Kwing's game Reviews on Newgrounds

[Pengu's Bubble Gun]

I got to 2412 before I got bored and called it quits.

It's a pretty faithful recreation of a bubble shooter. Everything more or less feels the way it should and the Pong minigame was unexpected but worked surprisingly well. As others have mentioned there is the bug with rows spawning incorrectly, though this isn't game-breaking.

The biggest thing this game is missing is some kind of difficulty curve. The rows moving down should happen more often as the game progresses, or perhaps the number of colors should increase.

STANNco responds:

my plan was to have each level introduce more elements/make it more difficult, but i was crunched for time. i will add these things later tho! ( :

[Danger Creek]

While I'm not a huge fan of pixel art, I will admit the execution on this is very well done, and the music is a real jam also.

Gameplay-wise, I'm not sure I really "get" this game. Sure, I can aim and shoot, and I got all the achievements on my first playthrough, but a lot of important detail feels obscured from the player. Does selecting the same powerup twice do anything? What exactly is my rate of fire?

Very small QoL improvements such as showing bullets at the top instead of a text number to indicate how many shots you have left, giving some indication of what your current weapons are as your arsenal grows, or having some visual indicator to show when you can fire again, would make the player feel a lot more in control of the experience. Without any indication of reload speed it can feel very clumsy to click on the screen too soon and see absolutely nothing happen.

Last, I really wanted the difficulty to feel a bit more interesting than just having a greater quantity of beefier and faster enemies. Enemies that zigzag back and forth and are hard to hit, or other kinds of patterns would really help make this feel like there was more technique instead of simply mashing your finger wherever you see enemies.

Frosty responds:

Ty for the review, ill keep all that in mind!!

[Lotsa Bots]

I have no idea how this would control on a phone, but it feels pretty damn good on desktop. The biggest issue is that it's a little dull. The enemies are all basically the same - even though some are melee and some are ranged, you deal with all of them the same way in that you can't do much other than run up to them and kill them before they get a chance to attack. The shotgun and SMG allow you to do this faster and at longer range, making them unilaterally better than the club (breaking bricks with the club is mostly useless.)

Despite adding in new content as the waves progress, the fact that all of them are dealt with the same way makes it feel very redundant. This game could have been much better with the inclusion of enemies that had slower but more powerful attacks, allowing the player to actively dodge and punish enemies. Perhaps some kind of rushing attack with a cooldown, or bosses with multiple phases. Any or all of these things would have forced the player to approach enemies with some kind of specific strategy.

The graphics look nice and it's cool that you got custom music also (the menu theme is a slapper.)

DJRahimAli responds:

Late ass reply but yeah, a lot of the things you described were similar to what I initially wanted to do with the game, but with the project being made for a game jam obviously a lot of things were to be scrapped for time. (Also I rushed to program every enemy in one day at the very end of development due to lack of time.)

There was a "DX" version of the game I had planned to develop after the Game Jam Version where weapons and the inventory were supposed to be a lot less annoying, with the ability to switch between melee and a gun and enemies were to be as fleshed out as I had initially wanted them.
The roomba enemies were to charge up and launch towards the player, which the player would be able to dodge, causing them to bounce against the walls like the balls in breakout and the bat enemies were to enter a crazed state when at low health where they chase the player at a higher speed.

There's improvements to the weapons, camera and other stuff too that I planned but in the end my passion towards the game went thin as I couldn't really draw yet so I would need the help of an artist to help develop the game, and they would be busy and I would also be busy and so on.

In regards to programming, I have since moved on from the GameMaker Engine to go and learn the Godot Engine, as a fair bit of limitations were really detrimental to what I would want to do in my games (For example, actual true pathfinding which I wanted to add to enemy ai in DX).

[Mini Musou]

The most obvious thing to mention here is the art, which looks absolutely fantastic. The theme is consistent and reminds me a lot of Okami.

The gameplay shows a lot of promise but it feels like it's missing something. The movement and attacking are logical and make sense, and the combo attack feels good to use, but something about the base capture feels off to me. The fact that the main character hits a large area when they attack makes the quantity of enemies irrelevant, so the difficulty doesn't scale the way you might have intended. This is exemplified by the fact that enemies don't really attack - they just kind of bumble around and deal damage when they're close enough.

I found a very dominant strategy was to do a quick sweep of each base from top to bottom, then heal at the home base until 2-3 bases were recaptured before doing another run. This allowed me to pretty quickly unlock all of the character skins, but it felt cheap, and waiting to heal at the home base was kind of boring. What if while you were in the home base, your other bases were converted 3x as fast, but the player also healed 3x as fast? This would keep the game balance the same but also allow the player to spend less time waiting around (this is a 30 second fix - you should definitely have time to handle it before the due date tomorrow!)

