Jaswir's game Reviews on Newgrounds

[ThePowerOfWhat]

Wow, so this is what they call a meta game.
Man, I never thought so much before in order to complete a game.
It is crazy. My brain broke trying to reach level -1.
Didn't figure it out :(
Could you prove a hint please?

joqlepecheur responds:

1 try to get the power of permanency
2 understand what it does
3 think of a place you can do something you couldn't do before

[Disk Allocation: Typing Spectacular]

Really love the idea behind this game.
It is very new and interesting.
Typing as fast as possible to kill your enemies :)

I think typing as fast as possible is a fun mechanic, but after
a while it just hurts my hands and I don't want to play anymore.
This could be a really good game mechanic idle games use it too with clicking, but they also make it less frustrating the more you click non-idle. You can buy upgrades that automatically get you more value so you can click less / play more idle.

An easy way to accomplish this is:
- if you str / hp upgrades remained and this was clearly indicated.

You could also try adding strategy, so you can type in a certain order
and then make it much easier for yourself.

Another way is after every battle you get some collectible like coins
which you can use to get better gear or perhaps something typing related would be more suitable. Like supercomputer upgrade.
This would make you stronger so makes future
battles easier.

Also the art looks very nice, incredibly well done for 48 hours.
Keep up the good work!

[Rookie Bowman]

Wow thanks so much, you actually provided a full game for free
on newgrounds! It provided atleast 2 hours of entertainment.

Love the mechanic where you can shoot an arrow with your bow
and then teleport to the arrow location. It is something I haven't seen before.
You provide great puzzles to solve with arrow teleportation.
They truly required me to think and get the best out of my skills.
Often found myself trying again and again, discovering new surprising ways
to solve the puzzles. Nor did I find myself cluesless as to what to do
There is always something in sight which makes you think, hmmm what if I went there?
Whether it be an unreachable area, key, or a moving platform.
Also the signposts weren't pointless they actually helped a lot, but didn't
make me feel like they told me everything I had to do with nothing for me
to figure out. They gave hints, exactly the way it should be: just hints!

As for improvement points.

* Bossfight difficulty
This might surprise you, but the first boss fight was actually the hardest part in the game for me.
I spend atleast half an hour of those 2 hours here. I felt like in the first section your skills
are not adequately tested to be able to defeat that boss. After the first section I just got the basics
of arrow teleportation. Where the bossfight required me to have like pro skills with the bow.
I found myself getting killed often in the corner and second most by the boss bouncing off.

The second boss felt adequately challenging after completing the second section.
Felt my skills were tested, but not so much tested that it frustrated me.
The third boss was actually the easiest, felt like my skills were way higher than the boss.
You could basically camp in the right corner, pull lever, jump and shoot.

I would suggest switching the first and third boss.
Or atleast use system of the third boss for the first boss: use your basic problem solving skill with bow: moving
from place to place then add some difficulty to this a bit more than section 1. For example like third boss
you have to move through certain areas (the platforms here) before you can shoot at the boss.

Then for the third boss, you challenged me very well with the difficult puzzles in section 3.
Would have expected a much more difficult boss.
What made the first one really difficult for me is that I had to shoot very fast and controlled to left
and right to get passed the boss. And then also shoot to avoid its bounces.
You could have made a puzzle with this in mind: very fast and controlled shooting.

* Water puzzles. The Water puzzles felt a bit out of place in this game.
Other than providing variation to the constant non-water rooms. They
seemed pretty pointless to me. I played a chinese hacked mario game once
where mario could ride dinosaurs and had to fight aliens.
So in this 1 level there were constant water puzzles.
And in the end you had a boss fight in the water.
This gave the water puzzles meaning in the game.
Perhaps you could devide an entire section to the water puzzles and a boss
or something meaningful with water in the end too?
This would have been a great 4th section boss that would fit after the third section
where you unlock the extra tank and get the most challenging water puzzles (tank + laser).

