Kolter's Reviews

[Globe Spinning]

Great work on the animation but the joke was only mildly amusing at best. The joke was predictable so that removed the surprise factor and deducted funny points.
Additionally, the video was scientifically inaccurate. You cannot open the emergency exit during flight due to cabin pressure (Smith 2013), especially at that high an altitude. The interior pressure fixes the door into place with such a large amount of force that even a champion bodybuilder can't budge it open. In order to open the door you'd have to force the pilot to depressurise the cabin first before you can open the door. If anyone's wondering how skydivers can dive off planes, it's because the planes they leap off from are not pressurised.
I'm giving most of the points for the fluid animation, so good work on that. I hope your future animations are funnier.

References
Smith, P. (2013). "Cockpit Confidential: Everything You Need to Know about Air Travel: Questions, Answers, & Reflections". Chicago: Sourcebooks.

[your art is shit]

Well-done animation and affecting narration with very appropriate background music. A compelling message too, though rather a little melodramatic. But still a very keen observation of the artist's mind and their constant struggle with their art not being "good enough". It's true enough that a lot of artists get thoughts like that. However, stating "your art is shit" like it applies to everything is fallacious.
You state it like a fact, but the only fact is that art is subjective. Even those amalgamations of other people's styles can be original; just because someone takes inspiration from another artist doesn't mean they're unoriginal and pretentious. Those previous artists had to take inspiration from something or someone else too. In fact, everything we make is essentially stolen from others - standing on the shoulders of giants if you will.
You can't count all art as being shit because art's quality cannot be quantified objectively. Each individual has their own experiences and will perceive art differently. That's the main point of art - art is not good because all the critics are raving about it; art is good because individuals are emotionally impacted by it and its existence enhances their life. That art will be shit to some but those individuals that appreciate it will think it's beautiful.
You're probably aware of this, and maybe this video wasn't meant to be taken from an objective standpoint but from the point of view of the artist with low self-esteem who feels the need to compare him/herself to other artists. In that case, good work on the "shit" art.

PS
One part really rustled my jimmies.
00:29 "A Frankenstein on canvas"
People often mistakenly believe that the name Frankenstein refers to the monster in the story, but that name is actually attributed to Dr. Frankenstein - the scientist who brought the monster to life. The monster doesn't really have a name and is often just referred to as Frankenstein's monster.
Or maybe you are aware of that fact and "A Frankenstein on canvas" refers to the fact that the artist is emulating what Dr. Frankenstein did (Dr. Frankenstein collected body parts from corpses and combined them together to create his monster). Maybe you meant it in the way that people mean it when they say things like, "that's totally a Dali" or "That's a classic van Gogh" and so on. I'll assume that's the case and give you the benefit of the doubt.

PPS
Nice description.

dylan responds:

"but every song's like gold teeth, grey goose, trippin' in the bathroom
blood stains, ball gowns, trashin' the hotel room,
we don't care, we're driving cadillacs in our dreams.
but everybody's like cristal, maybach, diamonds on your timepiece.
jet planes, islands, tigers on a gold leash.
we don't care, we aren't caught up in your love affair."

- beyoncé, 2013

[Sonic Dimensions Ep 10]

There are so many things wrong with this movie.