One strange thing that happened was that while I was doing a sweep, enemies swarmed the home base and gave me a game over, even though they hadn't captured all of the bases. Your instructions imply that you have to lose all of the bases before they attack the home base. Even if this isn't the case, I do think some kind of warning or indicator should pop up showing that your home base is under attack, or even just show a health bar for your home base on the UI at all times, because it was very frustrating to lose without even realizing it was happening until after the fact.

cheesycoke responds:

Wow thank you so much for all of the detailed feedback and suggestions!!! I can't stress enough how much I appreciate it, I wasn't planning on making any changes before the end of the jam but I pushed an update with some stuff based on your suggestions

For the part about the quantity of enemies not mattering too much, I will say that's sort of a fact of the gameplay style I'm trying to implement here. The number of enemies is more about spectacle while the difficulty stems from having to jump around to make sure they don't invade your shit. I did try to remedy this a bit, though, so now enemies in keeps spawn in a slightly wider area to hopefully make it more difficult to hit all at once.

The healing thing, I implemented your changes almost entirely and I think it's a great idea to help keep things a bit faster! I did, however, make it so capturing is tripled while healing is only doubled, just because I want healing to be a very risky move (especially when the enemies are, frankly, pretty stupid already so I'd rather players avoid damage in the first place)

Also ohh this last part is the result of an oversight with the enemy ai! So they do only choose to target home base if all the keeps are stolen, but there's nothing to tell them to stop targeting it if the player takes a keep back (unless they get bored), if that makes sense. I do, however, like the way this encourages heading back home instead of sticking to defending keeps all the time, so I did what you suggested and made the home health bar part of the UI.

Thank you again for the kind words and the fantastic ideas!!

[Bird On Bird]

This is the first puzzle platformer I've played in a LONG time that felt like a good organic mix of ACTUAL puzzles, ACTUAL platforming, and a concept that wasn't overly contrived.

The concept of "you can jump an extra time for every chicken you have" is intuitive and immediately understandable, and the way that each stacked chicken increases the size of your hitbox makes the game difficult in a way that feels logical and fair. The extra mechanics (such as the buttons or spiky chickens) add a bit of depth to the gameplay, but from a development standpoint what I like is that you don't use them to bloat the game with logic puzzles; virtually all of the logic required to beat the game deals with the same stacking logic that the core mechanics are built on.

The graphics and music are cute (and I don't want to take anything away from your collaborators) but the concept and execution really stand front and center.

I do have a few criticisms:

One, the main "level select" area is nice, but toward the end of the game it can be frustrating running around trying to locate the last few levels you need feathers from. Having a map (just for this area) would have been helpful for someone looking to get those last couple ones.

Two, the game can glitch a bit. If you fall a long distance while pressed against a wall, you fall through the floor. I noticed a chicken do this once or twice as well.

Three, the game's performance can get a bit shaky. Lowering the quality helps a lot with this.

Starblinky responds:

Thanks so much for the review!
Really appreciate the great feedback (and compliments)

And yeaa.. there's an issue with being able to fall through the ground. I discovered it like a few weeks before launch and with the amount of spaghetti I coded this game with I really don't think that will ever get fixed. At least it's not too bad.

A map would be a cool idea, I agree it might be a bit frustrating to have to find all the feathers you missed..

Thanks :)

[Portal Defenders: Tower Defense]

Okay, so last year's games were solid but this is the real deal. This game is fantastic.

I was a big fan of the creative liberties taken as far as tower defenses go. Only a couple places to put towers, only three types of towers, and one of them requires the player to micromanage where its troops move. These creative choices are weird and unusual but ultimately make the game a lot more interesting.

I found pairing the cannon with tankmen worked well at the beginning; tankmen forced enemies to stop, so the splash damage from the cannon could be maximized. Toward the end, as vehicles and flying enemies became more prevalent, I found myself using the turrets more. I do wish the turrets and cannon had more distinct differences, as by the end of the game, once the tankmen became less useful, they seemed very similar.

I find a lot of what makes the game remain interesting toward the end isn't so much that it becomes harder so much as the change in strategy relies on the expectations built through previous levels. For instance, I beat the third to last level using only turrets, which from an outside perspective is a stupidly simple strategy, but becomes unintuitive within the context of previous levels requiring you to use the tankmen a lot. This hampers replayability a lot. Another balance-related issue is that the last few levels actually aren't that difficult; most of the excitement comes from the power creep on both sides as your fully upgraded towers bash away at huge damage sponges (oddly enough I was able to kill Bizarro Tom really, really fast.)

Everything outside of the mechanics is basically flawless. The graphics, animation, voices, music, etc. all look great. The voices sometimes repeat just a bit too often, but in terms of style and presentation this game looks incredibly polished and the fact that this exact game could hypothetically have been made in 2005 (during XGen Studios' golden age if that puts things into perspective) is mind-blowing.

9/10 for overall quality, enjoyability, and execution, -1 for some balance issues and lack of replayability.

BoMToons responds:

Great review, and I agree with every point. Thank you for diving in to that depth! I agree that we do a 180 on the player with expectations (basically a lot of the development was nerfing how powerful the Tankmen are and introducing enemies that nullify their advantage).

Re: replay-ability, it's kind of our team's style to give you an intense, one-time, story arc in our games and we sacrifice some of that replay-ability to drive home those twists and turns/surprises on the first play through (speaking of which I'm glad you got the idea loud and clear of the "escalating power war"). It's a trade-off, but we don't pretend this is more than a web-game made for a game jam... if we were ever to expand this concept for a bigger game, I think we'd massage the mechanics you mentioned quite a bit (in addition, making upgrades more unique and having upgrades branch your tower specialties).

