B1KMusic's game Reviews on Newgrounds

[Type Help]

Interesting and meta concept but it doesn't work great in execution. Spoilers follow.

btw I wrote a walkthrough: https://pastebin.com/raw/BrEQNeaA

For one, the ability to edit nearly everything kind of renders the whole game meaningless. After all, I could just edit the starting room's description to look like it says "you win", but doing so feels empty. In a way, editing a golden apple into the room feels like a hollow victory, but not to the same extent.

On the flip side, the editor is not open *enough*. The game has special items and rooms that aren't listed, even though the listing is supposed to show "everything" in the codebase. I'm talking about the mug and anomaly mug, and the ending room you get to after drinking from the mug. None of these things are listed. Not only that, but I don't see a way to modify the behavior of world items, what item IDs they will accept with the use command to affect change, or even how to give a room multiple "states" that it can switch to when key items are used. For example, how exactly does the starting room automatically kick you into the courtyard when you use the wet blanket on the bars? I see no such data represented in the window world item, the cell room, nor the wet blanket item. This is special hard-coded behavior that can't be implemented with the data structures and commands the game provides. If the cmd command was truly open, the player should theoretically be able to remake the base game, type help, from a blank canvas. But this does not seem possible with the tools the player is given, and honestly, I question whether the two included web games were actually submitted by players or if it's just an easter egg.

Edit: as I say this, I notice an 'actions' data structure that I didn't notice before.

So I retract quite a bit of what I said, but this actually raises new problems. The missing items and rooms are still a problem. Anomaly mug has item id 9, but trying to view the item results in the editor saying there is no such item. This is either hard-coded behavior that was overlooked or a major design flaw in the editor itself. You shouldn't be able to lock yourself out of the game's data structures like that. This is like if you had a codebase, and your text editor allowed you to "hide" a function, and in doing so, the function is completely inaccessible from said editor. It's in the file, but you can't see it. You can't unhide it, because to do so would require you to be able to view it, which you can't, because it's hidden. Would you use a text editor or IDE that does that? I sure as hell wouldn't.

I really think that the hidden attribute should be removed entirely. I get that the engine is itself part of the game, but when you can link the start room directly to the end room, I see no reason to even have a way to hide things, and as I discussed above, this only causes problems from the editing side of things.

So if I have JUST ONE takeaway for Nick: remove the hidden attribute from all of the data structures. Its very presence undermines the editor.

Also, from reading other reviews and the responses to them, it seems the `cmd save` command is supposed to save your progress. If that's so, then it's bugged, because it didn't do that for me. It saved the game's *data structures*, so any edits I made to item descriptions, or item/room bindings were still there, but when I loaded it afterwards, it reset me to the beginning of the game. It did not save my progress. Guess I just misunderstood

Edit 2: I saw what Bom said about the reason for hiding some of the structures in the base game, and I raise a counter suggestion: how about a 'warn' attribute that causes the game to warn you if you try to edit something that the dev believes will ruin the fun? This will satisfy the player side by warding them away from something while not completely locking down the data for the editor side.

In any case, thanks for reading my feedback :)

Re (edit 3): sure! I'm working on another speedrun right now to see if I can break into room 5 from the cell window, but I'm running into trouble because the game won't let me use the pot on the window or say a magic word to activate the action. So far the best I have is...well, I'll put it in the pastebin as "even faster speedrun walkthrough"

edit 4: Nick and I had a chat and he's got some improvements coming along. Notably the base game is no longer locked down. You can use `cmd spoilers show` to reveal any objects that are hidden. There are some other improvements in the works, but bear with him. AS2 is a very crusty dinosaur of an ECMA language and frankly it's amazing he got this working at all.

edit 5: I made my own game. cmd web play 3. It has four endings ;)

BoMToons responds:

I appreciate the detailed delve into the game. As you eventually discovered there is an "actions" construct which allows everything you mention. The 2 included games were, indeed, built using the engine, in fact there's a video of me creating the Ice Fishing game using the engine here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l4w2pZwKqSU

There's a bigger story behind the hiding of the mug and the winning room (this kind of thing is only done in the core game)... it arose from beta-testing where, once people discovered cmd, they just edited themselves into the "win" screen and then expressed disappointment at missing a lot of the game content... it was a hard decision to do the transfer of "power" to the player in a more piecemeal manner, but ultimately, I believe it was the right call.

