deletedTAMyStudios's game Reviews on Newgrounds

[Level Up!]

One of my all-time favorite games. It continues to inspire me how you creatively balanced the idea of continual upgrades with having to re-acquire them. It's like "Upgrade Compete!", "Achievement Unlocked!" and (insert some generic RPG here) if they were actually fun.

[Madness: Project Nexus (Classic)]

I don't find this game series at all entertaining. The Madness franchise has been the exact same thing for a long time. There doesn't seem to be any interest in innovating the series or coming up with something new and interesting.

I got bored quickly and left.

[Seedling]

One of the best Zelda-esque games, free or otherwise, I've ever played.

That being said, some negative criticism - I met Sardol. He implied what I had already guessed. I beat the game, with blood on my hands and not. Either way, a rather plain ending for an otherwise marvelous game.

And finally, not criticism but perhaps lack of memorable experience - while most of the bosses required some level of wit, a couple were far too easy and hardly worse than regular enemies. Ex: Strategy wasn't required for some of the bosses as it was for most of the regular enemies who would ruin your day simply by running into them.

ConnorUllmann responds:

These are good criticisms, so thank you! I agree that the endings could have been spicier, and the bosses more challenging :P

[Psychout]

I like how you made each level in this game work under a different set of rules. It was nice fun. The main player reminds me a bit of Jonathan Blow...

Is that intentional?

[The End]

Excellent game. I enjoyed how subtlely you guided the players toward their goal. This is an example of a small game I was glad to see submitted to the portal. However, I'm disappointed you decided not to give it a proper ending beforehand.

[Yeah Jam Fury]

Certain aspects of this game make it almost unplayable, and the absence of minor polish in the presence of so much presentation polish makes me wonder who missed what and why.

I'll give some examples.

Fury doesn't have an automatic fire rate. The user has to manually click for each of Fury's punches. Running overrides punching, so if you're running while trying to punch with Fury, you won't ever punch. Having to wait for Fury to stop his movement before registering a punch request to the game makes playing tedious given that Fury's movement is cumbersome to begin with.

Quick switching between two characters rather than all three was an odd decision, in my opinion. Q is right by WASD, yet I continually must move to the number keys to get the player I want.

Jam's wall-jumps are arrow-key controlled, yet his hammer-jumps are mouse-arrow controlled. This felt really awkward. If Jam is standing still, I can understand guiding his jump with the mouse, but while he's running, I expect WASD to direct where he jumps since that controls the direction he's running in.

I have no complaints about Yeah.

Overall, a really solid visual and audio presentation. It's really ambient. I dig it. The controls need to be tweaked in order to create a more fluid experience, though.

PS: Left-handed players may appreciate either IJKL or arrow-key controls.

[Pico Radio]

Amazing. Remarkably fun. Thank you for sharing this experience with us.

I wonder how it speaks for the game dev scene that a simple gadget like this is more enjoyable than most "real games". Assuming that's even a rational comparison, do game developers even know how to compete with trinkets such as this?

I want to give you extra kudos for introducing me to such good portal songs. I haven't enjoyed the Newgrounds portal much until now. I don't mean to promote myself or anyone else, but MarkySpark has some good classical-style music I used in my game Shelter. I'm not sure if that style of music would fit into what you're trying to do with Pico Radio. I wouldn't want to ruin the experience by cluttering the interface due to it having too many features.

deathink responds:

Thank you very much for your support!

[Drone Assault]

Didn't find it enjoyable. There was nothing to encourage me to spend my ammo wisely, given that the game plays in a mostly static loop loop. The stats menu felt a little cluttered, and I wasn't given any motivation to continue leveling. It didn't seem to do much.

The side comments in the stats menu referring to the game's plot are almost depressing. I would have left out the plot. It's okay for a game to play in an infinite loop without having to justify why it does.

I'm not sure what you were going for. Was this experimental in some way? I'd love to hear more about the game and your motivation behind it. I was looking forward to a good shooter.

VictorGrunn responds:

I think "experimental" is an interesting way to put it. Not like "artistically experimental" like I'm some kind of performance artist, but literally "this is the second code project I've ever made, and the first time I've ever bothered making art since years ago. Both in terms of what the player sees (the art, the UI, the game concept, etc) and what they don't (the actual code, the inheritance layout, etc), a lot of this is me experimenting with programming and art."

Pretty much everything you saw in this game was a new programming or creating experience for me. The explosions? I had to sit down, watch countless explosion animations over and over to figure out the art-logic, figure out a way to replicate these, figure out a way to get them properly aligned on a sprite sheet, figure out a way to smooth out this process (Draw in art program layer by layer -> export to Flash, arrange on frames -> export SWF -> SWF to PNG conversion). The enemy patterns? Picking up an AS3 bezier program, figuring out the fundamental code (how do I make the pattern stop once the enemy is dead? etc). Even something as basic as adding Kong/Newgrounds Badges and achievements was pretty new (I had achievements in Electrikill, the code system was a nightmare. It was really, really bad. This time? Vastly better.)

So yeah, if you want to know what was going on with this game, it's not "Hey, Victor thought this was a fantastic game - what was he thinking!?" It's more that this was a project that involved me trying to learn a lot of things - success, I've learned them! But by the time I sorted a lot of it out, the development time had taken too long, I felt like I had to wrap this up and call it "done" no matter what just to move on to the next project, etc.

So the good news - for me - is that working on and finishing this got me most of what I wanted: I learned a lot of things I wanted/needed to learn, the game was (in a programming and UI sense) vastly better than my previous, and the skills I learned here have made it vastly easier to produce better games, faster. The bad news is that my cutting development early resulted in a pretty 'meh' game, and I cut a lot of features I absolutely know would have made this game more fun because I just wanted it done.

About the only thing I'll stand by is the end-of-round comments. I thought some of those were fun! I mean, yes, they tend to play off the game's shortcomings, even the genre's shortcomings, but I like a little self-deprecating humor now and then.

Either way, thanks for the playing and the feedback! I mean that, it really is appreciated.

[Brave Boy]

There's always an element of addiction to these games. Unfortunately, developers abuse this fact and get away with releasing otherwise unplayable games.

The game is tedious to play. It progresses too slowly. The music boring and doesn't immerse the player in the game or its story. There are too many transitional screens. There's no clear explanation or often even consequence as to what the in-game stats do.

Other than that, it's a very "professional" looking game, with unfortunately unprofessional overall play.

[ANtopia]

I hate to nitpick about Ludum Dare entries, since I'm always encouraging developers to submit games even if they aren't finished.

However, this is only encouraged when the game is interesting in terms of its game mechanics. The only thing new about your game is the plot. Everything else lacked polish and accessibility.