3p0ch's game Reviews on Newgrounds

[Tiny Escape- Forest]

First, I'd like to say that this is a very charming game. It took me longer than I'd like to admit to figure out how to go about handling the puzzles, but once I did it was enjoyable.

Also, I came up with a way to make Unity not lose save data when you post updates to your games. This describes how to do it if you're storing the save data in PlayerPrefs
https://3p0ch.newgrounds.com/news/post/1086279
and this describes a different way of doing it that's more flexible but not with the same built-in easiness of PlayerPrefs (it was intended to allow multiple game devs to collaborate on a multi-game project, but can be (and has been) used for stand-alone Unity games).
https://3p0ch.newgrounds.com/news/post/1099579

If you incorporate either of those into the game now, it will wipe everyone's progress for that update, but then will keep it for any future updates. For any future games if you use either of them from the outset then there won't be any save data loss with updates.

DarkryCZ responds:

It's you! :O I know you! Thank you so much for your review, means a lot.
I saw your posts but I didn't have enough time to read all of it and implement it before the PixelDay ended, and I totally forgot about it later on, so thank you so much for posting again! I finished it at like 5:30 AM of my time, but I will definitely take a look now and try to put it there.

[BitBase]

It's still a work in progress but so far this is good retro stuff, especially for having been made in only five days. It reminds me of the old Dune game. So far my only suggestion would be a quicker way to pan around the map than WASD, like if holding RMB and dragging were to pan the camera and movement would need a quick right click and release, or smth like that. When the game gets far enough to have a huge area to manage, maybe even a minimap where you can click to move.

Aron-Ato responds:

Hey, thanks for playing, and feedback. Yeah, ofc we had to focus on the playable aspects because we had such limited build time, mini-map (and much more) is definitely on the list of soon-to-be-added features :)

[Nearverse]

Edit: After playing it, I started thinking about everything that would be involved in the procedural generation. Especially the music if it's generated at the note level since Godot's really not set up for that. Even things that would normally be trivial like making ship sprites by importing a drawing would instead have to be done from code by spawning a bunch of pixels in some way that ends up looking nice.

HealliesGames responds:

Fixed the tag, thank you! I'll probably add the borders: the extra-space I added was to avoid black borders when comes to fullscreen.

EDIT: For graphics came really useful Conway's Game of Life, which is used in most of procedural sprite generator I saw online. Music was kinda painful due poor documentation of the AudioStreamGenerator class; luckily there was a set-up example from the engine repository which helped me a lot.

[Puk]

It was fun while it lasted, but I got the same problem as Remi-le-Oduen (and maybe imtheratman) with the guy in the lower left corner -- after going through the convo it just keeps re-looping through the same convo when it finishes. It was working fine the first time I talked to him, but when I completed his quest (I think) it kept re-starting the convo when I press Z to end it so it essentially softlocked.

bokononyossarian responds:

Thanks for confirming this softlock! We just uploaded a new version that has *hopefully* addressed this, as we have not been able to reproduce since.

[WYRDSMYTH]

Looks like there is a way of telling if a letter is used more than once? I guessed uvula (yes the letters I was left with were that horrible) and only the first of the two U's ended up yellow.

bokononyossarian responds:

Yep, if you guess multiple letters it will show the second as not in the word(unless it is actually in the word !)

[BUMBLING BUILDERS]

@Oroshibu @Duckonaut plz do this when you have Unity save with PlayerPrefs so the save data doesn't get lost when you publish game updates kthx
https://3p0ch.newgrounds.com/news/post/1086279

Edit: Ok, yeah, Application.persistentDataPath would have the same problem as PlayerPrefs because with HTML5 it points to an IndexedDB location based on the URL (not the NG page URL, but the URL where the game is actually stored), so it will also be lost when HTML5 builds on most hosting sites are updated because that URL will change with each update. But explicitly specifying your own path name in IndexedDB (like in the code to override PlayerPrefs) should prevent the save data loss.

Duckonaut responds:

We don't actually use player prefs, instead we save a file to the designated local path by the Application.persistentDataPath. Not sure why it makes saves disappear on NG, since it works really well on desktop, I presume it's the path being changed by ng

[19 - Forty Hell V0.2]

This is a pretty nice game for your second upload to NG! The graphics with parallaxed semi-transparent clouds and the glowing effects give a nice level of polish to the graphics. I felt like the controls for the player's plane felt less responsive than I would like for a shmup and like some inertia was deliberately coded into it (or IIRC maybe Unity has built-in parameters for it when you set up input handling?). While everything is subjective, I feel like most players would rather have the controls feel nice and responsive, and have the challenge come from all the enemies shooting at them than handling the floatiness. I also noticed that often if I hold down space to spam shooting then it would shoot continuously for a while but eventually stop after several / dozens of seconds -- using Chrome on Windows -- although it's not a big issue to have to release and re-press space. I admit I haven't made it far into the game, it's pretty tough ^,^

GraeBush responds:

I really appreciate the thoughtful feedback. :) Stuff like this is what I'm talking about. Helps me leaps and bounds.

Next time I will try to get playtesting from the community here first, instead of my non dev meatball friends lol. I added a stop to autofire on being hit, probably not the best idea.

I will apply all of this wonderful advice on my next shmup. Thank you so much for taking the time to help me out and trying the game out.

Sorry it wasn't up to snuff, I am getting better little by little...

[Gardengage]

It's a great game, but I'd like if it saved progress. IDK what engine you're using or if you wrote it in pure JavaScript, but if you can make JavaScript calls and you have the level progression data in a single object it could be saved to LocalStorage with
window.localStorage.setItem("gardengage", JSON.stringify(saveData));
and loaded with
if (window.localStorage.getItem("gardengage") != null) {saveData = JSON.parse(window.localStorage.getItem("gardengage"));}
or smth along those lines.

[Crystal Hunt]

It's ok, but there are some glaring things that seem like they should be modified:
- the long delay between pressing space and firing might have been an intentional design choice, but I can pretty much guarantee that most gamers would hate it and want to have their character feel responsive and easily controlled, with the challenge coming from tough enemies instead of tough controls
- jumping height on non-bouncy platforms is bouncy? maybe it was because I hit a spring earlier and a variable didn't get cleared to say I'm not on a spring any more now?
- falling is fast and camera tracking is slow so you can literally fall off the bottom of the camera view while still being in play
- it seems like you can control the character by mousing over the control symbols, and yet the mouse is hidden?
- springs don't work correctly if you jump up and land on the spring

k7games responds:

Thanks for the detailed feedback I am working on fixing the bugs and making new levels and bosses.

[RaccoonRun]

It really needs instructions, specifically how to make the brown 'coon use actions when escaping the very first room (I was able to cheeze the first level with just one 'coon pressing both buttons by moving fast and spamming space), even if it's just a brief overlay at the very beginning showing which buttons are used to control the 'coons. And the game freezes if you press Escape and choose Quit to try to go back to the main menu and see if there were instructions that you overlooked earlier.

fenr97 responds:

Thanks for your feedback! I have added controls to the pause menu and changed the quit button to go back to the main menu.