I really love that you got so deep into the game structure though, and thought through why some content was missing. I hope my explanation makes some sense. And I hope you'll check out the linked video, and I even more hope that you'll make your own game and submit it (since you obviously understand the game pretty well)!

Edit 1: Interesting idea to have the game "warn" the player. I'll ruminate on that a bit...

Edit 2: 'cmd local save <id>' saves the game STRUCTURE into the save slot (by design), but it does not save game PROGRESS (ie: current room, actions that have altered room(s) during the game, or current inventory) - but any default structural data is saved. I'm hesitant to add a lot of spoilers in these comments, so please DM me further Qs and I'll be happy to respond!

Edit 3: I just read the walkthrough, I love the speedrun version! Mostly cuz I hadn't considered that ability, but it demonstrates a deep understanding of the engine! Mind if I add it to the TypeHelp.org website (I'll link to your NG userpage for credit)?

Edit 4: I genuinely lol'd at your game. I hope others enjoy it too!

[STARSHIP PROTOTYPE]

Beat it in just over 5 minutes according to the in-game timer (and of course the game doesn't give me the achievement, but I don't care enough to make a complaint out of it). This game is gonna need a *lot* of work before you can even consider it to be in beta/early-access. Everything about it is clunky, and it feels like something that could've been put together in a matter of hours. To say this is a rough prototype is a massive understatement, and the fact that this is what you have after 46 versions is alarming, to say the least.

One major design change that needs to happen is the control scheme. Controlling this game feels awful and sluggish, and moving in the same direction as you aim severely limits your options, which results in awkward strategies like flying around a boss and firing weak pot shots at it. Maybe this is the vision you had from the start, but that doesn't matter because *this is not fun*. To fix this, you should change the controls to that of a twin stick shooter. That is, movement on WASD, attack on mouse, or if you're planning on supporting joypads, movement on left stick, attack on right stick (hence the name of the genre).

The attacks are also weak which makes the game get boring pretty fast. Let the player become more powerful the better they play. If you do this and balance it just right, the boss battles could actually be exciting instead of a boring enemy-circling pot-shotting slog. You could remove the ability to destroy projectiles with the added agility thanks to a WASD + mouse control scheme and let the player actually feel like they're being challenged.

Game's too early in development to offer much more criticism. I suggest playing some classic shooters like gradius and r-type, some danmaku (bullet hell) like touhou and ikaruga, and some twin-stick roguelites like monolith and blazing beaks to get a sense of direction here.

Oh, also, please don't tag this as point-and-click. I just saw that in the tags. Point-and-click games are adventure games succeeding the classic text adventure genre, where you point and click, and watch pretty animations of your character walking around and interacting with stuff. Don't confuse tags, please.

Edit in response to Brandy:

Full quote:

> I dont give a shit about your critique on the gameplay because i didnt design it.
> But i got an issue with this dumbass attitude you're tossing around.
>
> First of all, if a medal says you have to beat the game in under 5 minutes then
> OF COURSE it won't unlock if you take more than 5 minutes so i have no idea
> why you made a point of bringing it up like a complaint while also saying
> "but I don't care enough to make a complaint out of it"
>
> Second, point'n'click is a common attribute to adventure games but not
> mutually exclusive. There's a reason we say point and click adventure
> games are the successor to text adventure games. Adventure game is
> the genre, "point and clikc" as well as "text" describe how you interact
> with the game.
>
> Again, i didn't design this game, but don't be a dick to a fellow
> newgrounder (DimensionLord) who started learning game dev
> 3 months ago. By all definitions of the word, starship PROTOTYPE
> is absolutely an appropriate title. Bless the devs on here who do
> iterate their submission, even to version 43
-BrandyBuizel

1. believe it or not, there are actually two achievements on this game. One for beating the game, the other for beating it in under 5 minutes. I was obviously talking about the former.

