Plasmarift's game Reviews on Newgrounds

[Arm Of Revenge Trial]

- You make the player wait for the bad guys to stand up again so you can hit them. Why not just make it so the player can hit them when they are on the ground. This get more annoying when you introduce the super large enemies that take a lot of damage to kill. The old version of the game had this problem as well.
- Going off of the whole "can't hit enemies when they are down", even if I am punching over them as they get up, they still have time to hit me as soon as they get up while I somehow wasn't able to hit them. That doesn't seem fair. Plus, as soon as the player gets up from the ground, the enemies can stand over them and hit them as soon as they get up, leaving no time to retaliate.
- Something just seems off with the combat in general. I'm getting hit by enemies in front of me while I'm attacking them (I think they walk up while I'm attacking someone else and they aren't getting hit). It seems like you can't hit multiple enemies at once. You also can't interrupt enemies' attacks, but they can interrupt the player's?
- The fighting in general just seems repetitive and boring.
- You should work on the grammar in the game.
I do like the artwork and the combat system seems more complex compared to the original with new equipment and skills. I do wish you luck in your future of game design.

MagicWing responds:

thaks for your feedback

[Silent Wind]

Here are some notes:
- Due to the similar surroundings everywhere you go, I've found it is easy to get lost because both points of the compass look the same so if it is pointing at something, you have no idea if you are going the correct direction or the complete opposite direction (I know now that during the day, the sunlight will obscure the compass and the compass will keep correcting itself if you are going the wrong way,). Regardless, it would help out tremendously if you gave one compass point a different look, like make the point that guides you red. If you don't, you're most likely going to make a lot of players mad and confused.
- When on the menu, the mouse is hidden so you don't know where it is on the screen.
- I'd really encourage you adding some sound effects (for the environment, enemies, movements, goop depositing, etc.) especially footsteps for the "creatures". It's very easy for them to creep up on you and I think it might make things a bit scarier. I get if you don't want to add environmental sounds like wind (since the game is called Silent Wind), but consider the other ones).
- I'd be cool if you added a bit more choice to the goop machine. When you interact with it, you deposit all your goop, which becomes a problem later on when you can sell the goop. Maybe you only want to put 100 goop in the machine.
- I'd highly encourage adding a full screen option as well as an options menu in general, such as to lower or increase sound or mouse sensitivity in game and to reassign the controls.
- What't the point of the knife? The syringe does the job really well already and the knife can't collect goop. And what's the point of the little boxes you can break open? There's nothing in them!
- What triggers the darkness? It doesn't seem exactly like it is time related, considering I came upon a darker sky, went back to the house before it told me to, and when I got back, the sky looked normal again.

- The last thing is the gameplay. The first level was interesting, but that's when I was under the impression that, upon exploring the world, I'd find new stuff, like letters from other people that had been in this guy's position or new weapons or new, unique enemies, not the same two enemies. Perhaps these things will come up in future levels, but as it stands, I don't want to go through the same process of killing for goop, put in the machine, and go back when it gets dark (the machine that gives you money was something I would've liked in the first level considering I had over 200 goop when I got back to the house after dark).

[Consume_Evil]

Big glitch I found:
- I only unlocked three areas and can't progress any further. I ate the dude who was on the couch just before going on the second mission. I don't think that was supposed to happen until after I beat all the levels in that area.

Aside from the glitch, I was enjoying the game. There is dialogue that you can miss by not interacting with things in between missions. The missions are short and sweet. It feels as though this is a continuation of this universes' story; was there a game before this one dealing with the same universe? I would've liked to explore more of the game, but I'd understand if nothing could be done about it since this is an older project.

Fred-Bird responds:

UPDATE: Apparently I had changed my mind about the "romance" conditions for Philon halfway through and forgot the adjust accordingly :V
It fixed now.
Im glad you enjoyed the world! This game goes before heavenly escape, and there will be more that go both before this and after h-e. But it'll take a while haha

[Heavenly escape: REDUX]

The game is pretty good. I like that you make talking to characters optional instead of required. While a backstory for all the characters and such isn't provided (like why the main character was in prison, why does he not burn when using the sword, etc), conversations reveals pieces of the story, which is cool. Parts of the game were fairly challenging though I found some flaws with the game:
- There's a glitch with the prisoner kin (shadowy guy). After killing him, you can continue to strike the area where he was to get more angel wings. Although the game will only display three pairs, I believe I had 8 wings (some of the attacks during the boss didn't hurt me in the beginning).
- The game doesn't alert you or hint at the fact that you can "teleport" after getting one angel wing. While the instructions do say to use "Arrows/wasd/d-pad only", I pressed all the buttons at the beginning and when the back button did nothing, I figured it wasn't going to do anything.
- The hitboxes for the boss' attacks is confusing. Sometimes they'll hit me even though I swing at them. Yes, the player's health goes down whenever they are hit, but the player can't be focused on the health bar to see which one hit them. You do include an animation after an attack is successfully hit, but I only see this working for top and bottom attacks (also, they're pretty subtle so it's hard to tell).
- I wish the beginning cutscene could be skipped. It isn't too long, but regardless, it lesses the replay value when your forced to sit through cutscenes you've already seen.
- (this one is a personal preference) While backtracking in games is not necessarily a bad thing, it is when the player doesn't have any control over the pace of the game. To get two of the angel wings, you are required to backtrack. It gets old going through the same battles you just went through.