The introduction was sort of okay but it was drawn out way too long. Do you think that 46 seconds(!) of panning from the sea and the sky to a pixelated Sonic sitting on a deck chair is entertaining? It's not. The pixelated Sonic also ruins the ambience of the scene btw.
In the next scene, Sonic is having a "conversation" with Knuckles. However, he remains pixelated on that chair, and the standing Knuckles is pixelated too. Neither of them actually move or talk! The dialogue is very monotonous and boring. The font is shockingly bad; it looks like the font used on karaoke lyrics; are we supposed to sing along using their conversation as lyrics?
Following that is an atrocious purple gradient background. The "animation" is a bunch of low resolution pixelated images that don't move around. You could say it's "sprite animation" but the sprites are not animated at all so it's not. The dialogue is, again, not very engaging, and it has awful grammar to top it off.
Next scene. Wow, Sonic actually moved. And he... smiled? The teeth you drew looked way out of place.
Next comes an introduction sequence, and what do we have? A bunch of low resolution sprites that mostly don't move, some images, and some music, all of which you don't have the rights to, nor do you credit your sources.
Next is a boring fight sequence between Sonic and Knuckles. Kudos on actually animating this time, but that fight sequence was very uneventful (you didn't even give Knuckles a chance!) and their "wounds" at the end were as unconvincing as Sonic's drawn on smile. Also, wasn't Knuckles supposed to give Sonic some chilli dogs or something? What happened to that?
Now we're back to stationary sprites and now the background is also low resolution. Great! Bad grammar and writing make a return.
And on to the next scene. We have large text that fills up the entire screen rather awkwardly. The mixture of animated sprites and the lacklustre non-animated ones is very unprofessional. Bad grammar is back again.
Next, Sonic is at home with Amy and gets kicked by Shadow. I thought Amy was worried about destroying the new house? If she really was worried then why is she starting a fight? This makes no sense whatsoever.
Next there are low resolution sprites again and ugly text, Then a picture is overlaid on top of that with even uglier animated "To Be Continued" text.
Last sequence now, with still images and music, which, again, you don't have rights to.

I've basically pointed out a lot of the things wrong with this animation. Now I have a few pieces of advice for you:
1. Improve your grammar. You don't have to be an English nerd or anything, but if you're telling a story you need to have good grammar so it doesn't break away from the immersion. Also, don't just liberally use swear words like "shit". It's bad form, and should only be used for emotional effect. In the instances you used them they felt very forced, kind of like you were just trying to show off that you have "shit" in your vocabulary.
2. Use better fonts if you're not going to be doing any voice acting. The fonts you're currently using are very obtrusive and they take away attention from the important participants because they just stand out so much. With subtitle fonts, subtlety is key. You don't want them so big; you want them to be readable and NOT distracting.
3. Learn how to animate PROPERLY. Your fight sequence animations were quite awful, except for some of the sprite animations which actually weren't that bad (unless you stole those). The energy balls(?) are very poorly done. They're just coloured circles that look very awkward as they fly towards an opponent. The sprites don't move around most of the time and they look very ugly almost all the time.
4. Learn how to put images together neatly. A lot of the time (actually all the time) it's obvious you just mixed a bunch of sprites and backgrounds together. Maybe one of them is too big and the resolution suffers, or they just look like they don't belong where they are. This applies to the text as well. Don't just settle for karaoke font and call it a day. And what's up with that "To Be Continued" animation? Do you think that looked good? Your introduction and ending sequence could also use some work. As of now they're just poorly done montages. It's like you just picked a bunch of images, did a bunch of animations, and called it quits. You took no effort at all to actually do a full animated sequence, or even a seamless collection of images. This flash animation is full of those seams. You need to stitch things together in such a way that it looks like they were never separate at all.
5. Don't use copyrighted material you have no rights to without giving credit. Seriously, it's illegal. You should at least tell people where you got things from.
6. Have interesting characters. The characters in your story are not very well-developed. I don't think I'd feel sympathy for any of them if they should die. They're just like hollow to me. To add to that, your characters all seem to have one type of personality. The dialogue you wrote could fit into any one of them.
6. Have an interesting and consistent plot! Seriously, if your characters have no personality at all your plot will have to be stellar. But your story is boring; it doesn't go anywhere, it's inconsistent, it contains plot holes. Your delivery of the story is not very good either, in part because of your bad grammar. If you have bad characters, bad animation, you need to have something good, but it seems that your plot is not good either.
I honestly felt no excitement whatsoever to anything that happened. There were no cliffhangers, twists, red herrings, adventure, mystery, not even any considerable action. I'm sorry to say this but there just wasn't anything engaging about the plot.

