3p0ch's game Reviews on Newgrounds

[Atomic Alice]

Oh shit don't tell me mah fan levels are lost 4evar? My compy that I made them on and the email account I sent them from both died ;_;

They would totes kik everonez asses :3

MakeGamesHappen responds:

Yeah. I am sorry. We halted developement on the game because Flash was kind of a bad choice, but was what I was most proficient at the time. I am learning WebGL and OpenGL. With the intention of re-making the game with an awesome rendering engine.

The goal is to be able to have all the original level design data compatible with the new engine.
So if that happens I'll try and dig up your old levels.

-John Mark

[Musk Mining Industries]

Dude no way are asteroid mining spaceships that hard to control IRL!

Sometimes a hard game seems like it's hard because of cheap moves on the programmer's part that just makes people want to ragequit. Somehow, this game ended up being as hard as staying awake through an English class but still just made me want to keep playing instead of ragequitting and eventually start to git gud. But then I ran into that frickin monstrostiy of an alien anvil on a pendulum that just bent me over whenever I tried to pick up the miners on the third level, and I've had enough of that tormentor for now. I might come back sometime later to see if I can figure out how to deal with that abomination tho.

colburt187 responds:

What happened was they designed the ships on earth then when they got to planet Musk the gravity was nothing like they thought it was, but they had blown the budget.

[Y.A.A.G. 0: The Demo]

It's difficult to give a review on such a short demo. There are a few important things that a great game in this genre should accomplish. First, the gameplay should be a fun challenge -- either solving puzzles to progress like in a point-and-click game, or if you introduce combat mechanics then finding creative ways to defeat opponents (other than just picking attack until you're low on health and then healing). Second, the game should create an immersive fantasy world and storyline (preferably branching and non-linear) for the player to experience, as if its main job were to tell a story and the player is a participant. Sort of along the lines of Undertale or Ouroboros or Hyptosis games or something.

With a demo this short, it would be impossible to tell an engaging story. And I have to agree with timeattack that getting washed and dressed and eating breakfast seems more like a chore than a fun gameplaying experience; more like a point-and-click game where you just click randomly on things and eventually make the story progress just by trying everything instead of by figuring things out. So I can't honestly say I think it's heading toward being a great game, but at least I hope I explained why I'm thinking that way and what big-picture things you could focus on to try to improve.

Marcgal responds:

Thank you for you opinion & review.

Though, I must say I'm surprised people find it non-obvious how to get dressed and washed and have to resort to click randomly on everything. I thought I've put enough hints in the dialogue? I thought if my mom with little prior experience with games could, for most part, figure it out on her own, then guys on NG should have little problem with this?

I still wonder where exactly was my mistake here...

[Gladiator Combat Arena]

Graphics are nice, but the gameplay is just random numbers with no skill or strategy or anything? No thanks.

RHMGames responds:

Thanks for comment, Yes, that's the style of the game. :)

[Be a Cube]

That took some getting used to before I could kill the opponent. All the special effects when I fire made it difficult to see much at all, and very difficult to see where the enemy was going and whether or not I was hitting him. That makes it tough, and I suspect most players would want to be able to see what they're doing better and have the challenge come from the opponent being powerful instead of having their own shots obscure their view.

When I was playing, most of the battle took place outside of the buildings area and in an open field. So it ended up being just a matter of holding left or right to strafe around and avoid being hit, while I tried to keep the enemy in the crosshairs and fire short bursts so my shots didn't obscure my view. Then I tried playing again and staying within the buildings area to see if that made it more fun, but it started to seem unfair that the enemy could sneak up and tag me while I was having trouble finding him at all among the buildings, and it got practically impossible to follow the enemy when he started jumping around. Then I got hit and thrown in the air and landed on a rooftop with a small fence-like thing at the ledge with no way of getting off.

This is a very nice engine (idk how much of the engine you made yourself or how much came with the programming package you were using), but there's still a lot of work ahead to turn it into a really fun game.

Java-N responds:

Thank you very much for sharing your experience after playing the game!

I totally agree, it still needs to be a fun game.