2. You're wrong on the point-n-click point. Point-n-click has described the adventure genre since *at least* the 1990's and it makes NO sense to use it to describe anything else aside from maybe hidden-object games

3. You won't get anywhere attacking people who give you criticism. Learn to take criticism and fix your attitude before you turn into another Phil Fish.

4. I think you misinterpreted my wording when I said I don't care enough to complain about the achievement. What I meant is that it's no big deal, but I still want you to be aware of it.

5. I don't owe Dimension Lord a damn thing just because he worked hard on this game. Guess what: games take a lot of work to design. And judging by the quality seen here, this is what I would consider an early pre-alpha build. At this stage, it's absolutely essential that you take criticism and work with it. Big companies and publishers have QA teams, but as indie devs, underestimating the value of community QA is a fatal mistake. Again, LEARN TO TAKE CRITICISM. If Dimension Lord has a response to my criticism, he can take it up with me himself without you being toxic to someone who is giving free advice. In this case, the advice is coming from someone who has played literally thousands of games and knows what he's talking about. Sure, my criticism is brutally honest, and it may hurt your feelings, but it is also constructive feedback that if followed will improve your game, and reacting with hostility is only shooting yourself in the foot.

BrandyBuizel responds:

I dont give a shit about your critique on the gameplay because i didnt design it. But i got an issue with this dumbass attitude you're tossing around.

First of all, if a medal says you have to beat the game in under 5 minutes then OF COURSE it won't unlock if you take more than 5 minutes so i have no idea why you made a point of bringing it up like a complaint while also saying "but I don't care enough to make a complaint out of it"

Second, point'n'click is a common attribute to adventure games but not mutually exclusive. There's a reason we say point and click adventure games are the successor to text adventure games. Adventure game is the genre, "point and clikc" as well as "text" describe how you interact with the game.

Again, i didn't design this game, but don't be a dick to a fellow newgrounder (DimensionLord) who started learning game dev 3 months ago. By all definitions of the word, starship PROTOTYPE is absolutely an appropriate title. Bless the devs on here who do iterate their submission, even to version 43

[Codeine Cowboys [v2]]

It's like a fusion of Pacman and Hotline Miami, though not quite as good as either. Wall collision is a bit janky, too. I got stuck on walls quite often.

MoeAnguish responds:

That's fair.

[Bright in the Screen 2nd Session]

To say I'm disappointed that you just dug up a project that's been sitting on your hard drive for a decade and uploaded it to ng because, idk, maybe you were feeling nostalgic and wanted to push it out before flash goes away forever, would be the understatement of the decade. I played the original back in '08 when I saw it on the front page and remember being blown away by it. I saw this in the monthly voting queue and it was a big surprise. I get it, I'm nostalgic for it, too. I was so excited to see what you've learned about game design over the course of 12 years. It kills me to rate 2.5, but my dude, you released a 2008 flash game in 2020, what can I say? Fear Unlimited 3 and Bright in the Screen were my jam back in the day, but they certainly don't hold up to what exists on the modern indie platforms we have today like itchio, gamejolt, steam, gog and the storefront that shall not be named.

That said, if you *are* developing games professionally, hit me up some time. I'd love to see what you've been up to ♥

-Braden

P.S: consider uploading this to the blue maxima flashpoint database if you want it to be preserved. They're a good community making a solid effort in preserving all kinds of flash content.

HapPie responds:

Hey, thanks for an honest review.
I'm not pro and never been, this was just a silly hobby, never really expected success or any kind of money. It was sitting there and rather than have it rot in my hard drive I put it out there and maybe someone would get a kick out of it. Even if one person enjoyed then it was all worth it, sorry that person wasn't you. I had lost all motivation to make games, but I feel like tackling it again, we will see how things go.

[Hour of the Wolf]

I don't think even the original castlevania trilogy has this much bullshit level design in it. I get that you're going for that "nintendo hard" feeling, but towards the end of the game it gets more frustrating than fun. There is no reason that I should be dying 20+ times in a row to the same boss.

