kknots's game Reviews on Newgrounds

[Pendulum Dynamics]

I do not understand the physics behind this. This doesn't follow any classic Newton's mechanics.
This is not Verlet integration.
Friction is a phenomena, it is not a number. Yet by friction you mean speed coefficient?
The higher the friction, the slower is the movement. In your gadget that is reversed.
There are no forces, no string tension, no preserving of total mechanical energy. If there is friction then mechanical energy never decreases. What is damping?

I am not sure this should be studied on pair with classical physics in schools. Because there are no books in which it's written a pendulum's dynamics depend on all those factors the way you show.

[The Summoning]

1) archers pick a target and keep attacking it until it's dead. Arrows do not strike the nearest enemy of archer, they strike only the archer's target. If the target moves out of archer's range, archer won't follow it and will keep shooting nowhere.
2) if I click on zombie (create a zombie) when the cursor is fire ball (when I selected to cast fireball, but didn't actually cast it and created a zombie instead), then the zombie is created, but the fire ball spell is cooled down as if I actually cast it.
3) if a succubus starts turning a unit, and the unit dies before succubuss finishes waving its hand, then succubus will stand on its place and keep waving the hand over and over until it picks another target. Then it becomes normal.

[Legend of the Void]

Very well crafted, addicting

I praise your artistic and designing talents, the variety of abilities, enemies, items, hero classes, levels and side-quests. But there are problems with story, difficulty and coding.

The story needs more
a) explanation. How exactly did the evil mage manage to perform the void ritual in the ship? What caused the volcano eruption? Why was the first settlement blocked? Who built the tunnels inside the cave in which a guy is being sacrificed? What is the background story of characters, the land, the void world?
b) detail. You need to show the cave-in happening, for example, in form of a cinematic sequence. You also need to show the evil mage getting out of prison.
c) side-quests' varied endings. For example, let the player choose whether to spare the smuggler leader or cast justice upon him. Or if the player rushes into the sacrificial cave right after he finds out someone was dragged into it, and if he doesn't visit and unnecessary places (which can be visited on the way back), then the cult's victim is saved and the reward is better.

I didn't find the game to be challenging enough, even on the hardest difficulty. I even found the last stage to be easier than the first ones (because of character leveling).

I didn't find any bugs or glitches with the coding. Except for two.
a) Sometimes the protagonist's companion, Rogan, gets stuck in obstacles while following the hero. This has 4 solutions.
1) What you did. But it looks ugly with all that passing through walls.
2) Divide the game space into small cells and mark what cells cannot be walked on. Then use A* pathfinding algorithm to find the path, but it's not the final output. You will need to link path's cells, approximating it with straight lines which do not intersect obstacles. A simple loop through path's cells can do this. The result is that Rogan will be able to move not only diagonally, horizontally or vertically, and he will also conserve the distance he moves.
3) Use geometrical/vector pathfinding. You place rectangles that are obstacles and first check if Rogan is able to just walk straight to his target. This will work only if Rogan has no size (is a point), but you can alter the way he moves by pushing him away from obstacles, if he is a circle. Then you will need to use lines passing through rectangles' vertices and the initial position of Rogan. Those lines must not intersect anything. From rectangles' vertices you make more lines to other vertices and so on. The result is that Rogan moves by rectangles' vertices. remind: rectanges are obstacles. The problem is that you will need to remember for each line on what vertices it has been to avoid recursion and Rogan might try to squeeze through thick corridors, so make sure to block them off.
4) Disable collision detection for Rogan at all times. At least he won't pass too long distances through walls, but only short ones. The problem is that Rogan might stop on an obstacle, which will be very ugly. Then you can just push him away from it... into another obstacle.
b) I saw Rogan walking to me once while not moving from his place. It was after a battle.

I really enjoyed the game, finished it in 2 hours 30 minutes. I didn't like or dislike the story, and one time I accidentally Junked a chainmail and couldn't find a way to restore it..
Anyway, 9/10 because of story.

[Battle for Wayland Keep]

Programmer Tips

Hi, I really enjoyed the game.
I've noticed 2 things that might not be perfectly right about your game engine, though I'm not completely sure.
1) The camera scrolling is done with either arrow keys, WASD or by moving mouse to the edge of the screen. The problem is with the last thing. When the mouse is outside the window, camera's not scrolling. If you're using AS2 you can make a button over the entire screen with code in it:
on(rollOut){
_root.mouseOnScreen=false;
}
on(rollOver){
_root.mouseOnScreen=true;
}
//endcode
Initially mouseOnScreen should be false. If you have AS3, you should check if mouse position is outside of the window, and scroll the camera if that's so. I'm suspecting that this game is in AS3, because it can tell if I click outside of window.

2) I think I know why this is lagging. Upon examining the behavior of moving units closer, I've noticed that the game space is divided into little cells, and enemies are using what is called Pathfinding. That's bad for Flash, and not necessary at all. If all units are represented as circles, while some objects are rectangles, you won't need to divide the playing field into cells (meaning a unit's X pos can be 1.039 or smth), and you could apply a "sliding" algorithm for circle-units (involving maths). Pathfinding is needed only when there are obstacles on the ground, that need to be walked around. Blizzard's Wc3, for instance, ignores pathing of moving units. Screw cells.

I didn't notice any bugs, but I'm not feeling convenient about scrolling the camera with mouse, and I'd suggest you add mana points (!) AND A description for each of abilities when cursor is hovered over them, showing what it does, the duration of effect and cooldown. Can't say much else, 'cuz im just a retard lazy windbag.

[Interlocked]

Great Puzzles

where's the axe tool?

[Dodge.]

