3p0ch's game Reviews on Newgrounds

[Project Demonology]

So far it seems like it's on its way to becoming a good RPG game. I took notes on glitchy little things I noticed, none of which were major (playing on browser in Chrome on Windows):

When I play in a browser, I see save files from other RPG Maker games I've played on Newgrounds in the same saved game list that this game uses. That seems to be a common issue with RPG Maker and there's probably a solution for it.

Skills and many items don't have a description of what it does; it looks like there's a space where it's supposed to pop up when the skill/item is selected.

When the guy gave me a note and said to read it somewhere private, I wasn't sure how to do that and was confused for a while when I couldn't find the note as an item to read, and only later found it's in a quest log in the "pause" menu. Also, the quest log doesn't seem to update at the point when you're collecting relics. (It wasn't entirely obvious to me whether I actually collected relics in the Eastern and Western zones after killing the bosses, but I did kill the thing in the hidden room in the main town afterward so I think I did collect relics.)

Walking out of the town and onto the paved path toward the intersection just outside town, the scene didn't automatically switch from town to the road outside town unless I press the action button (at least if I walk with arrow keys; if I walk by mouse clicking it transitions). That seems weird, and might have people thinking they can't leave that way (what I thought at first) or aren't supposed to leave yet.
Maybe related: the Blood Heal ability seems like it's not targetable with arrow keys but is with mouse.

The battle with the imp in the cave outside town didn't have its background change -- the background during battle was the overworld scene with the player walking up to the cave, which seems weird.

It looks like I can't use a potion as an item during battle - only the weak teather and god item were available to choose. (This would be the only possible glitch that would significantly affect gameplay.)

Stairs at the Fallow Village Inn don't do anything -- maybe that was intentional but it's probably better not to have stairs that don't go anywhere.

If I'm supposed to be able to sell items at shops, I can't.

Edit: Now realized that the main town's building on the left is now no longer guarded, so I went there and actually finished the game. The only "big picture" thing that you might or might not want to change is that this game seemed to have an aspect of many RPG games that I don't particularly like -- it seems like the optimal approach is just to go with heavy hitting melee guys (the double/triple hitters in this game) plus a healer or two and there's no real need to change strategy at any point -- switching from melee to magic based attacks, starting to rely on items to deal damage, using specific combinations of attacks, actually using the Guard ability that no one ever uses, etc. That works perfectly well for commercial RPG games, and would be a perfectly viable way to design the game and probably generate plenty of fans, but personally I think I'd like it better if it called for changes in strategy from time to time.

MrCrabsGames responds:

Thanks for the feedback! A lot of very valid criticism here and a lot to work with in patches for this and future games :)

The issue with saves is quite concerning, especially since saves are supposed to be unique based on the games internal name, this is the case for the game as an EXE, but 100% worth investigating, so thanks for raising that.

The game was built mainly with mouse use in mind, but moving zones with the action key is an oversight on my end and will be fixed in the next patch, I will have to investigate the blood imp targeting, and the lack of a background on the first imp fight is also something I will address.

Not using a potion in battle is intentional, the idea behind them is that they are for healing during battle, this was to make it so the skeleton and imps healing abilities your only source of healing, with all the risks attached.

I do agree that once you have an optimal team, you don't need to mix up your strategy and this does detract from some of the intended difficulty mid/end game, I did originally have a concept where you would have hard hitting abilities that would slowly make your team go mad, and then be more unpredictable, giving another form of risk and reward, but this didn't play out as well as planned when tested out. I think this section especially boils down to a lack of experience making games, and I hope to improve on this and ensure that i can push this game much further and have any future games I work on benefit from this experience.

Thanks again for all your comments! Was really useful to have this feedback to work with and improve with :)

[ANOVA]

This game reminded me of Trader of Stories a lot, and that's a good thing. If it were longer, I would definitely say it's at least in that echelon.

I wasn't as put off by the UI as much as other reviewers; initially I did think it was a little unnatural dragging stuff out of an inventory screen to make the inventory panel go away and then be able to use it on objects, but it was easy to get used to. I'll grant that maybe it's worth thinking about tweaking, especially if click-dragging stuff all over the screen if you have a trackpad instead of a mouse would end up being a significant pain in the butt. But I get the feeling that time would be better spent building an immersive story with clever puzzles than cutting down on the number of mouse clicks that players make.

For the issue of whether the cursor should indicate on mouseover which items are interactable to make it less of a "pixel hunt": I'm in the camp of saying you should be able to expect the players to look at the game's amazing graphics and find stuff instead of just having everything handed to them, as long as objects aren't ridiculously obscure. If you do decide to include a mouseover indicator, I would recommend making it be optional, and default to off.

MontiGames responds:

Thanks for the thoughtful review and constructive feedback! Puzzle design is clearly something that can be highly polarizing, but your thoughts on the UI and cursor indicators are appreciated and something we'll try to keep in mind as we continue building out new content.

We're definitely working to make the game longer, but as you might guess, it's a lot of work for a small team. As long as we have fans who want more, we'll do our level best to make them as happy as we possibly can!

[Unstable Engineer]

I saw that this is an Unstable game from WigDev and I rated 5/5, then started playing TBH. Now that I've finished, I'm not changing my score. The puzzling is top notch. The graphics outside of the puzzling gameplay are great, and the graphics during puzzling are attractive as far as puzzle games go. Overall it plays like a pretty professionally made game. The only weakness is the music which gets repetitive pretty quickly; if you're not determined to keep this a one man production then maybe ask some musicians if they'd like to contribute to the game.