I'm mainly salty about the last boss, which again, took me at least 20 attempts to beat. The boss is more luck than skill. Wanna know why? Let's take a look at his attack patterns. To start, you have the guy spamming attacks at either end of the screen, all of which deal insane knockback, and the longer he is alive, the more shit gets spammed onto the screen. The only way I've found to deal with this phase without tanking your health to near zero is to spam the hourglass and wail on him relentlessly.

In the second phase, he spams attacks from every other boss in the game, which is cute and all, but when you can't predict what attack he will use, there are problems that arise. For example, the tongue attack from the previous level's boss will hit you if you're standing too close. You have to jump to avoid it. But it comes out so fast, and with no warning, that you have to pre-emptively jump JUST IN CASE he does it. The problem with that is that he could also just use the bone attack, which will hit you if you jump. So you can stand still and get hit (or not get hit) based on RNG, or you can jump and get hit (or not get hit) based on RNG. It's an unpredictable clusterfuck and the only way to beat him is to get lucky.

That's my problem with this game: it's unpredictable, and it's not because it's RNG, nor for a lack of effort on my part. It's because the enemies do not telegraph all of their attacks. You can't use the fact that it's a love letter to castlevania as an excuse for this design flaw. Unfair =/= hard. You had the sense to avoid resetting the player to the beginning of the game after an arbitrary number of deaths; you should have also animated telegraphs into the enemies' attacks. That's not hard. That's just bad game design.

On an unrelated note, the achievements are broken. I only got the pumpking achievement despite beating the game. See screenshots. You should look into that.

https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachments/769430851695280149/780981713748230154/unknown.png
https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachments/769430851695280149/780981935924838410/unknown.png

Edit: I originally said I died 45 times to the boss, but actually I wasn't counting. 45 was just my total death count and I was salty, so I just said 45. Actual death count was probably closer to 20, hence the edit to 20+

RainbowCemetery responds:

refreshing the page and restarting should unlock any achievements that didn't go thru while you were playing

[Elementalist: 0]

a little janky, but it's solid and has a lot of emergent gameplay and opportunity for an evolving meta. Add a leaderboard and throw it on steam for like 5 bucks and you got yourself a seller.

Franuka responds:

Thank you! I'm not sure if it's suitable for steam on its current state, but I'm planning on making a second, much bigger game with more maps, enemies, skills, replayability..

[Super Newgrounds Hyper Fighter II]

TL;DR this doesn't belong in the game portal. Please add more content to justify it as a gallery-type submission, as right now, it's no different from a series of animated gifs.

I know this is 3 years after the fact, but I find it bothersome that this is presented as a game, and was uploaded into the game portal, despite having zero interactivity. Slapping links on thumbnails does not count, and while games that are little more than just galleries or art trinkets, dress up games, gadgets, etc. tend to blur the lines of what is considered a "game", at least those have a measure of interactivity to justify it. Galleries have multiple pages of art and sometimes commentary or special things that can't easily be conveyed in a static image.

Here, though, despite the line being blurry, it is obvious that you have crossed it. It's just a single page of a few pieces of thumbnail art with animated sprites and static art. There is nothing in this flash that separates it from a static art piece, or an animated GIF. It could have easily been uploaded into the art portal as 9 consecutive collages of each character. E.g. on one, show the menu with the character select box on Dr. Bees, showing the animated sprite and background art along with it. IIRC Gifs are allowed in the art portal, so it'd be just fine.

I get that this is a collab, and you have this gamey aesthetic in mind, but something like this really ought to have more substance to it. I would be perfectly okay with the thumbnails instead going to an in-game page for each character with trivia, concept art and a link to their respective channels. I'm not fine with just a link, though, because it is confusing and makes it seem like you just designed the menu poorly. So I'll press a bunch of buttons on the keyboard and my controller in attempt to troubleshoot the menu to find out why the game won't start. But there is no game. There is no disclaimer, either. There's a tiny passage in the description, but the fake patch notes completely undermine that. I'll get to that in a sec. The point is, I'm clearly not the first to be misled and get stuck troubleshooting the menu because I'm not sure if there's a game here or not. It doesn't help that the description lists fake patch notes. It's misleading, and I refuse to play along. So I hope you can understand why I'm rating zero. The zero doesn't reflect the quality or artistic merit; I voted zero because this simply does not belong in the game portal. It's not a game. It's not interactive. It's just a fake character select screen with nothing worthwhile to justify its presence here.

