3p0ch's game Reviews on Newgrounds

[STARSHIP PROTOTYPE]

Like other people have said, it's a good game at its heart but rough around the edges. What stood out to me the most was that pickups don't always respawn on death; I went to the plant level and picked up the gun that kills the nebula but got kilt before I got outta that screen, and then I couldn't pick up the gun and get past the nebula any more.

(That's where you're supposed to say "Wouldn't be a problem if u don't die, quit whinin' & git gud!")

DIMENSIONLORD responds:

Going to make an update where everything resets post-death

[Snake Deminer]

It seemed like there were multiple potential solutions for a level I did with the clues that were provided and it was just a matter of guessing which one is "correct". Does it have an algorithm to make sure there's only one unique possible solution with the given clues (maybe I overlooked a rule that makes one possibility correct and one wrong)? If not, then I guess the original minesweeper also forced people to make guesses so it's true to historical form, but not really ideal for a puzzle game.

LazerRock responds:

Usually there's only 1 single solution to any level. That being said, there IS sometimes 2 solutions, but that's extremely rare (from my testing about 1 in 20).
I think you might be overlooking some of the criteria- remember, ALL the conditions and clues have to be met.
But perhaps you were just really unlucky? Anyway, glad you somewhat enjoyed it

[Slimoban 2]

Some levels are really good brain busters. The game crashed when I tried to push my dead corpse into the water on level 24 (I don't think that solution would have ended up working anyway though).

adgard responds:

I still couldn't find a way to throw body into the water at level 24:) But I fixed this bug.
Thank you for feedback!

[Magna Caves]

It lagged like a female dog on certain levels when I tried playing on Chrome (literally less than 1 FPS) even after rebooting my computer and just having one browser window open to run it, and is a little choppy but playable on Firefox. It's not clear what's causing the lag from the DevTools Performance analytics, so sorry that's not much help.

Once you get past the performance issues, there are some pretty clever puzzles in here. I'm not as put off by the star system as the other reviewers, but I guess it wouldn't hurt to have all or most of the levels unlocked from the outset and have something like a mediumly-good ending for finishing all levels and a better ending for getting all stars if you feel like making them happy.

bananabeng responds:

Thanks for the feedback on the performance issues. We had ported the game from a LibGDX / Java stack and the HTML5 export might not be as performant as we'll like. You guys can download the original game release at https://bananabeng.itch.io/magna-caves that runs on Java more smoothly, hopefully!

[Telekinesis Gun]

Lol don't make web browser games where you press Ctrl and W at the same time.

buboi0411 responds:

I didnt know it kicks you off

[Manorvania]

Overall the game is cool as all get out but I had minor issues. Like BiggBos, I also got degrading audio quality over time and started getting a little lag after maybe 10 or 20 minutes as if there was a memory leak or something. I reloaded the page and that fixed it, but then I found out it doesn't save progress ;_; Can't really complain though because it seemed like I was probably near the end by that point so the game is finishable in a sitting and saving isn't critical.

Edit: Working fine now so 5 stars dude!

Stopsignal responds:

I didn't realize how bad it got until i saw a few videos. Man! Luckily i found the only other person who had the same problem in the internet, and in a stroke of luck they said a solution (thank you -AAG- from the HTML5Devs forum!). I think it works? I'm not sure, but after letting the game play for 30 minutes it was alright. So i think it's fixed now! Sorry you had to go through that, hahahahah

Thanks for playing!!

[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.

[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.

[Hexdoku: Demo]

This game is pretty hard! Great for people who want a logic challenge.

Minor things I might tweak would be making different shapes be different colors and/or when you're touching a shape make all of those shapes glow or something to increase visibility, and adding more varieties of music.

Not sure if this is just a problem on my end or if an update to the game was published recently -- when I started playing last night I finished a bunch of levels but it didn't save my progress when I reloaded the page this morning, but just now I played one level and reloaded the page and my progress was saved. Also at one point the reset button reset most but not all of my moves on a level.

puetsua responds:

Thank you so much for your feedback! And yes I updated the game at some point, maybe that's why the progress was lost. I will try to fix issues you mentioned in near future!