I did run into a save issue - usually it saved fine but after I finished the game and came back I had the progress knocked back to only having 100 lock points, still with the character change that occurs, and probably but IDK for sure with the same game state that I had at some point in the past (same set of levels cleared and dialogues with the characters used). It might have had something to do with clicking the credits just before the progress was rolled back. Using Chrome on Windows.

WigDev responds:

Thanks for your comments! I'll look into it as I build an extended version.

[Azumi and the Vertical Slice]

This is kinda cool. The only things I would say to be tweaked are that 1) the keys still affect browser scrolling -- specifically, when I hit up and attack to throw a star or down to change menu options, that makes the browser window scroll. 2) When I played the game once and then said not to make me do the tutorial again it made me do the tutorial again. 3) After I died the second time I said I don't want to continue and was put directly back into combat on level 1 (without the tutorial). But that seems kinda random because I tried it again after dying a third time and it behaved as expected. Using Chrome on Windows. Less critical: some people like using up arrow / W to jump so maybe make those keys do that (with some other way of throwing stars), and if I click the webpage outside the game so I can't control the guy any more I'd like the game to pause until it regains focus. Overall I'd say this is a good start at making a great platformer along the lines of Ripple Dot Zero or Phoenotopia if you're feeling ambitious enough. 4/5 only because it's still just a demo.

Edit: FWIW I wrote that while the game was still under judgement and I couldn't see the other reviews. Guess it's nice to see that I'm not alone.

PopStrikers responds:

I think I might have figured out the menu bug: It determines your menu choice based on the X coordinate of the cursor, so if you press an arrow again (to say, for example, move the page back into place cuz it scrolls), it will change the menu choice after the option should be locked in. Throughout development, I tested the game running in a new window so I never noticed this behavior since there was no page to scroll. I will go back and fix this and update it as soon as it's working properly.

Thanks for the feedback, it really helps.

[Rise of factions 0.2.5]

The underlying concept is great, but there are a lot of issues with the execution that leave the player baffled about what they're trying to do and fighting with the interface as much as the game's underlying puzzles they're supposed to be solving.

Some things I would recommend:
If people have placed a conveyor belt and want to change the direction that inputs/outputs are facing, then let them rotate them without having to destroy the transporter, bring up the transporter building page, change the directions of the inputs/outputs, and then place it on the map.

If people have placed a production tile like a furnace, let them change what it's supposed to produce without having to destroy and rebuild.

If I'm trying to build a production line and don't have all of the units I need available, I'd like to be able to buy more from the building screen instead of having to exit out to the trade tab, buy more, then go back to the build screen and place them, especially if there are multiple different types of units that I need to buy to make the production work.

I am confused why I can't set up a collector picking up something like iron ore and wood from two different source tiles and feeding it to a furnace and have it work.

I get the feeling that things could be clarified a lot better with the guide tips, and the wikis look kind of like a computer programming reference that can only be understood by the person who wrote it and some professional programmers so they could use a little more of an "English" explanation about how to make things work.

GrafixGames responds:

You can change the direction of the belt and recipe of production object by just clicking on it. No need to destroy it.

The reason I was not allowing people to buy objects from build menu because I wanted to make the experience like real life. You create a shopping list then go to shop and buy all the stuffs in the list.

I am constantly working on wiki.. Next version I will create very detailed wiki.

PS If you want more help or want something else, can you please post on my reddit page or support forums? It is really hard to create a comment chain on newgrounds

[The Question - Web Edition]

Well, you've proven that it can port to a web game, so mission accomplished I guess. The game itself was kinda sucky, but that'll be the task of actual game devs to solve, amirite?

The only bug I found was that if I go to fullscreen and then back to window mode, the positioning of everything (including where I need to move the mouse in order to highlight an option) gets a bad case of the fuckups. Using Chrome on Windows.

Beuc responds:

Haha, I didn't mean this upload to appear in the New Games section, yeah it's a really short game.
Thanks for the full-screen report, I'm still investigating this, from the preferences screen there's delay and mess-up, though it seems to work fine with the 'F' keyboard shortcut...

[Elite - New Age Parkour]

I thought it was pretty fun although sort of short. I suspect that a lot of people will complain that it's too slippery because of the guy's momentum, or at least think so even if they don't post comments saying so. Personally I think getting used to handling the momentum it is just part of playing, but maybe games in the future will be received better if there's less momentum and they use other mechanics to keep the difficulty reasonable.

Ace-Productions responds:

Thanks

[SupercEELious]

Dat ending... and I thought there was enough weirdness just from riding around on an eel upside down a fair chunk of the time with easy listening jazz in the background.

EvilObjective responds:

Way to make it to the end...YOU SHOWED THEM!

[Leave the Room]

Would've rated it higher but it was a little too easy.

Seriously though, just wondering if you're actually expecting anyone to legit earn the Lively medal? I remember at least one level where I thought it was necessary to die in a specific way to get through (and I don't want to look at any walkthroughs to find out if there's another way). Anyway it's nice to see a tough game, but my main criticism is that the physics seem off with the guy not sticking landings onto and staying on platforms like I'd expect, and in other ways that are difficult to describe but just seemed not quite right, especially with double jumping. And having the physics really tight is important in a game that demands top notch platforming skillz.

CyanSandwich responds:

Haha thanks. Dying isn't necessary at any point (and I don't think there are any shortcuts through dying), but it is admittedly hard. Feel free to PM me about that.