FutureCopLGF's game Reviews on Newgrounds

[Chez Bernie]

This one's an odd duck for me! I like these kind of 'smithing' type games where you manage shops and craft items, and this one was pretty neat. Lots of interesting complexities to the job like getting coal and ingots ready, timing your bellows only when the coals are hot, hammering the iron dead center for perfects, and so on, were quite fun to get good at managing. While it only has one item to craft at the moment and simple deliveries, it's fun to build up your renown while running around and listening to the goblin moan and groan, haha.

The crux of my mixed impression was in regards to the tutorial/instructions. On one hand, while the game does help out somewhat with environmental storytelling, like symbols next to the stations and little feedback touches like the coal spitting out fire if you time the bellows, it was really confusing to figure out how everything worked. For example, I still don't know if there is a way to keep the fire going, or if you just need to have it run out and resupply with coal. I didn't even notice that there was a very tiny 'instructions' billboard in the corner that was trying to help, and even when I did notice it, it wasn't much of a help at all as it was way too small and vague. But on the other hand...I kind of ended up liking figuring everything out on my own through experimentation and making good guesses so...it might actually be the game's strength, in a way? I dunno: that's the tricky part of game design! But it's definitely something I thought you might want to consider.

I do think, at the end of the day, while this is currently lacking, this is a pretty neat proof of concept that I had fun with, and I would love to see this expanded on: stuff like more recipes, more orders, quests, and so on. We need more of this goblin smithy!

TealRocks responds:

Big Big Thanks for this detailed feedbacks :D!

We're really conscious about the repetitiveness of the gameplay over time,. Complexify orders (add new weapons), add several kinds metals, add customers and fidelity system, complexify the inventory, add a reputation system for weapon, and others. This is a sample of ways we want to upgrade the game. We heard and took seriously and constructively your comment :).

Also we've a very cool idea that is create a "Weapon Test Zone". The purpose of this zone will be : You will be able to test weapon on "victime" (like humans ^^) in a mini game to increase its reputation. Really love this idea ^^.

So, when we started, we didn't think to continue the game but we received a lot of good feedbacks and we've many ideas to improve the game. So be sure we will continue to develop it :).

[TOYROGUE]

Once I figured out how this game works, especially in regards to the interesting design choice of having cursed items still be useful since they can be thrown at enemies to reduce their stats, it became somewhat fun. But for me initially, it was way too confusing since it lacked any way to learn of these concepts in-game. Couple that with the drab environments and repetitive gameplay both for picking up so much junk and fighting being overly simple stats bonking against stats with odd randomization and I can't imagine many people getting to the point of having fun with it.

I think the biggest oddity is the random maps. I had an interesting experience on my first playthrough. The first map was just a simple room with an exit and one warrior. I thought the warrior was my friend, a fellow campmate, but suddenly I ended up fighting him, and realizing I didn't have a weapon, I ran. Exiting the level and moving on, the next level was much larger with tons of monsters which blocked access to the exit and the only weapon. I tried to be clever and 'ran' through the monsters to get the weapon, and upon finally getting equipped, began my quest. I died shortly after though, but despite that, I thought that was actually a bit of a cool 'story' experience, very rough and survivalist with tons of improvisation, teaching me certain mechanics. However, on my next playthrough, the first map was huge with tons of easily accessible loot, upon which I was immediately geared up and clobbering enemies. It left me confused on what the intended experience was, and I think it would be better if you either constructed some maps manually to help serve as tutorial sections or guide the player in a general way, or at least reigned in the randomization so maps aren't quite so...well...random. As random as roguelikes can be, they are still generally built to tell some sort of story, but this didn't seem to have that.

Like I say, I think there are some nice ideas in here, and I did like a lot of the presentation in regards to the menus, transitions, and so on, but the gameplay execution is a little lacking for me at the moment: too confusing and random to get the intended experience.

Extar responds:

Thanks for the detailed response! Your first playthrough sounds rad, having to run the gauntlet of enemies without a weapon sounds pretty cool. :)

I think a problem of making small games, especially that people are just going to play casually for fifteen minutes or so in a browser is that the further you stray from conventions (and it feels like RPGs are made up almost entirely of conventions at this point) the more you're going to either have to explain things to the player or drip-feed things into them, or you're just going to throw them in at the deep end and leave it up to them. My general experience of rogue-likes like Nethack, Zangband and such was that they tended to go more for the 'in at the deep end' approach. I was hesitant to even put the game onto Newgrounds because of the fact 'steep learning curve' and 'casual fifteen minute games' are a difficult match. :)

Like you suggested, it would be best to put a tutorial into the game, and I did think about making some constructed maps, however there really wasn't much in the way of token space or time once I'd got the 'core' parts of the game actually working. Pico-8 limits projects to a certain size, so all the code has to come in under a token limit for it to run. The last time I made a proper tutorial for a game it was easily 10-15% of the total code, and as it stands now the game is basically using 100% of the token space, so I'd be looking at making the code a heck of a lot more efficient, or just cutting bits out.

