3p0ch's game Reviews on Newgrounds

[Quantum Split]

Haven't I seen other games with this mechanic before or is that just deja vu?

Seriously though this was fun although short, and could almost certainly be expanded on to make a pretty cool game. Only thing I might say to tweak would be dialing down the movement speed a notch to feel more like a puzzler than a super meat boy.

RedCocoa responds:

It's very possible that you've seen games with this mechanic before, I know that this isn't the first game with it :D

I'll keep the speed thing in mind, I might make a longer version of this eventually. For this I didn't have time to properly balance the puzzle / platformer ratio so I understand that the player might feel too fast for the more puzzle heavy levels.

[ADRIFTER]

It seemed like the core puzzle mechanics were quite good, and while the art was kind of mediocre it's generally not that critical for a puzzle game.

But then I left the game and came back to realize it doesn't save progress, and that pretty much kills it. Ability to save is critical, especially if the levels are locked until you complete all the previous levels.

TwoPigs responds:

Apologies for the missing save feature, it will be our to-do list for future updates. Thanks a lot for playing the game and providing feedback though, really appreciated :D!

[Aerial Guard Prototype]

This is so kickass that I feel a little awkward giving feedback, but the things that struck me are:

Using a drift mechanic in a flight sim game is simply insane! (Physics be damned!) That seems like it could really be exploited to make for some remarkable gameplay, but with a very open level design it's not really necessary to drift for maneuverability. It would take some serious thinking about how to set up a level so drifting well would be rewarded, without making the level so tight and cramped that you can't see where you're going and what you're doing when you're flying around at a few hundred miles an hour. (Maybe there are areas in this stage where it's useful, but I didn't recognize them.)

Mouse buttons for firing and slashing seem a little weird if the mouse doesn't also aim -- it seemed like aiming was determined more by which direction in world space the plane is pointing, plus some degree of auto-locking on targets. If the mouse is only used for free-look angling, when I did that it became ridiculously difficult to play so it seems like I wouldn't really use it in practice while playing. (Maybe just have a button for rearview for when I've got bogies shooting me from behind?) And in that case, I'd probably rather have my right hand on the keyboard (with access to a bunch of keys) instead of essentially just using that hand to control the two mouse buttons.

For laser fire, I might recommend either making an overheating mechanic or smth to make it more than a matter of just holding down the fire button for the entire stage, or just make it autofire instead of even needing a fire button. I'm not sure what the slash will ultimately be used for (hacking a path through obstacles?) but I didn't have much use for it in this level. Similar for barrel rolls, and braking if there's a drift mechanic. Hopefully level design will bring them into play as helpful features.

Overall the recurring theme seems to be level design. With this level, many of the gameplay features seemed not to be necessary, and ultimately in order to reach its full potential I get the feeling that level design will have to be done in such a way to demand that the players master the tools you've given them. Especially drifting :3

Amni3D responds:

Thanks so much!

Drift is a really hard mechanic to figure out, I think this kind of drift works best for sharp 90 degree corners and combat in more open maps. I have some ideas now how to use them in level design.

The keyboard control scheme was messed up because I needed Q and E for barrel rolls, forcing a WASD control scheme. However, now I think barrel rolls would be better off as directional double taps, allowing me to go to arrow keys, giving you the whole rest of the keyboard for input. Definitely will look into this, so don't get too used to the keybindings if things work out :p

I think a weapon switching mechanic would be significantly more interesting than weapon leveling by itself. And I need more intent behind combat, but the lockon is certainly part of what makes this playable. Will have to look into improving aim while making it less automatic.

I'll get more competent with level design the more content I make, I think I can already make this map 2x better in less time, so that's neat!

Wrote this down, definitely taking this into account.

[Hexdoku: Demo]

This game is pretty hard! Great for people who want a logic challenge.

Minor things I might tweak would be making different shapes be different colors and/or when you're touching a shape make all of those shapes glow or something to increase visibility, and adding more varieties of music.

Not sure if this is just a problem on my end or if an update to the game was published recently -- when I started playing last night I finished a bunch of levels but it didn't save my progress when I reloaded the page this morning, but just now I played one level and reloaded the page and my progress was saved. Also at one point the reset button reset most but not all of my moves on a level.

puetsua responds:

Thank you so much for your feedback! And yes I updated the game at some point, maybe that's why the progress was lost. I will try to fix issues you mentioned in near future!

[Lost Alien]

Being able to hover horizontally without flapping after you spawn, and being able to either glide along the bottom of the screen or spam flaps to hover at the top without dying for going out of bounds, makes it much easier than flappy bird from the perspective of difficult controls -- whether that's a bad thing or a welcome relief from flappy bird and its clones is in the eye of the beholder. Personally I thought gliding horizontally mid-screen after spawning seemed more like a bug than anything, but thought not going past the upper and lower screen edges and dying was nicely merciful since this game has challenges other than just flapping. Would probably recommend adding things that kill you if you hang out there too long in the open space segments though.

