Plasmarift's game Reviews on Newgrounds

[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

[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.

[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

[A Happy Home]

The game suffers from a few different things:
- One major flaw; it takes too long to go through the text. Yes, I know, it is only a few seconds, but this is a big deal since you only give the player a short amount of time to complete the game. Plus, in order to find the correct actions to complete the game, you need to experiment, meaning you have to play through the game multiple times; this means waiting through the text. After multiple tries, the wasted time adds up. There should be a skip button (I've beaten the game, only interacting with everything I had to and yet I had one hour left before bedtime. You really didn't leave any wiggle room, did you?)
- I don't know what the point of the pinata is. If it is a joke, then it's really not funny, especially with the text you have to wait through to find it and the time you wasted spending on it.
- The game also has glitches:
-- I got stuck in the chimney in the room where you have to pick up toys. After disabling the room, I pressed space over the chimney and I got stuck there.
-- In the bathroom, if you move over specific objects in the room, copies of the boy will appear (also, you can leave the room without getting dressed).

Still, I liked the game and I hope to see more from you in the future. Good luck!

BrandyBuizel responds:

Ding ding ding you've found the point of the game! It's supposed to be a chore to get anything done(the theme was "what does home mean to you") and the textbox does in fact get slower each time you see it.

Sad to say we do know about those couple of bugs, can't quite do anything about it since the software was only free for the duration of the jam, but the duplicates are pretty funny.

[Danger Joe 3D]

If more enemies types and weapons were present and the game had secret passages (you press against a wall to open them; Wolfenstein had them), the game would've been fun. As it stands, it really isn't for a lot of reasons:
- The red stickman enemies clashed with the levels since they looked so poorly designed. Also, it seemed strange that they sometimes were killed with one shot and other times, it required 2 or 3. I will stay that making it so they died more often when you took them by surprise was a nice touch though.
- The boss was just a blob with a face. It was near impossible to avoid getting hit by it; it can hit you from far away and will hit on you on sight so trying to shoot it while peaking around a corner is useless (I can only name a few times where this worked. On my second attempt, I literally stood in front of it and kept firing, left to get health, and repeated until it died.
- It was extremely easy to get lost in the game since artwork was scarce and nearly all of the rooms contained no objects or identifying marks. While it is true that I've gotten lost in Wolfenstein as well, it certainly wasn't to this degree.
- What is the point of having a "secret ratio"? There were no secrets and if there were, there certainly wasn't one in every level.
- Having customizable controls was a good idea.
- The enemies made one sound and that was it. It was a subtle sound so it was sometimes hard to tell how many enemies had seen you when they all play at once.
- This game had nothing new compared to the original Wolfenstein. I'd understand making this game to train yourself to make games, but it wouldn't be a good idea to release it.

I hope you will continue to train yourself in making games and I wish you luck!

IamJonathan responds:

Thank you for the feedback!

I think I didn't make it clear enough in the description, but this game is literally the official JavaScript port of Wolfenstein 3D with new graphics, sounds and levels. That's why it has a secret ratio, because I didn't change that part of the code. That is also where the customizable controls come from. That thing where you sometimes kill enemies in one shot and sometimes in multiple is exactly the same as in the original Wolfenstein 3D.

I didn't make better enemy sprites because I needed a lot of them (50 to be exact) and I didn't want to spend forever drawing them. I got used to them but I can see why other people don't like them.

Anyway, good luck to you too!

[Winterberry]

I like the controls and mechanics of the game though I feel it would have been more fun if it had a story mode and/or ending instead of randomly generated levels. I came across two problems:
- Sometimes you spawn on top of enemies. I had the bad luck of doing this several times in a level and I ended up dying as a result of it.
- You can pick up snow in mid-air. Doing this, you can infinitely jump (I know you can only hold a max of 99 snow, but basically, it feels like you can jump forever).

I wish you luck in your future of game design!

platformalist responds:

Hi Plasmarift!

You're right about spawning on top of enemies - I didn't run into it much during testing, so I didn't put up proper safeguards against it. Being able to grab snow in mid-air is meant to be possible, so you can superjump all around the screen and reach tough areas. In the main mode, jumping forever isn't really possible since you'll run out of snow, but in later levels (once you've built up a stockpile), you can superjump forever!