* Major core improvement / Next level
This game reminded me a lot of Aground, also an RPG with similar music I believe.
While your game is much better as a mechanic mastery game.
Aground added something extra to it, you really got emotionally attached to the characters.
As your crew around the campfire got bigger and the island actually changed.
I think if you really wanna improve your game to the next level.
You should take a look at adding these "effecting your area majorly by your actions"
and "emotional attachment" to the game. Some ideas I could come up with:
- Give your bow more character. You made the bow seem special from the orb
introduction. Why not give the bow a voice? As you solve more puzzles, the bow
could start to like you and will help you with hints about the game.
The bow tells some about it's backstory, or the orb or the cave?
- The weird furry animal bosses in your game sure have character, you could do something more with that.
Unlock a furry pet after killing the boss? Some weird furry civilization inside your cave which is
bullied by the boss? After killing the boss the furry civilization will change, new areas / items are reachable.
Some of the furry civilization can become your pet or join you in battle?
- Make the orb from the beginning more present. After each boss fight, the orb could
come with some remark for example: Well done killing the first boss rookie, but this was just the beginning.
It would be surprising if you didn't beat this boss. A huge plot twist: final boss is the orb???

I actually checked out every room of every section of this game as far as I know.
With the hope of finding new items to make me more powerful.
Also enjoying completing new puzzles when I found them.
It was hard for me to think of improvement points for this
as it was already such a great game.
Hope this was useful and you will try to go next level with your next game.
Looking forward!

mapacarta responds:

Thanks. This is probably the longest comment I have ever recieved. You have good suggestions.

Some other people also complained about unbalanced boss difficulties. This is the first game I added boss fight, I hope I will make it better in my future games. Also after testing the game numerous of times, the developer becomes really good at it and it gets harder to know which part of the game is hard, which is easy. Actually I can easily beat first boss :) and first boss is the boss I tested most. So at some point it seemed really easy to me and I kept making it difficult during the development :)

About water levels, actually I wasn't thinking about adding water to the game when I first started. It was something like a last time thing. After most of the coding, some of the level designs finished I thought about adding more to the game and added a few things. Water was one of them. So it was kind of unplanned. But adding a water boss is a very good idea.

I don't know how many people worked on aground but I developed this game alone. Developing a detailed game alone is really difficult. There are lots of things to work on. And I doubt I can add such an emotion to the game. But I will try it in my next game if I make another game in this genre.

Thanks again for your effort.

[EVOLUTION]

I must confess, that I enjoyed seeing the earth become a tumor and explode.
Thought it was rather funny. Was anticipating the boom from the moment I saw the smily shrink a little.
Didn't expect the earth to become a tumor, that was funny xD.
But still very horrifying, good thing this is a game.

After exploding the earth, I tried to find what I could do more in this game, then just make it explode
and found that when you place lots of windmills, man start walking! Also saw a helicopter come out of another building.
Really liked that. Reminded me a bit of Grow cube , you know that game?
Weird Awesome asian game, also about evolution, where you can evolve a certain way based on
the order in which you do a certain tasks and every task has a result to the world.

Would like to see that more in this game. Just like the car appearing when you add more industry.
E.g the man outside of the house, will go cutting wood.
with this wood they make houses.

Also the game currently is, you can just leave it green and nothing happens.
So your best bet for survival, is just let it green, but that's also not realistic.
Because just like the indians who lived green in America not progressing, but
continuing the hunter tradition for hundreds of years probably, eventually they got killed by
the western civilization because they progressed and had guns.
So if you leave it green, it would be more likely for aliens to come and harm the earth.
This way you have to evole the earth and make sure you do it green.
You would have to balance in such a way that you progress, because otherwise you get killed by those who progrgess.
But also not progress it in such a way that the earth turns into a tumor and explodes.
And then you would have an amazing deep game with messages that would blow my mind.

Love the art! Keep up the good work.

[A Hunter's Day]

Great short story:
From the get going it is clear what is going on because of the title,
at no point do I feel lost in this game. I am a hunter
and this is a day of the life. There are some mushrooms that I hunt.
Simple clear gameplay: move and hit enemies to kill them.
Enemies block path, kill to progress.
Good difficulty curve: simple mushroom, yellow ball, bossfight.

