AraneidaeArt's game Reviews on Newgrounds

[Soup Time]

Score was given with the fact that this was a Ludam Dare game being taken into consideration.

As I played the game, I felt like most of the game's development went into the art and style of the game, as it has a very strong art style. Some of the sound effects sound really good and satisfying.

Unfortunately, the gameplay mechanics bog down the cute style. The clicking and dragging of cards to attack is fine and gets the job done, even if it's a clunky way of doing it. However, the issue with clicking and dragging arises when you are trying to read the instructions on how to attack the vegetables. Each individual page is click and drag-able to its detriment as you MUST click and drag them away from the page clutter in the bottom right in order to read the instructions because each attack recipe is lying in a pile on top of each other. You end up forced to clutter up your menu bar at the bottom which gets annoying and cumbersome when you have to click different things and shuffle things around in a limited space. If it were up to me, I'd have all of the recipes in a singular book that you could flip through the pages of.

Additionally, I noticed that when you drink healing soup, instead of refilling a heart that was previously x-ed out, the game just spawns another clickable and draggable heart icon on top of your health "pile" that makes it kinda difficult to understand how much health you actually have.

The puzzle mechanics in the recipe book felt kind of unclear, as I got random cards each "turn", I was unsure if I was either "doing it right", or if the game would rig it so that there was always a solution for taking no damage and following the recipe. For instance, one of the recipes said something like "if the enemy is at full health, use red", but what if the game decided not to give me a red card, and I just had 3 blue and 2 green? Do I just take damage there through no fault of my own? The whole recipe card mechanic felt a little "half baked". Pun intended.

And the Soup Rewards. Those were very unclear as to what those were at first because the explanation as to what each soup did was not only buried under the recipe pile, but when I was presented with the reward cards to choose from, not only did I not know what each soup did, I didn't know what the name of each soup was at first as there was no reminder text on each card. Yes, I get that you can discern which one is "mushroom soup", which one is "bone soup", which one is "eyeballs" after seeing each one, but having each card labeled goes a long way in regards to clarity. This also applies to the utensils cards, as one of the recipes says "use green if you're holding a cleaver". If the cleaver card is clearly labeled as well, it changes the thought process from "I guess I'm holding a cleaver, I think" to "Oh, I'm holding a cleaver, I should do X"

Also, Eye Soup's description "See the rainbow" was really unclear. I thought it did nothing until I realized the cards in my hand were turned into red/green/blue hybrid color cards.

And the healing soup requiring it to be dragged onto the enemy was confusing. I was wondering if I was healing the enemy at first.

Overall, nice art style held back by clunky controls and game mechanics.

[Squishy black egg]

Awesome first attempt.

I would recommend that for your next steps you work on movement physics, as the insta-top speed at a single button press is really jarring and doesn't feel good when moving or precision platforming.

AndrewCr responds:

Thanks! And yeah, the physics aren't the very best. I just used the default Godot preset so it makes sense xd

This "game," if we can call it that, was more just to get the feel for Godot

[Ducky Doo's Great Adventure]

I did not enjoy the flappy bird segments.

Positives:
Art
Design
Color Palette
Soundtrack and sound design
Wall Jump Mechanics
Physics implementation of the player character, and how each stage iterates on platformer mechanics

Negatives:
The flappy bird parts are annoying. This probably has more to do with the base mechanics of flappy bird.
The arch of the jump after a wall jump on a single block attempting to get to the top of said 1x1 block feels unforgiving and is a little frustrating.
The game made me "pirate it", we need to support indie games, not pirate them.

ElanMakesGames responds:

Hey, thanks for the detailed review!
This was made for a 2-week gamejam, so it's definitely a little rough around the edges, but I'm glad that you could still enjoy it.
:)

[COSMOMOMOMO°]

The small size of the first planet made it different to understand the mechanics at play at first. It was difficult to understand the perspective and understand what I was looking at. At first glance I thought that I was the planet and the shots were operating within my gravity field, so I somehow dodged every shot by holding w. Because I moved at the same pace as the shots, I somehow timed it so I was rotating around the planet in constant motion just as the shots were. This strategy took me through planet 2. The caterpillar-like obstacles on planet 3 took me out of that strategy, and forced me to come up with a new strategy. I realized I could shoot two shots to the right, move down a little, stop, shoot two shots to the right, stop and repeat until each shot was revolving around the planet along a separate axis as me, and then I'd just stand still.

With this in mind I moved along to planet 4, ready to see what the next challenge that would force me to rethink my strategy was. When I saw the 4th planet, I saw copies of myself that mirrored my movements, and thought "oh no, am I going to have to also perfectly maneuver the mirrored versions to also avoid the shots? This is a nice evolution of the puzzle gameplay."

Sadly, I then realized that this was supposed to be the end of the game, where I reunited with my brothers lost among the cosmos. My major criticism of this point is that it needs an end card or something to let the player know that they beat the game and are done, and maybe a return to title option so the player doesn't run around endlessly at the end wondering what to do.

For a short game jam, it's charming and simple, and gets the job done, but I feel like there is still potential to expand upon the puzzle elements.

What carries this game the most are the vibes of space and music which bring to mind the quiet sadness of Super Mario Galaxy. Based on atmosphere, art direction, sound effects and vibes alone, it deserves to be expanded upon.

[Online Russian Roulette - Web]

That uh... that logo looks very ai generated. A lot of the 2d assets as well look ai generated. I thought using ai generated stuff to this degree was against the terms of use.

(Edit because I want to reply to you, but cannot do so properly. I understand where you are coming from, and that the core features and programming was done by you and not some subpar code generator, which constitutes the majority of the project. But at the same time, presentation is everything, and the ai generated looking logo is offputting. I'm sure you can find someone who would be willing to pitch in and help you with the logo.

RenOliBR responds:

Thanks for the feedback. This is not an art project, it is a game project. It was not generated in AI and published. 99% was designed, modeled and programmed manually.