Fangames > Unfinished / Incomplete

I Wanna Be The Beaver v.91

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kilgour22:
After playing through this 4 or 5 times, I've decided to write up a review:

Screen 1: Upwards diagonal skip that is more than worth doing. Someone could do the easy jump after it, hit the save, then come back and do the skip with minimal cost of time on death. (Note: I realize the save isn't there on hard mode, but it's still worth it to do the skip on hard, thus making the second half of the segment pointless.) The last save before the portal is far harder than the rest of the screen, on any difficulty because of the two end jumps. (Note: Those jumps (or very similar jumps) appear quite often. They are present in two of the first three screens. Dying often to the same type of jump can feel very grindy and unmotivating, as well as lacking creativity. Any way you can spice up a couple of those jumps into something new and creative would be much appreciated amongst everyone.)

Screen 2: When I first played this, I went head first into the shit brown block with grass on it in the water because I didn't see it. I suggest using either a spike or changing the opacity of one of the object's. The corner skip is appropriate difficulty relative to the segment it skips. Other than that, I enjoyed this screen a lot and felt like there was a good variety of jumps, as well as consistent difficulty.

Screen 3: The difficulty spikes way up on this screen. You bring back the last two jumps from the first screen and put a carbon copy in this screen, as well as two very similar jumps to end this screen just like in screen 1. Did you want the minispikes to show inside the blocks on the final segment? If not, then make the depth of the spikes more than that of the blocks. This will cause the body of the spike to disappear, leaving just the tip. The last save is far harder than the rest because of the final jump.

Screen 4: Felt a lot easier than screen 3. Was the apple in the top right corner supposed to fly off when the trigger was touched? It didn't for me, when all the others did. I liked this screen because of the variance in platforming, as well as the incorporation of triggers in a way that didn't involve death. Probably my favourite screen in the game.

Boss: Felt like a grind, not only because of the long i-frames but because of the lack of a health bar. Might I suggest more health with no i-frames or a shorter length of i-frames? That way heavy mashers can go for quick kills and make the boss a bit more exciting. The boss difficulty-wise felt appropriate for the difficulty of the game, maybe a touch harder than it should be. A suggestion would be one more type of attack.

All in all, not a bad effort for a few days' worth of work and your first fangame. Keep it up, and make sure to listen to constructive criticism. If you don't have any testers, make sure in the future you have testers of varying skill levels to make sure the difficulty curve stays well-balanced. Good job!

PlainZombie:

--- Quote from: kilgour22 on January 04, 2015, 12:50:08 PM ---After playing through this 4 or 5 times, I've decided to write up a review:

Screen 1: Upwards diagonal skip that is more than worth doing. Someone could do the easy jump after it, hit the save, then come back and do the skip with minimal cost of time on death. (Note: I realize the save isn't there on hard mode, but it's still worth it to do the skip on hard, thus making the second half of the segment pointless.) The last save before the portal is far harder than the rest of the screen, on any difficulty because of the two end jumps. (Note: Those jumps (or very similar jumps) appear quite often. They are present in two of the first three screens. Dying often to the same type of jump can feel very grindy and unmotivating, as well as lacking creativity. Any way you can spice up a couple of those jumps into something new and creative would be much appreciated amongst everyone.)

Screen 2: When I first played this, I went head first into the shit brown block with grass on it in the water because I didn't see it. I suggest using either a spike or changing the opacity of one of the object's. The corner skip is appropriate difficulty relative to the segment it skips. Other than that, I enjoyed this screen a lot and felt like there was a good variety of jumps, as well as consistent difficulty.

Screen 3: The difficulty spikes way up on this screen. You bring back the last two jumps from the first screen and put a carbon copy in this screen, as well as two very similar jumps to end this screen just like in screen 1. Did you want the minispikes to show inside the blocks on the final segment? If not, then make the depth of the spikes more than that of the blocks. This will cause the body of the spike to disappear, leaving just the tip. The last save is far harder than the rest because of the final jump.

Screen 4: Felt a lot easier than screen 3. Was the apple in the top right corner supposed to fly off when the trigger was touched? It didn't for me, when all the others did. I liked this screen because of the variance in platforming, as well as the incorporation of triggers in a way that didn't involve death. Probably my favourite screen in the game.

Boss: Felt like a grind, not only because of the long i-frames but because of the lack of a health bar. Might I suggest more health with no i-frames or a shorter length of i-frames? That way heavy mashers can go for quick kills and make the boss a bit more exciting. The boss difficulty-wise felt appropriate for the difficulty of the game, maybe a touch harder than it should be. A suggestion would be one more type of attack.

All in all, not a bad effort for a few days' worth of work and your first fangame. Keep it up, and make sure to listen to constructive criticism. If you don't have any testers, make sure in the future you have testers of varying skill levels to make sure the difficulty curve stays well-balanced. Good job!

--- End quote ---

Thanks a bunch this is great. I'm trying to incorporate as much feedback as I can before I decide I've spent enough time tweaking and just release it into the wild as I don't want to get super hung up on it, and then also keep everything I learned in mind on the next game I do.

I don't have any testers, no. It's kind of just me at the moment. I figured I'd throw this up here because I felt if anyone would be able to provide good feedback and constructive criticism, it'd be you guys. Next time I might ask folks in private to take a look at it while making it, just because it might be a bit longer and I'd rather an even smaller subset look at it before putting up any kind of unfinished thing like this for everyone to look at.

PlainZombie:
So I decided that instead of making any MAJOR changes, I was just going to go ahead and make some of the polish changes (I changed at least the spike sprites, and fixed the silence between BGM loops, and changed the boss music situation a little bit [don't worry it's still the same music!] and the water opacity so the kid and blocks/spikes are more visible) and then just put the game out. I'd rather focus what I learned on this project on the next one which will probably have much more effort put into it and hopefully still be just as dumb.

Thanks again for everyone who took a look at the game and provided feedback, whether it was telling me my sprites looked like shit (they did) or specific things about jump repetition and shortcut/difficulty balancing, I think I've got a lot to focus on during my next project.

The game has been uploaded to the wiki, and I am now officially the only fangame with Beaver in the title. We did it.

Kyir:
For future reference, placing saves so that the player has to do a full double jump every time they restart is super annoying.

PlainZombie:

--- Quote from: Kyir on January 05, 2015, 04:32:27 AM ---For future reference, placing saves so that the player has to do a full double jump every time they restart is super annoying.

--- End quote ---

Good to know, thanks. I assume you're talking about the ones (which are a few) that are right under ledges? Probably also the one where you have to jump to the lone platform on the right of the wall over the large spike diamond. I'll keep that in mind for next time.

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