sharpnova's game Reviews on Newgrounds

[Seaside Fireflies]

initially 5 stars:

-1/3 star for down arrow scrolling the page down. this is an issue that can be solved.

-1/3 star for timer. i was enjoying myself and vibing and chilling and then suddenly a timer lets me know that the game is not about that at all

-1/3 star for the camera/graphics. i'm referring to having 2d sprites in a 3d world. i've never liked the feel of it. paper mario knows how to do it perfectly. but in this case it was just awkward af.

Bumped the rating up for the thoughtful and awesome developer response.

Piggybank12 responds:

Thanks for playing the game! Sorry to hear you didn't enjoy your time with it, though I appreciate your honesty. My answers aren't perfect, but I'll go through each point:

- I don't have thorough experience making browser games, but so far from my experience most browsers will lock the scroll wheel on the game if mouse input is detected on the game window (aka, you've clicked on the game). My other games usually do this by having a "Click to Start" button or having the player select options using the mouse, but time got away from me and no such thing was included. If the game sees an update in the future, this is something I can look into including, though ideally without needing to use the mouse.

- The game's concept originally did not include a timer and let you freely explore and collect all of the fireflies at your leisure, but the jam's sudden limitation of "everything dies in one hit" meant a clear interpretation of the limitation was required, else disqualification was a consequence. The timer was the inclusion of that limitation, crude and unforgiving as it may be. I feel some regret over the original friendly concept being lost as a result of this, though as most feedback for the game seemed to enjoy its presence, I think including it made for a more memorable choice in the end and turned the game into a bite-sized arcade-like experience. It's no silver bullet though, and it sucks to hear it had personally ruined your time with the game.

- This is a fair complaint as well haha, I personally went with this specific mix of 2D & 3D to help make it possible to achieve the three day deadline with my first crack at a 3D game. I only realized after completing the game how much of a presence this style has had recently, and if I had realized that earlier I may have thought twice about doing it. Making platforming with this style was a challenge as it features heavy use of collision and jumping that doesn't have much presence in the world, two things Paper Mario never had to contend with as it was very light with its platforming and put more focus on its RPG mechanics iirc.

[SpaceCraft]

I really like the concept. There are a few things that could use some improvement:

1. you should be disembarking from your ship when on a planet. would be way more immersive.

2. it's spelled oxygen

3. it took me quite awhile to figure out how to navigate and use the shop. i mean a long long time. it was completely nonobvious that you use the arrow keys to navigate it. i'm sure the majority of people who have rated this poorly had that issue and didn't bother mentioning it. that's kind of my guess but i'd say it's a pretty well educated guess.

4. the first planetoid you fly to has nothing on it... this isn't great design imo. put some stuff there.

that said, i really like the concept. please develop it more. and i'm giving you a 5 because the genre is right up my alley and i'd like to offset the 3 star rating which i believe is a little too low

AndrewHighfields responds:

First of all, thank you so much for such a detailed review!

1-That's something to think about, but I have many smaller things to resolve before doing such a complex task, I'll think about it after patch 1.05....
2-All I can do is accept that I've spelled it wrong, it will be fixed shortly
3-That's something I already thought about, but it's surely something to be fixed for the next patch! I'll be working on that
4-This algorithm generate random planets in random positions, in wich they have a chance to have minerals or bases, but adding a fixed "first planet" with minerals is definitely a great idea! I'll be adopting that for the next patch

[Mouse and Guns]

couple complaints:

the grenader is complete and utter trash. it barely seems like it's doing any damage at all..

dying resets all progress even though it takes forever to get very far because of the atrociously tremulous resource incretion rate

[Reel Deep]

i hate getting a bunch of coins on the way down and losing them all on the way up because it becomes so insanely hectic so insanely fast.

[Return to Castle Penistein]

if ur going to not have a crosshair, the least you can do is have the enemies react visually when you shoot them. rofl.

also. having 'r' restart a level in an fps was pretty ridiculous. i get that some fps's magically don't require you to reload (doom/wolfenstein/etc.) but punishing a player for hitting r to reload by reloading the whole game? what..?

and why would you call credits 'options'?

SlickRamen responds:

game is unfinished!!!!! will be fixing a lot of this stuff soon when we have the time to work on it!!!!!!!!!!!!!

[Somnokid]

i'm not even sure what genre to consider this... how creative and oriiginal

[Labyrinth: SoS]

very nice. never found the key though

[Wika Wicked's Egg]

i wasn't able to adjust the resolution. when i went into options, the up and down arrows only let me cycle through the volume options.

it defaulted to low for some reason so i wasn't really interested in testing the game further.

also.. all the random switching between needing to hit space, enter, backspace, and arrow keys to navigate open and exit menus was so unbelievably unintuitive.

gustavvonperiwinkle responds:

Sorry you had a bad experience playing! The Newgrounds webGL version does turn off the resolution settings because it runs in a Newgrounds widget. Being a pixel art game--high resolution isn't going to give any particular strong visual advantage. I agree the keyboard controls for navigating menus can use some work.

Best,
Gustav

[Descent (2021)]

great music and art

some of the really dark levels were really annoying but overall great

the music was at an absurdly low volume though. and i checked your in-game volume setting and it was maxed. i had to check my headphones and OS-audio to make sure it wasn't something on my end.

but in the end you simply tuned that music volume way too low

ShogunPixelArt responds:

Thank you for your feedback, I'm extremely happy you enjoyed our little game.

We never heard complaints about the volume before, so that's weird but I did notice that the final music for the boss fight was way louder than the theme of each level. Please forgives it was our first full-scale project, we promise to do better in the future.