Kwing's game Reviews on Newgrounds

[Cottonball]

Cute and well-drawn but the first jump is the only hard one and the lack of features (especially some kind of difficulty curve) bring it down.

Nabella responds:

No arguments here. I made this in like a week.

Maybe Cottonball 2 will have second background, lol.

[The DEGENING]

This genuinely kept me engaged much longer than I expected it to. The art reminds me a bit of Amoeba Amoeba. The battle music was short and annoying and I wish you picked something else. It threw me for a loop that the arrows to navigate the map were all at an angle. Especially for the first section in the old folks home I found myself backtracking when I didn't mean to. The simpler level design later was fine though.

Balance-wise it's pretty simple - dump all your points into power for Orderly and Party Goer and into Energy for Priest and you'll be fine (though at first I was scared to use stat points because I didn't want to make a bad build on accident, especially since there's no way to level grind.) There's no real reason not to use your strong attacks first so the cooldown expires sooner, or to take on an offensive build so as to spend fewer turns receiving damage. On perhaps one occasion I noticed an enemy that had such high defense that I needed energy attacks to beat it, and seeing enemies that summoned more enemies enough times taught me to prioritize those.

That being said it was still complex enough that I had to retry a couple fights and learn the different enemies and abilities.

I didn't really understand the plotline. I saw that the enemies were furries and what looked like feminists, but it wasn't clear if there was an actual narrative or if the game was trying to make some kind of political statement, and it was particularly bad that you could acquire party members and not even know it until you entered battle.

Jin responds:

Very nice! Appreciate the substantial feedback! I'll use it to improve the game.

[LOLympics 100m Flash]

It's good for what it's trying to be but DAMN is it frustrating (though as you say easier than QWOP.) I'm sure there's a certain shape to the mouse should be moving in but with no practice mode or any hints all I can really get is that an orbit that's higher on the left side and and lower on the right side makes me move slowly and consistently an every once in a while when experimenting I can make a huge leap forward (but not replicate it.)

The graphics and presentation are there but this feels actively difficult not just to play but even to enjoy.

AthleticDesign responds:

Thanks for the feedback. Yes, my intention was to include elaborate instructions of animated mice & corresponding running strides for basically every input parameter. But in the end, the hastily put together instructions on display had to do. If the complicated input stays, those elaborate instructions will eventually join :)

Actually, intricate shape parameters were removed from the final uploaded version. What matters is the average deviation from the straight line between two turns. A high movement during a forward swipe will lift the heel, which generally improves performance, and a low movement during a backward swipe will straighten the leg before ground contact (also generally advantageous). So an oval movement, like the one shown, works well. But easier said than done, especially after a while of spastic action.

But yeah, instructions are severely lacking.

[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

[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

[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

[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

[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