Kwing's game Reviews on Newgrounds

[Pizza Tower Defense]

Tower defenses are a pretty basic formula, and while this doesn't add much to the formula, there are plenty of shortcomings with the basic implementation.

The biggest issue here is that there's no way to see the actual speed and damage of a tower, or how those stats change as upgrades are applied. My first time trying the game I didn't upgrade the towers and was frustrated by not being able to kill anything. Then, after buying one tower and dumping 2-3 upgrades in it, I saw that I started killing enemies in one hit. I still don't really understand the functional difference between the three tower types, as pepperoni is strong enough to kill enemies on its own, negating the need to buy other towers except for getting the relevant medals (which are currently broken.)

Aside from essential information not being available to the player, my next biggest complaint is that the game freezes a little bit when an enemy spawns in, probably because it's running a pathfinding algorithm. There's no reason to do this for every enemy; run the algorithm once at the start of the wave and reuse it for all of the enemies that spawn in. Alternatively, bake the paths into the game instead of making the towers and enemies occupy the same game space. The way it's done now is really boring because you can just use the towers to create a winding path - and if you don't, enemies just go straight to the right and then down.

Graphics and music are unremarkable.

clarkiagames responds:

I understand it's hard to balance the game on my own taking account of all the possibilities, for now i just tested it a couple of times, I will make some adjustments. You got a point for the lagguish part I basically wanted to have the ability to add tower mid game but found out it would be too difficult and removed that. I might actually calculate the path once as you suggest. Basically the slow tower is useful for speed wave and splash tower for tanking waves. But the upgrade are too powerful for now i'll also adjust that. I don't know if you know the basic War3 TD in which you basically have to create a winding path. I find this kind of fun knowing there are multiple path you can use to optimize tower usefulness so i implemented it like that. I obviously said I done it in less than a week so yeah this is not some ultimate art. I appreciate the feedback though.

[Pixel Puzzle]

It's a not a bad concept (though simple) but is there no way to register when the player has solved a puzzle? The pieces don't snap into place. I also dislike that you have to click on the area where the pieces spawned from to rotate them.

Graphics and music are simple, gameplay could be decent but putting the pieces together and then just going back to the parent menu to do another feels really underwhelming.

Veinom responds:

I wish I could fix the 3 problems you mention (and I tried multiple times) but they are beyond my programing skills. So this is the best I could do. I understand why someone would expect the pieces to snap, but the game works fine as it is and the concept is clearly presented. And that's a win in my book.

[Hollow Knight Demake]

I wanted to give this a higher score based on the high quality pixel art but the game itself is a pretty miserable experience.

The sword attack has barely any range and the delay between when you wind up and when you attack is extremely frustrating. The UI dialogue goes too slowly and there's no way to make it go by faster. The cutscenes are unskippable, which is a bigger deal when you consider that the delay in your attack leads to you eating hits, and you only have 3 masks of health whereas you start with 5 in the original game - the deaths send you back to the cutscenes over and over. I also found myself hitting my head on platforms while trying to jump at an angle. All of this put together makes an experience that's slow and clunky.

If you're trying to remake the full game, the stuff I've mentioned should be some of the first things you address before you continue adding content.

Elv13s responds:

yeah the engine i used to make this at the time is really limiting, it might be better now but I plan to start from scratch with all the things I learned from this little experiment, thank you

[Dead Fish Clicker]

The most impressive thing about this is the fact that Cookie Clicker was itself meant to be satire, and you somehow managed to take it a step further. The narration feels like the drunk cousin of Getting Over It. Your hesitation and stumbles really add to how hackneyed and thrown together everything is.

Despite looking like stupid spam, there are some interesting choices of juice going on here, specifically the chimes varying in pitch when you accumulate maggots. The images are also surprisingly high-resolution, and you picked great music.

Obviously I can't give a high score to something that's basically spam but this was surprisingly amusing.

LeviRamirez responds:

thank you :-)

[Vizzy & The Lost Cat]

You know I was mad when I got 5:01 on my 3rd run.

This game looks awesome in terms of development, but in terms of design it doesn't seem to know what it wants. The mechanics make it out to be a collect-a-thon, based on the counter going up instead of down, and enemies dropping a lot of loot. However, getting the hardest medal for collecting money is still absurdly easy and after that there's really no point to continue hunting down pickups.

On the other hand, the ridiculously fast pace of the game, including movement and jumping speed as well as no cap on your firing rate, make this feel like it would be much more at home if speed were the primary goal of the game. And the game is much, MUCH more fun to play this way! Unfortunately, the one time-based achievement is based on the completion time of the entire game and feels tacked on.

What this game really needs is a more robust scoring system, and a level selection screen so players can practice individual levels. You could probably mix the collect-a-thon and speedrun playstyles by having some kind of ranking system that requires a certain score AND completion under a certain time, but whatever your preference is, I really do think this game could have played to its strengths better.

The graphics are decent but it's the smoothness of how everything feels that really steals the show. The music REALLY gets your adrenaline going and feeds more into that speedrun mindset.

Simple concept with perhaps a somewhat misguided execution, but even that one speedrun achievement is enough to bring out the potential this game has.

Just-a-ng-dummy responds:

Under 15 days I didn't really think much about this kind of stuff. You listed a lot of great ideas, mostly the speedrunning potential and I want to implement them after voting ends. I think misguided execution happens a lot of Game Jam Games. Hopefully I'll improve on this game in later updates

Thank you for the review Kwing!

[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!!