3p0ch's game Reviews on Newgrounds

[Apocashop]

Two suggestions: many video game players might not notice that there's a time limit for each day as the sun moves across the screen, so the faster you finish interactions the more people you'll have a chance to sell to and the more profit you stand to make. If you take all day reading everything and asking questions to everybody then the game will be tough to beat, but that will be most people's instinct if they don't realize there's a time limit, and is probably the source of the negative comments about the game being super hard. Just making it clear there's a time limit will probably clue people in and boost the ratings a bit if those people aren't left thinking this is impossibly hard.
The other thing is that there are occasionally gold clouds that float across the screen that you can click on for cash. That's fine during the day when time is moving since it gives people more things to focus on at once, especially if there's a time limit on the day, but I noticed that the gold clouds will still come out when the anvil makes the last comment of the day saying that the day is over if you just wait at that screen without continuing and you can just hang out and click a few gold clouds before ending the day. I'm not sure how I feel about that -- it's cheating, but also would give weaker players a way to make it through the game easily if they don't mind cheating a little and would therefore boost ratings because there are definitely people out there who downrate stuff purely because they can't beat it. So it's up to you if you want limit when the gold clouds can come out.
I had one run where a bug appeared, and this is what I can remember of it. Either day #2 or day #3 (can't remember for sure which) began with no clues about what item people are going to buy a lot of that day, but they seemed to end up mostly wanting swords. I offered to protect the guy who was hiding from the bounty hunter, and on the next day he went through both the dialog thanking me and giving me a bonus for doing so, and I also got a message right after that about needing to watch my back for turning the guy in to the bounty hunter. And on that same day, there were a few times when people finished talking and I had to click the continue button multiple times before it would advance.
The sun also didn't make it all the way across the screen before the day ended on days when I accepted a bonus to have more time during the day -- it made it most of the way across, but not all the way.

kylechu responds:

Thank you so much for the detailed feedback -

We were hoping the sun would clue enough players in to the time limit, but it sounds like we need to be more explicit about it. My only concern there is that if players aren't looking closely enough to where they would see the sun, I'm not sure what I can do that they WILL notice.

That's actually a bug - we wanted to make it so they didn't pop when the timer is paused, but it doesn't seem to be working. However, you make a good point that it could act as a crutch for weaker players, and it isn't like some players "cheating" will affect anyone else - there isn't a leaderboard or anything - so we may just never fix this bug.

Do you happen to remember the clues for the hero that you had on the day that the nasty glitch happened? That might help me narrow down the issue, since the crisis clues are tied to individual heroes. (EDIT: I just pushed what I think is a fix to this glitch. Thanks again for pointing it out!)

When you say the sun didn't make it all the way across - do you mean it stopped like 3/4 of the way through the sky, or where about half of it was off the screen? If it's the first, that's a nasty bug and I'll take a look. If it's the second, that's just a side-effect of the modifications that I made to try to smooth the sun's movement.

Again, thank you so much for the good review, and the helpful feedback!

[The cave]

On the third level I walked through the walls going horizontally, I think I was in mid-air from jumping but I'm not sure if that was a critical part of making the bug happen. The guy fell down through the bottom of the screen and didn't die or anything, just fell off the screen, and the game at that point was pretty much locked for all practical purposes (even though the guns were still firing) and I had to reload the page. Happened twice.

If it's a fixable bug then by all means fix; if it would be very difficult to find and/or correct then maybe just make the guy die if he falls off the bottom of the screen so at least the game doesn't get stuck.

LucasRebelato responds:

I will fix those bugs, sorry for that. And thanks for review

[CLONESPACE]

This was a really fun game from start to finish that had me glued to the computer until the end and making the effort to ace every level. I was on the fence between giving it a 4/5 and a 5/5 until I read the other players' comments. 5/5 for making a puzzle platformer that's challenging enough to get downrated by weak players for being too hard. Git gud r git rekt.

Chaz responds:

Hey thanks man!

