3p0ch's game Reviews on Newgrounds

[Miriam's Mice]

I'll come back and write more of a review once I've finished (or given up), but for now just wanted to say the only way I've found to get all the pellets in the Pellet Contest level involved something that makes me think it's not the solution you had in mind based on the dialogue.

Only potential tweak I can think of is that it might be nice to have a button to reset the entire level instead of making multiple undos.

[The Lives Of Others]

I like the concept, but in practice there ends up being a whole lot of walking around just to reach the enemies or items that makes the gameplay drag. One playthrough like that is OK, but replaying it to get all eight endings would get pretty tedious. Maybe add a button to run? That would break the difficulty if the player could run around enemies, so maybe only if enemies aren't nearby.

[BUMBLING BUILDERS]

@Oroshibu @Duckonaut plz do this when you have Unity save with PlayerPrefs so the save data doesn't get lost when you publish game updates kthx
https://3p0ch.newgrounds.com/news/post/1086279

Edit: Ok, yeah, Application.persistentDataPath would have the same problem as PlayerPrefs because with HTML5 it points to an IndexedDB location based on the URL (not the NG page URL, but the URL where the game is actually stored), so it will also be lost when HTML5 builds on most hosting sites are updated because that URL will change with each update. But explicitly specifying your own path name in IndexedDB (like in the code to override PlayerPrefs) should prevent the save data loss.

Duckonaut responds:

We don't actually use player prefs, instead we save a file to the designated local path by the Application.persistentDataPath. Not sure why it makes saves disappear on NG, since it works really well on desktop, I presume it's the path being changed by ng

[19 - Forty Hell V0.2]

This is a pretty nice game for your second upload to NG! The graphics with parallaxed semi-transparent clouds and the glowing effects give a nice level of polish to the graphics. I felt like the controls for the player's plane felt less responsive than I would like for a shmup and like some inertia was deliberately coded into it (or IIRC maybe Unity has built-in parameters for it when you set up input handling?). While everything is subjective, I feel like most players would rather have the controls feel nice and responsive, and have the challenge come from all the enemies shooting at them than handling the floatiness. I also noticed that often if I hold down space to spam shooting then it would shoot continuously for a while but eventually stop after several / dozens of seconds -- using Chrome on Windows -- although it's not a big issue to have to release and re-press space. I admit I haven't made it far into the game, it's pretty tough ^,^

GraeBush responds:

I really appreciate the thoughtful feedback. :) Stuff like this is what I'm talking about. Helps me leaps and bounds.

Next time I will try to get playtesting from the community here first, instead of my non dev meatball friends lol. I added a stop to autofire on being hit, probably not the best idea.

I will apply all of this wonderful advice on my next shmup. Thank you so much for taking the time to help me out and trying the game out.

Sorry it wasn't up to snuff, I am getting better little by little...

[Gardengage]

It's a great game, but I'd like if it saved progress. IDK what engine you're using or if you wrote it in pure JavaScript, but if you can make JavaScript calls and you have the level progression data in a single object it could be saved to LocalStorage with
window.localStorage.setItem("gardengage", JSON.stringify(saveData));
and loaded with
if (window.localStorage.getItem("gardengage") != null) {saveData = JSON.parse(window.localStorage.getItem("gardengage"));}
or smth along those lines.

[Dad 'n me 3D]

As a fellow dev who released 3D games on NewGrounds that I thought kicked ass but got meh scores, I feel for you. The modeling and overall graphical aesthetics are gorgeous. Getting 3D gameplay to be intuitive and fun with anything other than a simple first person shooter is hard though.

[Gravity God]

It takes a while to get into, but gets really good in the later levels.
Pretty awesome for being made in just a week.

[Crystal Hunt]

It's ok, but there are some glaring things that seem like they should be modified:
- the long delay between pressing space and firing might have been an intentional design choice, but I can pretty much guarantee that most gamers would hate it and want to have their character feel responsive and easily controlled, with the challenge coming from tough enemies instead of tough controls
- jumping height on non-bouncy platforms is bouncy? maybe it was because I hit a spring earlier and a variable didn't get cleared to say I'm not on a spring any more now?
- falling is fast and camera tracking is slow so you can literally fall off the bottom of the camera view while still being in play
- it seems like you can control the character by mousing over the control symbols, and yet the mouse is hidden?
- springs don't work correctly if you jump up and land on the spring

k7games responds:

Thanks for the detailed feedback I am working on fixing the bugs and making new levels and bosses.

[RaccoonRun]

It really needs instructions, specifically how to make the brown 'coon use actions when escaping the very first room (I was able to cheeze the first level with just one 'coon pressing both buttons by moving fast and spamming space), even if it's just a brief overlay at the very beginning showing which buttons are used to control the 'coons. And the game freezes if you press Escape and choose Quit to try to go back to the main menu and see if there were instructions that you overlooked earlier.

fenr97 responds:

Thanks for your feedback! I have added controls to the pause menu and changed the quit button to go back to the main menu.

[Nest Quest]

This is hard but it's frenetic and fun for sure! I'm not 100% sure whether the Egg Mode you can toggle in the main menu affects the rolling mechanics and makes you roll either like a sphere or an egg shape, or whether that was just me imagining it made it easier after I had practice playing, but if that does make a difference in game mechanics then maybe let people know. Especially for the acorn levels since that's some punishment right there.

Oh and if the author comments means there are some bugs needing fixing (I can't see other comments while it's under judgment) then maybe check the discord and run it by Figburn -- in the discord it seemed at least to me like bug fixes to our games after the deadline might be ok but adding more content after the deadline isn't. The only thing I noticed was that it doesn't save my times and acorns if that was intended; my browser's Dev Tools window in the Console pane mentions an ArgumentOutOfRangeException but IDK if that's really a culprit or a red herring like all those error messages I got and blithely ignored when I was using Unity :3 Good luck!

Trent-Sama responds:

Yeah the egg mode changes the collision of the player to an actual egg shape, it's pretty chaotic but goofy. I actually didn't have time to make the best times and such save between sessions, but I'll try to update that in once the jam is over. Thank you for the review!