FutureCopLGF's game Reviews on Newgrounds

[TV TIme Alpha 5]

Hmmm, this one is pretty rough, but I suppose that's to be expected for something that's still in an alpha state!

On one hand, there's a lot of potential in this game, particularly with the presentation. Overall the graphics are very cute and charming, and I was impressed with the menu design and other nice touches such as transition animations and the like. The platforming mechanics seem ok with a decent amount of variation in terms of obstacles, such as disappearing platforms. Basically, the game looks to have an interesting world to explore!

That said, it currently feels very much style-over-substance. When you cut to the meat of it, the game just feels incredibly generic, your bog-standard hop-and-bop action, and doesn't offer anything new or interesting to the platforming, nor is the platforming fun and fluid enough to make up for that. I was really hoping that the game would do something interesting with the TV premise, but unfortunately it just rather superficial.

Moving on from that, there are a lot of rough spots and nitpicks to its current state:

*I was very confused as to the purpose of the static and the towers. Do they do anything?

*There didn't seem to be any sort of health meter and I was always confused when sometimes I could take a hit but other times I'd die in one blow. Very odd that you've got this wifi meter that goes down when you die: you'd think you'd use that as a health bar, with each pip representing the amount of hits you can take.

*As unique as the static animation and sound for collecting coins was, it was very unsatisfying and didn't compel me to collect them at all.

*I was using arrow keys to play the game, but they only seem to work for movement in-game: menus can't be operated except by using WASD for some strange reason.

And there was just a lot of other general confusion and odd glitches here and there. Hopefully this feedback can help in some way as I'd like to see how this game develops!

Trashedy responds:

The Arrow keys thing is being fixed, and the hit system is sort of like crash bandicoot, the remote follows you around and when take a hit he disappears. As for the towers, the wifi symbol respresents how much.. like connection (idk what to call it) you have left, if you're too far away from the towers for too long it slowly drains (faster without the remote). I do agree with you about the coins, I think making them disappear faster would make it more satisfying. As for the TV premise, I'm not entirely sure what you mean by style-over-substance, but I see what you mean by the game not really being related to TV's all too much. I feel like there's cool stuff I could do with the idea I just can't think of anything. The theme also isn't really supposed to be just TV's it's more about old tech in general. There's a loose story I have planned. So I'll add a intro cutscene as well as a tutorial. Also I do plan to try I make the game stand out a bit more by adding some metroidvania type upgrade elements, not sure how I'm gonna do that, but I'll take it into consideration. Also you said the platforming wasn't fluid which I could see but could you explain more?

Also sorry for the long response but you wrote a lot! I means a lot that you took the time to tell me what you think! I'll try to improve.

I also noticed that you really only complimented my art (not mad) programming and music are pretty new to me lol.

[The Newgrounds KinitoPET Collab]

Cute art collab! I'm not familiar with the source material unfortunately, but the art is nice and I do like the whole fake-OS presentation you got going. That said, I do wish the art was presented in a more creative fashion than the typical slideshow format, and I was bothered that some of the art is difficult to look at because the artist credit gets in the way (there's a piece of Hexamak where a speech bubble is covered up). I also wish there were some other quality-of-life features, like being able to click on an artist's name to go to their NG page, some sort of gallery view, being able to move or zoom the art, etc. Not too shabby, though!

riot100233 responds:

SKIBADI TOLET

[Magli Draelyn the Half-Dragon Mage]

Huh, this is quite the interesting game you got here! For the most part, I really like the concept of switching between two forms which each have their own strengths and weaknesses, and while there's a lot to take in, I really liked how deep the mechanics got and enjoyed mastering the various movement techniques to pull off some cool tricks! Game is also very charming with its presentation: love how the personalities of the characters come off with their animations and stances, and the dialogue could be rather amusing.

That being said, while there was a lot to like here, there was also a lot to nitpick, so here we go:

*I felt like the characters are a bit too strong on their own and could use some tweaking to their capabilities so as to make them more synergetic and make-up for each others weaknesses. For example, I found it very odd that the timid and weak wizard form is able to do something as physically strenuous as wallkicks: I think that ability should be eliminated so that wallclimbing is left up to the dragon form where it makes more sense due to their strength and claws. I know you'd need to tweak the existing level design and such to make up for this, but I think it'd be worth it and highlight the character swapping much more.

