3p0ch's game Reviews on Newgrounds

[Nearverse]

Edit: After playing it, I started thinking about everything that would be involved in the procedural generation. Especially the music if it's generated at the note level since Godot's really not set up for that. Even things that would normally be trivial like making ship sprites by importing a drawing would instead have to be done from code by spawning a bunch of pixels in some way that ends up looking nice.

HealliesGames responds:

Fixed the tag, thank you! I'll probably add the borders: the extra-space I added was to avoid black borders when comes to fullscreen.

EDIT: For graphics came really useful Conway's Game of Life, which is used in most of procedural sprite generator I saw online. Music was kinda painful due poor documentation of the AudioStreamGenerator class; luckily there was a set-up example from the engine repository which helped me a lot.

[Puk]

It was fun while it lasted, but I got the same problem as Remi-le-Oduen (and maybe imtheratman) with the guy in the lower left corner -- after going through the convo it just keeps re-looping through the same convo when it finishes. It was working fine the first time I talked to him, but when I completed his quest (I think) it kept re-starting the convo when I press Z to end it so it essentially softlocked.

bokononyossarian responds:

Thanks for confirming this softlock! We just uploaded a new version that has *hopefully* addressed this, as we have not been able to reproduce since.

[WYRDSMYTH]

Looks like there is a way of telling if a letter is used more than once? I guessed uvula (yes the letters I was left with were that horrible) and only the first of the two U's ended up yellow.

bokononyossarian responds:

Yep, if you guess multiple letters it will show the second as not in the word(unless it is actually in the word !)

[Indirection]

I like it overall and have some small suggestions:

1) faster text appearance in the signs, and/or smaller font so it can show more at once, because text display can get tediously slow
2) no audio (or maybe different audio) of continuous laser firing -- that got grating quickly
3) I was getting some crackliness to the background audio playing in Chrome, and that became an issue in Godot HTML5 builds after a Chromium update sometime around March 2021. If you're not already using Godot 3.4, that version seems to decrease if not eliminate the audio crackliness, or you can implement the workaround I posted here of routing the music through howler.js instead of playing it through a node in Godot which completely gets rid of it
https://3p0ch.newgrounds.com/news/post/1148893

[Heroes Quest]

The player animations are adorable, music is good, and graphics overall are nice. I agree that I'd like to see other paths you could take by killing or not killing different things, but it's a cool little game for what it is. Also I know there's not an API implementation for GDevelop up at newgrounds.io, but if you feel like adding medals to the game or future games I got this implementation for GDevelop working so feel free to use it: https://3p0ch.newgrounds.com/news/post/1211786

[House Pusher]

One of the cuter and more polished Sokobans for sure, although easy until the last few levels when it gets real on you. If the secret room actually is present I couldn't find/unlock it.

[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...