FutureCopLGF's game Reviews on Newgrounds

[Jumping Clones]

Wow, very nice stuff here! I thought the concept was a bit cliche but I was surprised at the amount of unique mechanics and puzzles that were derived from it. Once again, everything you'd expect from a Rob1221 game: great concept, great puzzles, intuitive design that subtly teaches you mechanics, great 'gotcha' and 'eureka' moments in the puzzles that make sure you're not just autopiloting but using your noggin, a great variety of mechanics that are paced well to keep the player hooked and increase the difficulty smoothly, and so on and so forth! It took some effort to pull myself away from this!

My only gripe, if you could call it that, is that I felt like the game does have a pretty big difficulty spike early on, particularly with the stacking double jump mechanic. I liked the challenge and felt like you provided enough hints to figure it out, but even with that, it could be quite tricky to pull off at times. I also found it a bit unintuitive in that you needed to have both stacked at the start to pull off the double jump: you couldn't create the stack midjump to double jump off of it even if they aligned perfectly, unfortunately. You also introduced it only for it to disappear from the levels later on, so perhaps that mechanic could've been left till later levels for the player to be more comfortable with a challenge like that. Anyway, great stuff overall!

[Inside you are two wolves or something]

Wow! Solid game with a fun little concept and a goofy yet catchy title! For the most part, I had a fun time going through this: felt challenging but fun to try and race against the rising lava by simultaneously controlling both wolves when I could. I am also really surprised at the level of content on display here: for a game jam game, I had a few times where I thought that the game was going to end on me beating a level that felt like a finisher, only for it to keep going and keep introducing brand new types of obstacles!

That being said, there was a lot of wonkiness with that game here and there. I would have times where my wolf would stop running even though they were running across a flat floor: I had to jump to get them unstuck, must've been a misaligned floor tile that was sticking up a pixel or two and creating a stopper, I guess. I would also have times where a wolf would get stuck in a falling animation above an inactive spring for some weird reason. Also, apart from those glitchy moments, I also found the buttons really unintuitive and lazy because they don't provide any feedback, like animating them to depress, to let you know you interacted with them. Finally, there were some levels where the obstacles that were put into place were totally skippable by utilizing wall jumping instead of buttons or springs or whatever: felt like you forgot you gave the player that option sometimes, haha. Still, putting those parts aside which is understandable for a game jam game, I had a good time overall!

[Scrawler]

Wow, really solid action puzzler here! Really felt like it had everything well put-together: unique and intriguing concept, great presentation with cool paper transitions and cute animations, intuitive controls, a nice steadily paced increase in complexity and mechanical variety through the levels to keep the player engaged through challenge, smooth and forgiving hitboxes/movement, and nice effects/little touches like how your character gets more tired as they run outta ink. I found myself easily getting addicted to going through all of the levels, so well done!

It did have a few annoyances here and there, like how the tutorial pop-ups could be placed overshadowing part of the play area where I'd travel as a player, making it impossible to see where I am: might've been better to allow the player to close the pop-ups, or just place them somewhere the player isn't going to travel in the level. Also some of the later levels got a bit more wonky on the difficulty curve, where they would actually be a bit easier than some of the levels that just went through. But for the most part, solid work!

nulledwine responds:

Thanks so much for all the feedback! I'm super glad that I ended up making something a bit better for once. I've definitely noted down the visibility issues and when I have time in the future I'll add a way to close the pop ups. As for the difficulty curve yeah, the way I designed and ordered the levels was a bit strange; I rushed that part a bit but I'll definitely note that down for similar projects in the future.
Thanks you so much for playing!

[Octillery VS Putin]

Haha, nice goofy little adventure here! I liked how it cut to the chase and went straight into combat and such, but I was a little disappointed that the combat didn't seem to have much strategy to it: seemed like it was all about just mashing the various moves to see the flashy effects, which is fine, but I thought the idea of playing an RPG with everything maxed out and winging it could be cool, but oh well. I'm probably being silly expecting more than that, but the ability descriptions fooled me for a bit into thinking there would be strategy with debuffs and such. It's fine that its shallow in the end since it's just being goofy, but if you did something I bit deeper I'd be for it. Anyway, I also liked the hidden little touches the game had, like insulting you if you attempt to Go To Title at the start, haha. A nice, short and sweet little jaunt.

Vidyabatter responds:

Thank you for the actual criticism.

[GUN SHIT DRIVE - Shoot Trip Die Demake]

Hey, nice stuff on display here! I love me a good demake and I felt like this did a great job at providing an atari-esque look at Shoot Trip Die: captured all of the mechanics faithfully like the combat, shooting pots for cash and then purchasing items, the final boss, and plenty of little touches like the game over animation and such. Always fun to see a game through another lens, but I also liked that the game did even more with it, like a new game plus mode and an extra survival mode!