By the way, the challenge was to create by myself the system of movement of the main character, and the camera, as well as the artificial intelligence of the enemy (which lacks much to improve) the only thing not done by me were the buildings , The soil, the sun, and the particle system that i downloaded from the asset store.

I will continue to work on it to make it a really fun game :D

[TRY. DIE. REPEAT.]

Reminds me of SeppuKuties :3
Mosdef check it out if you haven't already, for inspiration and to see what's been done with the concept. Fortunately in this game the dead bodies aren't as slippery.

rodolfodth responds:

yeah, I found SeppuKuties after I made this one xD (this version was made in 2015), and now I'm working on the full version which will me a "plot driven semi-open world 2d platformer" xDD
<3 thanks for your feedback!

[UnderNet: Block Smash]

It was sort of interesting at first, but after a while I figured the way to go is to just take very shallow angle shots and let things bounce around a lot. That does lots of destruction, and there's not really any need to anything particularly skillful or do much other than occasionally click to launch a shot and watch how much damage it does, which takes all the fun out of it. It could definitely stand to be improved with mechanics that force the player to stay immersed.

tikotus responds:

Thanks for the analysis. I think you're right. I have to fix this with deeper mechanics.

[Extraction: Chapter 0]

I see that most of the commenters have already said this is shorter than a game ought to be (even for a pilot) but very good for what was presented, and a few people pointed out the similarities to Submachine. I'll say this: you've got a good engine and hopefully you'll be able to spend most of your effort concentrating on designing an immersive world and story for gamers, because IMO when it comes to point-and-click games in general and the Submachine series as a great particular example, that's a big part of what makes the best ones stand out. The other is of course making a variety of reasonably sensible puzzles that aren't exercises in pixel hunting. From this pilot it looks like you'll probably be safe in that regard; *** [spoiler] *** personally I would have preferred either having the grate change the mouse cursor (at least when the screwdriver is held) or never having any objects change the mouse cursor, but I can respect the design you went with considering how prominent the grate is and how reasonable it would be to screwdrive it. [/spoiler]

Criobite responds:

Thanks for the review, you made some good points! :)

[Voltaic Triple-Gun (C3 Jam)]

Lol, the explanation of how to make special abilities work is in the title page's "About" button... I spent a while just figuring stuff out in-game (it really wasn't obvious even with the instructions) and after finishing it I went and checked out that button and saw it would've made things a lot easier if I did that while I was trying to figure stuff out.

That said, IMO most of the fun in the game was figuring out how to get those special abilities to work to get through the levels; if I started off knowing how to use them, then getting through the levels would've been a lot more straightforward. If you were to expand this game, or make other games that try to capture the same spirit, I'd say to keep introducing new mechanics as the game progresses for the player to figure out how to use effectively to make it through.

ValettusGD responds:

Haha, yeah I added the ability controls to that page last minute, but it's good to hear you had fun discovering how to use the abilities on your own. It was my intention to have the player learn them organically, so I'm glad it worked for you. I know the in-game instruction wasn't great (thus the addition to "About"), so I'll certainly introduce them more gradually and more clearly if I make another version.

I can't change this version now that the Game Jam license for the engine is up, but I'll probably expand on this game at some point.

I appreciate the feedback!

[Vikings]

So far this has been my favorite of the c3jam games. It has superb graphics, nice music, fairly good gameplay although the levels are short -- leaves me wanting more. I agree with t4upl tho, it could use better in-game description of the controls or any description in the author comments... even after reading t4upl I was all "why isn't the X key opening the chest?" and a few minutes later was all "oooohhhh, that was talking about the X button on gamepad; only the E key on keyboard works for that". Persistent (not briefly appearing) descriptions in the background of the opening area are the way to go IMO, but that's pretty nitpicky considering it's a gamejam.

But wasn't there supposed to be a "three" theme to the jam?

SebbeV responds:

Thank you for your feedback. We made this game in 2 weeks. We put most of the work in to level design and programming. We will keep patching the game as often as we can. We hope that you enjoyed it.

Greetings /Crew