goldenPiGames's game Reviews on Newgrounds

[Captain Peggles: That Man's Chest]

This game is a perfect execution of a concept that has very little going for it. If the mapmaker actually tries, it's trivially easy for the seeker to find it, with very little variety. And it's also easy to make a useless map and just remember where your own treasures are. Perhaps you could make it harder by randomizing where the seeker enters the map, or even put the map and island in different rotations so you have to orient yourself.

I agree with previous commenters that you should be able to see the stats for your submitted maps, with some kind of reward or ranking. Perhaps to encourage maps that are cryptic but still solvable, you could make it the mapmaker's objective not to have the seekers find the treasure quickly and easily, maps are scored based on how close they get to a 50% success rate or how long the seekers took.

[Riddle of the Rainbow Rune]

there's a good amount of depth and variety to the spells here, but it doesn't really change how the gameplay sort of boils down to hoping that your guys stick together better than the bad guys do

VicBiss responds:

I went a little too deep with the spells! Haha. I had built those out before ironing out the gameplay and it was hard to wrangle the game together afterwards. Testing and making changes gets more difficult with more spells X.X

[Anxi's Carnation]

It lags terribly, often doesn't recognize my clicks, and I don't understand the instructions

Tyhond responds:

TurboWarp is a software that makes unavoidable bugs when it lags T_T

[Pigment]

Sorry, I can't get past how awful the controls feel.

[Battle of The Bands: Orientation Day]

it has promise, but man, the gameplay and the dialogue and everything are so, so clunky.

[Lonely Duck]

Would be much improved with a one-step undo button, use of d-pad rather than just analog stick, and better visual distinction between on and off buttons than just different shades of blue.

[sillinder's somewhat uneventful tuesday noon]

silly

at no point did i fully understand the plot or the level geometry, but it was a most enjoyable experience nonetheless

silly

you often get stuck at the tops of flat walls going upwards, which is a problem

silly

there's a discord? i can't find it

silly

[RoboNips]

Badly scuffed bounce physics. Which way the ball will bounce is effectively unpredictable, and the faster it gets, the worse it gets. This game pretty rapidly devolves into a game of chance where you hope that the ball doesn't shoot right by you and spazz out and destroy half the floor. A brick-breaker game absolutely needs predictable physics, especially one this fast.

[Recital]

it's mostly good, but the phase intros aren't skippable, the third phase has too much HP, there ought to be health bars in general (or at least some indication of how much progress you're making), and, most critically, why on god's green earth would you make the controls X and spacebar???

[Home 45 Min Experience!]

So, first, I've gotta echo PersistentDreamer's points. Not being able to save is a shame. Tje items are such a colossal pain in every way that I think you'd best tear out that system and redesign it from nothing. I got the bug where the entire battle results screen is black apart from the floating orb, twice, and a similar thing also happened to me once when I paused. In the scene after choosing to choosing to tuck Joh in, the game went black.

Apart from that, I also think the game has problems with visibility and fatigue. The spritework is great, but I'll barely see it when my eyes are mandatorily glued to the top of the screen. The bars expanding like they're coming around a carousel is kinda neat but ultimately I think it would better to just have them stay one size. And not only is it half the screen away from the beautiful spritework, they're also as far away as physically possible from the health bars. Heave you considered making each bar (as well as the target zone) extend the entire vertical height of the screen? Then you could look anywhere up and down the screen - combo and SP at the top, sprites in the middle, HP at the bottom - without having to look away from what you need to be looking at.

Then the fatigue. Just give us a break of a few measures at a few points throughout the song to let us regain our composure and shake our fingers a bit, please? You could take that time to let one of the combatants say a one-liner or pull of a dance move if you don't want that time to be completely empty.

SquishY-Bottom responds:

Great suggestions, reworking the health is definitely a must. Been brain storming a better item ui design as well. These are great suggestions, I'll probably opt to add breathing room in battles with dialogue, that's a good idea.