TharosTheDragon's game Reviews on Newgrounds

[Lee's DeLeeVery Service!]

I wanted to like this, but having to know ahead of time how to avoid softlocking yourself and needing to restart the game over and over just isn't a good game mechanic. Even knowing exactly what to do, the game keeps crashing around 15 minutes in before I can get to the hidden layer. On this last attempt, I had just used keycard 7 so only one door remained, but for some reason I was able to partially walk through that final door and get stuck inside it, and there doesn't seem to be a way to reset my position without restarting the game. If there were more quality of life features to prevent the need to restart over and over then I'd like to play the game to completion, but as slow-paced and clunky as the game is I'm going to give up.

One time the game crashed I was just walking along as usual and the PICO-8 window froze and became unresponsive. I couldn't even pause. I suspect it may have been one of those collision adjustment infinite loop bugs.

tscoct responds:

Oh wow the door bug returns again, i've been struggling to fix it for a long time and i thought it was finally gone but i guess not, sorry you had to deal with it and thank you for reporting it

can you please elaborate on crashing though?

[Off the Grid - Summer 2024 Collab]

I like that you can keep clicking the nav buttons while it's tweening and it still works smoothly

alsoknownas1 responds:

Thank you for noticing. I was particularly happy with that too. :)

[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

[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 :)

[MEATY MAYHEM (The Full Experience)]

Why no auto-run? My pinky hurts

BakethedBean responds:

no pain no gain ;)

[Seeking Peace - Zombeez Jam Winner]

I was having difficulty with the final level and then I realized the full screen mode cuts off part of the game

traguilar responds:

Yes I had some resolution issues... I have to find why this problem is appearing, because when I did the game everything was fine

[Stickyfoot]

Looks like level 28 can't be solved if you go right first instead of up. That was surprising since most of the levels seem to be designed so that you can't get stuck

platformalist responds:

Hey TharosTheDragon!

Tested out level 28 based on your feedback and you're totally right! I've pushed an update that should fix this issue. :) Thanks for pointing it out, and thanks for playing!

[Portal Re:/ Flashed]

Even without the mouse, I think the controls could be better. An auto-aim seems like a good idea, where you just move left or right to point left or right, and jump to point up. Anyway, I got soft-locked on level 9 by bouncing a cube between two floor portals and then jumping into the portals myself underneath the cube. I couldn't find a restart button and the game doesn't seem to save progress either.

JamesTDG responds:

Yeah... That was a problem with how the entity collisions were programmed. It took me a lot of heavy bargaining just to get him to make cubes work like semi-solids for collisions for V1.1.

[Politics.]

I tried getting Shart Tsunami but the NG API had timed out and now I can't get it even after refreshing. It's like you saved a copy of the medal state and are specifically preventing medals from trying to unlock again

Chris responds:

Thats weird. I’ll take a look at it. In the meantime I just unlocked it for you as you’ve achieved it.

[Citizen Pico: Pico's School IV]

Is that a dreamy photo of Tom Fulp in Nene's room?

Kolumbo responds:

sure is!!