sharpnova's game Reviews on Newgrounds

[Bunny Smoosh (Nokia3310)]

10,000 times more visually stunning and musically innovative than any game in the bit trip runner series

[waxweaver]

this is awesome.

what a great atmosphere.

i'm actually inspired and am making a similar prototype with o1-pro. (it's fixing a problem with the lighting system as i write this review)

[Lightspeed Hideout]

damn got to phase 3 of the boss on my first try but then died... and had to start over completely.

not a fan of that formula, but it's a nice game overall.

i will give it a 3.5 which means it is a 3.5.

[Winsley's Guardian - Demo]

your keybindings are all jacked up.

i had to hit 'z' to do things that said you were supposed to hit 'a'

very annoying.

re: dev

obviously i knew the keybindings weren't actually broken. i was just angry that you made the design choice to depict them in-game, as gameboy controls when they aren't.

you do not understand how to do something in a theme. the specific details of the letter associated with a button on a gameboy are not the thing that makes it a gameboy.

you could have had the same visuals and style and just used the actual keyboard letters. it would still be just as much true to the theme as your game already was.

getting hung up on details like that is an issue that often creeps up in design when the dev's priorities are misaligned.

and that's why you need smart people working with you to check and course-correct you.

one person in isolation (with the exception of people with +5-6 s.d. iq's like me) gets less aligned with what's truly good over time.

Elv13s responds:

take note that this is a gameboy game, and theres also the controls laid out in this games description

[sillinder's somewhat uneventful tuesday noon]

re: dev

fucking with settings accidentally is super easy in the beginning. do you see that? initially you don't know what the controls are and i found myself in settings and janking things up before backing out and understanding what i was, where i was, and what the relationship between me and the UI was.

this may seem weird, but factor in that i'm much MUCH smarter than you or anyone else here. i see things you don't and probably can't. regardless, take this as incredibly valuable feedback.

1. progressed through a dozen screens, died and then had to start from the very beginning? eww.

2. this feels like an LLM just learned how to actually understand 3d and like this was generated using it in some kind of -pro system with 3d integrity checks but without quite getting it the way humans get it. but still never technically being wrong about perspective and mobility etc. very odd feeling.

sillylittlepyro responds:

1. normally you respawn in the same room you died, you must've turned off the "loser baby checkpoints" setting
2. it is definitely weird but it is unique and i personally like it quite a bit, theres a learning curve to playing with it

[Dragonsweeper]

we need to be able to see the type of enemy that used to exist on a square before we killed them so we can see which way they were facing and all that.

[FILL THE HEART]

not being super responsive to rapid key inputs (queueing up moves) is absolutely unforgivable in this genre.

it kills the experience completely..

like most people i like to stare at a puzzle for awhile. or memorize it and close my eyes and think about it for awhile. and when i have a solution i want to execute it quickly before i forget all the moves and the structure of the solution starts to fade out of my working memory.

instead you seem to have designed this with an underlying assumption that your players are dumb and incapable of intelligent problem solving and efficient working memory use.

[Babel.EXE]

oof... or should i say woof. guess it's oof now. no more woofy.

GooseStranger responds:

No more woofy indeed :(

[Die for the Lich [v0.5]]

i don't like games that feature explicit dice. it doesn't make sense.

the point of dice in games irl is to simulate randomness. video games can simply generate random numbers on their own.

it's immersion breaking.