Kwing's game Reviews on Newgrounds

[Windowz 98 NetTowns Edition]

We get one of these every year but this one is really nothing special, at least as far as I can tell. It's always interesting picking through the different menus and options and seeing what's there, but in this case, such a large percentage of the content are just old text websites that are accurate depictions of the 90s (in terms of the topics covered and the low quality GIF assets) and after looking at 4-5 of them they're all kind of the same.

The mediocre framerate makes me wish there was an option to disable the cursor, and some way to see what page elements are clickable (EDIT: WITHOUT searching around with the mouse - for instance if ALL hyperlinks were blue) would make it a bit easier to skim through the pages quickly. I suppose poking around and exploring everything slowly was probably the point, but the actual content being perused needs to be interesting enough to incentivize that as a user experience.

There's a lot here, but it seems like an exercise in quantity over quality.

Kolumbo responds:

saying "they're all kind of the same" is an overstatement. also, "we get one of these every year" is just false.

buttons in the browser make the cursor change to the hand cursor, as they do in real browsers, so there is a way to know what's clickable

anyway, thanks for playing - although it seems like you didn't actually play it

[this is absolutely terrible]

So obviously this is bad, but I think just another 5 minutes of work could have made this significantly better. A badly drawn helicopter is better than none at all, 1-2 minutes drawing/tweening some clouds would have been nice, and some instruction (I didn't realize the up key was the control until restarting the game like 5 times) and way to restart the game would have made for something that at minimum felt playable.

[Bowlly Dress-Up]

Solid art and well-coded (I tested dragging an item behind another item and off-screen to see if it kept dragging and it continued working - though dragging off-screen makes the item unrecoverable.) I also appreciate that negative space (for instance, between the gloves) can be grabbed and dragged, which makes smaller items easy to manipulate. A larger canvas size would have made the right side of the screen less cluttered. You also could have had some kind of QoL features like returning all items not being worn to their starting place.

[The Whicher 2]

Jesus Christ this is good. I was expecting something similar to the first game, and the humor is definitely still there but the sheer length of this game is absolutely absurd and the humor basically never misses (which in and of itself is insanely hard to do.) That's before we mention the art, animation, and music, which are so meticulously done you could have 1/3 of the content and I'd still be surprised that you did it all in 4 months.

There are a decent number of typos and the audio quality (and voice acting) are a bit shaky at times. I also wish you could skip some animations and scenes during replays of the game. But none of these are enough to warrant subtracting from the score when this game brings so much else to the table.

Joeyag responds:

thank you so much for your review!

[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.