I will be happy to change my rating to a 5 if you...

1. upload this to the art portal as an image or series of images
1.5. (optional) upload this flash to one of your dumping grounds so users can still play with it and post a link in each of the descriptions of each of the art portal submissions

or

2. add more content to this. To recap, my suggestions are:

* add a disclaimer to the menu to make it absolutely clear this isn't a game. You can't expect us to quickly figure that out on our own. We're stupid sometimes.
* instead of linking to the newgrounds page of, say, HappyHarry, when you click on Dr. Bees, have it throw up a personalized "info card", like a case file or something, showing history, facts and trivia about Dr. Bees. On that page, you could have a link to the original Dr. Bees sketch and a link to HappyHarry's newgrounds page, youtube channel, etc. Do this for every character. I don't care if it's the shittiest looking info card possible. I don't care if it's just black text on a white background. What matters is that such a thing would meaningfully differentiate this from a static art piece.

If you did that, I would happily change the rating, because then there would be actual justification for this to be here and to receive a score based on its artistic merit. If you wanted to make a game, that could be a separate project. I do not think it would be a good idea to replace the flash on this page with a functioning game.

Also, I saw that response to a May 2016 review where you said it was a week's worth of work, with coding as one of the pieces of work. I'm not trying to flex, but as far as coding goes, I could replicate the functionality of this menu in 10 minutes. It's just movieclips and mouseover events. The point is to say that whatever interactivity you have here is bare-bones. The work really went into the art, which is why it kills me to leave a score like this. But again, it doesn't belong here, and I would rather leave a negative review than use the report button.

Template88 responds:

Interactive art isn't allowed in the art portal.
Submitting this as a series of gifs destroys the presentation.
It is listed under "Gadget" which are universally not games.

[Knightin'+ Demo]

This is definitely one of the best, most polished games I've played on Newgrounds this week. It's a Zelda-like dungeon crawler and possibly a rogue-lite. I dunno cause I haven't played long enough to die. But I'm a sucker for this type of game regardless. You've got a buy from me as well as a vote for best of July, as I am on the private voting panel.

Edit: Don't worry, it's fine for me to disclose that. It says "Success! Here are your choices. Print screen and show your friends!" when you finish voting. So for site policy reasons, we're friends now. https://www.newgrounds.com/dump/item/0fdf1f53db66d6e34b69ee6eb1580e37

I don't usually give 5/5, but I didn't notice any glaring flaws with the game while I was playing, and I kind of bored myself out of it when I brute-forced almost 2,000 solutions (0110... = 1024+512+...) for the switch puzzle on floor 2 or 3. There's 4,096 possible combinations and I optimized my route so it took about half an hour to do.

Anyways, when I buy it on steam and play it, I'll be sure to give a far more thorough and detailed review there.

Wolod responds:

Thanks for the cool review! It's not a rogue-lite. No procedural generation or permadeath. At the moment at least. Standing next to the SexualLobster is an honor. Can't wait to read your detailed review on steam!

[TentaCat: The Lost Lineage]

Decent, reasonably polished platformer. I have to give props for adding a settings screen where you can change audio levels, graphics settings and controls. However, I do have some gripes with regards to under-the-hood stuff and game design...

* It didn't recognize my controller despite it using Xinput, which is a widely recognized standard.

* The prompts and labels did not change to accommodate my control settings. This can potentially be confusing, e.g. if the player forgot what a certain button was supposed to do. Dev should either use a generic label like "jump button" (which to his credit, he did do in some places), or create labels for every possible key that can be mapped and use the corresponding label for the mapped key instead of hard-coding them. This could easily be done by limiting the key set to A-Z, Space, Enter, Shift and a few other keys, to guarantee that the game won't glitch out, crash or throw an exception if the player sets a non-standard key (since setting a non-standard key would be disallowed; no volume-up to jump, TYVM).

