Kwing's game Reviews on Newgrounds

[Sport Dungeon]

It's a neat concept but it's missing a lot. The movement speed is just slow enough to be frustrating, and it looks like the attack plays an animation of a single projectile instead of using attachMovie, which means that bullets vanish if you restart the animation.

The whole game is one boss fight which is pretty easy since the attack animations don't target the player, have blind spots where the player will never be hit, and the hands and head don't have to be targeted separately to win.

The animation is pretty good but like the rest of the game feels a bit too slow. I wonder if it would help to just increase the framerate of the whole game?

fmdavid responds:

Thank you for taking the time to play and give your opinion, I'm glad to hear it, I'll take all those flaws into account for a future update (when the competition ends permanently).

[Dwarf Planet One]

This is super cool on pretty much every front and is far beyond what I expected out of this Jam. The animation could not be better, the visual effects are fantastic, the music is atmospheric, and the premise of a puzzle platformer with shifting gravity is really neat.

On the other hand it needs a lot more explanation and player guidance than currently exists.

You receive the flag but you're not told what the flag does. You get the hand tool but you're never told what THAT does. The levels are pretty big so you're not sure where you're supposed to go, and certain objects or enemies you encounter are never explained, which can be particularly daunting on levels where you've already done a bunch of work to reach a certain point and don't want to start over from doing trial and error with something that drains your health. Even the intro seems to have no real connection to the gameplay and this disconnect isn't addressed within the first half hour of gameplay.

I'd happily play through the entire thing if I knew what the heck I was supposed to do.

Emrox responds:

Hey thanks, glad you like it! As far as the lack of instruction - to some extent the "point" of the game was supposed to be that you see all this weird stuff and you don't know what it does and you kind of figure it out by interacting with things and trying out different things (like zelda 1, or something) but obviously that kind of design-aesthetic choice has to be handled well for people to not feel frustrated or alienated by it. I don't know how well I did on that front - I had to cut some stuff toward the end of development that would have guided the player better and made the "story" make more sense, and ultimately the game ended up being even *more* vague and impenetrable than I had intended! oops.

if it helps, the point of the flag is just for you to mark where you've been, and help you find your way around with the arrow. I might update the text to say that, so people don't think they need to put the flag on something to win the game, or something like that.

[Ricardo Goes To War!]

This is pretty fun. The graphics are nice (except for that horrid looking stop sign) and the sound design is functional. The gameplay is simple but fun enough to be worth playing several times. As to be expected from a 53xy83457 game there are a gazillion animations based on where you shoot someone which is a nice layer of polish.

A bit more complexity or length (perhaps different levels or a boss fight) would be appreciated.

53xy83457 responds:

All the animations for shooting people were TheAsterDood02's doing this time. I fucked up the helicopter pilot but that's about it. Now the lack of complexity and length, I'll gladly take credit for that.

[Skeleton Day]

The premise for this is absolutely hilarious. The last several games I've played I haven't been too enthused by the plot, but this one was really funny! Apart from that the art and music sound great and the controls, simple as they are, work just fine.

Regarding flaws... As you say it's very short and it's too bad there's no real gameplay, be it puzzles or combat.

TeamTamago responds:

Thanks! Hopefully after a couple of bug fixes I can continue the story and add some more "game" game to it

[Assassinating the Guards]

Well, it's a Henry Stickman tribute. I don't mind these, but the actual quality of the animation is very crude. Some actual frame by frame animation instead of just tweens (and some easing on the tweens) would go a long way toward making this feel more fleshed out, since the animation really is the cornerstone of the "choose your animation" genre.

There also isn't a whole lot in terms of branching choices but for a Game Jam game this is totally excusable.

anon0284750184820175 responds:

ty 4 the constructive criticism.

[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!