I'm glad you realize and appreciate that this was built with pre-2009 era tech (AS2) It even runs super smooth on most mobile devices...

[Beat Drill Galaxy]

This is pretty solid, and when you compare this to stuff like Ice or Burn the Earth it's clear this is several giant leaps ahead of the kind of stuff you've done before.

The menu, UI, and general vector graphic style all look immaculate. The physics are weird but it's interesting that each level has its own gimmick to keep things interesting. No one would ever know pixel art was your strong suit from looking at this.

The music isn't bad, but it really doesn't fit for a rhythm game. Your looping synths are working against you here; they work great when the game isn't centered around the music itself, but when the dynamics of the song determine the action in-game, more progression and complexity are going to be what give the game its complexity as well.

Obviously there are going to be sacrifices made with the deadline of a Game Jam breathing down your neck but there are a couple things I think would have been easy enough to implement without being too difficult.

The objects on screen should have different colors. This would be the easiest way to tell them apart while playing and really doesn't take more than about 30 seconds of work to change. Sound effects could also be a nice touch (with the option to toggle on and off.) The songs are a bit too long, and especially for easier songs it can be kind of boring to sit through them. Not having a fail state and not being able to see the score during a song takes any sense of tension away. Last, this is a simple enough game that you totally could have added a joystick or some other way to control the game on mobile.

Last note about the general design is that shorter, harder songs (and a fail state) would provide greater encouragement for the player to redo levels and try to perform better.

ShinsukeIto responds:

Thanks for the review Kwing!

Really appreciate the game design feedback. I agree with all the things you've noted here - especially shortening the tracks. I underestimated the impact of level design when making the tracks and building the levels out, and is one of the glaring issues I have with the game.

I did learn a lot from making this though. And if I were to update this (or make an improved version) I might look at getting you to play test it!

[Newgrounds Snowboarding]

For as cute as this looks (and as nostalgic as it is to see Kerrigan after LegendaryFrog has been MIA for so long,) it's just not that fun to play. The different tricks are identical gameplay-wise, as they take the same amount of time to execute, and most importantly you don't bail if you're doing a trick when you land. This makes the game extremely low stakes, as you pretty much can't lose unless you attempt flips.

Some suggestions:

- Basic game balancing would dictate that each of the tricks has a start and end lag, with the slower tricks having the greatest point payout, such that you execute (and finish) a trick BEFORE landing, otherwise you bail. The size of the jump would then determine when to use each of these tricks.
- Make linked tricks multiplicative rather than additive to incentivize players to take the risk of chaining tricks back to back. Show a timer for how long the player has until their combo runs out, and don't let the player do two of the same trick consecutively (otherwise the player will use the fastest trick repeatedly to get an infinite combo.)
- A bounty system where the game asks the player to perform a combo with several specific tricks in it would also help add a sense of tension to the game.
- Make the camera zoom out, especially when the player becomes airborne, so that the player can more accurately assess how much hangtime they're going to get.
- Make the slope only have a finite distance, so that the player is incentivized to take more risks in order to achieve a high score. If the slope is infinite, the best way to get a high score is to take no risks at all.

As for things not related to the game balance, I noticed a glitch where the game didn't recognize that I had already purchased some characters, asking me to buy ALL of the characters with money I didn't have and thus making the game impossible to play. The characters, while well-drawn, all play identically to one another. The game itself has a pretty low framerate and the slow animations only exacerbate a feeling of slowness to a game that should be anything but. Last, the controls are a bit too responsive and make this feel more like a platformer than a snowboarding game. The jump specifically weirds me out, I think holding and releasing to jump higher might make more sense.

MSGhero responds:

Thanks for the feedback. We would probably need about 5x the time we had to implement these things, but it's still valid. Though, the framerate is 60 fps, so you're probably experiencing something you think is the framerate.

[Cat Burglar & The Magic Museum]

I remember you posting about this on the forums and playing it before it was officially released. While some work could definitely be done to improve performance (the money particle effects are particularly bad - they should just have an animation where they fade out instead of programatically moving toward the player) the tradeoff is that the graphics also look pretty great.

Similar to my thoughts on the beta version, there's not a ton of strategy here. It's more of a touchy-feely thing where you try and guess how long you've been making noise and err on the side of caution. Security never increases fast enough to be especially punishing if you decide to be overly cautious. What is nice is that you can actually escape security this time! As many people said, in the earlier version you were basically dead once the guard was coming. I'm glad that both gloves and boots have a purpose now.

All in all the simplicity of the gameplay makes this pretty casual and sets a certain ceiling for how engaging it can be, but that doesn't mean it's not enjoyable.

Starblinky responds:

Thanks for the thought out review.

And yes I find some people are put off by the hyper casual nature of the game but that’s understandable.

The game has definitely come a long way.

There is not much optimization for the game so it could lag on older devices unfortunately. Once the jam judging is finished I’ll upload a new version with a bunch of improvements.

Thanks again 🙏