Kwing's game Reviews on Newgrounds

[Windowz XP 2012 Professional]

I came into this expecting a Windows parody, and by those standards, this is pretty lacking. After reading the description, I see that this is really an archive of old animations. Some of them are good, some of them aren't so good. Most of the things that were funny in 2012 were pretty boring, but the nostalgia factor is definitely there. If Dom Fera still visits Newgrounds I'm sure he'd appreciate all the lazer references.

A couple animations are surprisingly well-done, most aren't. Overall I think this is a good format to deliver a collaboration like this.

Kolumbo responds:

thank you! to address some of your points:

i'd say most of the animations aren't good - even included a medal referencing that! that's the point, though, we were all kids at the time & we had no idea what we were doing!

have to disagree with the 2012 thing - that stuff's hilarious

[Lampyrinth]

The production value and top-down puzzle mechanics remind me of some of the old school Miniclip games (Acno's Energizer comes to mind.) The light effects are the standout feature and look absolutely fantastic, but the graphics themselves are no slouch either. The walking animations look great and the lerping on the menu UI is unusually smooth.

Mechanically the game is simple, but made more difficult by the darkness mechanic. Early on the game is actually pretty linear. Sure there's a decent amount of backtracking, but there are only so many places to go, so even without seeing the entire level you can intuit where to go next.

Later on, the darkness becomes more of a nuisance than a mechanic that encourages problem solving. Sure, the player knows that the green/red floor switches toggle floor grates and the pull levers toggle the walls, but once the darkness makes distant obstacles impossible to see, the player never truly knows the consequences of pulling a lever, especially since even if they can see a grate or wall moving, it's always possible that a different one is also moving somewhere else. The result is that there's a ton of trial and error, which is made all the more tedious by the player's slow movement speed (it's not actually that slow, but when you have to traverse the level 5+ times it becomes really noticeable.) I'm not sure exactly what the big O complexity of these levels is but it feels like it's at least polynomial complexity. Perhaps if there was some message that said "N platforms moved" or visualize little sound waves coming from everywhere that walls moved it would make it easier for the player to understand the consequences of their actions and plan accordingly.

[Sound Maker]

So for a gadget like this the obvious tradeoff is going to be whether you want to lean toward useability (especially if you're only expecting the user to tinker around with your gadget for a few minutes) versus diversity of features. I think you largely struck the right balance here but there are still a handful of really important features that are missing.

First of all, what even is the scale you're using here? It's not diatonic or chromatic. Several times I went to add a note only to realize the scale you implemented skipped over the one I wanted. A single 12 note chromatic scale across one octave would have made this a lot more useable in terms of making it easy to put down the notes you want. You could also label the actual notes (and maybe tint them light or dark depending on if they're white/black keys on a piano) instead of just having colors.

Second, the scrolling is annoying if you want anything of significant length. You have to add notes bit by bit, and there's no way to copy and paste repeated sections or zoom out. For anything longer than a few measures this would be a real hassle to use. I would guess zoom would be a bit harder to do but just an input box that allows you to choose how many measures to add would be a huge QoL improvement.

Last, I don't think it would be too hard to have a couple different instruments you could choose between. Synth, guitar, and piano would probably be enough for a small scale gadget like this.

Really cool idea and the export/import feature is especially cool, but with the lack of QoL features I wouldn't want to use this long enough to create something worth exporting.

mtv129 responds:

I plan to transfer all this to Action Script 3 where everything will be much better, to be honest, I wanted to add a server but it didn’t work out

[Deeply Lost]

Aesthetically speaking this game looks fantastic. The visual style is unique and goes with the music to create a consistent theme. Not much more to say on the subject other than that you did a fantastic job.

The gameplay is where I found the game to be the most lacking. I like the level design and puzzle elements, but the intersection between graphics and gameplay is really messy. You say the collision with the player is a box, but since the box is invisible, the player is left guessing as to just where they need to stand in order to avoid enemies. Combined with how much larger the graphics are than their hitbox and certain elements that obscure large sections of the screen and the player is left really struggling to navigate levels that shouldn't be hard to navigate.

There are also instances where the collision just DOESN'T work. I noticed in at least one level, holding the down and left buttons allowed me to skip through a wall, and in another instance, having spikes activate while I was standing on them broke the collision and allowed me to move through walls until I popped out from inside of them. Combined with the aforementioned issue with obstructive graphics it made the entire collision system feel like an "anything goes" kind of deal, which would be fine in a casual platformer but is infuriating when navigating tight spaces and hazards that force you to restart a level.

I can't help but wonder if you either played and tested this game with placeholder graphics and added in the art at the last second, or if you didn't have any beta testers to warn you that this would be a major pain point.

I think the best solution to this would be to make the entirety of the game tile-based. This would preserve the puzzle and timing mechanics the game currently has and allow the graphics to largely remain the same (I suspect the messy graphics are part of your artistic vision so I don't think it makes sense to change them,) but eliminate the issue of being just a few pixels off while trying to avoid hazards.

It's a really solid concept and the integration of story, aesthetics, optional objectives, and solid puzzle mechanics showcase a very high level of effort, but unfortunately all the guesswork that comes with invisible collider boxes gives this a fatal flaw in terms of quality of life.