*Game definitely overdoes it with the tutorial handholding, I feel. So much text to explain things that could be explained with simple pictures, can be put off till later, or the player can naturally infer. I understand that you want to teach the player all of the little subtleties of this wonderful system you've built, but seeing so many words just makes me want to skip them, and I as a player would like to figure some of them out myself, almost like a puzzle, so as to feel clever.

*I felt a bit let down by the final level: we'd been spending so much time learning all this movement tech that I thought the game was building up to be like Dustforce or Celeste, delivering some challenging parkour/speedrun-esque precision platforming levels, but instead we just get what felt like very generic combat with levels that don't need any of the techniques we just learned.

*Speaking of the final level, it was also weird that it suddenly introduced this new emotion meter where if you get too scared or too brazen, you can't transform back to the other until you calm down. I like the idea in theory (one of my favorite games is Pac-Man 2 on SNES which uses this same system), but in application, it just kind of felt like an unnecessary annoyance, and you even seem to think so because you had to introduce items that can force an emotion reset just to avoid players getting stuck in one form with no way out. Think you might be overloading the game with so many systems instead of having a clear focus.

*There were also some minor issues like how the LT button wasn't being recognized from my controller: perhaps its because I use a PS4 controller? Luckily the LT button wasn't that necessary, as it was only used for these weird and superfluous techniques.

Despite my gripes and grumbles, I really like the idea behind this game and want to see more progress on it!

[Frogfall]

Yowza, this is fantastic! Very charming presentation, great juicy effects, wonderfully varied array of challenging mechanics and levels...this was just very well-done in practically all aspects and delivered not only a great short and sweet puzzle-platformer adventure, but you spoil us with extra B-side content as well! Bravo!

The only complaint I could think of is that I didn't like how similar the symbols were for flies that return after one bounce and flies that return after all the others are cleared, but for the most part it didn't cause confusion, so it's just a very minor nitpick.

[Homestuck FreshJamz Collab]

Neat music collab! I'm not familiar with the source material or anything like that, but the jukebox interface was clean, there were some cute easter eggs, the game provides credits with links to artists profiles, and I quite enjoyed some of the music! If I were to have any complaints, it'd be that it'd be nice to have a volume knob and to have links to artists directly adjacent to their songs instead of being stuffed in the credits, but these are very minor nitpicks. Cool stuff!

Wiserim responds:

The player was based on this panel: https://www.homestuck.com/story/830
Originally it was flash based interactive music player.
TBF the fact that it was replaced with static image was the main reason behind this collab.

[Armored Souls]

Wow, quite the interesting game you got here!

I'll admit it's certainly in a bit of a rough state. The game doesn't have mouse-keyboard controls, the HUD and text are incredibly tiny and hard-to-read even on full-screen, there are no visible cooldown timers for your abilities like regen/overclock, and the biggest issue of all, combat just doesn't feel that satisfying with how dinky our little peashooter sounds and a general lack of clear, crisp feedback for actions.

However, looking past those issues, I found the game to be very promising as its core! I love a good boss rush and the boss design here was great with how it had a good variety of moves to contend with and clear telegraphs to make everything feel fair and challenging. I had loads of fun customizing the motherboard: assigning abilities to controls was very novel and I felt so clever figuring out stuff like how to equip two guns to the fire key. Also despite the game saying it had no tutorial and you should read the description, I actually found everything to be rather intuitive and figured it all out myself in-game! I'm very much looking forward to seeing how this develops!

[Stealth Optional]

Pretty cool game! It's like Hotline Miami but if it had stealth similar to something like MGSV with its 'reflex' system where you have a crucial moment between being seen and the alarm being sounded to take care of them. Bit of Splinter Cell thrown in there as well with the lights.

Anyway, for the most part I had a great time! The game had a good amount of juice which made actions very satisfying and smooth, it did a great job at introducing the mechanics intuitively, and it addictively evolved the challenge over time with lots of interesting arrangements! Loved the panic of trying to scramble and chain kills to keep the cascading alerts from getting me into trouble. If I were to have any complaints, it'd be that I think the camera is way too zoomed-out, and that I wanted even more levels because I was really getting addicted to this and then suddenly it was over!