The art is cool, I like the haircut of the main protagonist, and I enjoyed playing the game.

Fred-Bird responds:

Thank you for the feedback!
I added a skip button and fixed the exploit - I really thought I had that one sealed up!
I also adjusted the effect when destroying Azrael's attacks so it's a bit more visible.
Cheers!

[Jewel of the Stars]

For your first game, this is very good. You have backgrounds, sound effects, sprite animations for the protagonist, enemies, and the environment, and a pretty solid design altogether. I haven't found any glitches. However, it is far from perfect. Here are some suggestions:
- Be sure to list all the controls in the description. Also, you didn't show the spacebar or enter key in the initial startup of the game as a possible control. Some dialogue came up and I didn't know how to get rid of it and ended up getting hit by the first monster because the dialogue box was blocking my view.
- Like the others have said, change the Ctrl and Alt keys; those who play on apple products will have trouble with this key assignment due to the Ctrl key shifting the screen as well as other problems. You could change them to the z and x key for example. You can also add the ASDW keys as alternate movement keys and assign the k and l button.
- The game lacks music. You can find plenty of songs in the Audio portal (search adventure music or something) or you can use stuff from Kevin MacLeod (royalty free music. Just be sure to give him credit).
- For advancing dialogue, make it so the spacebar or enter key, when pressed, will show all the dialogue it was going to scroll out and the next press will dismiss it and start the next string of dialogue. It gets annoying having to wait for dialogue. Also, make the font size bigger; it's hard to read.
- Include what program you used to make your game in the description. This will give the people who created the program some publicity and answer the player's question (believe me, others will want to know).
- What is the protagonist's sprite doing? It looks like he keeps opening and closing his mouth. Also, when the protagonist is falling, you can add in an animation of his cape waving as he falls.
- Now for the important part. The game doesn't offer a lot of challenge. You could literally go through the entire game without killing any of the monsters. Plus you don't offer an incentive to kill them such as the monsters dropping gold or killing them makes you stronger, etc. The most difficult part of the game was the platforming and that's only because a few levels have a bottomless pit so a single mess up will result in a restart (mind you, this isn't a complaint about the bottomless pit). However, I'm sure the difficulty will ramp up later in the game.

This is a great start for it being your first game and I can't stress that enough. I've seen people put out some pretty horrible first games. I enjoyed the fire power and I look forward to the continuation of your game or whatever project you chose to work on next. Also, if you need a voice actor for one of your games, let me know. Good luck!

KAY-s-JAY responds:

Hello, thanks for playing my game and also thank you for the feedback, it really helps a lot, you pointed out lots of errors, ill try my best to fix them all and i'll definitely let you know if I want a voice actor

[HEAL ME PLZ]

As the other commenters have said, it is a well made game. I feel a lot of things in it were given a lot of thought (like the fact that you can hold down the mouse button to rapid fire healing orbs). I would like to give some suggestions for improvements:
- I'd recommend making the screen bigger; the characters are already small as it is.
- For the abilities' cool downs, I'd suggest having an aura appear around them or something to indicate once they are completely done charging because many times when it looked like they were done charging, I got the "no" sound effect when trying to use them.
- I'd also recommend changing up the color palette or adding more color to it; it's extremely blue (the ground, walls, the healing blues you shoot out, and the aura around you and your team).
- This one goes with color palette suggestion. Can you make the party characters a little more noticeable? It's little tough to see where they all are at a quick glance (though I learned quickly that if I don't see them, they are probably hiding in that crowd of monsters that are killing them). Maybe a change of color palette can fix this.
- Perhaps add a mute and pause button feature.
- Is it possible that you can add the arrow keys or ASDW keys for movement? If not, that's fine.

I honestly wasn't sure if I was going to be able to beat the game. It took me a few tries and I had to utilize every ability that you put into the game to win; that's why I think it was so well thought out. I hope the game does well/did well in the contest. Good luck with your future projects!

[Help Yourself]

I've played games similar to this one such as "Kill Me" and "The Company of Myself". I do like the game, but it has a serious flaw; there is A LOT of waiting. There are many reasons for this: the enemies in the game move way too slow, you don't give the player an option to kill their character, meaning they have to wait for the enemies to kill them, and the biggest one of all is that in order to progress through parts of the game, you usually have to wait for your previous deaths to play out.

