KoniWorx's game Reviews on Newgrounds

[FRIDAY NIGHT FUNKIN']

be be ba be be bo böä böä böä

[Canabalt]

The father of infinite runners!

[Pinball Breaker DELUXE]

Lovely game. Has potential for more content and modes. Would be fun to see story to this.

[Bullet Hellween]

Put Dash on RmB

Nice polished game!

[Elephant Rave 2]

All hail beith little light elephant

[Pinokyo is depressed]

Very cool idea! Charming ending as well.

Some design notes:

Not a 100% sure how I feel about the turn mechanic, I feel it is really generous with the time it takes for the nose to extend, making it feel like I might have solved some puzzles by mistake. You can turn and jump while the nose travels from one side to another and during the turn time, squeeze through. While it looks cool, it might take away from the puzzle design slightly. I wonder if it might be worth checking the raytrace on turn, rather than on impact?

Another thing to consider is rethinking the checkpoint. I feel that the levels are so short that you don't really need a checkpoint system and that it could be replaced by being able to instantly shorten your nose to 0 to avoid softlocking (I guess that's why the checkpoint is there), and have that be a part of the puzzle solving, as well as keeping the incremental shortening by turning into platforms.

I dunno if those notes would improve anything or not, it was just my general intuition while playing the game.

Great job!

[Pack Your Bags]

Been playing this on and off and it's a really charming game. I feel the timing of the melody is a bit off sometimes. Generally a really neat rhythm game. Hope to see more in the similar direction.

[CrossCode]

This has been on my wishlist since forever. Glad I gave the Demo a try!

[Citri Plays Noirwood]

I've had this game on my mind days after I first tried it.

At first, I didn't think much of it, but I came back realizing it made an impression. I think you've got something going with this. It's kind of cool that you have the anime character there reacting to the game. It's interesting and amps up the jump scares.

The scares in this game are very simple but effective. I was honestly surprised that they caught me off guard because I was expecting them to happen (slenderman-esque experience).

Once the novelty of the idea wears off, however, it does start to feel like the concept drags on. When you've been scared 2-3 times by the jump scare and had a sneaky spike death, you kind of "get it" and move on. But for a game jam sized game, I think you've found a fun concept worth exploring.

My suggestions are to do more with the anime avatar <-> game. Perhaps the monster starts to have an actual impact on the anime girl that's playing the game, and that effects the game. Like some sort of meta-game horror thing. A way to push back on the monster would also be nice. What really is lacking is variety in the experience because once you've died once or twice, the alure of the game starts wearing off.

Either way, a really nice project and I'm glad I gave it a chance. I hope you do more with the idea!

[Impact-Effect]

I think it's a really, really polished game jam game.

It's polished to the point where I wish it was even better, actually. It has so much potential. The game loop is a lot of fun, and it has a lot of addictive qualities that I think would work well for a full release for an app for instance.

Where I find it falls a bit short is how the difficulty is designed. I don't like that the rockets are gray with this tiny triangle for visibility. Using these visuals as a type of difficulty design I think takes away from the experience. Because if you made the rockets entirely orange or white, you could push the difficulty curve of the introduced mechanics more aggressively.

This is where the game became slightly dull for me. I got to level 10 and at that point I felt like I had gotten so many powerups that I could survive most stuff. The damage I took was from not seeing the projectiles due to the dark gray design. So, the difficulty isn't really coming from the game mechanics very much, but the visual design.

One more thing I think could have been better is the placement of the timer. I find that having the timer dead-center of the game messes with your perception. You really need to stay alert of your surroundings in this game and having a timer taking up screen space with projectiles zipping over it, is an unfair design choice in my opinion.

All these feedback points comes from me enjoying the game and seeing potential in it. Perhaps it could be useful to be taken into consideration if you push this further some day in the future.

Cheers!

IdeasPerSecond responds:

Thank you for the detailed review, KoniWorx!

If I do go for a full release of this concept, the game's progression would be completely different from its current state. This game was only designed to be played for a short while; a full release would need to stay fun for much, much longer, requiring many hours of playtesting to develop a satisfying progression system. I also agree the color of the various projectiles would need to change; gray just blends in too well!

Thank you again for leaving such a detailed review! Your observations are truly invaluable to me!