RaIix's game Reviews on Newgrounds

[The Burning Locks]

I think it was great. I liked the story; it's a pretty good idea.
However, I'd have probably chosen a slightly more contrasting pair of colours. Also, the fact that movement keys are the same as "interaction" and "continue dialogue" keys meant that a number of times, I accidentally inspected an object (or entered a memory) twice in a row.

[Diamondstep_DEMO]

Wow. The game is amazing. I have nothing negative to say about it.
There are loads and loads of game mechanics which get gradually introduced, the difficulty slowly increases (easy in the beginning, pretty hard in the later levels), I absolutely adore the art style, and since it's a bit dark, the colours nicely stand out. There are also collectables which reward those who take risks, controller support etc. I even accidentally noticed you can change the colour of the main character! Cool! The level design is superb, too.
It would take *long* to list everything I enjoyed about the game.

I didn't finish it, though, because despite reaching multiple checkpoints, the continue button didn't work after Game Over. If that's what is supposed to happen, then what is the point of the flags anyway? Only to load the game if you quit mid-way through?
This is perhaps my only true complaint.

As for the minor stuff:
– The keyboard is set up for the French layout – ZQSD, correct? I'd perhaps add an option to switch to the much more common WASD. Luckily, you can use arrow keys, too.
– Level names look like they've been pulled straight out of the game files ("wood_11", "night_4" etc.). Does the underscore make it look better? I'd say it'd be better without it, but that's up to you.
– Sometimes the art style is inconsistent, as in some objects' pixels are larger than others. The breakable platform seems slightly out of place to me (in comparison with the rest of the environment)
– The game over screen shows the base blue colour, not your actual one (e.g. if you change your colour to red, the game over screen probably ought to reflect that and show a red face)
– You could also try adding medals to make the game even more popular:
http://www.newgrounds.io/get-started/

Once more – great job! Well done and welcome to Newgrounds.

Andostress responds:

thank you so much^^

[Platformer]

Not bad for a first project; actually quite all right. The controls are fine and fluent, there are no bugs I could find, and there are at least two kinds of enemies.
Although there's space for improvements.

– First, there's no victory screen. Just an end flag which leads nowhere. It doesn't take a lot of time to add a "You win!" screen but helps you a lot to feel you "completed" the game.
– The game is too short to truly enjoy it. You can complete it in under a minute.
– Perhaps it's just me, but the game resolution feels a bit small. I'd change it a bit, make it larger. Not to mention the resolution on Newgrounds (the black area around) was chosen too big.
– I know Kenney gives away free assets, but these platformer sprites are a little bit too recognizable to be usable as anything else than a temporary placeholder because too many people use them already. If you don't want/can't draw your own, check (for example) OpenGameArt, there's a lot of free stuff, too.
– The health mechanic is a bit confusing.
• Things which hurt you take away half a heart. But an empty heart still doesn't kill you (might be confusing).
• Getting hurt three times subtracts a life and restarts the level. That is okay.
• Losing all lives restarts the level and refills your lives, too. Since it does essentially the same thing as the previous bullet point and there is no game over, it means you have infinite lives. You could just as well have written ❤ × ∞.

Good luck with your future projects. :)

[The Caretaker]

Two things:
– This is not the kind of background music which allows you to read and think about long paragraphs. Ominous music is fine, but this too intense even when there's not too much going on in the dialogue. The key to good horror is knowing how to use *silence*. Although I liked that you play sound effects at certain times; that's a good idea.
– This is not the kind of background picture which allows you to read long white paragraphs. It's colourful and changing which makes reading harder. In contrast, the dialogue lines come in a black box which is way more convenient. I'm not sure if the backgrounds could be considered "disturbing visuals" – there are too many filters and it's too blurry to fully discern what they represent, although sometimes you can guess.

For the above reasons, I couldn't really get into the story. I read it three times just to confirm what you say results in the same response (which is a no-no – why even have the choice, then?). There's also an unwritten rule in literature that you shouldn't use digits for common numbers ("20 something years", "80 bucks") unless it's too complex or a scientific calculation etc.
The story itself just didn't ‘grip me’ enough. There's not a lot of going on except for a barrage of (repeated) swear words which can't magically make your story more intense. Unless I missed it, there's no truly thrilling moment or a plot twist and boils down to "a woman murderer is calmly arrested for desecrating graves". But perhaps there's more and I just missed it, partly because of the distracting music and backgrounds.

[Golf World]

It's fairly good; although could be better if there were other kinds of obstacles – e.g. different terrain types, interactive (moving) elements. Sometimes I thought the ball is inconsistent – it sometimes stopped on what I'd consider a hill, and sometimes (the very end of the last level) it kept rolling on a slightly tilted surface despite being really slow.
I'd also write the total number of holes somewhere; I almost quit because the game got too repetitive in the end. Which is fine since there are only nine levels; but if you added more eventually, you'd definitely have to introduce new elements to the gameplay later on.

[Birds Way Home!]

