3p0ch's game Reviews on Newgrounds

[TEXT 'N' DRIVE]

Think you could make a more mobile-friendly version so I can play it on the way home?

[Bomb rush]

It's fun but could definitely use different control options -- arrows as well as WASD, jumping with up, and dropping crates with down or pretty much any key would be better than using RMB. It should be an easy change to make in Unity. A conventional control scheme would be something like

Left: A / left arrow
Right: D / right arrow
Jump: W / up arrow / space (if you want to keep that)
Drop crate: S / down arrow
Dash: Left shift / numpad enter / maybe numpad plus (ok that's not conventional)

[My Hat]

It has outstandingly cute animation and music that does a great job of setting an old-timey ambiance. I just wish the gameplay were something more than a point-n-click.

[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.

[360]

I'm afraid I fall in the camp that views it more as a bunch of random stuff thrown together than a cohesive and fun game, although the graphic effects were pretty nice.

[oddpum]

This is really well done. My only suggestion would be to have the player automatically repeat jumping if you keep a jump key held down since there are places where you might want to sit around and do that.

[Path Maker]

If you saved the players' data in PlayerPrefs and then had everyone lose their data when the update to reduce slipperiness was posted then you should read this to make that not happen for future Unity games
https://3p0ch.newgrounds.com/news/post/1086279

[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.