If I had any complaints I'd say that it can get a little repetitive due to it being overly long. Don't get me wrong, I had fun and I liked all of the levels and was glad they were hand-crafted instead of randomly-generated, but I felt like the stretch between the store level and the final boss level was a bit long: could maybe have peppered in a few more stores or mini-bosses here and there, and extra stores would've made replaying more fun to see what different stuff you can buy. Oh, and I also wish that the final boss was more flashy in its death animation, like flashing the whole screen with colors and such ala Atari, but it was fine for what it was.

Taka responds:

Thanks futurecop! You make good points and I'll keep that in mind if I do something like this again! Can wait to watch you play it in a few days :D

[Pink Firefly]

Huh, not too shabby! It ain't going to blow anyone away or anything, necessarily, but this felt like a pretty solid package: decent juice with the player pulsing to shots as well the shots leaving trails and explosions, decent variety in enemy and encounter design that is introduced at a decent pace to keep engagement up, some decent mechanics in having bullets clash which leads to some strategic play to avoid it, and so on! My biggest complaint was that it was over so fast: really felt like it was building up to something like a boss! Take that as a compliment that I was kinda hooked, though: definitely some solid potential here and looking forward to future games.

[Simpler space]

Hmm, I had a rough time with this game, unfortunately.

On one hand, I thought that it was kinda cool to build up your spaceship, bit-by-bit, through killing enemies. The freedom in being able to add new modules onto your ship as well as upgrading them allowed for some great expression and customization. I also kind of liked the mystery of figuring out how the game works due to its minimalist design, like how money isn't represented with a number. Definitely some interesting progression to be had here.

But on the other hand, all of the progression felt ultimately pointless. All the game ever seemed to do was introduce more and more spongy enemies: they never fired back or got more complex AI patterns or anything to pose a threat, so what was the point of upgrading weapons in the first place if nothing provides a challenge?

To add to that, the core controls felt bad to me as well. Moving and aiming the ship was an exercise in frustration since you just keep flying to wherever your cursor is, never being able to stop and aim (and when you do stop at your cursor, you bizarrely do not point in your last direction, instead you always point to the right). Shooting being automated was annoying too: the constant drone of the same firing sounds going off over and over quickly became grating.

I can certainly see the appeal of these progression games and I think there is some neat stuff here, but the core gameplay here was a big miss for me.

[FROGUE]

Pretty neat game! It's like a cool fusion of SuperHot and Dandara and I had a blast playing it.

It definitely didn't make the best first impression on me: there were some odd snags such as the introduction movie getting off-sync when I attempted to proceed by hitting space, and it was a little confusing to grasp the movement and mechanics at first, since the slow button was unresponsive in the tutorial zone for some reason, leading to me thinking it wasn't unlocked yet, and I didn't realize you could dash into enemies at first since I thought you could only throw at them to kill.

But it didn't take me too long to start dancing around the levels in a stylish and satisfying kill frenzy! Loved the satisfying hit effects, both in terms of visuals, feedback, and sound, I loved the strategy provided by the unique movement mechanics and diverse enemies, and I liked the nice touches like enemies announcing their incoming attack with an exclamation point above them.

There is still some minor jank I have with the game, such as how I don't like how it loses my mouse cursor if I put outside the level borders, and how it doesn't just snap the targeting to the closest square which your mouse path leads to (for example, if I put the cursor into a box, it shouldn't red out and not allow me to click to move, it should just target the closest space outside the box and allow me to click to go move there, despite not being precisely on it). But for the most part, it's some cool stuff!

[Saimai Rd. (demo)]

Hmm, had a bit of a rough start with this game, so I'm not sure if I understood it all. My trouble was mostly because the tutorial did not pause during, so I felt like I had to rush through it so as to stop the alarms from sounding, leading to me not grasping a lot of knowledge. I didn't realize I could manually pause until I already rushed through the tutorial, but to be honest, why do I need to pause the game during a tutorial? It should be automatically pausing when appropriate.