I'm glad you appreciated the menus and transitions, because it felt like that's all I ever worked on during the project. The inventory alone took absolutely ages! :)

Thanks again for the detailed review!

['Brain-Toasting Dungeon']

What a charming little game! The whole "choose-your-own-adventure" style really takes me back to the past, so it's very apt for a flash jam, and this one certainly nails it with a lovely amount of funny scenarios all brought to life with goofy animations. The game doesn't necessarily have much depth to it and it's over so quickly, but it was fun while it lasted and I enjoyed every second of it, including going back to see all the alternative choices. My initial playthrough went through with practically no deaths: I think I caught on to the strategy too quickly of choosing the seemingly stupid choices, haha. Cheers for this!

Butzbo responds:

Wow, great to hear it was a throwback! and it's also fun that you figured the logic of following the weirder choices ;)
The good response makes me think of making a more elaborated story with something like this, we'll see. Thanks for the review!

[Vending Machine Action 2.0]

Whoa, what an incredible game! I love the intensity that this game brings: so many explosions, crazy gunfire, leagues of enemies to blast through, and the bosses, oh man, the bosses are absolute dynamite! When I saw the first boss running with those iconic gunstar-esque limbs, I knew I was in for a good time, and it just kept escalating from there with all sorts of cool variations in level design like battling through a level while being lasered at, or running down a collapsing bridge. Weapon-switching mechanic was pretty neat as well: I thought it felt really gimmicky at first, but I did feel it lead to some cool dynamic fights where you need to be ready to improvise at all times.

It does have some minor issues: for some reason the game's volume is incredibly muted, and even then, I think there is a distinct lack of sound effects in the gameplay, particularly for the enemy death explosions. Sometimes the readability of the game suffers from so much shaking and explosions that you can get hit from a bullet you didn't see. One of the stages just had me stuck at the beginning with no way to proceed until I selected to just skip: bit of an oddity. Finally, the controls can be a bit awkward to get used to, with weird things like having to stop shooting just to pick stuff up, even if you're standing right on top of the pickup when shooting.

Still, this game was such a trip! I'd recommend dressing up the title/intro a bit more as right now it is a bit drab: people need to see a hint at how epic the game can be!

EDIT: AHHH THAT ENDING SEQUENCE AHHH! I never thought a vending machine would make me feel so many emotions

toaster101 responds:

Thank you so much for the feedback :) i'm glad you liked it

[Noir: Deinitialize]

Someone really loves Nier Automata, haha! Definitely a pretty neat game that certainly has a great presentation to it through graphics and sound, though it's largely just ripped from Nier, so I'm only giving you half-credit for that aspect, haha.

But speaking of that, that's kind of the good and bad part of this game for me. On one hand, it's quite fun to run around, blasting and slicing enemies and bullets: feedback is nice, and there is some decent variation to levels in terms of enemies and setup.

But on the other hand, it does have a lot of the bad parts of the hacking minigame from Nier: because so many of the bullets can be destroyed by your attacks just like Nier, except now you have a sword as well as bullets, there's barely any challenge at all. Huge swathes of levels can be beat by just running straight at enemies and mashing to nullify their bullets: it's only until the end when blue bullets and such start showing up that you need to somewhat use your brain a bit.

Heck, even when blue bullets show up, your character has so much health you can still just tank and mash your way through levels. Due to this, the game has a lot of repetition to it that really dulls the experience for me.

Basically, it's decent, but I was really hoping for not just a recreation, but something that takes the idea from Nier and expands on it in a cool new direction. Still, for what it is, I had some good fun.

Yword responds:

Thank you very much for playing! And thank you so much for your great feedback too!

[Admin]

Very clever concept for a game, and executed very well! I had a fun time playing detective, piecing the puzzles together while enjoying the generously abundant flavor text and jokes around the many clickable objects in the office. I wish the game would keep going because I felt like it could've been even more challenging with some more cryptic clues or maybe clues that criss-cross amongst roommates or some other manner of escalation, but for what it was, it was a short and sweet fun time.

Bit disappointed that there was no save function for this game so I could continue where I left off; luckily its not that bad because you can just speedrun it by entering the passwords you know, but still, this is easily a potentially multiple-session game that could be helped by saves. Still, I did come back to play and finish it despite that inconvenience, so take that as a compliment for the game having a great hook!

By the way, I actually guessed the title screen password without even realizing you have to check the yellow sticky, haha! Many years in IT just make it a muscle reflex...