I'm sorry, but the controls feel just so wrong. Flapping wings in mid-air doesn't actually move you up a lot, which makes jumping between platforms difficult and frustrating. You also get stuck a lot and the project resolution is unnecessarily large, not to mention the two-second music loop which would get annoying no matter how good it is.

[Bizarre Cross'd Lovers]

I think it's great. Somewhat challenging (but not too hard) puzzles, the gameplay which evolves as the game progresses, just as the difficulty – with an interesting art style which matches the current mood and a neat little story, too. Reminds me of "The Company of Myself".

As for improvements, I think it could be made more powerful by changing the background music at certain points (it plays the same cheerful loop both during the "warm, we're together" levels and the "cold, pushing back" levels). And when the story finishes, "And she forgave me." with an instant cut to menu feels a bit flat (because it doesn't top anything which came before, it merely returns the story to the state it was a few levels ago).
The movement can be a bit confusing, too. The characters move continuously, but you're expected to tap the key only once (holding doesn't work) which is counter-intuitive. I think moving on a grid, as you did, is the better option, but in my opinion, it would work better if the characters instantly snapped to their new position instead of slowly walking there.

Also, when choosing the vertical resolution in Project System, you need to add the height of the footer, too (unless you pick the "Minimal" WebGL Template in Unity), otherwise your game window is going to be cut off at the top and at the bottom.

But other than that, well done!

kypello responds:

Thanks for your review! The background music does change actually, bongos are added for the autumn levels, and the music becomes snowy in the snowy levels. Other than that glad you liked it
Edit: I see what you mean about the actual tune being the same cheerful melody the whole time

[Blink Runner1.075]

Now we're talking. I liked this game much better than your previous one. It's certainly more enjoyable to play. Again, I appreciate you took the time to add more things on top, such as the shop with power-ups and the unlockable characters (it'd be cool if each of them had something different in terms of gameplay, e.g. an ability – like a magnet for coins, temporary shield etc.).

There's a slight issue with the camera, though. Presumably, it's a child of the player, so when the player skips a bit forward, the camera does too. This unexpected "skip" can be confusing and cause you to run into a spike. It'd take some fiddling with its (or the player's) position, but I'd try to make the camera move at a constant speed.
As for the coins, it's a pity that there's no "collecting" sound as that's the major thing you do in the game. And since you keep track of the gold you own even between different playthroughs, I'd display the whole sum of coins you own in-game instead of only your current attempt.
It might make the game seem more "sci-fi" and consistent to remove the blood from the spike (In-universe, how big of a chance is it that somebody got killed on every single spike you encounter?). Speaking of graphics, there are sometimes gaps of various sizes in between the blocks you run on (their positions aren't precise) and the "play" and "home" buttons on the game over popup are too blurry (probably resized too much).
The pause button and the bottom bar being cut in half is probably caused by choosing a wrong vertical resolution in Project System (it's the resolution of your game + the size of the footer, unless you choose the Minimal WebGL template).

TheOilyGooseStudio responds:

Hey Rallyx ,

I'm working on an update based on your feed back, I saw your comment on the other game too. I really appreciate the time you've taken to write these responses :) . On the other game though I think I won't act on the feedback just yet because I was looking at the code for that game and it's a mess that will take time. Again thank you :)!

[Bot Face Survival 1.521]

It's a fine little game, although with a lot of flaws.
I like the different kinds of enemies, power-ups, special abilities and achievements. This shows some effort has been put into creating the game.

However, I think your movement speed is too low to comfortably move around (I'd at least double it) and everything is way too small. This makes enemies (who are about the size of your projectile) harder to hit and even if you *do* hit them, they take a lot of shots to finish off.
I think the benchmark generally is that the weakest enemy should go down in 1-3 hits. Otherwise, if you don't use special abilities, you can go through the whole game without killing a single enemy even if try hard. And that makes the gameplay uninteresting.

As for the UI, it's pretty messy (especially when you die – it appears all over the place with some text even being on top of the rest).
No clear colour scheme (colours are more or less random), various border thickness, the default rounded UI checkbox – but other things have sharp corners, no alignment, text going out of their respective buttons, pause button being cut in half (and since the cursor is hidden during gameplay, it's harder to click it, too; and once you unpause the game by clicking, the button remains focused and pressing space pauses the game again), random font-style (some headlines are italic, some all caps, some neither), etc, etc.
The worst offender is probably the health bar which has 6 digit precision and the text gets smaller to fit in. If you're passing a float value to the Text field, you could round it before (Mathf.Round) or do something like textField.text = $"{health:F0}".
You also don't need to write the condition directly in the achievement description. "Gain more than 300 points." sounds better than "Score >= 300".

I think the game could be fine, but these are the things which drag its quality down.

[#0000FF]

The game doesn't load for me, unfortunately. Does it for you?

"Uncaught SyntaxError: Unexpected token <"
"VM35:83 Uncaught ReferenceError: GameMaker_Init is not defined at VM35:83"