3p0ch's game Reviews on Newgrounds

[Tunnelboy]

I like the concept of working through a maze with a limited number of items. But as it stands now, having to keep one hand on the arrows to move side to side, one hand on space to jump, and one hand on the mouse to select and use items requires three hands so it doesn't work well for poor people like me with congenital hand deficiency syndrome and only two hands.

Fortunately it should be straightforward to make it more playable for people like me if 1) players could move with either WASD or arrows, 2) they can jump with W or Up in addition to space, 3) they can use numbers on the keyboard to select items to strike with, and maybe 4) having a "strike" key to destroy whatever object they player would be moving toward based on which movement key is being pressed (that could be space's new job). Although TBH you could just make it so the player automatically uses whichever tool would be needed to destroy the object they're trying to destroy instead of having to select it -- less clicking or button pressing needed.

[CaveEscape]

My main comment in addition to what others have said is it seems like it could benefit from a more zoomed out camera so the player can see more of the level. As it currently is with the player not being able to see a whole lot, I feel like it makes exploration more tedious than fun. And the mechanic of having the player press up or down to see more might be ok to include for bonus items, but when they have to do it to see the next platform to jump on it also feels more tedious than fun.

[First Person Shoveler - Godot Wild Jam #45]

W00t, more 3D Godot games!

I didn't realize you could get away with having that much non-primitive 3D stuff without running into computational efficiency issues on an HTML5 export. I've been sticking to very low-poly in my games, but this runs great in my browser so I should give more complex stuff a shot and see how much the envelope can be pushed. The fact that this was all modeled for a jam is pretty impressive to me.

[My Father Sold My Soul for One Million Gold?!]

I worry that many people will be put off if they run into the bug of the game freezing when you pick a character to respond to an event (which happened to me a lot), and won't read the author comments and see that if that happens they should save the game (because that button still works) and restart (not needing to completely reload the page because that in-game button also still works) to keep going.

If the freezing isn't fixable, maybe instead of making the text in the event description in the lower left disappear as soon as there's a click, make it be replaced with "If it seems like the game froze, use the buttons in the top right to save and return to the main menu" and stay up if the game freezes at that point, and clear that text after the event has been processed so players won't see it if the game is running smoothly? Or some other approach to achieve a similar effect.

Aside from that issue, it's a pretty entertaining game! Having a fair amount to fiddle with in managing the tavern, and cutscenes scattered throughout to add an engaging story, kept it interesting. IMO it could stand to be made harder, but since other people were saying it's too hard I guess it's impossible to please everyone.

Marckel responds:

Thanks for the review! You don't have to go to the main menu actually. The bug is resolved by simply opening up the save menu. You can return to the game/cancel with right click. This and the disappearing text issue both exist because Reim has had to really push what we could do with Rpgmaker and its plugins. In future games we'd hopefully figure out a way to overcome those issues.

The original release version wasn't impossible, but it was a little too hard. In the future maybe hopefully we could implement a difficulty setting feature.

[Bazooka Bugs Beta]

Wow, this is a really odd little game. It's not intuitive and there's not much in-game explanation but eventually I figured stuff out, and I worry that most players won't see that really important thing at the end of the author comments about clicking the black area outside the main game screen to make keyboard input register because otherwise it'll seem like the game's broken. After getting the machine gun I tried to spray a ladybug or whatever that was full of lead and the screen went black, so I guess I'm stopping there. It has its charm but seems kinda weird as it is, and I'm sorry you won't be able to work on it more to iron stuff out.

[Stonks]

After showing the four tabs, it gets stuck on what looks like it would be the main root gameplay scene with a never-ending Loading indicator. If I go to my browser's Developer Tools under Console it shows this error in red

FormatException: Input string was not in a correct format.
at System.Number.ParseSingle (System.String value, System.Globalization.NumberStyles options, System.Globalization.NumberFormatInfo numfmt) [0x00000] in <00000000000000000000000000000000>:0
--- End of stack trace from previous location where exception was thrown ---

It looks like it would be a kinda neat game, but is currently completely unplayable at least for me.

Edit: Yep, game works now!

While the concept is great, there seems to be at least one playability issue. The list of stocks that shows up in the stocks screen doesn't seem to be fixed even if I mouse to scroll through the whole thing. I bought four different stocks and then didn't have any elegant way of going back to the stocks screen and selling them all off (2-3 would show up but not all four). In principle maybe I could make a separate list of which stocks I bought so I can go back and search for them later, but in practice people aren't likely to do that playing a video game.

The other issue might just be because of my schedule, but it's tough to get engaged when I can only play when markets are closed and I would have to just buy stuff and check on it again the next day, and keep doing that for the entire course of the game. Maybe it would be better if I were free during daytime and could simulate day trading.

MonoFlauta responds:

Ey! Sorry about that. It should be fixed now. We had an issue with the api. Let me know if you encounter any other problems. Thank you for reporting this :)

[Henry Is A Normal Cube]

At first the narration and overall presentation made it look promising. But ultimately you go to outer space and can't open the door at the end, and can't do much other than fall off the screen indefinitely afterward?

[1V1 Simulator]

Does the player not get any ammo, or is there some other reason I can't shoot?

Edit: I see what's messing it up -- it has to do with the gamepad. I'll send a PM since this gets complicated.

MountJoyGames responds:

Was your cursor visible? Should be unlimited ammo

[Asteroids 3D]

Kinda neat to see it done in 3D. I'd recommend a keyboard button like space to shoot instead of having keyboard control movement and left mouse button shooting, and to have it repeatedly fire when held.

chris3232 responds:

I've already done that. I Just have to upload it!