3p0ch's game Reviews on Newgrounds

[Annoyingly Helpful]

It seems like it could be a thing if you expand and tweak it to be a harder platformer or add enemies or a timer or something, and give it a little polish.

It can git jittery if you're standing on the cling-on and are off to a side, and that should be ironed out. Might also be funner if the cling-on sinks slowly while you're standing on it to keep things from being too still, unless you want to go down a puzzle game route and make it so the player gets stuck and needs to reset if they move it too high and get stuck on a level. If you want the main challenge to be platforming, then maybe don't make it possible to float horizontally by standing on it and moving a little to the side, which would both fix that jitteriness and make it so you can't just float horizontally. Otherwise, it would need some other form of challenge because being able to float horizontally and always able to move up makes it super easy.

& wth, you made it in Godot and in the software credits listed Unity?

ZenoGameDev responds:

'& wth, you made it in Godot and in the software credits listed Unity?'
Oh, yea, I forgot I used Godot. I'm too used to credit Unity lol.🤣

[Cryomancer]

Good game from a precision platformer standpoint with creative mechanics. From a puzzle solving perspective, in the last couple of levels it seemed like I was probably not solving them the way you intended at the end and was exploiting the block jumping mechanic you mention in the author comments (and have an example of in the video) which gets very easy when you have the freezing ability. At least for the final levels, if you don't want people to be able to do that as a cheesy way to win, then maybe have the goals on floating platforms instead of tops of cliffs.

If you do make any updates, it looks like this was made in Unity, so hopefully you're either not using PlayerPrefs for save data or you've implemented this to prevent saves from being lost on update: https://3p0ch.newgrounds.com/news/post/1086279

KanartStudio responds:

The game is full of shortcuts for those wanting to speedrun, some of them skip almost the whole level, and this is fully intended, also, the only thing using PlayerPrefs are the sound options, the save data is a file encrypted as binary and saved on the computer.
Thanks for the awesome feedback :D

[Musync]

You just don't see visual effects like this in a 48 hour game jam. The only thing I might have liked changed is being able to see the time remaining right after getting killed instead of going straight to snow static so I have a sense of how far through the level I was.

At first I thought that an avoider game mechanic would be mediocre. Eventually I figured out that the key is not avoiding the enemies, but is killing them efficiently enough that they won't be able to swarm you, and that mental switch made for a good game. There might not be very much more room to expand on the concept, but it's great for a short game jam.

As for the music, maybe it's just me, but something seemed out of key on the last level with everything overlaid (probably the background synth, the one without the sweep/flanger).

The only semi-buggy thing I came across is that when you select the note for the final level, the mouse can be right over an enemy emitter when the stage starts so you end up being instantly killed.

HealliesGames responds:

You got it right! The trick is to kill the enemies without getting "out of control" of the situation, making the screen full of enemies.
I agree with the nitpicks you say, also happened to me the mouse fact.

The music seemed right to me, but I'm not a musician, maybe there's a bit of off-key.

Thanks for the feedback, 3p0ch!

[Bulldozer]

I don't normally complain about game controls, and usually take the attitude that if the controls are challenging then that's part of the game's challenge and the player needs to git gud at it. But in this case it seems like it goes beyond challenging and gets flat out buggy. It's tough to put my finger on everything gave me that feeling, but what stands out the most are abrupt changes in direction when I hit a barrel, especially when moving at low speed (which happens most in areas where fine control is critical like level 19 and that behavior really messes with the game). And the controls are pretty much what makes this game what it is.

[City Escape 2]

I'm late in writing a review, but the two most important things have already been said.

First that during the invincibility after being hit, the inability to do any vaulting/springboarding until the invincibility ends makes it nearly impossible to get back up from the ground on later levels because you'll mostlikely be overlapping an enemy when the invincibility ends so you'll get hit right away (or in the air from a jump, but about to land on an enemy and get hit regardless). Making the player able to vault/springboard while invincibility is still active would fix that.

The other is as LethalElephantForce mentioned; there's only a small number of moves -- jumping, vaulting, and springboarding -- and enemies. The game is much more entertaining than I might expect with relatively few moves and enemies, but I feel it could use one or two more things like ability to move forward/backward a little bit within the screen's auto-scrolling or another technique that would be well suited for making it past pairs or multiples of cops that are too close together to vault sequentially. There's a potential for making a game feel too busy and cluttered if you add too much, but I think a little bit more would have been good.

Those things said, the game was still pretty fun and certainly enough to keep me playing, and a lot of the other commenters thought so too. The pace auto-adjusts to the player's skill since they slow down when they get hit. Although I'm not usually a fan of random level generation, in this case I think it helps keep the player involved and concentrating on coming up with and executing a good strategy instead of just remembering an exact sequence of optimal moves for each level. And while unfavorable random placement of enemies might happen and suck, it somehow avoids becoming frustrating when you'll just get a newly generated level on the next run.

Final thoughts are that I'm not as put off as others by the bright cop lights when it's close to a loss, but I would've liked a more streamlined way of restarting a level if I'm having a bad run than exiting to the main menu and picking the level again Edit: didn't realize double-tapping R to reset is an option now :3.

[Duck Waddle]

Excellent level design and good presentation. The puzzles were very rich considering that the only controls were the four directional buttons, and I'll have to disagree with others and say that the mechanics were reasonably self-explanatory without needing any additional instructions. The pixelated graphics are fine for a puzzle game, and the music I felt could have been better. Incidentally, it's possible to get scores under the star score for some of the later levels; I got 2-4 with 48 steps, 3-4 with 48, 3-5 with 102, 3-7 with 117, 3-8 with 28, and 3-9 with 40.

[Project Rocket]

Three things that could easily boost its appeal would be to either explain the controls or better yet include arrow keys as an option which is easy to do in Unity (add up for thrust and left/right to tilt), make it restart the current level instead of restarting the whole game if you die, and make the sound if you die be less abrasive -- just an explosion would do.

to-mahto responds:

Thank you! I will get on it!

[Prism Light]

Ack, my save data is gone :(

In case you're using PlayerPrefs to save data and have uploaded an update to the game that made everyone lose their data, plz read this... if not for this game then at least for any future games...
https://3p0ch.newgrounds.com/news/post/1086279

If it was just an issue with my computer not saving then nvm.

Edit: It was just an issue with my browser, IndexedDB was loading very slowly and wasn't completely loaded by the time the game started, so the save data wasn't available to be read. In case it happens to anyone else: try giving it a minute and reloading the page, and be aware that if you start playing again before doing that then you might overwrite the old save data.

[Josh Dumb]

I got to level 4, and even though I block the bees with the shield, Josh still dies when the bee would have reached him if it weren't blocked. Using Chrome on Windows, and I don't see any errors in the Console log if I open Developer Tools (just warnings about failing to load SourceMap).

Edit: Also happens on Firefox.

Catalystl responds:

I'm assuming you're blocking with the shield directly on top of Josh. This doesn't work because later in the game multiple turrets will shoot at you from different directions and that would make the game too easy to just block all of them in one spot.

Just block the bees right in front of Josh so they dont both hit Josh and the shield at once. I'll add this as text on Level 4. I'm really not sure what the warning is about but I've beaten the game many times on HTML5 so I doubt this affects the game much. Feedback was helpful, thanks!