sharpnova's game Reviews on Newgrounds

[The Broadenlands]

the pixels on my screen in the rectangle that makes up the flash window were of various colors. they also emitted strange sounds akin to music and various sound effects.

forgot to mention. the colors of the pixels changed a lot.

Guy-Unger responds:

have you try to look for patterns in these pixel colors and their connections with the sound? If you manege to do that I would recommend you to also try to connect this with things like motion and story and maybe even mechanics but I can't ask for too much

[What Do We Do Now?]

incredibly short. incredibly easy. i got every puzzle instantly in a few clicks. the last one was just ridiculous. move all to center, rotate.. ur done.

the design was awesome though. you just need to make it longer, harder, and have upgrades.

just kidding about the upgrades.

seanjames responds:

Haha, nice. Yeah, definitely going to make a longer one. This was just a test. Thanks for playing!

[Wonder Rocket]

boosters don't work unless you hit the down arrow first.

such unintuitiveness. uninterested in this.

jjwallace responds:

thanks for your reply, however it sounds more of a complaint than anything constructive. Yes you have to push the button to boost. This is a very common theme. How would you improve it, what would feel better to you? How were the other aspects of the game? thanks

[Ender Story: Chapter 1]

Dialogs where portraits of characters are off to the side to show who's speaking are incredibly cringe. Instant turnoff for me.

Additionally, you are using inconsistent art styles. For example Said portraits are at a much higher resolution and level of detail than the sprites and graphics of the game world.

Also the art of those portraits is itself pretty bad. Bad enough that the game would be better off without them. Not to mention it'd be better simply because as I said, having portraits on dialog boxes is extremely childish.

I don't like the grid based movement.

The sprite animations are extremely stiff and awkward.

In world map you can select regions with arrow keys but when you hit enter it takes you to a menu? Whaa...? Yes spacebar works.. but enter bringing up a menu?

Btw, the music matches the art and graphics style of the portraits of the characters when dialog boxes come up. And completely doesn't match the game's graphics. A more chipetunes'ey theme for that would have been appropriate. Though when I first entered the woods.. or whatever they were, the third dot on the map, the music there did fit a bit better.

I get there is only so much you can do with an isometric view, but you could have done a lot better with certain perspective details. Like the back half of a roof could have less vertical length than the front half. Little things like that give it a very amateurish look.

I didn't notice any bugs which is a plus.

Also the narrative was a bit heavier for what the game was. A light more implicit narrative almost always makes for a better game.

Design choices should flow from an underlying fiction understood and planned out by the creator. It doesn't need to be told to the player explicitly.

The game has a pretty good scope which means it definitely took a lot of work. But these are some things that need to change.

Just my opinion. And I'm a professional reviewer for game informer.

TheEnkian responds:

I like the use of portraits when it comes to RPGs, it's a more appealing visual indicator than having to read a name. I will agree though that my art for them isn't great. It probably would have worked better in a smaller, pixelated form.

I tried non-grid-based movement with another one of my games, JUGGERNAUT, and for an RPG it didn't quite feel right.

Enter is always the menu button, it just so happens that it can be used in the world map too. There's no reason not to be able too really.

Yeah, we tried pretty hard to weed out as many bugs as we could before releasing the game. It took a fair few weeks of playtesting, but I think we're near bug-free at the minute :) Hopefully there aren't any more to find, haha.

Thanks for your review, it was quite an interesting read. Glad you still had an overall positive stance on the game, hopefully Chapter 2 can impress you more if you give it a chance.

[The Naked Alien]

Yeah whatever the issue was, years ago when I first played this, it's gone now. Excellent work as always.

Kajenx responds:

Lol, it sounds like a random glitch to me. Why did you get so upset about it? Just try again, it'll probably work.

EDIT: Actually, it looks like newgrounds has a problem with the game. It works on other sites though. I'll have to look into it. Not sure when this bug happened.

EDIT2: Actually, after refreshing again it works now... So, IDK, there must be some kind of conflict, but if you try refreshing it might work for you. O_o

[Star Spangled Hero]

*sprints through the door* HEY DUDE WAIT WAIT. BEFORE YOU SUBMIT THIS GAME TO NEWGROUNDS.. ONE THING YOU SHOULD DEFINITELY ADD IN...

*catches breath*

Ok man sorry. So I was thinking-

Wait you already submitted it? oh FUCK

Well I was just going to tell you that for a person to be seen as hip and trendy and cool and intellectual they have to rip on America. You just HAVE to do it.

Rip on America but not all the european countries that will jail you for so much as thinking something they don't agree with or won't let you go on a bunch of websites or own guns or anything.

Rip on it because it's the cool thing to do.

Then pseudointellectuals and otherwise retarded individuals will think you're really cool.

Oh well too late I gue-

What you already did it?

Well great man!

Now everyone will see what a fucking idiot you are.

Kcori responds:

It wasn't my intention to insinuate that European countries are necessarily better than the United States. I'm just not surrounded by European culture like I am American culture, so I don't really have any place to speak about that. This game isn't about guns rights or civil liberties, so what you're suggesting would be out of place.

It was my hope that with a little logic from the player, this game can apply to not just the United States's militarism, but the aggressive militarism of any country.

[Waddle Antarctic]

It's "sweating" not "sweeting"

Forfeit button in same place as continue button. Idiotic.

Omfg. If you level up in gym, you don't get skill points. What the hell is the matter with you?

I leveled a ton in gym and I didn't even get the skill points for it?

My god? You don't have a leveling function that gets called? You literally do everything manually again and again in different places in your code?

You're that bad a programmer?

Ya. This is over.

JackAstral responds:

Fixed! Thanks for pointing all that out.

[Witch Hunt]

you gain way way too little gold at the start.

mobs have way too much health at the start.

looting gold is very annoying. it's tiny and blends in with the background and has very little "juiciness" to it. no pleasing audio/visual effects when picking it up.

plus.. no one actually likes having to manually pick up the gold.

i mention all this because it could actually be a good game if these issues were fixed

vipervgames responds:

Uhmnn... loot is auto acquired.