Kwing's game Reviews on Newgrounds

[Decapitaticide]

Good but missing some QoL improvements. I was only able to beat Vibe & Vannio and Alfredo, since those are the only fights where it's clear you can block attacks. The others I just clicked mindlessly until I lost because it wasn't clear how to counter attacks.

The graphics look great and I like the variety of levels and attacks you have to deal with.

[ZenFish]

I have mixed feelings about this. On one hand the controls (both keyboard and phone) are simple and intuitive. On the other hand the difficulty is frustrating and the lack of scoring mechanics makes the game unrewarding.

- Have bigger fish lose interest after some time.
- Make it so smaller fish don't dodge so well. You could perhaps add some variation where different fish can turn faster than others, making it easier to catch some than others. Or make it so that a fish can dodge for some amount of time but then becomes tired and easier to catch.
- Make it so the player's fish grows over time and perhaps display some kind of score counter so the player knows how well they're doing.
- Give the player a larger field of view.
- Some sound effects and music would be nice.
- Different graphics and colors for different fish would be nice. Perhaps different shapes could indicate how quickly a fish can turn or how fast it can move.

Currently it's advantageous to make slight turns and to be an opportunist, only catching fish you're already lined up with instead of making sharp turns to catch a fish that's about to get away. This is partly because sharp turns can put you in harm's way of larger fish and partly because by the time a smaller fish has made a sharp turn it's basically impossible to turn perfectly enough to lock onto them and chase them down.

This creates an interesting risk/reward opportunity if you could chase a really hard to catch fish to exhaustion; you would put yourself at risk by making sharp turns while being chased by other fish, but if you can keep the chase up long enough you could get rewarded with big points.

andai responds:

Thanks, appreciate the in-depth response.
Especially like the "tiredness" mechanic, that is brilliant!
Should the player get tired too? There should probably be UI for that, but I'm trying to avoid screen elements. (Maybe time remaining in fast/slow mode could be shown in some "organic" way?)

Re: Growing over time
Original prototype had this, but then player became enormous and game became boring. I think to achieve this effect, I'd have to keep the fish roughly the same size, but shrink the world instead? And add bigger and bigger enemies to keep it interesting (sharks.. whales.. submarines? ;) Or add some kind of physical changes / evolution to the fish instead... maybe Flow figured this out.

The chasing mechanics ideas are interesting too. I've made a few different versions with different controls. I'm using a simple physics system (acceleration, velocity, friction) right now but I think unfortunately it doesn't model neither actual fish behavior nor good game feel. I'll have to experiment with more interesting controls and more rewarding AI.

>Give the player a larger field of view.
Wasn't sure how to accommodate both desktop (landscape) and mobile (portrait). So I picked the worst of both worlds (I hoped a circle would be "artsy" lmao)
Not sure if Flash can handle switching orientation. Though I guess I could make a HTML wrapper that hacks it in. That's probably doable!

Thanks again for the feedback!

[Tiro escapes hell]

The concept for a point and click adventure is solid, but I wish you hadn't chosen to use a custom cursor as it's really nice to be able to see when the cursor turns into a hand over a clickable item. Otherwise it's a real pain searching around for things to click. It's also rather annoying to trigger several lines of dialogue (sometimes on accident,) especially when you have to click on the speech bubble to advance them. If items were highlighted when rolled over it would prevent the player from accidentally clicking on the same thing twice (for instance, the chairs and tables in the empty classroom all trigger the same dialogue even though a player might consider them to be different objects.)

What you have now is a decent start but could use some QoL improvements as well as actually having more than just a couple different rooms to explore.

Tlegendprox0x2 responds:

Thank you! I will take all these comments into consideration!

[Ruffy the Shelline - Prototype version]

It's surprising this is where you chose to stop, because most of the game (collision and physics) are already there. Even the menu has some nice polish to it and the graphics are really cute. This game could still be solid even without coding in enemies or new mechanics, a simple timer and actual level design could have made this a fun game to speedrun. I look forward to seeing the final product.

MebroukTheCat responds:

I'm working on the full game, with my friends on Discord.
Hopefully, You're gonna like it more than the prototype version

[Paint(Flex 2/3 WORK!)]

This is a pretty cool drawing tool. Most of the important options are there but it would be nice if there was some kind of transparent ghost or outline of your brush so you could see just how wide it actually is before you start drawing. Modifiable background color would be nice as well. While more complicated, it might be cool to save the user's last action as a vector so that it can be undone, and only baking it into Bitmap data after they draw something else.

Neat idea but missing several key features.

[Lip-Sync Microphone]

Even with Newgrounds Player this thing seems to be bugged; you can't make it past the screen requesting microphone permissions. I downloaded this locally and ran it, and all it really does is echo what you say back to it; the sound level never actually influences the mouth animations. It's a cool idea, it's just too bad this was never finished.

You should work with the guys in the Ruffle Discord to make sure support for this kind of stuff is working by next year.

[Blocky's Funny Doings Interactive]

The animations are okay but rely too heavily on tweens and easing. The buttons have seriously messed up hitboxes. More animations or even just a higher quality of the ones already present would be appreciated.

SuperGibaLogan responds:

the reason why the animations are a little wonky is because i wanted to finish the game as fast as possible
also the hitboxes are messed up because i used masks to make the symbols

[Flex 3 example]

It's not clear if Flex is something you made specifically for Flash or if it's something you ported over (I assume the latter since your Github repo has a bunch of XML files.) As a demonstration this is okay but it would be nice if the user could tinker with some of the options, like create their own area, bar, or bubble charts. I also find it strange that the button bar has tabs but none of them show content. The data visualization only really lets you see the sample data you've supplied, so for something like a bar graph we just have to accept on faith that you didn't just paste in a still image of a graph without actually implementing what is implied.

Some kind of intro or explanation would also be welcome.

[SMILEY clicker :)]

This was way more engaged than I thought it would be and I nearly quit before unlocking the actual game at 50 clicks. By the end it's not exactly *hard* but damn does it get tiring beating away all three enemies at once!

For a first Flash game (in 2024!) this is impressive as well as surprisingly engaging.

As far as criticism, the crude brushstroke art works in some places, but in other places it genuinely looks bad. It wouldn't take much effort for the graphics to still be simple but at least have an acceptable level of simplicity. I also think it would be nice if the gameplay had some kind of an ebb and flow so it's not just a constant barrage of attacks form the enemies. As it is, it's both physically and mentally tiring to fight an uphill battle the whole time with no breaks.

It's a shame it looks like there are no other features before 50 clicks because I'm sure a lot of the low scoring votes are coming from people that never saw the actual game.

DrDevGuy responds:

thanks! i really appreciate the criticism! although i dont really see where the crude artwork doesnt work (i might just be blind or something) i'll see if i could do anything about it (if i can also still update the game after the whole flash forward thing lol).

and also yea i think most people probably didnt get to 50 clicks which sucks cuz there obviously was a bit more to the game, i guess bait n switch (or whatever its called idk) doesnt work well with clicker games or i might've just done something wrong in general with the start of the game lol