Alejandro-X-Azul responds:

Thanks for the feedback and the complements, Yes I knew that the collisions and hit boxes were going to be a deal because as you said, most graphics are bigger than their hitbox not way bigger but just bigger, the reason for this is because graphics change a lot and are a little fuzzy and have many shapes that just don’t go well with the structure of the game, see, To make the levels I used a square tile tablet, let’s say 4x6 depending on the level, this helps to settle a structure for the level, each tile is reserved to each object in the level, this is good until I add the drawings which have many shapes which make it confusing, I understand, for example the main character is very tall but his hit box is a perfect square so I placed the hitbox above his feet to make it appear as it is all about where he is standing at so the head and shoulders don’t collide with anything, I couldn’t change the character at much to be smaller for his hitbox because it would just look bad, legs are supposed to be larger then the stomach and lastly the head, I removed his neck to make it smaller but did not help much. Now to solve this issue I created a second character which is the blue guy (you unlock him with 18 stars or someth) this one is smaller and fits better because his head is close to his feet in fact, he is an alien octopus xd. Now, something I did not mention in the description is that the chracters hitbox square has a small circle inside, this circle is the one that interacts with the enemies, the enemies have their own circle as well, this is due because a squares distance from its corners to its center is different than from its sides to the center, so if it was only square to square then standing diagonally towards the enemy will make you collide with it easier than standing close next to him. So only the square is there to collide with the levers and the ground(clouds) but the circle inside is for the enemies
As for the rest, yes there may be certain bugs in some levels where you can pass above the grounds but it would be helpful if you stated which level is it to correct it
Thanks for your time
And also thanks for appreciating the effort it takes to make games on flash, some users don’t understand how limited is flash 8 and how painful it is to make games there

[La Renault Clio V6]

The driving mechanics are functional, but the lack of collision obviously makes it impossible to have win/lose conditions or even a complete game loop. You could probably add a speed penalty for going off-course in about 10 lines of code and counting laps or completion time wouldn't take much more than that and would actually give the player an objective to shoot for.

MebroukTheCat responds:

I just made this game to see if I can make a racing game, but the results were meh...

[Boyfriend's Valentine Gift!]

The idea is there but it's a bit lacking. Longer and smoother animations, more options, and a bit more detail in the graphics would have gone a long way. For a week's worth of effort it's not bad.

[Supra Mayro Bross. 2: Mayro Madnnes]

The sound really carries this game. There are plenty of unironically bad Flash platformers and without the music it would be significantly harder to determine if the low quality was intentional. Much like Pretentious Game, the joke lands, but the actual gameplay is tiresome. Faster movement speed and gravity would have allowed the player to get through the entirety of the game before getting annoyed.

[HiveClock: The Game]

I never know how to rate spam crew submissions, especially since the graphics in this one are actually pretty high-effort but still doesn't require much more than moving from one screen to another without any real problem solving or puzzles.

There are plenty of reasons this isn't engaging as a game, but not much you could realistically do to change it without essentially creating an entirely new game.

[Hex Merge]

It's actually a really fun game, but it really needs instructions.

My first impression of the game was that it was really slow. It became interesting toward the end to try and keep the bigger numbers at the bottom, and to rectify your mistakes by sneaking lower numbers down to match with any stragglers you left there by accident. However, when I realized how many more ways there were to combine numbers, I had to completely reevaluate my strategy.

I didn't realize you could select more than one number to combine, that you could combine multiple items that weren't in a row, or that you could combine different kinds of numbers (for instance 8+8+16.)

Even after learning this, it seems like the safest way to play is to combine numbers two at a time, so that you're not surprised by tons of tiles coming in at once. Small moves mean fewer new tiles, which means it's easier to change your plans gradually according to what comes up.

This should be balanced out by big combinations rewarding you with bonus points, but unfortunately it's not clear how the scoring system works, you just see your score go up. I notice 2+2 gives 2 points, 2+2+2 gives 3 points, and 2+2+2+2 gives 4 points. 4+4 gives 4 points, so it looks like the points you get are just the base number times the number of tiles you combine it with? The player could get the same number of points by combining them individually, with the added benefit that they have more opportunities to keep small numbers from falling to the bottom.

Currently it's possible to combine a whole screen of 4s into 128 and have the respawning tiles bury a 4 beneath a huge tile. This heavily disincentivizes big combos as it's risky and doesn't give any sort of bonus at all. Generally I found it was only useful to do big combos to combine odd numbers of small numbers I was trying to get rid of, or if I combined straight down so that I could ensure big numbers fell lower.

- Add some instructions for the player.
- Allow the player to click once and roll over tiles to select multiple, and preview what number you're combining to. This will make it easier for players to know what number they'll end up with if they combine a bunch.
- Add bonus points for combining more tiles, and display the point value of each move with a popup (for instance, 2+2+4+4 = 8 points x2 bonus = 16 points.) Reward the player for big, risky combos.
- More colors after 512, it's easy to cruise past this number and it's visually hard to play after that point.

Cool concept but missing some things that would balance it.

[<lightBot 2.0>]

There's way more here than there was in the first game, but I think the added complexity demands a better QoL experience for the player. For instance, the break feature which is introduced for recursion is explained poorly. I couldn't understand why I kept hitting code after my break statement when it triggered. It wasn't clear that you have to use the light command to make the ROBOT a certain color before calling a conditional on it.

It would be nice if the player was able to see the call stack, as well as set breakpoints to pause mid-execution and look at what's going on.

For easier levels I wished I could add commands with one click instead of clicking and dragging. For harder levels I wished I could select multiple commands and reposition them up and down, in instances where I needed to shift several commands forward or backward a couple slots to add in something I missed.

The game also feels poorly optimized, I have to play with low quality to get a decent framerate.

All that criticism aside this really is a big step up from the previous game.