RaIix's game Reviews on Newgrounds

[BlockJump (UNFINISHED)]

This platformer unfortunately breaks apart two seconds in, because the camera doesn't catch up with the player.
So you get across the first two platforms and then you have to move outside the screen boundaries and guess where to jump… which will either get you killed instantly or you get lucky.

Either way, it's not a fun gameplay.

ScuffedGames responds:

Thanks for the feedback I might fix and redo the game tho :(

[Defeat The White Mushroom]

It's a pretty straightforward game in which you can only employ one single tactic if you want to win – move to the opposite side of the screen out of the range of the fire breath and keep shooting until the “mushroom” jumps into your wall of bullets. Given your limited moveset, no room for mistakes and the unchanging attack pattern of the enemy, anything else will get you killed.

To improve the game, it'd be nice if the enemy sometimes did something different (especially as its health decreases) – but if it made the game significantly more difficult, you'd probably have to give the player lives, so it's not just a one-hit kill. And possibly allow jumping to allow for some added complexity in the attack patterns.

But as a simple game you play, win, and forget (or as an early-game boss in a larger project), this concept works fine.

[the duck game]

It's almost perfect… except it's a bit short.

The movement and platforming are amazing and fluent, the mechanic about traversing through the edges of the screen is cool, and the quacking when you die is pretty funny.

I wanted to talk about how you're taught about the screen-edge traversal in the first two levels and then it's not used in a while… but it's used in the final stages again, so that's a moot point. I may feel the key's hitbox is a bit too small (there's a level where you walk underneath the key without collecting it even though you're almost touching it) – but that's a really minor detail.

So overall, it's an impressive little game that is unfortunately over just as you feel things are starting to pick up.

[Sluggerz 2.0]

It's a pretty cool shooter. 3D, several stages, multiple power-ups and a boss battle. And one of the most epic Credits sequences I have ever seen.

Although considering it's the core of the gameplay, I'd expect to enjoy the shooting more… but it's fairly bland. I can barely tell I successfully shot someone. The torso very briefly blinks red if you hit it, but I'm not sure if any other body part does the same… or if there's a difference in damage between shooting other body parts.
But mainly I’d try looking for ways to improve the main feel; gunplay (for inspiration – https://youtu.be/SWf9pNdivpo) and add impacts to affected body parts, temporary stun animation or some better visual indication (for inspiration – https://gamedevacademy.org/game-feel-tutorial/).
Otherwise, it's always such a surprise when you click a few times to seemingly no effect and then the enemy drops dead.

Other notes
– Default Unity buttons in the Menu; they're pretty recognizable for bad reasons – they don't look too good on purpose so people would be more inclined to replace them
– You can hide Quit button in WebGL games, it's pointless as it just freezes the game forever until you refresh the page
– I'm not sure what the menu background is supposed to be (blurry texture, overlapping models, different grass texture scale); but it certainly isn't very representative of the actual game (it should ideally make players excited to play it; for example you could show some enemies posing with their weapons)
– You start without a gun in the tutorial and before you even have time to look around and learn the controls, enemies already shoot at you.
– Half of the fence in the tutorial area doesn't have a collision
– I love the audience members with their creepy smiles; a pretty good choice to include them there watching you all kill each other
– If your FPS avatar is a capsule, disable its shadow (no one needs to see that)
– There are different weapons, but they don't feel that different; only by sound (related to the gunplay feel mentioned above)
– “green gun” plays audio only “from the right” when using headphones which is somewhat distracting
– after teleporting, your weapon changes
– I wasn't really sure who the boss was, no one seemed to look too different or be tougher
– I ended with a boss count of -3

Still, it's an impressive game with a lot of content, but it feels like a prototype rather than a game I'd love to return to and recommend to others.
Hope the tips above will help you if you'd like to continue with this project or when you start your next one. Good luck!

[Mincreft V3.7.10]

I couldn't get it to load at all after waiting ~5 minutes (Windows/Chrome, and then Edge).
Does it load properly for you at least?
If the loading is really that long, consider adding some sort of preloader with a progress bar, otherwise, you're bound to lose a lot of potential players before it even finishes initialization.

Alanthecat07 responds:

That has been fixed, thanks for the feedback

[Ezra's Art Quest]

The platforming in this game is fairly basic (so is the level design), but as an art project, it's quite unique and each level is very different – we go from hidden feathers, through chopping down a tree to collecting imp skins (!).

– I think the first level is the weakest one because there's no hint or visual indication as to where to look for feathers, so I almost thought I saw everything there is to this game, but I just needed to find more feathers – by methodically jumping over every accessible pixel of the screen. Not very fun.
– The shift to the tree is amazing, I would have never guessed the second level would be this after the first one.
– I would recommend not simply vanishing enemies when they are killed, that feels cheap. Ideally do some disappearing effect afterwards.
– The boss can be fought and defeated in the same way as the other imps (that's good, it's consistent and you can use what you learned before), although the one-hit-kill would be pretty annoying if the boss was harder (the fireballs are nearly impossible to dodge, so you learn to pogo on the boss’s head and expect when it turns)
– I would not end the game with the corals, but rather with the imps and the boss battle (for pacing reasons)

But it's really awesome we get to see the finished art project at the end in its full beauty.
Thanks – it's not the greatest platformer, but certainly an interesting and memorable one.