[Astral Crashers]

I'm only a few stages into it, but so far so great.

There are a few things I personally would like to tweak on the controls. First, I would want to have the default movement for soldiers to move in attack mode (stopping and attacking if any enemies get in range) instead of moving to the destination first and then attacking (make that be the mode that requires pushing a button). Second, since I have a mouse with a wheel, clicking the center button to pan the map will sometimes make the screen scroll up or down. I would rather pan the map with the keyboard, but it's tough to hold the mouse with one hand and use the arrow keys to pan and use the number keys to select squads and use the A button to move in attack mode all at the same time. If it were possible, I would have WASD pan and have a button other than A switch between attack mode and moving mode.

Also, in case anyone complains about lag or choppy play: switching browsers from Chrome to Firefox made a HUGE improvement for me. Even though the FPS on the display was a little lower in Firefox than Chrome, I could actually tell (or feel) that the game was running much more smoothly in Firefox. (I know, I should have quit using Chrome for gaming ever since they stopped supporting Unity, I'm just a slow learner.)

moligames responds:

Thanks! I have noticed the control problems you mentioned.
I will try your suggestion in the new game, it will combine RTS and other genres of games.

[Lectrovolt]

It looks like a very good beta right now. The only sizeable bug I ran into at one point was after I used C to charge-jump, the guy kept charge-jumping after that even when I used a regular jump. It was after I had been trying to charge jump a few times but the charge-jumps weren't working because I was right next to a wall, so I was sorta mashing C for a little bit. And it went back to normal after I used the X charge. A minor bug is that charge-jumps didn't work when I was up against a wall.

Aside from those little things, the controls seemed very responsive and the puzzling was fair. Puzzle difficulty could probably be expanded upon in future levels even without adding new mechanics like enemies or timers on the switches or portals or anything, but if you'd like to add any of those it'd be rad. This is just a personal preference, but I'd recommend making a Metroidvania type giant world rather than individual discrete levels in the full game (which you might have been planning all along anyway); that somehow makes games stand out as more memorable to me. Also I might recommend going easy on using / abusing boundaries of the rooms' camera views to add difficulty (some of the buttons were deliberately obscured from view because of where the boundaries lie or came immediately after a room transition); I felt like it was fair game to do, but I imagine some players would consider it to be a cheap way of making the game difficult. Other minor things would be to make a restart key and save/respawn points in case the guy gets stuck somehow like Zylofan mentioned, and WASD-JK controls for people who use their hands backwards from us (or customizable keys for those crazy European AZERTY keyboards).

Anyway, 4/5 only because it's a short beta and I'll probably have a 5/5 for ya when the full game's posted.

VFHolloway responds:

3p0ch, thanks for the help, I'm really happy you left such a constructive review! Some of the contact points are a little out of line (Honestly, I'm more of a game designer than a coder, I love figuring out how to create the best experience for a gamer than coding the game itself) and the bug report is appreciated. I've written a review for DamonandSky's review above, and it really goes into what I'm aiming for.

Thanks for the review, and please follow me! I love how in-depth you've gone with helping me improve the game; I am a firm believer in games being something someone should enjoy, not an ego-fest by someone who wants to be seen, and I think the game should be ALL about what the gamer enjoys. I would love if you followed me and gave such a fantastic review to the next attempt, with a new level map :) thanks for all the help!

[Sideomorph]

This seems like a very good game so far. Definitely not too easy, especially on the diamond runs. I haven't even gotten to the point where I'm picking up gears (without it trapping me) yet. I haven't run into the problems other people have talked about with lag, even though I'm using Chrome.

I had no idea what I was supposed to do at the first boss. Only after looking at the walkthrough did I realize the point was to find ways to stomp its body/tail.

The only thing I don't really like is the mechanic where if you go from one face to another by ascending, and then cross into another face by moving sideways, then gravity rotates. It seems like it ought not to do that, so it's giving me fits. But maybe my brain will adapt to that instead of what I think should really happen (I realize the definition of what should "really" happen if you're a two dimensional man walking around on the surface of a cube and pushing it around in a three dimensional world with gravity is somewhat subjective).

