriate but I'd appreciate a bit more lateral content in the form of bad endings (which would also coincide with some much-needed difficulty.)

Veinom responds:

What you said is spot on. In this current version (v 0.3), you can't lose. This was intended to be an introduction to a larger case, but I couldn't finish the entire thing in time (for the Flash Forward 2025 deadline), so I focused on polishing this shorter version.

The complete story was to include two more witnesses and be three times the size. That's why I added the password system, in case someone needs to take a break. The story and dialogues are all mapped out, with various endings depending on how many jurors you have at the end.

This is the first visual novel I've ever created, and it was challenging to calculate the length of the game, or how long it would take me to finish it. I've realized it takes more time than I anticipated. But I'm pleased that I was able to complete something presentable on time, and I'm eager to gather some feedback. So, thank you for playing and sharing your thoughts!

[Riddle of the Rainbow Rune]

I REALLY struggled to understand this game. Too much is thrown at you at once (7 stats, 5 disciplines of magic, and a spellbook you have to begin purging before you even understand what the spells are or what they do.)

Probably the biggest issue here is that you're given tons of information about your units and their loadouts, but the gameplay itself is idle, making it nearly impossible to actually see the impact of your decisions. What spell did my unit use that nearly one shot an enemy? This makes it impossible to know which builds to lean into and what spells to discard. Clicking on stats to see a description of them doesn't matter if you don't understand what stats contributed to which spells or which spells contributed to which victories.

Plenty of things on-screen are shown but NOT explained. What is a "lonely" spell? Why are some AOE shapes different colors despite only being one tile?

Other game mechanics are also explained very poorly. There are 3-4 different "contexts" I've noticed between fighting, collecting, the rainbow "riddle" mode (I didn't even realize there were riddles to solve until I saw that there's a medal attached to them) and shops. One of the biggest points of confusion is that I'd give one of my characters a rune to level up one of their colors of magic and I'd see the regular level of a DIFFERENT unit go up. At first I thought the runes gave experience as well as a level in that type of magic. Later I realized that collecting all of the runes essentially triggers an "end of battle" sequence where the experience you already gained has now propagated to your characters. This is super counterintuitive and implicitly communicates inaccurate information to the player.

After playing and failing, I still have absolutely no idea what a good strategy is, and my intuition that having certain units specialize in different kinds of magic rather than being generalists is probably useful, yet I have absolutely no data to show on this account.

In order for this game to be even remotely playable, I think having the name of a spell being used appear as it's being used, as well as some kind of damage indicator that gets bigger when dealing bigger damage would be a good first step. As an example, seeing "Splash" next to big damage numbers would confirm to the player that one of the spells they've invested in is paying off, while seeing "Magic Missile" next to small numbers might suggest a player should discard that spell the next time they're forced to.

The music and voices are okay but nothing special. The game sprites are basic but I like the idea of having the units change color according to the type of magic they're strongest in, and the frame by frame animation for the spells themselves looks fantastic.

EDIT: After playing a bit more, I've found that a generally effective strategy (on novice at least) is to minmax for high levels in specific types of magic, then learn the spells with the highest level prerequisites and discard the ones with the lowest prerequisites. Reaching high levels happens pretty quickly, so conserving gold for healing is useful, as well as experience if a character ALMOST has enough experience to level. Runes to level up a unit's magic are nearly useless unless you already know the tech tree (which you aren't allowed to see.)

I mostly put all my units in the front because there didn't seem to be a straightforward rock-paper-scissors hierarchy between the colors, just that opposite colors dealt extra damage to each other (which isn't necessarily good or bad; it just meant fights would either go by quickly or slowly.)

I'm sure on harder difficulties you have to pay attention to the actual skills and perhaps place support units toward the back, but due to issues mentioned above I suspect if I picked a harder difficulty and lost I wouldn't really understand why. The seemingly endless levels (without content changing or even an indicator saying how far I'd gotten) make it really demotivating to try and "finish" the game since I have no idea how close I am.

The end of the game comes suddenly, and without any real content other than random magicians from start to finish (not even a boss) it's kind of frustrating (and anticlimactic) that the game just ends, especially if you were gunning for some of the level mastery medals.

VicBiss responds:

Implemented a couple of your suggestions. Appreciate the feedback and thanks for playing! The engine is built to be very complex, that's the kind of thing that I enjoy. It certainly has it's downsides, though.

[Mr. UFO]

When I saw you created your own open source Flash creator I originally thought the actual game was just going to be a minimalistic showcase of the features in it, but this is so much more. The controls feel great and the light puzzle elements (switches and mine bouncing) add a lot to the gameplay beyond just dodging and making tight gaps. I also like that this deepens the gameplay without even requiring a dedicated attack button.

The one thing I didn't like is that the deceleration of the player character doesn't appear to have a minimum cutoff. I've had some "slippery" controlled games like this and I like to have a "close enough" threshold where things come to a complete stop if their velocity falls below a certain amount. This was particularly annoying in levels where you had to squeeze through a really small gap and needed that granular control.

The graphics and sound are also great and make this feel like a complete experience.

As far as criticisms, I did find it a bit weird that finishing a level just put you into the next level immediately, with no indicator of what level you were on or how many levels there were total, and no way to exit to the menu and restart midway through from a level selector. It's not strictly necessary for a game this short, but I also enjoyed this enough that I wanted more content.

Some easy additions would be a death counter and a timer for someone looking complete the main game with tighter constraints. A more complicated solution (which would have been fucking awesome) would have been a level editor. Most of the levels are already the same assets pasted in different orientations, which makes this a great candidate for customization.

