TharosTheDragon's game Reviews on Newgrounds

[Lampyrinth]

Hey I found the bonus level in level 10! Interestingly, that made the game put 10 seconds as my best time for level 11. I assume it was supposed to count as one of the three bonus levels at the bottom of the trophy screen.

What the heck are the apple and orange trophies? If they're about getting all the food, wouldn't that just be one trophy?

Veinom responds:

I'm glad you asked. The Apple icon in the Trophy Room, lights up when you gather all the visible food. The Orange icon lights up when you have also have gathered the secret food in a level, and there's always a hidden diamond (except from level 0). There's a lot to discover and also yes, there are 3 hidden bonus levels.

[Florisher]

I was able to get all perfect hard medals on my first try without ever killing a root branch so I think the game might be a bit too easy. If you don't kill any root branches, all of the plant types are exactly the same

amidos2006 responds:

The game suppose to be on the easy and relaxing side

[The Legend of Quintavius]

Is there an explanation for why your fallen comrades are alive and well in the next scene?

ImmanentDeath responds:

Not other than saying that they're "defeated," but not "killed." There's just the assumption that when you win a battle, your defeated soldiers are only wounded and will be fully healed by the time the next battle happens, probably with the help of the healer Quintavius.

It's not something I thought was important enough to address in this game, since the story is the main focus and it assumes a main character won't die when they shouldn't. Your allies are just tough, and when they fall they'll get back up and walk it off.

[Feathered Escape]

Ha ha, I accidentally beat the game with all the fruit without even knowing I could ceiling run and stuff because I didn't read the instructions :P

yokoboko responds:

Epic!

[Piñata Poppers]

I don't want to be mean since I did enjoy the game and I feel like you put effort into its charm, but if I'm being honest I have to award almost no points for originality. There have been a ton of suika games on Newgrounds lately and most of them have at least one thing that sets them apart. Your game might be the most generic of all. The only thing different about it is that there are fewer levels than usual, so I can get that happy feeling of making it to the end, but that's more like a missing thing than an extra thing. Also I guess there are multiple ways to handle getting to the end. I think Cthulhu Merge just prevents the top level animals from merging. Another approach would be to form higher levels automatically by doing something like making the balls a little bigger and changing the color a bit. Your approach is to allow two top-level pinatas to merge into one top-level pinata, effectively destroying one of them, so I guess that's something unexpected at least.

Also, I lost because an explosive merge sent a few smaller pinatas flying :P

Reply: Yeah Fit Cats has a mechanic that allows you to destroy cats, and Cthulhu Merge lets you devolve animals, so that kind of thing definitely can work. With pinatas you have a lot of possibilities. Pinatas are supposed to drop candy, right? Maybe you could get to break a pinata when you collect enough candy, though that would be kind of backwards. Maybe you could get a bat that you drop the same way you drop pinatas, so you could only break pinatas at the top. Maybe pinatas could have hit points requiring them to get hit multiple times. You could even get rid of the suika mechanic and just make a game about trying to bash pinatas against other pinatas hard enough to break them before they fill up to the top

UnitedFailures responds:

I appreciate the honest and well thought feedback :)

A mechanic we had like 50% working (and maybe I'll return back to it if I have a better vision for it) was to add the ability to break open pinatas. I wrote a shader and some custom code for the pinata breaking effect, and we were planning on you building up "charges" to activate "pinata breaker mode." In this mode, you'd move your mouse around on the pinatas and slightly hit them around and deal damage.

However, we realized this is hard to balance and disrupts the natural difficulty escalation of Suika game (think of the small pieces that get stuck and build up over time, now you can just essentially delete them) -- and could lead to seemingly endless playthroughs.

I would want to add some sort of "pinata breaking" mechanic to the game, and I think it would help give the game more of a unique flavor. If you have any suggestions or thoughts on that I'd be down to hear them :)

[Bunny Bun]

I like the aesthetic. It reminds me of Armed With Wings. The dark creepy visuals don't go with the happy music at all, though. But I love the music too.

And damn, that training bunny is so hard. Good job designing that AI. I had to restart the whole game to get there because I didn't buy the feather soon enough. It's too bad it becomes unavailable later.

ErikSwahn responds:

Thanks! AI can be very fun to design :)

[Palm Cracker]

I can see lots of people complaining about textual errors, and I can see that you say you've fixed some, but there are still many more. The very first library book explains the Caesar cipher backwards from how you've implemented it, so even though you say you fixed a typo in there already you seem to have fixed it wrong. And your explanation of the rail cipher doesn't tell us how to account for an odd number of letters. I assume the top row would have more letters than the bottom row because we're supposed to start with the top row, but that gives us DOWSOUOTYRR which doesn't work.

Also the calculator is super jank. The division button seems to just divide by 100 which I assume is what the percentage button is supposed to do, and the percentage button doesn't seem to do anything. I'm sure there are other bugs in there but it's hard to say because I'm not quite sure I understand how it's supposed to work to begin with.

I appreciate that you tried to make a game like this, but you gotta pay way more attention to detail to make sure you get things right for this kind of game. When your players are relying so much on your instructions, the intricacies of the instructions need to be correct.

EDIT: Okay, now that I know the solution I can see what the problem was. You explained it backwards again. This is probably because you're confusing encryption with decryption. This is understandable because you need to explain to the player how to decrypt when you're the one doing the encrypting and not the decrypting.

