Aardwolf's game Reviews on Newgrounds

[Fish Tank]

It's fun how the whole game is basically a pun on "fish tank"

Very fun!

I think new buttons that appear later should make some obvious sound/animation when they appear, on the first playthrough I didn't realize the speed slider was something you could control (and didn't realize it wasn't there in the beginning but appeared later, thought it was just some aquarium decoration)

[Infinite Tree Pinball]

Completed the game (and re-beat the boss multiple times), got 6 out of 8 skins, got all flies and 5 nudges, figured out why entering the long pathway leading to the bottom left of the map doesn't work (it's because it leads to the tutorial starter area), and only NOW discovered that in the map you can press "enter" to teleport to any of the save areas!

[Generic Fishing Game]

Very casual

[360 Degrees]

Where is that 10th trashcan...

Stepford responds:

You will have to look for it. It might be at the very end of the power line?

[Michaelsoft Binbows '97]

Neat! What's the name of the screensaver vaporwave song?

Ant responds:

I credited it on the game, its called Can you feel by Torchkas
Also thx!

[Drillionaire]

I really want to like it, and this game has really good parts, though overall there are some issues that made me unable to continue enjoying. I'd love an updated version of this since the core is awesome!

The good parts: upgrading your drill with appending of parts, collecting resources that allow you to upgrade things, anything that can be automated (like hiring employees), the reputation and contract system if the contracts would be better tuned

The bad parts, imho:

The drill goes way to fast even when having merely the second type of drill, the drilling was fun at the start of the game when there were some actual manual tactics involved, but with just 1 automatic shovel and two older drills it goes so fast that it's nothing more than randomly spamming the mouse left and right to make it zig zag a bit and maybe get more stuff

The lighting upgrades are not useful if the drill goes so fast that you can't control it anyway

Too many buildings that you need to scroll in the UI for to do daily things. e.g. the recycle center requires using its UI manually every day, not fun, let it work automatically instead?

I'm getting way more garbage items than the recycle center could ever handle.

Gem cutting: unclear what to do, requires creating expensive items that disappear, it's not well enough explained why you want to do this rather than just sell the gem.

Unclear what the workshop is for and why you want spend resources to craft the items in there, it doesn't have help text like the others

Various other buildings: unclear why I'd want to use them, just too much stuff going on, unclear what gives benefits even when reading the help texts and not enough willpower to try it all out if it'll mean a daily repetitive building UI action like the recycle center is, I'd prefer if there would be more obvious and less different ways to use the metals and gems I collect, and more focus on the mining (but then with the miner not going too fast like now) rather than all these buildings (or let them all do things automatically instead). Note that the forge is fine, that was one of the first buildings that unlocked, is simple to use, shows clear benefit (sell stuff for more), and can be automated (though I didn't have enough money to try that yet), and obvously the mechanic and market are also fine

Unreadable font: it's a pixel font (that is fine), but different pixels are having different sizes. It could be a bit bigger too (on a 4K screen), maybe if those narrow pixels became full size like the others? The 1 looks like a 7. It's as if it's a pixel font rendered onto a differently scaled or misaligned pixel grid

The UIs of buildings regularly require using scrollbars, but they don't support the mouse scrollwheel. Would be more convenient if scrollwheel worked

Unlock things based on progress rather than days. You can quickly run 20 days anyway just to collect coal for a contract

[9111]

My fire truck destroyed 4 buildings while trying to save 1 building. The other two vehicles probably destroyed some more during that.

[Sticky Slimes]

Very nice puzzles, and very fitting music!

One thing though, does it not save your progress? I closed it to come back to it later, but now I'm back to the beginning and there's no menu to select levels or anything...

[Bullet Heaven 3 [Prototype]]

Nice, a good old shooter with upgrades!

Would be nice to have a way to pause. And some way to turn off menu music but still have in-game music so that you can leave it open when doing something else (or just have pause mute the music once there is pause)

Showing total money in the game over screen would be nice so you know whether to press Try Again, or go to the shop in the level select menu

One question: given that this game is written in flash, how comes that this one works with ruffle on newgrounds, but older newgrounds flash games do not work that way (say, e.g., bullet heaven 1)? (supposedly there is a newgrounds player but not for the platform I use)

EDIT: would also be neat if hard mode would have an extra tier of upgrades!

matt-likes-swords responds:

Flash has two programming languages, ActionScript 2 and 3. Only ActionScript 2 works in browsers through Ruffle emulation at the moment. The other one is a work in progress.

[POOM]

The implementation is awesome, but the controls make no sense to me:

I found three shoot keys: x, v and m. Those aren't even mentioned in the description. But what key opens doors? Why not one of them to open doors instead? Space makes the browser scroll down a page.

For opening the nearest door I tried about all letters I believe, and as said, space doesn't work

And strafing is with esdf? why not wasd like everything else does? Nothing against it if for a reason but since it's not standard, the description really could clearly list all the keyboard keys for all the actions, rather than screenshots of console controllers with "P1" and "P2" stuff and no weapon/door keyboard keys in the description at all.

Doom on PC, as it was released for DOS, is supposed to be played with a keyboard, I don't want it to capture the mouse, that's why I try to use the keyboard controls. I guess I won't fault it for not using ctrl to shoot since PICO-8 games never seem to support ctrl/alt/shift keys :) Another weird PICO-8 control-ism that all PICO-8 games seem to have is that enter doesn't activate menu items...

EDIT: Thanks! Updated documentation makes it clear! c opens doors. And of course the door I tried was not actually a real door but the starting door. But of course knowing the correct key made that more clear. Upgraded the score to appropriate level for doom-in-pico8

freds72 responds:

Thanks.

I uploaded a new version, trying to fix some of the control aspects + updated controls documentation to be slightly clearer.

When using keyboard+mouse, space is indeed supposed to open doors.
What browser are you using?