Thanks so much for playing, and for the feedback. I always appreciate detailed feedback like this! :)

[Neverescape]

This game does have problems though the randomly generated floors isn't one of them (if you have bad luck on the first few floors and you die, you can always quickly regain your progress. After the first five floors, you should have enough equipment to deal with whatever comes your way).
- The biggest problem is that you hide a majority of the level in darkness. The reason why this is bad is because, on the upper levels, you run the risk of opening a door and immediately being killed when there are two men with automatics, one with a shotgun, and others waiting by the door, shooting at you the moment you open the door (and this is only around level 20). This has so many problems coupled with it:
--> I've experienced this myself. As soon as you open the door, you can be shot and take damage and you aren't able to move out of the way as there seems to be a short pause as the new room you just opened up is revealed. This means the game forces you to take damage. That isn't right.
--> If you want to play it smart and safe, you have to assume the worst, so you have to have your best guns equiped (and firing as soon as you open the door is your best bet since you are going to take damage from gun wielding guys standing next to the door regardless of how fast you are because shooting as soon as the door open will still end with you getting shot first as they are still faster). If it turns out that it is just a few unarmed cops, then you can either waste your good ammo or quickly equip some lesser guns or bare fists (why conserve ammo? Partly because you put a limit on how much the player can carry so they have to be mindful of it and can't just waste it). This wouldn't be a big deal if this situation only occurred a few times in the game, but you run the risk of this EVERY TIME you open a door, so you always have to do this or take a gamble and hope you won't have to deal with this situation.
--> If there are a lot of guys on the other side of the door with good guns, you are going to take damage no matter what, even if you jump and move backwards, so you're left with two options: use your healing items before opening the door (even if all you have are the gold ones and you have half your health still) to bring your health up to a decent level or take a gamble, open the door, and hope there isn't hell on the other side. Sure, you can probably heal yourself as soon as you take damage, but that is assuming you are quick enough to do so (plus, the button for healing is in a weird spot) and if you actually have healing items to use. If this is the first door of the floor, you won't be able to back up far, making it easy for you to get cornered and die, even if you just healed yourself.
- Another problem is getting shot at and punched the moment you enter a floor. Yes, you could move away as soon as this happens, but you are going to lose health no matter what, which makes this unfair. If I lose a game, I want it to feel like I screwed up, I don't want to feel like I was cheated by the game.
- As for leveling up, why do you make the player wait to die so they can level themselves up? You make it so they have to die for them to reap the benefits that they earned during the actual gameplay. It would make sense for them to get the benefits of the upgrade when they earned it. This wouldn't be such a big deal if dying didn't mean starting from floor one. You could have made it so they could level themselves up in the pause menu and when they die.
- With the number seven gun, if the enemy is too close to you, if goes passed them, doing no damage.
- Bringing all this together into one problem, the problem is you can't play the game fast and smart, no matter how much you level yourself up. You can't blaze through the early levels since you need to conserve your good ammo, you take damage no matter what somtimes (you even put a limit on the number of first aid kits you can carry, one of the few things that could offset some of the problems I mentioned), and the game cheats you by doing damage to you you can't avoid.
- Once the enemies are near you and have shot a few times, sometimes they'll just stand there. Why would they just stand there and not keep shooting? If they are reloading, I would suggest having them start back up to put distance between them and you until they have reloaded as that would be the smart thing to do if the enemy were smart.
- Another commenter was correct; the weapon select menu isn't really that good. It's easily just to push the number key then use it (and why wouldn't you have the left mouse button select the gun and the right mouse button turn on and off the menu?).

My suggestions for the game:
- Make it so you can see how many enemies are on the other side (you don't even need to show them, just show something like a seismic animation to show they are making noise by walking. That way you can time when to enter the room, waiting for some to walk to the other side of the room).
- Get rid of the pauses I mentioned or decrease enemy reaction time in the case of opening doors.
- Add an upgrade menu that can be accessed through a pause menu.
- Add a mute and pause feature.
- Add an option to change the control scheme. Even if not all players use it, they will appreciate having the option to use it (personally, I know I would use it to switch the g and h keys.
- Make it so weapons can be changed by clicking on the weapons at the top of the screen.

As it stands now, I think the game is missing a few elements that would truly make it fair and challenging because right now it is just "shoot fast and survive". For example, there's no duck feature, no way to hide behind cover, the enemies AI aren't really smart. Regardless, I still got enjoyment out of the game and I like the concept. I hope to see more from you in the future.

Neroun responds:

Thank you for your feedback! This is my second game and I'm still gaining experience. So thanks for your advice and for pointing out the disadvantages of my game! I will try to take them into account and make the games better in the future!