TharosTheDragon's game Reviews on Newgrounds

[Deep Snake]

This makes me remember the golden age of Flash, when Nitrome was coming up with innovative game mechanics. Games like this must be a blast to figure out how to program.

I felt like I wasted a lot of time replaying the first segment over and over, because the second segment is when the game gets really interesting but I kept dying as soon as I unlocked it. I wish there was a way to skip past the first segment, like if there was a checkpoint or something.

I do appreciate that the game has an end, despite its infinite loop gimmick. My final score is 174 points. I got to 47 and then decided to kill myself while I was stretched across the loop point and I guess a bug made me pick up a lot of apples all at once during my death sequence.

[Go Figure]

Level 20 was the hardest for me, which makes sense because it was the last level before portals were introduced

[OUTSIDE]

For the first 10 levels or so, I was worried this was gonna be the same old gotcha over and over again. The solution to every level was just to go with the non-obvious path. Usually the longest path is the solution. In these kinds of games you have at most two choices at every junction and you often just have one, so it's not difficult to brute force these levels by trying every possibility. Then you introduced some new tiles and I got interested again, but you ended up just replacing levels that are full of one type with levels that are full of a functionally-very-similar type, and we were back to the same old formula. I thought you might combine the different tiles more to make for more interesting level design.

[The Lumlings Welcome You]

I got all the flowers in level 2 but nothing happened. I wasn't sure if I should look for another portal or just assume the ending hasn't been coded yet

bannanalizard responds:

yeah sorry about that, i still need to figure out what to do for an ending

[RPG MK. II]

A save system would be nice

[The Planetologist DEMO]

My hardware acceleration is on and I tried turning off all effects and lowering the resolution and it still runs at around 0.3 speed. A pixel game doesn't really have an excuse for that. It also doesn't make sense for a pixel game to even have resolution options. You should be using a genuine pixel engine.

gares232 responds:

Hi TharosTheDragon!

Thanks for playing the game and for the feedback! :D

Yeah, I know the performance is pretty lacking in the web version of the game, it really bothers me too (I'm the programmer btw). I might eventually invest some time into improving the performance of the web version, but our main focus is on the Windows version as we don't intend to have anything more than a demo for web. TBH, this version is only meant to convince people to try out the Windows version.

I'd say I'm a pretty seasoned programmer (~15 years of experience in the industry), but I'm also pretty new to game development (18 months or so). I don't completely understand what you mean by "genuine pixel engine", but I'd like to! Can you point me to an example? I'd say GameMaker is quite pixel-friendly as it is mainly a 2D engine. It might be worth clarifying that although the game features pixel art, it is not meant to be an actual retro game.

Regarding resolutions, yeah, I couldn't appreciate much of a difference when I added the resolution options (except it looks pretty bad when running low resolutions). I figured I'd leave it as an option as the code was already working and maybe it did make a difference for someone else's hardware.

Btw, I strongly recommend running the Windows version (you can get it from itch.io, there's a link in the game description), especially if you're having performance issues ;)

Regards!

Edit: Forgot to mention we just uploaded a new version (already available both here and in itch.io). Please try it out! We'll have a changelog post later today :)

[Boss Rush Delivery Demo]

All of the social links go to Twitter

[Pumpkin's Sky Tea]

I guess any animal that's not a cat can get fucked.

I remember being into Tradewinds, so I do like these buy low sell high merchant games. I love the quality-of-life features you've included, like telling me what the base price of a tea is. In a lot of games like Tradewinds, you just have to figure out for yourself what the "normal" price of an item is.

I was a little confused at first because the cat tooltips just use the name of each tea and your stock shows the tea based on pictures, so I thought I had to go back to the menu to remind myself what the name of each tea was, but then I realized you can tell based on the listing order. Still it might've been nice to be able to hover over a tea icon and see its name.

I quickly discovered that the game gives you free rerolls. You can keep switching between the menu and the map until you find a cat that has the right prices for you. Maybe you should've kept the prices fixed so that they only reroll when you do a run.

I think it's too bad that the cats only have about 5000 pounds each time. This removes an element of strategy from the game, since once you accumulate a nice stock of cash and tea, you can easily clean out every cat you visit so you don't really get much of a reward for smart trading.

Like future cop said, I realized before I bought any photos that it makes the most sense to wait until the end to buy any. It would've been nice to have the total value calculated for you so that you know how much to save up.

[WOP]

I definitely feel like I'm not in on the joke. Why did this blow up so much? It's not even a game

[The Test of Insanity]

I got the No skip medal without actually finishing the game