I like how you made the game revolve around cute cats. The cat fighter, paw on the door
, paw forest. It gives the game some character and would have liked to see more of that.
Some ideas:
- Instead of fighting with a sword, what if you could slash them with your claws.
- An angry meowing sound when getting hurt / dieing
- Little double paw trail after you walk

Love how you end the story with a twist.
Usually the hunting story is out of revenge, or to make money to
get rich or buy better weapons to kill more.
But here it is about a momma cat that brings food for her children

[A Hat on Time]

Wow dude, great game!
I loved the music and soundeffects.
Did you make those yourself, or can I get them somewhere for potential future games?

Usually I quit a game after a couple minutes, but completed this one, because of the elegant way in which you scale up the difficulty for each mechanic: jumping, hooks, balloons, ray man.
And also in the timing between introducing new mechanics.
Especially liked the hook mechanic, it's really cool.
In some levels you could take an easier path but not collecting the hourglasses.
I always took the hourglass path. And at some point there wasn't even an hourglass there but I still took the more difficult route, because I got so accustomed to : difficult route = hour glass. Loved that surprise when I realized , wait why am I going here?

Some improvement points: why am I collecting hourglasses? Didn't read all the help messages, but this was something important that I needed to know, would have made the experience feel a lot more meaningful to me. Nonetheless I did collect all of them blindly.

Controls: sometimes I wanted to jump and hold movement key at same time, and it wouldn't jump this is a minor thing but gets really frustrating.
Also add in aswd controls.

Nice game, looking forward to your next
Needs highscores!

platformalist responds:

Hi Sabooo! Thanks for playing, and for the detailed feedback! :)

Yes, I made the music and sound effects myself, though the music is based on the Hat in Time OST - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nVPdg2CLduM - if you're looking to make games with similar sound effects, you can make music in PICO-8 (the program I used to make this game), and export the music as WAV files for use in different engines!

Collecting hourglasses isn't really explained - I just assumed that because there's a floating object that adds to a counter, that seasoned platformer players would naturally go and grab 'em all (which it sounds like you did)! I'll remember to explain the reason for collecting a little more clearly in the future. :P

I'm really glad you enjoyed the game, and thanks again for playing! :)

[Square Shooter]

Glows are nice, shooting is nice, but nothing too new or interesting...
Would have loved some innovativity.

[Make Jack Happy]

Liked the multiple endings.
Felt like the ending didn't match the title.
Because it seemed like he went up to heaven when you made him happy and he realized he could only make himself happy.
Then shouldn't the title be: Help Jack go to heaven or something?
By release his soul

Stickme responds:

I’ll take your suggestion into due consideration

[The Youtube Game 4.0 Updated]

At first I thought what is this crap, the art looks poop
and the game play very basic.
But then I got the idea and it is super original, just the execution is lacking.

You play a youtube channel that has to get subscribers.
- Then you have to face various struggles that youtubers face, such as stopped channel

Improvement points:
1. In the level with stop the block. Instead of leading the block to the next level, what if you actually had to stop the block!? For example you could make the level so that you could push certain blocks to prevent the block from reaching your channel and then when it couldn't walk any more path, you won!
2. No need to press space to collect to subscriptions, they are like coins right? You want to collect all of them. Do you press space to collect coins?
3. Make it possible to walk a direction while holding the key for another direction. I found myself getting stuck often for example I walked right, then I had to go up, but I was naturally still holding right down.Then I had to unclick right before I could move. This felt frustrating

[The fire calls]

The puzzle mechanics are really good.

But I felt overwhelmed by the pace I was introduced with new effects.
Before writing this review and checking out your description I wasn't even aware cubes changing their effect was intended. I thought it was a bug.
I suggest using only 1 block in the first level and then introduce the effect change mechanic
in the next level with 2 blocks and then introduce effects and increase amount of blocks gradually from there.

Keep up the good work with your daily challenge.