GabeMalk responds:

haha lol I'm so glad you guessed the title screen password like that, I was wondering during development if someone who worked with IT would actually do that... And seems like we got it haha. Thanks for the nice feedback, I hope on expanding this game one day, I have a few other levels written and designed, but everyone in the team (myself included) is working on other projects right now. Anyway, thanks again, cheers!

[Nebula Fighter]

Cool little game! While it is a little game, it still has a decent amount of pizazz to it with cool bomb power-ups, explosions, decent enemy variety, and some neat bosses with interesting patterns to fight through.

It does have some annoyances and confusion to it, though, that kinda hampered my experience. The most egregious was the hitbox of the player being incredibly large, or maybe the hitboxes of the enemy bullets being very large: whichever it is, it made so many shots hit me when I swear they didn't, and made it impossible to try and thread the needle between bullets, which is something I love to do in these games, so I was disappointed I couldn't. Couple that with the enemy bullets appearing without telegraphs and traveling so fast and it made for a frustrating time. Also, I kinda wish the power-ups were a bit more explanatory with symbols or something instead of just colored boxes: I eventually grasped some of the colors, like yellow being speed and green being fire rate, but I had no idea what the black color boxes were, as well as many others.

In the end, though, the game sessions were short and sweet enough that it encouraged me to keep coming back to finish the boss once and for all, so well done!

KJScott responds:

Hit boxes fixed now, minor menu page explanation of drops (think i have a bug there though).

[Randy Learns Science]

Pretty neat game! Really captures the style of those old-school edutainment games with frightening accuracy, down to the glitching hourglass loading! I really enjoyed going through the various games and slowly having the hidden, surreal nature of the game start to creep out, bit-by-bit. My only complaint is that, and maybe I'm just impatient, is whether the juice was worth the squeeze, so to speak. Like I said, I enjoyed playing through and getting subtle hints at the lurking horror, but some aspects of it seemed repetitive to the point of making me want to quit before getting to the conclusion. I felt like the quiz dragged on a bit too long without giving enough variety in creepy responses, and I was stuck in a nigh infinite loop that I just wanted to quit out of, but I couldn't, with the whole sorting game. Would've loved if the game got really meta and recognized how bad I was doing at the sorting game and chastised me or altered the game with a glitch or something, but no, it just kept looping without doing anything, so I felt it was a missed opportunity for some spooks. The periodic game too was really difficult to read and tedious to do, well, until I realized I could just cheese it by clicking haphazardly and I wasn't penalized for that. Speaking of the periodic game, it was weird that it kept playing the 'answer the question' theme when...that only makes sense for the quiz segment. I also wish the periodic game made the pictures you were filling out turn out to be spooky images. Overall, I still consider the game quite memorable and interesting: just would've loved to see more reactivity and variety in the horror aspect of it.

Also a bit confused on the ending: I thought I lost the final challenge by losing all my health, but it still let me continue?

Dungeonation responds:

Got a lot to think about for a sequel now that it’s not for a jam, yeah! Thanks for the feedback! :D

[Spinny Discs]

Pretty nice game that I can appreciate, despite it kicking my butt constantly, haha! Overall it feels very smooth and polished: menus transition well, fun to move and dash around, satisfying to whack discs! Combine that with a good variety of enemy types, levels and obstacles and yeah, good times ahoy! I don't even mind death that much because it comes with a nice gory explosion and goofy monkey screams, so when I can enjoy a game that kicks my ass, you know you've got a winner! The only confusion I had was at the very start, where I wasn't actually sure on the game's objective: I actually thought, since I had a bat, that my objective was to fight against the discs, break all of them, instead of whacking being a defensive move and the objective just being survival (maybe that could be a separate mode?) Was also curious whether the game might be better with just a whack move, no dash, in order to have the player utilize it more and amplify it as the primary mechanic: it's fine as is, but could be a fun experiment.

jontopielski responds:

Thank you for the nice review! :-) Experimenting with bat-based goals (like whack discs X amount of times) would have been an interesting direction.

[SELF]

Had a blast with this! It was a bit awkward getting used to the controls at first (tank/rotate controls for the soul instead of just pressing the direction you want the soul to go, and toggling the soul instead of holding the key down) but eventually, I was in full control and loving it: dunno what the story was about, but it just felt so satisfying to move and engage with the core gameplay! My only real complaint was that I felt it was over too quickly, and when I wanted to play more, all I had was endless mode which wasn't enough, and I couldn't even redo story mode. Bit of a letdown compared to other games you've done that have either fleshed out the mechanic more with big challenges or have had bonus levels, but hey, it was great while it lasted nonetheless, so nice work! Oh, and before I forget to mention: the music was absolute dynamite, heck yeah!

EDIT: Bonus levels were awesome! You guys spoil me, haha!

devdwarf responds:

Adding bonus levels tomorrow!