Wackiedk responds:

Good to hear you enjoy it - I hope you will finish it.

Yea the bosses can be kind of tricky - they are probably "too hardcoded" so it can be quite hard if you don't do the exact thing that is expected.

Heh, maybe you're right - but I thought this way would make the most "sense". :)

[Chessworks]

I think it's a very good game for anyone who has played some chess. But the number of such people may be dwindling. I might suggest making the early levels be clearly marked as tutorials (maybe with a conspicuous "TUTORIAL" showing up in the right hand info pane while you're playing those levels) until you get to level 32, with an option to skip them and go straight to the harder levels, just so people don't see many easy levels and think that the whole game is going to be easy.

It might also be nice to allow the game to run as it currently does for casual players, but also make a more difficult mode where the player has to position all of the pieces and then click a button saying "declare checkmate" when they think they've got a solution instead of having the computer automatically check it after each repositioning of the pieces. If the solution is not correct, then show a move that gets the black king out of check.

Background music and possibly sounds would also be good.

Also, I think I spotted a bug on level 60. It counted it as a solution when I had the knight at K4, bishop at QR4, and rook at Q7. But I think the black pawn should be able to advance one space to block the bishop's check.

Antworks responds:

Hello, thanks for the feedback!

Having a How To Play with chess rules is in our to-do list. However, we believe it would be kind of troublesome to have players skip all the way to harder levels, since we do introduce some new stuff even for chess players. Also, we had some chess players try out the game and many got confused at the first levels, so maybe having pretty easy ones in the begining is good for making the player more confident.

About the "Declare checkmate" button. It is something we are considering. Did you find that you kind of accidentally solved the level?
Animations are also on the work!

Background music and sounds are also on our list! Sounds like we have similar views hahaa

Lastly, the bug. Yes, it is a bug, thanks for reporting! We will fix it asap.

Thanks!

[Pico's Exile]

First time I played a level, it worked OK.
Second time, my guy went right but couldn't face left and couldn't hit anyone to his left with the beet.
Third time, his gun was floating in midair away from his body. It would fire OK (from the position of the gun, not from Pico) but no enemies fell to fight.

So it looks nice but wasn't really playable for me.

HappyWhaleStudios responds:

That's really weird, I know there are some issues with the game, I had to rush development to finish today, tomorrow I'm going to do a massive debugging session, I hope you can take the time to try and play it again. Thanks for the feedback, a lot of that stuff I haven't heard before so I'll try to fix those things too

[PingCode 3D]

The difficulty is ridiculously random. For several levels I thought this was a complete kid's game, sometimes just taking three steps to pick up a fish, and then I got hit with a freakishly difficult level where I hit the help button and the solution was some algorithm that cycled three times before it got all the fish with a bunch of wall-bumping in the process.

I would strongly suggest making a set of fixed levels of increasing difficulty as a standard level pack, and including random level generation as an optional play mode. And giving the player an indication of how difficult the levels are as the game progresses (ie. something that lets them know they're still on easy or tutorial levels at the beginning and the difficulty will ramp up as they progress, so they know to stick it out if it seems too easy at first). The graphics and sound could be more polished, and some music would be nice, but I think those things are of secondary importance to making a good level pack.

RodKis responds:

Thank you for valuable advice)

For now I did increase the complexity by increasing score.
The more points the more complexity

[Crash Cortex Island]

It doesn't go past the loading screen. The portal comic runs on the left side of the screen, the right says Loading... [Cortex Island] and doesn't do anything even if I go play another game in a different tab for ten minutes and come back to check on it. Hopefully it doesn't actually take half an hour to load; if it did then it ought to at least have a progress bar. If you can figure out the issue, please re-upload it.

keonmckeon responds:

Its happened to me a few times too. it depends how many are playing it at once. its a common problem. it will load. u just gotta keep refreshing and wait until the comic strip goes all the way down