I don't actually know which way is which, but I'll assume the way you explained it on the last page of the library book is how to encrypt a rail cipher so I'll call it rail cipher encryption, and the way you've implemented it in the game (and apparently how you explained it before the last page) is how to decrypt a rail cipher so I'll call it rail cipher decryption.

Rail cipher encryption is splitting the word into halves and interlacing the two halves together, much like shuffling a deck of cards. That's why I needed to know what to do with an odd number of letters, because I didn't know which half the middle letter should go in. Rail cipher decryption, therefore, is recreating the two halves by sorting odd letters into one half and even letters into the other.

If we were to decrypt LTRTRIEAUE this way, we would get LRREUTTIAE and not LITERATURE. If we want to encrypt LITERATURE with a rail cipher, the actual code should be LAITTUERRE. So like I said, if we try to decrypt DWOOYROSUTR using rail cipher encryption like you explained instead of rail cipher decryption like you wanted us to, we get DOWSOUOTYRR instead of DOYOURWORST. And if we were to "encrypt" DOYOURWORST the way LITERATURE is encrypted in the book (using rail cipher decryption instead of encryption), we'd get DYUWRTOOROS.

On further examination, I think the calculator percentage button does work as a division button so you just swapped the labels.

I don't know if you'll read these edits, but now that I've beaten the game I'll provide a list of other mistakes I found.

1. Typo in the readme: "Do with is as you please."
2. It's unclear if we're supposed to click on the words "Princess Diana" or her picture.
3. Book 4 explains the cipher backwards again but this time I was prepared.
4. I never unlocked book 5. I'm guessing I was supposed to input a three-letter code in the I SEE YOU app to unlock it and I wasn't smart enough to figure out the code, but if that's not the case then it's pretty weird that it lets you highlight the letters like that.
5. With M + D * Y, you've put multiplication after addition and expected us to know that we're supposed to disregard the order of operations and just calculate it from left to right. Also, you called it a SUM even though the last operation is multiplication which makes it a product.
6. In book 6, you've written "it's both a combination of." I'm guessing English isn't your first language but this redundancy makes it incorrect. It should either say "it's both" or "it's a combination of."
7. In book 6 you say to use the row and column even though the column is supposed to come first and you don't mention that. We can only see which one comes first by interpreting the examples.
8. In book 7, the message ending in VDVX does indeed translate to LITERATURE, but it differs from the message you've shown in the earlier grid which ends in XDVX. It seems a bit strange to have just one letter be different because it looks like it should be the same message in the grid examples and the last-page explanation.

It turns out no one has been able to crack the Crypt Killer's codes because he explains them so badly! That was his criminal mastermind secret all along!

Anyway, thanks for the game, glad to see it, happy to play it, hope to see more :)

Hurr durr, I just figured out how to unlock book 5 when I watched FutureCopLGF's video and remembered what the I SEE YOU app was originally. I didn't need it of course because the pigpen cipher is pretty intuitive. The letter buttons in the pigpen key flicker a bit but I assume that's intentional for the palm pilot effect.

Another bug for you: books 1, 5, 6, and 7 can all be clicked while another book is open. Books 5, 6, and 7 will then open automatically after you close the current book, but that doesn't happen for book 1.

I updated my rating because I can see you're so committed to improvement.

Deklaration responds:

Appreciate it, finding and cracking out bugs is a part of the process. You’re corrcet about the caesar cipher, I fixed a typo and ended up with another one. But I don’t see how the rail cipher would work any differently based on if the letters are even or odd. They can still be placed according in the rows and added?
Just swap between the top and bottom row, one letter at a time, when typing out DWOOYROSUTR.

It should look like this, no matter if the password is even or odd:
DOYOUR
WORST


I’ll take a look at the calculator, it’s one of those things that can get messed up depending on ports and system. Html5 is pretty janky, thanks for letting me know.


EDIT:
Oh, right! It took me a while to understand the issue, but I get it now. You're absolutely correct and I'm a doofus. Thank you for your insightful comment, it really opened up my eyes to fixing the issues. I've updated the game, changed the passwords, the explanation in the books and the calculator as well. Thank you a ton!

[SUPERSLAP2444]

Needs a pause and a mute

Shroomius responds:

You can press escape to pause, forgot to put that in the description, my bad.

[Shirogami's Maze Pocket]

1:37

It said B+start for reverse mode but I can't get it to work. To simulate the B button I've tried ctrl, X, and K, and I've tried holding the B button down while I press enter for start, and I've tried pressing and releasing the B button before I press start.

cidoku responds:

Congratulations!

EDIT: Once you beat the game and go back to the title screen without reloading the game, pressing start (enter) as you hold down B (X) will let you enter reverse mode. I just tested it here so I'm 99% sure it works

[Driftmania]

I really wanna play this game but it won't save my progress! Can this be fixed?

EDIT: It's working now, thanks.

Funny shortcut for C1: start the race by turning around.

Potential bug. I got a "new fastest time" on a race that was -0.00 seconds, and it seemed to misalign the ghost. The ghost was following the my latest run but the lap notifications were following the previous fastest run.

No matter how long I play, the level select feels awkward. You should change selection with arrow keys and then immediately press Z or X to start the level. You shouldn't have to move right to the start button and then press Z or X.

Frenchie14 responds:

It should be saving your progress! Is local storage disabled in your browser settings or are you playing in an incognito tab?