And the font ain't that bad! It just needs distinctions between the letter A and R, because right now they look the same: can't tell whether the musician is named 'SPIRALFLIP' or 'SPIAALFLIP', haha!

[Pillow Fight]

Wow, this game was fantastic! I'm not typically one for these roguelike deckbuilders, but I got absolutely sucked into this and really enjoyed myself! The presentation and concept is very charming and cute, the tutorial and interface were very intuitive with great use of tooltips to figure out everything naturally, and I loved how the complexity and strategy of the game evolved over time with all sorts of new tokens and rules. I was worried at first that the game would feel too luck-based and screw me over, but I always felt like I could improvise my way out of any pitfalls as long as I played carefully with my moves and cards. All in all, it's a grand slam on all facets and was a great short and sweet adventure!

Can't think of much feedback besides a minor nitpick that confused me at the start, being how it animates the rounds resolving. I know now that the tokens it picks to contribute to the final count are arbitrary, because the scoring is purely population totals pitted against each other, but because it picks a token in a certain position, I thought that there was some sort of significant importance to which one was picked and thus perhaps I was missing a rule about positions. This was probably just because I brought in background knowledge, like the black and white reminded me of reversi so I thought similar rules would apply here.

[Lightning Katana - Gaiden]

Hmm, pretty neat game you've got here! I was a bit worried at first since I'm typically not a fan of these old-school Wolfenstein 3D-esque games, but the fast-paced and skillful killing frenzy you can get into this game was pretty cool and very akin to games like Anger Foot, Mullet Madjack or Hotline Miami! I really enjoyed all the various ways you could style on enemies: kicking doors into them, comboing abilities one-after-another by targetting colored enemies, parrying and dodging: it can get pretty deep and expressive!

As much as I enjoyed it though, it's certainly a bit rough in some aspects, and I'm not talking about the obvious stuff like how the death animations all reuse the same default thug sprite: that's probably because it's just a work-in-progress and those are placeholders. Moreso I mean something about the game was just off or inconsistent at times which led to confusion. Sometimes I couldn't tell whether I got hit or not, sometimes I couldn't tell what the significance of whatever sounds playing were, sometimes I would swear I picked up a power-up only to have nothing and therefore ruin my planned combo, and so on: just these awkward moments that didn't feel like they were necessarily my fault or anything.

If I were to nitpick something else, it's that I don't like the whole aspect of some enemies being immune to swords because they have this aura assigned to them: if you must have something like this, I'd prefer it be a new enemy type which carries a riot shield or whatever that consistently has this property instead. Oh, and I was disappointed that there is no foot animation that comes with kicking: c'mon, ain't you ever seen Duke Nukem's big boot? We need something like that in here!

Hope you continue to work on it because I think it's got some good potential!

FCPXAV responds:

Thanks! Hotline Miami and Anger Foot definitely played a part in establishing some of the pacing and game feel!

You're right and the game is still a work in progress, and I'm gonna be implementing a cleaner and more clear UI for some of the more confusing things like seeing how much health you have left, where you were hit from etc.

I'm working on some art for more animations like the kick and gonna expand on it so that you can kick enemies and objects in the environment as well, and hopefully add more enemy types if my budget allows for it!

[Stickyfoot]

It's simple but fun puzzle arcade madness! With so much bite-size content on offer that is progressively adding new innovative mechanics over time to keep things fresh, as well as some great juicy gamefeel and amusing touches like how the character vibrates angrily to reset the level, I couldn't help but get addicted to going for the gold! It's not exactly blowing my mind or anything with something I haven't seen before, but it's just all-around a very solidly constructed and executed game!

If I were to have any feedback, it'd just be for minor stuff, like how it'd be nice if there was a ticking timer during gameplay and a preview of what award you're currently on track to get: in this way, if you see the gold switch over to silver, you could tell whether you've already failed at acquiring the gold and restart immediately without having to go through the entire level to check.

platformalist responds:

Thanks for playing, FutureCopLGF! Glad you enjoyed the little touches.

If you pause the game with Enter and select Show/Hide Timer, you can toggle on a timer! Based on your feedback, I added two little colored lines on the existing timer that change color based on what trophy you're currently able to get. Hopefully this is helpful for you! Thanks again for playing and for the detailed feedback. :)