Plasmarift's game Reviews on Newgrounds

[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.

[Hacked Halloween]

Well, I've found a few problems with the game.
- The score doesn't reset or go down after being killed in a level so you can effectively just keep collecting things, get killed, and repeat to get an extremely high score. Kind of takes away the value from the score mechanic.
- What are green, orange, and yellow things that you can collect? Candies, right? Can you do anything with them? If not, what's the point in collecting them?
- You should put the controls in the description as well.
- Why do you need to use the mouse to activate the next level? Why not use the spacebar or enter key?
- No pause or mute button.

I did like the fact that you have to use your respawn pumpkins in order to advance in some parts of the game. I don't believe I've seen anything like that before (though this does bring up the problem of "Should I use it now to save my progress or am I going to need it later in the level to progress?"). I also like the artwork, especially for the main character. Good luck in your future of game development!

Newdam responds:

Thanks for your comments. Just some answers. Because the game is developed by a single person, and I wanted to publish it on Halloween, the game came out in beta with some details to adjust in future updates. Candy collect will make you able to use some power.
Thanks again!

[The Chains That Bound Me]

I enjoyed the game very much (I played the downloaded game). However, I experienced a number of problems with it:
- On the mac port you made, it won't let me save.
- In the mines, whenever I mine copper, it sometimes doesn't go into my inventory. I found 3 copper and only one registered in my inventory (and this wasn't a one time incident. One or two other times, I only got 2 copper out of the 3 that I mined).
- This next problem might have to do with the fact thatI was using an emulator to play the windows version (this allowed me to save the game) so take it with a grain of salt. After the battle with Richard and the beast, the game would sometimes keep bringing up directional keys to press in the quick time events after the event had already ended and it would keep doing this until I reloaded the game.
- I understand that cutscenes and dialogue are a big part of the game, but after having to replay the game multiple times (I played the browser version that kept bugging out on me, forcing me to restart, add to that the multiple plays I did on the mac port), I really wish you would include a skip button for these cutscenes. Making them go faster by holding down the spacebar is good, but not good enough in my opinion.
- I'm guessing the character and story arcs that were unfulfilled in the demo are going to be finished in the complete game (the green potion, the tax inspector's wife, the abusive husband, the woman who has a crush on the main character, especially the green potion one), correct?
- There are a few things in the game that I feel like should be interact-able, but aren't, like the hole in the floor of the house on the far left of the lower district?
- I threw a miner's body into the pit just before going into the mine and fighting the monster, but I didn't receive any experience points.
- The music you chose for the game is great, but try and mix it up with a few more tracks (because the one that plays near the beginning starts getting repetitive and annoying after a while after listening to it for so long).

I really, really hope you'll continue and finish this game. I wish the best of luck!

yo13ob responds:

Thank you so much for your feedback! Omg, there's quiet a bit of bugs you spotted.

Yeah, those quests will be completed if the game gets finished. To be honest, this is such a huge game and I actually have a kickstarter up but I have a good feeling that the kickstarter might not get funded. I'm not too sure if this game can be completed since it's such a huge game, I'm kinda regretting doing a rpg lol There's a lot of work. I might create a new small game or maybe continue with this game and put TCTBM on hold.

You should definitely join my discord though. It's easier for me to talk to and receive feedback from my fans. Communication is a lot faster

[Just one chance]

Luck and permanent death are not a good mixture for a game. Many parts of the game rely on platforming skills and figuring out how to progress (you can get through a lot more than one might expect without using dead bodies), but the parts that require there to be bodies for you to progress is not only blatantly unfair (your game basically already points this out), it is also undermined by the fact that those sacrificed bodies will disappear at some point or only some dead player bodies are generated for each run. I managed to play the game multiple times and have yet to beat it partly because of that last room that requires multiple sacrifices to spawn in a path like formation for anyone to win. While I'm sure I could beat the game at some point, it just isn't worth it. If I fail, I'd like it to be from my own shortcomings as a gamer, not because 10 other gamers didn't get to the same part and have to die unfairly.

This is definitely an interesting experiment to say the least. It probably won't garner mass appeal as it incorporates aspects of life that people play video games to get away from, not to experience them in a 2D format. Regardless, I enjoyed the platforming challenges and the smooth feel of the controls and the graphics were pretty good as well. I wish you luck in your future creations.

[Purpy]

The game would be good if it weren't for a few fatal problems:
- Trying to jump up and into a space the same size as the character is extremely difficult for some reason; the character just won't go into the space sometimes. While this would be annoying in a normal platformer, it makes the game even more difficult since when you fail to make the jump, the other mirror image of the character has moved out of place, forcing the player to either realign the other character to the proper spot it needs to be in or to restart the level because the level is now unwinnable.
- The wall jumping also doesn't always work for some reason.
- The controls should be explained in the game or in the description (having the controls explained in both would be preferable). While the controls and mechanic might seem intuitive to you, every game has different rules.
- I'd suggest making the R button the restart button for the level. In a game like this, restarting might be done multiple times for some players so having to go to a menu to do it is both annoying and a waste of time.

I like the aesthetics of the game as well as the gameplay, but the problems make the undesirable to play unless they get fixed.