There are many more things you need to work on, but I'll stop there. You'll have to figure out yourself in which direction you'd take your art.

tl;dr - This animation has no redeeming qualities whatsoever so to make better ones in the future: fix your grammar, fix your art, fix your story-writing skills, actually put work on your art and use your own imagination and creativity to actually entertain people and not be boring.

sonicguy322 responds:

Wow... Really? Thank you for your advice :D Now i know what i did wrong xD

(I'm just a beginner so don't expect me to be a pro or something)

[DATE FIGHT]

This is fun as a novelty game but overall does not have a lot of depth.
First I want to point out the parts of it that are appealing.
Randomly generated characters make for a large variety of individuals with unique 'personalities' and movesets. Even though the variations are simple, this made for more interesting gameplay.
The selection of player moves available also allows for a variety of gameplay allowing you to mix and match play styles.
The interface is simple and easily understood through simple fiddling with keys; no tutorial is necessary. The memes were also occasionally amusing even if they got old after a while.

However there are a number of things that could use some improvement. I will not necessarily refer to these as cons but they do limit my enjoyment of this game.
I'm going to start with something simple. The game needs a Cancel button. There have been times when I clicked 'Edit Profile' accidentally when I didn't actually want to edit the profile. Another problem is the fact that dates disappear and move on to the next one when you move away from the main screen even if you did not swipe left. This makes it annoying when there is a date available that is the right level and I want to check moves or check the options, and I come back to a candidate that is not as ideal for gaining experience or money. Now on to the other things more involved with gameplay!
The game is missing balance. What I mean is that there are moves that are evidently better than previous moves and have no penalty for being better than the older moves. Obviously these moves will see the most use because they are the most practical. The only thing that could be considered a penalty is their higher price, but even that is a low barrier of entry.
In Pokémon games more powerful moves tend to have less PP or have lower accuracy, and this adds an element of risk to using the moves. Use it too much and you'll run out of it, use it in a crucial point of the battle and you have the fear of missing.
Adding PP would not only be beneficial to discouraging overuse of powerful moves, having a limit to move usage is good in general. This prevents players from being able to spam healing moves infinitely. Admittedly this problem could be gotten around by using buffs. (P.S. While buffs are spammable, I believe the buffs and debuffs actually top out at +6 and -6 respectively but the message box does not display this fact. Do you think you can employ a quick fix that says "x's y cannot go any higher."? Thanks).
Nonetheless adding PP might also lead to more interesting AI. Perhaps you could employ AI that prioritises saving PP for example. At the moment the AI seems to buff when you debuff, debuff when you buff, or else attack when they have something useful enough against you or they have no other options. This might be an oversimplified view of the AI's activity but should be an accurate overview (correct me if I'm wrong). Adding a PP system might allow for more complex strategies.
Talking about more complex strategies, there was a time when an AI attacked my player with 'Hope' when I debuffed them to -2 Def, and the move did a lot of damage. Can you confirm if debuffs affect the damage output of this move? If that is true, that is a neat effect. I do feel like moves could use more secondary or conditional effects. An example I could think of is for 'Interrupt' to have a 10% chance of preventing the opponent from having their next turn.
I understand that this game is a parody type game and is meant to be simple, but when you have achievements like "swiped right/left 1000 times" and "had 1000 successful dates", you need to give players a reason to want to attempt those achievements. At the moment, this game is rather barebones and after you've gone on 10 or so dates you've basically seen the whole game, there is no incentive to keep going beyond that point. The battles are the same, you could keep using the same strategy and win every time. It just becomes a grindfest with no foreseeable reward other than an achievement. Adding extra elements to this game and making it even the slightest bit more complex would really assist in improving its longevity and keeping it fun.

Overall this is an enjoyable game but only in the short-term. I see a lot of potential for a more entertaining game if aspects of it could be better fleshed out. Even if you don't flesh this one out hopefully your future games would also offer good entertainment value. Despite the middling score, do know that I had a blast with this game even though it was only for a short while. I hope you continue developing more entertaining games in the future. Peace out.

BigBossErndog responds:

Wow, thank you for the really in depth response!
I'll definitely be taking all this into account for future games! :D

[Jumphobia]

This game has great level design, an original concept, and very responsive controls. There are also a good amount of levels available so it's satisfying for a short game. Plus the Level Maker feature is really great, giving players an opportunity to create their own levels if they're not satisfied with the current levels. The jump mechanic is actually really novel, and I think it's a great idea given my propensity to get my character to fall off platform ledges instead of jumping in platforming games (I'm sure I'm not the only one who's ever experienced this).