JJGamez64 responds:

So the reason you glide forever after you spawn is because when you used to spawn you would just immediately fall and it would be annoying if you're in a tunnel wave and it puts you in a bad spot and also in general it felt bad to have to constantly get yourself back to the center every time you spawned. In retrospect I could just put a timer on it for when the blinking stops the character will fall again. As for being at the top or the bottom of the screen, every wave after the first boss has something to kill the player if they remain in those areas for too long. It starts in the UFO wave actually where a UFO would occasionally zoom on either the top or the bottom of the screen. I do agree that there are some waves I could be cheesed by being at the top or bottom but I felt like I had enough challenging waves especially in endless mode to justify not putting in something preventing the player to have the sanctuary at the top and bottom.
I very much appreciate the feedback!

[iii Demake]

Nice game; the only thing preventing me from giving a higher rating is that after looking at the trailer for iii on YukonW's site it seems pretty much identical. If you like making demake games, I'd mosdef recommend trying to take it a step further and making more like an expansion pack with new levels and material. (Also, I can't download the original iii right now and am basing this off its preview, so if there was new material in the demake then yell at me.)

CarsonKompon responds:

I did want to add more to make it a bit more "original" but PICO-8 is very limited in terms of how large your games can really be, especially when it comes to map size. I had to do a lot of work to make the original map fit within those limitations and at that point I ran out of space. Would be nice to do something like that for my future demakes though if I DO have the space :)

[Resurrection]

It's a kinda attractive game but has a few major issues:

If you aren't playing in fullscreen mode, I can't see as much as I really need to in order to play the game (I can't see hearts in the top left, or platforms that are sort of far away to jump on). It needs to be able to scale appropriately when not in fullscreen mode.

If I'm not playing in fullscreen mode and I press Pause and Exit to try to go back to the main menu and switch to fullscreen mode, it just goes to a black screen and hangs.

Hitboxes seem really off.

shaux responds:

Alright, I will take those suggestions to mind and try to fix them. Thanks for playing.

[Beneath the Branches - demo]

So far it's doing a good job of setting up its ambiance, but I don't see a coherent story behind all of it, at least at this point. Hopefully that gets fleshed out as the game progresses.

There's not much in the way of gameplay. It's just walking around a map and picking up the next bits of the story aside from the encounter at the lake which was okay albeit weird. Even if video gaming mechanics aren't really your thing, it seems like it could use more interactivity to get the player more immersed in the game beyond reading text and walking. Even if it's just making choices that have some impact on how the story unfolds.

Walking seemed awfully slow. I can appreciate that having the character walk slowly might be intentional in trying to set a creepy mood, but I would still like to be able to move faster or hold shift or something to run.

Overall I feel like if you're going for an atmospheric storytelling experience then it's heading in the right direction but not quite there with a solid story yet, and if you're feeling ambitious then adding more serious gaming mechanics could have a big impact.

Primajin responds:

Appreciate the detailed feedback. The story is meant to be somewhat cryptic at first, but the demo is fairly limited in what it reveals, as you progress bits and pieces will be easier to put together.

I'm not sure I agree on the walking speed, any faster and it starts to feel wrong to me.

There is some more interactive gameplay later on but perhaps I should have included some in the demo.

Thanks :)

[Dying Rogue]

Kinda cool for a bleakly themed platformer. The ambiance is spot on, and bonus for keeping corpses wherever the player dies.

For the game mechanics I think I would've liked his climbing to have been a little bit faster, and it sometimes got glitchy when I climbed down to the bottom edge of walls -- he kinda stood there not in climbing mode but also not falling. (I think it was in cases where I jumped from one wall to another wall and climbed down to the bottom of the second wall, but I'm not sure on what triggers it.) With just the movement mechanics that it had and limited threats (spikes, golems, and falling blocks) it seemed like it was about the right length, and if it were expanded to a larger game then it would probably need new mechanics introduced as you progress.

The platforming difficulty seems fine -- I died some on the first playthrough but made it through without dying on a second run. But some players will probably say they don't like jumping into stuff blindly without being able to see what they're getting into.

The big falling blocks might've been better with some other sprite because at first I thought maybe I was supposed to jump onto one of those and ride it, but that's a pretty minor point.

BelowGames responds:

Thank you for the recommendations. I will definitely try and expand some of the mechanics and mess with the camera to make it feel like a fairer experience.

[In the Time of Pandemia]

Hotkeys plz?
Smth like:
1 - activate hospitalization mode
2 - activate testing mode
3 - activate quarantine mode
Q - buy tests
W - toggle lockdown
A - speed down
S - speed up
or maybe just numbers to be friendlier to people with AZERTY keyboards.

kikill responds:

Working on it!