For example, on level 10, it takes the enemy about 30 seconds to get across the entire level. Several times in this level, you have to stand and wait for the enemy to kill you. Because you'll often need to wait for the previous death to play out before you move on to some parts of the level, you force the player to wait longer and longer each time. Also, keep in mind that if you mess up and kill the enemy or get stuck in one of the yellow force fields (this has happened to me), you'll need to restart the entire level.

Some other things to note:
- There's a glitch in the game. If you enter level 10, leave it, and then go back into it again, all yellow force field platforms will be visible, but they won't all be solid.
- Sometimes when I fall off the screen in the game, it won't restart until press the directional keys, as if the character wasn't dead yet. This happened a few times in level 8.
- Speaking of level 8, on the first yellow energy platform (the one that appears when you jump on the squares with the red dots), if you jump back to it from the second higher energy platform, you fall through it.
- When it comes to jumping on the "dead" blue blobs that represent the character you control, it doesn't always work for me. I can have a lot of them stacked over the same area and still somehow fall through them when trying to jump on them.
- While I'll admit, I was a bit confused at around level 3 since the mechanics hadn't really been explained, it was interesting figuring them out. You could always design the beginning levels to where it will reveal the mechanics naturally, such as jumping down a small hole with spikes at the button and the button to open an door just below the door so that the player will jump down once, die, and the second time land on the previous one, demonstrating that mechanic.
- I'd advise adding a mute and pause button.
- Do the coins in the levels do anything? Do they unlock anything?

I know this is a lot of criticism, but I did enjoy the game. The artwork and music are good and the puzzles, despite the wait time, are creative. I have suggestions for some things you can implement in the game.
- Perhaps offer a way to speed up the time in the level to cut down on wait time.
- You could also add acceleration to the enemies' movement algorithm. That way if you are waiting in one spot for a long time, they will increase more and more in speed to cut down on wait time.

I wish you luck in the jam and in your future of game design!

NoodleSushi responds:

Thank you for your constructive review! I know the game is not perfect since it took like a week to finish, especially implementing the level editor and system and all. I'm thinking of improving it, but right now I'll just chill for a bit since took a lot of effort for a week to me. I'd like to respond to the bugs or issues, like in a 'fun fact' or 'did you know that...?' -ish kind of fashion in case you were curious why they happen.

-The force field staying visible and hollow was an object initialization issue. I programmed each object to animate once its voltage changes, but for some reason that sometimes didn't happen and doesn't change the animation according to the voltage, during initialization that is.
-The character does not die off-screen unless you move because below the screen, it is standing on top of its solid counter-part.
-I'm gonna have to do advanced collision detection or something else for this. The player falls through the platform since his falling speed was too fast for the sensor to detect, my bad.
-I might have to test it a bit more, it might be because of its collision shape being a circle, not sure.
-Yep you're not alone on this, some (or more) people had some difficulty figuring out level 3 and giving up, I myself have thought of this as well. This is something my level designer could improve on.
-I agree
-Not really, coins are just collectibles for fun, like a challenge to collect all of them. But yeah it does not have any other purpose aside from just collecting them.

Thank you for your suggestions and bug reports, this is the very first in-depth constructive review I have for this game, and congrats for being the first! I appreciate you taking the time to play my game, giving me feedback and suggestions, it really helps. I'll take note of them if I ever come back improving the game.

*EDIT*
Also I didn't know there are other games similar to mine, aside from Braid or Chronotron. I'll check them out, thanks for sharing!

[Rooftop Postgirl]

Lesuperchef basically covered things, but here's a few other notes:
- You should include the instructions in the description.
- Having a text box show up after the giraffe leaves is a bad idea because if you are mid-jump, you fall straight down (to your death if there's nothing under you).
- A few of the birds are impossible to avoid unless there is some function of the game that I'm unaware of.
- The "leaps of faith" the game requires you to take is a bad idea since, at time, the player needs to wait for something to happen before jumping, like a platform to start rising. You want to be consistent when it comes to things like that. Either reinforce waiting when there doesn't appear to be a path or make jumping into the unknown the thing to do.

I don't do reviews much anymore since I usually end up pointing out the same things, but your game shows promise. I wish you luck in your future in game design.

PoteComPao responds:

Thank you for the review. I'll try to improve the level design, maybe this game is a little bit too random.

[Ritz]

The music, the art, and platforming are all good, but the invisible platforms were not. It would be one thing if they didn't move, but having a moving invisible platform is not good design. The only reason I knew that a specific area had it is because there was no other possible way to reach that cheese. Finding it requires the player to jump around at random and hopefully land on it and even if you do, if you fall off, you have to do it all over again since the platform will have moved.

invisible stuff aside, it was a good game overall. Good job.