Anyway, I think I eventually grasped the game, in that you need to build roads and then connect carriages and carts based on imports/exports that places have based on their intuitive arrow symbols above: a wheat field takes in person from carriages and spits out wheat in carts that go to another place that takes in wheat and spits something else out that goes somewhere else, etc etc. Not too shabby, except, and this might be due to my confusion, the gameplay seemed quite boring as it just led to adding more carts and carriages to the same routes over and over as populations/demands grew. I didn't feel like there was any interesting challenge or progression to it: yes, new products were getting introduced, but it was the same type of solution over and over. Challenge felt wonky as well as the pacing seemed random: the first time I played barely any new housing happened which made me feel bored and the next time houses were popping up all the time at a breakneck pace (maybe this was because I was doing better so it reacted to that? curious if that's the case, if so, kinda cool)

I do think the game has a lot going for it: I like the presentation and the way you watch your workers going around on the roads like an art farm, and I like the little touch of being able to click on a worker to see what they are carrying. Seems like a cool city-builder: just feels like it needs a bit of a better tutorial and a better sense of how it progresses and how to control traffic jams and such. Would love to see how it develops.

[Cosmodrome Demo]

I got incredibly lost in my playthrough, unfortunately, so I can't say anything definite on the game in a deeper sense. I think it has potential and a lot going for it, and could just be a game not for people like me, but nevertheless, I think it absolutely needs a bit better of a tutorial experience, more intuitive design and a more uncluttered HUD.

The tutorial was way too overbearing and impossible to process. It just vomits pages and pages of textboxes at you, giving you no time to breathe or see the full results of certain mechanics before it speeds off to teaching you the next set of mechanics, so you just forget everything and stop listening. It doesn't help that the textboxes are overlapping constantly as well which makes it impossible to read or interact with anything.

Regarding the tutorial: For one, I'd say you can cut down on the amount of instructions you give: the game is already laid out pretty intuitively and provides a ton of info pop-ups to learn, so you don't need to explain every single thing. And secondly, I'd say you should have the tutorial be a bit more of a story where they introduce mechanics bit-by-bit: leave the complicated mechanics for later, let the player just learn about basic trading first for a few days or whatever, then slowly introduce more complex stuff like crew and factions wayyyy later on.

The game was absolutely chockful of typos. Luckily, they were never major enough that it hurt my understanding of the game, but I seriously don't think I went by a single textbox without something being misspelled. Bizarrely enough, there would be times where the same word would be spelled correctly and wrongly, all practically in the same sentence!

I didn't like how I was being rushed all the time (the game gives you so much text to read and so little time to make a decision, alarms going off with unclear meaning as to why they were going off since hovering over the alarm doesn't tell you with a pop-up, you can never pause full-stop, the game doesn't pause automatically when you go into menus, etc) and yet simultaneously I was also just waiting around all the time (felt like all I could do was just sit and wait for events to happen, hoping for something in my favor to randomly happen, ordering oxygen/food/water is so delayed and unintuitive, etc).

I can definitely understand the difficulty in teaching a game as complex as this to a player, so you have my sympathy, haha. Looking forward to seeing how this develops!

JamesChapp responds:

Thank you very much for taking the time to play cosmodrome!

I developed the game alone for 4 months and it's not finished yet.
It seemed important to me to share the game in the state it is in before leaving it archived on my hard drive.

Luckily it had a very good reception from the public and now I'm putting together a team to finish it.

To begin to understand cosmodrome you have to keep in mind that it is an experimental game. where I implement a lot of different mechanics in a playable experience.

One of the last parts of the game I developed was the tutorial and I had a lot of trouble explaining each of those mechanics.

Regarding the alarms. yellow alarm is when you are running low on oxygen, food and water. (Less than 30 units.) If that happens automatically the station will contact a ship of those primary resources and will buy that resource.

The red alert is when the station is attacked by pirates or there is a threat like asteroids.
There is a button with which you can mute the alarm.

There is also a button with which you can automatically sell fuel to the ships that come to the station. that makes not so many windows with text appear, interrupting the game.

Regarding the design of the UI... sorry... but each system has a different system... it's all part of the experimentation... but I am aware that the UI is a disaster. hahaha.
All that is going to be fixed with the team... yesterday I was meeting with the new ui designer (Naty) who is going to clean up the mess I made.

Regarding the spelling errors... the game was made at super speed without corrections. Missing the editing and correction part.

The game is a kind of multi task...
You have to survive first and take care that you don't run out of resources for life support. (oxygen, water, food)
Then it's a space trade. where you have to trade with different resources to earn credits.
Then you have a Tower Defense where you have threats that attack the station and you can buy and improve your defense system.
on top of that there is an experience system with skills.
and on top of that a system of factions where depending on the relationship you have with the factions, different events are enabled...
and on top of all those systems... like a cherry on a cake... there is a system of random events that happen all the time...
all those systems make each experience playing the game different... or at least that's what the game's design points to.

Thank you again for taking the time to play the game and record a video.

I think all the feedback you give me is consistent and I appreciate it a lot... it really helps a lot in the development of the game.

Greetings