Edit: Updated the rating. Thanks for listening to feedback. :)

Mythicvenom responds:

OK thanks for the input, I changed a few things.

[Pumpkin Dash]

I think it's a fun game at its core, it just needs better balancing and tweaking here and there.

Aesthetically it's stellar, and the spooky Halloween color palette + pixel art is what has drawn me to the game in the first place (but you shouldn't have different pixel sizes for various assets, because then something looks “pixelated” and something looks “smooth”; breaking the consistency)
The update system is awesome and would definitely be what makes me keep playing for a while – if I didn't have trouble with actually collecting the coins at a satisfying pace.

The main flaw and the most frustrating part – in my opinion – is the unpredictability of the falling pumpkins. When they appear, you have very little time to react, let alone avoid other pumpkins falling in the direction you're running towards.
Then you're supposed to be primarily collecting coins to progress, but those are scarce and again, you need to be quite near to reach them, avoiding the pumpkins in the process.
All the while you're wondering why the ground has to take up so much of the screen.
Consider the following options:
– move the ground lower (this gives the player more time to react)
– show an arrow at the top of the screen briefly before a pumpkin or a coin is about to fall, so it's not a complete surprise
– it suddenly starts getting insanely quick around the 15 score mark, is it the difficulty curve you want? Or should the increase in speed and pumpkin frequency be more gradual?

Secondly, I gave up before unlocking anything because after several runs I had just about ten coins, but in fact, I would need twenty-five to unlock *anything*. You ideally want to give the first reward pretty soon, almost immediately, to keep the players motivated.
Consider increasing the coin frequency, or lowering the required costs, and perhaps give some small amount of coins for a good score, so you can feel you're progressing after a good run even when you didn't manage to collect an interesting number of coins.

And btw, using 'space' to confirm anything isn't very intuitive – before reading the Author Comments, I thought the game was stuck after either clicking on the button or pressing enter did nothing.

Nevertheless, it's a very solid Halloween game, pretty fun and enjoyable. Well done!

P.S.: Did you hear about the Halloween event?
https://www.newgrounds.com/bbs/topic/1528553
If so, and you wish to participate, you may need to use the tag “halloween2023”.

J4cko16 responds:

Thank you for trying the game. I am glad you enjoyed the game and will take what you said into consideration. Did you claim any of your milestones? After reaching a score of 50 you can claim a decent amount of coins for the first upgrades? (It only took me around 30 minutes to unlock every upgrade in testing) I recommend going back to collect your milestones?

[jogo labirinto]

This game doesn't really have much going for it, except for the medal and high scores (kudos for that!).

– Clicking buttons is a terrible way to navigate, especially when each movement moves you barely by a pixel
– You can completely ignore the red lines and move outside of them (and the starting point is also in the black area); there's no collision with the “walls”
– The entire game is tucked into a small top-left corner of the game window
– The timer is invisible and you have to highlight the text to see it

And that's all there is to the game. But even if all the issues mentioned above were fixed, completing a single maze level would still make for an extremely short game; the game would genuinely need more content (or gameplay mechanics) to begin to be enjoyable.

[Scratchy's fun platformer]

This is actually pretty decent!
The movement is mostly fluent, and you have tons of gameplay mechanics. Spikes, moving platforms, enemies, locked doors, wall jumping, checkpoints, lava… quite a lot.

Sometimes, though, the cat is quite too big to navigate between various perils, so you lose lives quickly and ultimately I don't think three is enough.

The first screen especially feels like a mistake because it's actually the hardest one I found – with spikes that can be avoided only with a well-timed precise jump, after which you can still be killed by the moving platform. It actually made me think moving blue blocks are enemies as well, so I avoided them.
The second screen has an enemy that will always get stuck under the moving platform.

I think I explored quite a bit of the place, and took the checkpoint in the top right corner behind the locked door (why is there a checkpoint in a dead end in the first place?).

What ultimately killed me was wall-jumping where I wasn't supposed to and jumped into a wall from below. The same happened later by falling into an innocent-looking hole in the ground somewhere else. And that's where I gave up.
I think if you want to make something unreachable, wall the area off, and put spikes in supposed deadly pits because this feels like bugs.

Other than that, I'll repeat I was quite surprised by the amount of different mechanics your game offers, it just needs a bit more polish.

Cooljack2003 responds:

press up up down down left right left right to get 10000000000 lives ok
ps: i'll also fix that

[Tiles in progress]

This is a pretty cool idea, and I like the visual style as well.

I can't tell if the symbol selection is completely random or if it's somehow ensured there's a fair balance, since often I feel like I'm simply moving back and forth between the same symbols and I can't really be “clever” and do the right thing, I have to also be “lucky”.
At least you have three symbols to choose from, so there is room for some strategy.

I didn't get to the end because the “Levels” button seemed like a level selection (I wanted to check how many there are) but instead it throws you back to the title screen and you have to start over.

Good luck in the jam!