3p0ch's game Reviews on Newgrounds

[GD3D]

It looks and "feels" kinda cool for a one-button game. But while the game does start to get catchy after getting into it, it risks losing people early since it starts needing precise timing pretty quickly. It would probably be better to include brief in-game instructions saying you need to click while the cube is on circles (not depending on the auto-repeat jumping that happens if you continuously hold down the button) to make special things happen. The submarine is just nuts to start controlling right off that switch from the cube, and having to restart from the beginning when it crashes is enough to make me call it quits at that point.

NeuronExtractor responds:

Uhhhhhhh... why not try playing like... Geometry Dash... instead, because that's actually a finished game which I am recreating

[Dark Reign]

Well, the text shows up as black text against a very dark gray background. And it doesn't fit in the game canvas, so basically it's unplayable because on the first screen after starting a new game there are no accessible choices to click within the viewport which can't be scrolled with arrow keys or mouse wheel.

This will mostlikely get blammed, but that's why and those should be fixable problems by setting a light background color and adjusting the text size and location. A playable re-upload would probably do better.

[All Right on the Knight]

I looked into the game a little further than the surface gimmick, but I was limited in how much I could find because even if you know it's there to look for, it's still hard. And it looks like most other players who've left reviews haven't looked even that deep.

I feel like adding a mechanic to make it possible for the player to slide down a 1-block size gap if they're near the center by pressing down (as well as making the browser screen not scroll if the player presses arrow keys while playing) or something would help at least with level 1, because otherwise it's annoying (not challenging fun) to do it. With later levels I've only found some but definitely not all of the stuff to find, so you would know better than me whether there are other mechanics that might've been lurking in the back of your mind as potentially being a similar kind of issue.

Maybe it's meant to be hard, but it's tough for a dev to judge difficulty when they've designed the secrets and spent hours playtesting their game compared to a player coming in as a blank slate, and it feels like this one might have overshot which I've definitely been guilty of doing in my own games.

[Jump it!]

It's a nice start for your first game on NewGrounds! If you're going for rage, having to restart from the very beginning if you die was a great way to do it, although ofc that might hurt your score from players. I like the fact that even though it's a simple game it pays attention to important playability details like zooming the camera appropriately at different points in the level. I'm not sure if the auto-repeat jumping as long as you're holding down the jump button was a design decision or sort of accidental -- it did make the elevator kind of funny, but it's an unusual way of doing things in a platformer that felt a little off in other parts. I look forward to seeing what you come up with in the future.

[Bunny Rush Demo]

It looks like it'll be an interesting game, but this demo comes across as sort of pointless because there's no gameplay (random guessing winners doesn't count) so it doesn't even give a taste of what the game would be like.

[Tunnelboy]

I like the concept of working through a maze with a limited number of items. But as it stands now, having to keep one hand on the arrows to move side to side, one hand on space to jump, and one hand on the mouse to select and use items requires three hands so it doesn't work well for poor people like me with congenital hand deficiency syndrome and only two hands.

Fortunately it should be straightforward to make it more playable for people like me if 1) players could move with either WASD or arrows, 2) they can jump with W or Up in addition to space, 3) they can use numbers on the keyboard to select items to strike with, and maybe 4) having a "strike" key to destroy whatever object they player would be moving toward based on which movement key is being pressed (that could be space's new job). Although TBH you could just make it so the player automatically uses whichever tool would be needed to destroy the object they're trying to destroy instead of having to select it -- less clicking or button pressing needed.

[CaveEscape]

My main comment in addition to what others have said is it seems like it could benefit from a more zoomed out camera so the player can see more of the level. As it currently is with the player not being able to see a whole lot, I feel like it makes exploration more tedious than fun. And the mechanic of having the player press up or down to see more might be ok to include for bonus items, but when they have to do it to see the next platform to jump on it also feels more tedious than fun.

[First Person Shoveler - Godot Wild Jam #45]

W00t, more 3D Godot games!

I didn't realize you could get away with having that much non-primitive 3D stuff without running into computational efficiency issues on an HTML5 export. I've been sticking to very low-poly in my games, but this runs great in my browser so I should give more complex stuff a shot and see how much the envelope can be pushed. The fact that this was all modeled for a jam is pretty impressive to me.

[My Father Sold My Soul for One Million Gold?!]

I worry that many people will be put off if they run into the bug of the game freezing when you pick a character to respond to an event (which happened to me a lot), and won't read the author comments and see that if that happens they should save the game (because that button still works) and restart (not needing to completely reload the page because that in-game button also still works) to keep going.

If the freezing isn't fixable, maybe instead of making the text in the event description in the lower left disappear as soon as there's a click, make it be replaced with "If it seems like the game froze, use the buttons in the top right to save and return to the main menu" and stay up if the game freezes at that point, and clear that text after the event has been processed so players won't see it if the game is running smoothly? Or some other approach to achieve a similar effect.

Aside from that issue, it's a pretty entertaining game! Having a fair amount to fiddle with in managing the tavern, and cutscenes scattered throughout to add an engaging story, kept it interesting. IMO it could stand to be made harder, but since other people were saying it's too hard I guess it's impossible to please everyone.

Marckel responds:

Thanks for the review! You don't have to go to the main menu actually. The bug is resolved by simply opening up the save menu. You can return to the game/cancel with right click. This and the disappearing text issue both exist because Reim has had to really push what we could do with Rpgmaker and its plugins. In future games we'd hopefully figure out a way to overcome those issues.

The original release version wasn't impossible, but it was a little too hard. In the future maybe hopefully we could implement a difficulty setting feature.

[Goodbye Time Traveler]

I'm not someone who normally likes visual novels, but this story really ended up growing on me. I just worry that small things like grammatical and spelling issues when storytelling is the real draw might make people miss out on it if they judge too quickly and leave before it really develops.

fouzi94 responds:

Yeah, you're right.
Anyone playing, please excuse any spelling or grammatical issue you encounter. English is only my third language.
I will continue to fix these issues in the upcoming updates/patches of this game.
Edit : Game has been updated today .