Not too original

This is well implemented. I'd say, this is a classic game. That's why it should have upgrades and other things affecting the gameplay. But this very very similar to hungry hungry felhounds. are you its creator?

And also good job on making orange enemies shoot red projectile when there are no other enemies that are able to shoot them, otherwise you just wouldn't be able to kill them.

[Civilization IV]

Beautiful piece of crap

The title says "civilization IV", but no one said that it is the game itself, it can be anything related to civilization 4.

"Oh you have probably done a shitload of work to get this working in flash, and the song is from Civilization 4, and every single detail of the techtree is accurately implemented. I see you also drawn the rotating Earth yourself, as a contribution to Civ4. 3D graphics are beautiful, maps are looking awesome and the campaign is more interesting in flash form than in original C++ form. I wonder how is it even pOsSIblE tO..."+GET SMart ENOUGH TO UPLOAD SUCH a HORRIFYING PIECE OF SHIT ON NEWGROUNDS. Prepare for your deadly summary:

+100 because it is about civilization 4;
-10 because it is fake;
-10 because there's a stupid loop instead of "new game";
-10 because there's the trollguy in the loop saying "I'm sorry for real";
-10 because you didn't say a word about civilization 4 original creators in the "About" menu button;
-10 because you lie Newgrounds is not sponsoring this;
-10 because this flash doesn't require Flash 10 or even Flash 8 to run properly;
-10 because this is blasphemy towards all civilization games;
-10 because the main screen is looking absolutely different compared to original civilization 4 main screen, you fail to even phish the game;
-10 because there are 3 save slots. In original Civ there are unlimited slots and that load things entirely looks different;
+1 because you did actually put some effort to draw that shitty stuff;
-11 because civilization 4 is far too great to be ran down by this scummy stuff, if you would run down something else then it would be fine;
and
-1000000 because I don't like the joke.

I hope. If I could give this submission a rating of -1 000 000, then I certainly would.
Even if I could rate minus million only once in entire life, I would gladly spend that chance on this submission. Is this a troll-flash? It failed to troll me 100 %.

Lare responds:

You probably spent more time writing this review than I did making this flash. So troll successful!

[The Breach]

This game is art

Everything is made in beautiful details, awesome. But the graphics and theme is the same as that of Alien Disorder's one. These two games are alike.
I expected you would make something more advanced for your hit detection, than just touching an enemy and getting damaged. Monsters that spit at player and try to predict where to shoot constantly miss.

I noticed 1 glitch: when the monster, that can jump and wears a yellow hat, dies, its dying corpse sometimes freezes in the air. You must run gravity scripts for corpses, because monsters can die while they are in the air. That's just one glitch I seen repeatedly, and everything else is fine.

You failed very hard at making a frightening atmosphere. I'll tell you why. Because the main character is too "strong". And because he wears a massive marine suit and is not afraid of anything. And all this stuff from your game, story, monsters, are so generic, I think I've seen similar things a hundred of times.

But I'll tell my secret. I freaked out in your game once, when I was so excited shooting a thing that spits on me from the ceiling, and there was flashlight illuminating in front of me, so while I was doing that I didn't notice a red bombing ant coming from behind. I was like "AAAA--", jumped from my chair and killed it.

Still it is all very generic, good artwork though.
+8 for artwork
+4 for programming
-1 for bad keyboard control decisions (tap arrow key two times made it hard to complete last level as I fell of platforms)
-1 for bad design decisions (when I get hit I face the other side I was facing)
-1 for not letting me shoot at different angles (notebook users could aim as well as with mouse, because camera follows the protagonist)
-1 for some AI decisions (the AI is dumb, monsters often fall off the platforms, and flying monsters try to get on same height with me, but they hit a wall and fly the other way)

there's no perfect game

[< lightBot >]

Hard

Good programming skills, and I didn't see any bugs in this game. The concept is not new, because it is similar to other isometric puzzles, like isoball, or something, I don't remember. So the concept is not really too exceptional.
But the functions are a good idea.

You've done a good job, my head didn't hurt like now in a long time. Thank you...

[BeatStreak 3000]

Not a challenge

I've played through 20 levels, made a few mistakes.
But you made the game in some places too easy: enemy paper, rock and scissors have different colors, making it recognizable by not even looking at it.
The graphics are a bit weird. I didn't believe that rock was a rock, paper paper and so on. It more looked like this: at first time paper looked like a rotating piece of DNA. Rock looked like snowball, composed of little pieces of paper, and scissors were so ugly that I couldn't even tell what that was.

Following rhythm was impossible. All songs were absolutely different from each other, and I can't tell how you assigned the 3 lines and types of enemies under voices of the songs. The game is a lot easier to play with sound turned off. Really. That way this is more of a Defense game.

May be make hotkeys? Because I tired of pressing everything with mouse at around level 11. You could use QWE,ASD,ZXC keys for corresponding lines and corresponding items. Probably worth an update for future players.

What about bosses? Some kind of special boss arena with all lines merged into on. And boss is, like, a figure composed of enemies that rotate. And you'd need to hit right enemies with right things.
You could also make different types of enemies have different speed! For example rock would go faster than everything else. Then it'd take more precision to launch the correct thing. That would ruin your idea with rhythm, though.

As far as I can see, some player got 6 times more score than me. I guess the problem lies within the Streak bar, which purpose is totally unknown to me, sorry. But those people somehow managed to figure it out.

Overall, there's too little art (mostly blue highlighted text, which is not art), and the idea is self-exclusive. You named the player's side "Shield". That means he has to defend. Rhythm is hard to follow. Then it's not rhythm, it is a defense game. But that's just me.

Warnockworld responds:

Hotkeys are already in the game, you can use qwe, asd, zxc, or numpad as short cuts.