* Skipping text does not work properly. When I press jump twice, I expect it to fill out the rest of the text box and go to the next line of dialogue. Instead, the text keeps going at the same pace, and then completely skips the next couple lines of dialogue after the first one finishes. This is broken.

* I disagree with having a lives system. There is no good reason in this day and age to implement that instead of just having infinite lives and being set back X amount by every death. Dark Souls, Ghosts n Goblins, and Jak and Daxter are some immediate examples that come to mind of games that do not have lives systems (or do, but losing X amount of lives just sets you back slightly more rather than to the beginning of the game as in GnG). I did intentionally get a game over to see what would happen, and to the Dev's credit, they've implemented a Mischief Makers-esque "Let's Continue!" screen, i.e. you can spend fish (points) to continue. I say get rid of the lives system altogether and use the "Let's Continue" screen on every death.

* I also disagree with having enemies respawn while still in the same room. Just...why? Doing this disincentivizes the player to kill enemies, because if they'll just respawn anyway, there's no real point in killing them. If they stayed dead at least until you left the room, you could at least clean the room and then go back and look for the special secret fish without having to be hassled by enemies. I do this in DOOM all the time when looking for secrets.

* Bosses take way too many hits. There's a difference between a genuinely challenging fight and a war of attrition where the boss can just wait you out until you screw up X amount of times. Especially when one tiny mistake or failure to read a telegraph can result in you getting combo'd to death because the boss is constantly on your ass and your jump arc isn't high enough to effectively deal with that. I think the bosses could be better-designed. I only beat sharky because I spammed the bullets so hard that the game glitched and he got locked into his idle animation, such that I cheesed him. I'm totally fine with this, cause that boss cheesed me several times before that. Also, spoilers, that's the end of the game's current content.

* Going further on the bosses, I think it's pretty weird that I have a Zelda-like "X amount of hearts" health system with i-frames (frames where the player is invincible just after taking a hit) while the boss has a Megaman-like health bar with no i-frames. Either give the player a health bar and beef up the enemies or design the bosses to have moments when they let their guard down and can be attacked, such that their health system can be consistent with the player's. One system instead of two.

I hope the dev sees this review and uses my criticism to improve it. The game has potential, (and it's unfinished, so there's lots of room to improve), which is why I'm voting for it in the Best of July 2019 Panel. I dunno if I'm supposed to keep that secret or something, they didn't say anything other than it's private, but "private" doesn't mean the same thing as "secret".

Anyways, good game. You should sell it on steam when you eventually finish it.

PKTORA responds:

Thanks for the feedback! I'll be making some of these adjustments as soon as I can. Once the game has been completed it will be on steam.

[The Heroic Rooster]

Character is too slow. Especially considering that this game is obviously taking inspiration from Sonic.

Seeds = Rings.
Ants = Roboticized animals.
Rooster = Sonic.
S Hi T = Robotnik. RoNOTnick?
"Act Conplete"

You should make him able to accelerate to higher speeds, and design the stages to better accommodate said speed.

The controls are unpleasant and floaty. You should make them tighter, more responsive, and faster.

Sound dips suddenly when Dr. Ronotnik speaks. You should have the volume lower and raise in a gradual triangle pattern rather than a sudden square, and it shouldn't lower to less than 70% volume. This is to make it subtle enough that the player doesn't notice the dip in volume to accommodate the voice. I'm not supposed to notice that.

Lacking fun factor. Though this could be a consequence of the controls. If you're going to emulate Sonic, then you should probably look closer at what makes it exciting to play. One thing I notice is that seeds are not exciting to collect in this game. Try giving them a little animation, and adding a subtle sound when you pick them up, so that they have a little liveliness to them.

I lost interest around the stage where you're trying to find a password for the doors. I just got bored. That's definitely not a good sign.

So my suggestions would be to take a closer look at games like the original Sonic The Hedgehog trilogy (study the game mechanics), Phoenotopia (study what makes it polished and exciting), and, I hate to bring this up again, since it's barely relevant, but I Wanna Be The Boshy, for its tight controls.

Aside from all that, I can tell you put a lot of work into this game. But the glaring issues prevent it from getting a really good score.

DIWAKAR responds:

Thanx for the review !!