Bcadren's game Reviews on Newgrounds

[Danger Time]

This is a well-polished turd. Seriously; that's what it felt like to me.

1.) For starters; the intro is ~WAY~ too long. As a rule of thumb; either develop backstory over time or show it; a bunch of blocks of text in the early game are not something ~ANY~ player wants to see. It's a barrier to playing the game. People come to your game to play it, not read a novella explaining the backstory.

2.) The animation on the main character is smooth. But none of the other sprites are at anywhere near the same quality level and even on him, you could stand to half the resolution. (Going smaller makes for more exact pixel art and a retro feel; atm, you have an MSPAINT feel). Some of the enemies plain look like you took sprites from other things and kind of frankensteined them together.

3.) Is there any indication of when the 'suicider' is going to jump? ...like at all?

Overall it seems like you spent a lot of time on backstory and on (attempting) art; without managing good art. While mechanics and level design fell quite flat. I tried to start to pick at a few things, but it's like picking at the middle scab on a gaping wound.

HenerzH responds:

Well some the art is made in paint and temporary, it's not highly polished, it was made in a few weeks by one guy. The intro can be skipped. I didn't want you to know when she would jump because i thought that wouldn't make any sense.

I didn't spend loads of time on back story. I thought it would amuse some people, it can be easily skipped. There is only lots of text in 1 level for those who want to read it, or you can just run past it, which is why i did it like that.

Complaining about an entirely skippable intro is ridiculous.

It's just a simple prototype.
I like the main characters look, others do to, i don't want to half his resolution, it's obviously not meant to look like a small 8 bit character

If you don't like it, fine. Critiscm is useful. But you don't need to be a jerk about it.

[Blake Strongflank Escapes]

Very solid level design. Unique, but minimalist controls and no art. Thanks for reminding me that sometimes simple works. As someone that recently DNF'd a gameJam because I spent too long on art and was the only programmer; this is something I'd do well to remember. That said. I played most of it, but got stuck and had to give up on 5 09; which I'm sure is near the end, but I just...can't.

almostnot responds:

Thanks man!

I've had a similar past history with projects and I really wanted to make this one happen as an end to end product. 509 is a killer level but one of the guys in the reviews gave and awesome explanation of how to do it.

You can do it!

Thanks for playing :D

[2030]

I haven't played it enough to really write a lot; but:

Good: Very pretty well done artstyle and interesting flying physics that youd on't see very often.

Bad: Intro is a little long. Having you find out what happened slowly through gameplay is better than -saying everything in a really long blurb at the opening. Most players won't want to read it, then...but might get curious with an interesting story.

It's a lot to take in at once. You need tutorial levels that explain things instead of just throwing the player out there in the beginning. I died of a high wanted level on the first level on my first try, because I didn't know what to do and just started shooting things. I'd recommend starting with just the flying mechanics, then a level with just the machine gun; then add in the special attacks...slow introduction.

[Pursuit of hat 2]

I love this game, though it is a bit too complex at times and I feel that now, since WHICH parts you pick off when matter more than in the previous game; it really should let you choose instead of picking off things then picking half of them immediately back up.

Anyways; I found an amusing bug and I think the developer should know. It's caused by climbing a ledge while there's a cannon on it. I used it to solve level 20. Video: http://youtu.be/gXMfOrYiYQ8

I was also able to fly in a weird and uncontrolled manner the first time I tried the same action, like same effect, but the shooter was in mid-air continuously rolling backwards, causing a 'hovering'.

[You won't tell anyone?]

Some friendly advice UnityDev to UnityDev:

For the programmer:

1.) You can cut down on the REALLY LONG load time when first opening a game, by making a small base game that includes none or close to none of your art and then loading your art with the WWW.Texture and WWW.AssetBundle functions. Though, that requires you host most your game somewhere else (like dropbox). Since most your assets are used in very few scenes; I'm not sure it would cut down much load time in this case; but it WOULD allow you to have a custom splash screen (Unity loading goes by quickly; lightweight unity splashscreen or mini-game plays while the WWW bundles load; then load the actual game. Larger flash games like -epic battle fantasy 3 and 4 do things like this.

2.) More specifically you can cut load times through procedural placement, through it also increases scene load time on their opening. For example, a script placing all of the theater seats when the theater loads would cut down on the saved asset space for the scene, but increase the processor pull on the first frame of opening the scene.

3.) Also, it's often recommended to use 128x128 as your max texture size and do some color shaving for online work. But, enough on the loading time.

4.) You called Screen.LockCursor = true; once. It's better to call it when the player clicks the screen.

Rect screenRect = new Rect(0,0, Screen.width, Screen.height);

function Update () {
if (Input.GetButtonDown("Fire1") && screenRect.Contains(Input.mousePosition))
}

5.) Similarly it's common courtesy to allow the player to pause the game and remove their mouse whenever they like, I tend to use the 'Escape' key and 'P' key for this. Just call

var paused : boolean = false;

function Update () {
if (Input.GetButtonDown ("Pause")) {
if (!paused) {
time.timeScale = 0;
screen.Lockcursor = false;
} else
time.timeScale = 1;
paused = !paused;
}}

6.) Alternatively you can use right click and left click to simulate how a flash object would gain and lose focus.

For your artist:

Do something about those hard texture edges on the character's shoulders. It's really distracting in the theater scene. I admit, since several of the characters look like posing dolls, I'm not sure you've been using a model program that you could use to fix it; but it's possible to do so even without mesh access in GIMP if you know what you are doing. (Or in a cheap or free mesh editor; though admittedly it's easiest in 3DS Max and that's out of the indie price bracket).

For the work in general:

As a game; it's not really a game and it's pretty poor in a lot of ways including wall clipping and the like.

As an artwork; it's very effective for the point it was trying to drive across, even though it's more like an interactive short subject animation than a game.

Considering that it was made in a week: If all the art was made in that time; your artist is impressive. Otherwise; doesn't change my opinion.

Overall: 3.5/5. Might bump it to a full 5 with art revision and the minor program tweaks I suggested. It is -quite- effective at its message; but it feels like that's all there is to it. No game; no game'play' it's just a short-subject Heavy-Rain-esque thing. Be interesting to see you pull out something that was longer and more like a traditional adventure game with the same sort of creepy feel.

Thanks for reading.

[Pixelo]

[Mostly writing as a bug report]

Beer is misspelled as Bear. AND...it has a point at which guessing is necessary which is bad for this kind of puzzle.

[Candy Bird Saga]

Just watch; this will mysteriously become the most popular game on Newgrounds...because it has the buzzwords 'candy' and 'saga' and the other weird reasons that the original Flappy Bird mysteriously became popular. That said; it's an almost perfect flappy bird clone. So...since that was your intention (satire and not excellent gameplay) 5/5.

[Million Pixels]

Very nice. I feel like you need to tighten up the difficulty curve a bit though; it seems to be a bit too slow paced; doesn't get hard enough fast enough; and overall feels like it takes too long without major mechanics changes to win.