[Red goes to the Store]

It's rough, but the roughness adds something not unlike the old Johnny Rocketfingers games. The voice acting really does wonders here for the game's personality and elevates the writing from lackluster to quirky. The music is also great, which makes the audio as a whole a really engaging experience.

The mix of actual fonts (as selectable text?) and badly hand-drawn text, inappropriate colors (door randomly has a red outline?) and grunted sound effects give this a really homemade feel which would be bad if it weren't for the fact that the actual animation is pretty decent. Small things like the car bouncing after launching off the ramp subtly show the difference between "bad on purpose" and just bad.

My biggest frustration was probably that picking the wrong options often led to interesting outcomes, which meant that accidentally picking the right option could necessitate a second replay to see everything, but the short length of the game makes this a very minor issue (though the game being too short is something of a problem on its own.)

Games like these are ultimately a great experience in a Game Jam as they're short and sweet and you can play a bunch of them back to back and get a novel experience each time. On the other hand it's a bit lean from the perspective of this standing on its own.

If you're concerned about the filesize, you can go to Publish Settings, change the bitrate under Audio Stream and Audio Event to be lower, then check Override Sound Settings. At 48kbps I was able to compress Slasher Click 2 to about 11MB and it has nearly an hour's worth of audio in it.

Redead-ITA responds:

Fascinating, thanks for the audio tip, admittedly my main reason why i was worried about it was because i recorded most of my audio on wav and i didn't bother much on converting them to mp3 (with the exception of The music which i did in advance), then i saw that newgrounds devoured 10 out of the 12 mb so i suppose newgrounds also does some optimization under the hood.

the inappropriate colors are actually intended as a way to tell the player that they can click it to see interesting things, it has additional dialogue and everything.

thanks for playing non the less!

[By My Own Hand]

The instant death mechanic of the button is okay, but is less interesting when the actual content of this game is so bare-bones - it makes it hard to want to play again after making it decently far and then failing, especially when missing one shot is basically all it takes to lose.

Not much to say about the gameplay and the UI is minimalistic, but the animation on these 3D models looks fantastic, if somewhat out of place next to the other game assets.

[Chess Force]

I enjoyed this, but it's definitely a flawed game. The bullet hell genre is done well, though grinding is perhaps a bit more necessary than I wish it was; I went through the first two levels only to find I did basically no damage in the 3rd level, which was annoying as I was perfectly capable of dodging and attacking but simply didn't have the firepower, making level 3 tedious and leading to very few enemies actually dying and dropping money.

Regarding the actual upgrades, they're okay. Following chess as a theme obviously comes with certain limitations; you can't exactly have AoE attacks or homing bullets without betraying what the helper ships are meant to represent. Unfortunately, this also means that there isn't a ton of strategy to the upgrades, you just buy them when you can and do more damage. There were perhaps 2-3 instances over the whole game where I was able to strategically pick off enemies using the diagonal bullets fired by bishops and queens, but for the most part the utility I got came from these bullets making contact by dumb luck.

With that said, I really did like the way that the helper ships followed you. This made it possible to play more offensively or defensively depending on whether you simply got out of the way of the attack, or whether you got to the right altitude to line up with an enemy before wiggling horizontally to align all of the helpers. The delay on the following mechanism also made it possible to dodge an incoming beam from rooks while still letting your helpers dish out damage, which felt really good to do.

Boss phases are fun, creative, and definitely the highlight of the game. If this were to have any post-game content, I think I'd like some kind of boss rush, maybe with the ability to increase the refresh rate of the game for added difficulty.

My biggest complaint is that the pace of the game is slow. Partly this is due to the current memory leak in Ruffle, but this is an easy fix - just quit and restart the game. The main issue has to do with enemies appearing slowly, with large gaps of time in between waves, the levels themselves being quite long, and the difficulty of on-screen enemies being relatively low. Low difficulty and lack of checkpoints makes it so that most of the difficulty comes from making small mistakes during long, low-risk, high-consequence marathons, which leads to a very frustrating and artificially long game experience when I would have preferred much higher difficulty with less severe setbacks in case of a mistake.

This frustration is exacerbated by some visual issues; tracking your own bullets, the coins that enemies drop, and enemy projectiles is annoying, especially when enemy bullets can sometimes be shown at a lower depth than player bullets, leading to your own bullets hiding incoming fire. Combine this with pink bullets that match the pink background of the final level, the green and white projectiles that match the green and white projectiles that your rooks and queens fire, and the similar saturation of the main layer, background, and foreground elements, it's very easy to run into obstacles not because you made a mistake and got cornered, but because you didn't see the obstacle in the first place.

We've had this conversation at least once before; power creep and visual juice are hallmarks of your games. That's fine, and I've definitely put these features in my games, but one of the first things I do after adding any flashy background and particle effects is to add an option to turn them off. Having player bullets appear at 10% opacity, dimming the background, and disabling loot drops when you already have four queens would be massive quality of life improvements that would require relatively little work, and players that aren't bothered by these things would still get the same experience if they didn't change them in the options menu.

Not much to say about the visuals and sound other than that they're great. The colors are vibrant and varied. The animation is scaled back as you would expect from a Game Jam game, but the small bits of animation that are present look fantastic and there's a consistency among all of the assets that leads to this looking polished.

BoMToons responds:

Thanks for the thorough review. You'll be glad to hear that update to version 1.03 fixed the lag issue that you called a "Ruffle Memory Leak" (but was really an issue in the way I coded custom sound volumes naively).

I'm ok with putting an option to turn off the screen flash. Seems like that's the most-annoying component of the fx. Look for that update coming soon. Another good point is about enemy bullet depth... I'll see if re-arranging that can be done too.