However, it's not perfect. My problem is not with the gameplay itself; that is mostly good. The difficulty was very fair too. The occasional bugs are what's annoying. You can easily get stuck in a level if you accidentally go back to the previous room. I had this problem with level called "An Obstructed Pathway". The following level had an arrow that changed the "gravity" of the room. Since the door to the previous room was still open, the character accidentally fell back to the previous room and since he was upside down there was no way he could exit the room. This is made especially annoying that if you exit to the menu, and if you want to get to that same point in the level, you have to play through the entire level from the beginning again. I'd say implement a checkpoint system that allows a player to return to a later room even after exiting the level, but I have a simpler solution (I actually think playing levels from the beginning is mostly fine); make the previous room inaccessible as soon as the player enters the next room. I see no reason to allow the player to access the previous room when there's nothing gained from doing so.

[Beardgrow]

Mediocre story but fairly fun and challenging game.

Positives
Despite me saying the story was mediocre, I did like the 5 multiple endings! They were predictable but it's still mildly interesting seeing how differently Dora responds based on how long Danny's beard is.
The 2-button restriction was also implemented very well. In the beginning it was a little frustrating but after some practice, the movement was actually very easy to master. The maximum beard rank is very attainable even with minimal effort. The game is fun once you get over the learning curve, which honestly is not that steep.
PS @trollface68. If arrow controls were added that would mean there would be more than two control buttons. This game was made for Ludlum Dare 34 which had the theme of growth and using only 2 buttons. Adding more controls would not only not meet the specifications of Ludlum Dare 34, it also makes the game way to easy. Have you seen the level design? You could get the highest score on the first try with the arrow controls. What’s the fun in that?

Not-so-positives?
When Danny gets caught by his dad and sent back to his room, you have to press the Up key to get rid of the Dad’s dialogue. This means as soon as Danny “respawns” he immediately jumps off the top centre platform and onto Hill the Bully on the middle left platform. It’s easy enough to avoid him while you’re in a period of semi-invincibility but this doesn’t stop this from being annoying. It may have been better if the 3 “enemies” at the top (Dad, Mom, and Kylie the Cheerleader) were similar to the bullies, i.e. their text automatically disappears and you don’t have to trigger it.

Suggestions?
It doesn’t make sense that Kylie the Cheerleader pinching Danny’s cheeks or even her thinking Danny’s a dork would be emasculating. Wouldn’t that make him more popular because a cheerleader is into him? (The one talking about Dora’s date is more morale-depleting than emasculating too). He would really be emasculated if she asks him to go shopping with her or play Barbie dolls, or manicure their nails together.
When Danny’s dad catches him he is sent back to his room but when his mother says he’s “grounded” he stays on the same platform. I found this to be an inconsistency. Wouldn’t “grounding” Danny indicate that he was forced to stay in his room?

Conclusion
This is fun for a short game and is a good time-waster. You really did a lot given the restrictions you had. As you see I didn’t really have a lot of negatives to say regarding this title. If it were a professional release I might, but as it is it’s okay. Great work!!

[climbingonroofs]

Are you just posting all of your musical experiments on here?
This one's not very interesting; and not very nice to listen to. I think you'll have better chances of being scouted if you publish complete works.

In fact, this one's so simple, I can summarise the notes you played. They might be slightly wrong but they'll play the same melody that this song played.

AB
A
G
E
G

Post better works in the future. :)

[Derp Face]

I'll get straight to the point.

"This is a place to share your own original works, not to post your favourite Eminem songs or the song your friend asked you to upload. If you didn't make it, do not upload it."
Source: https://www.newgrounds.com/wiki/help-information/terms-of-use/audio-guidelines

Reported.

[Tristam & Braken - Frame of Mind]

Hello there DragonicSin.
So I was considering the possibility that you're actually Tristam, but I checked your profile and I see that you're from the Philippines. Now, Tristam is from Canada. That's an inconsistency right there, so I'm going to go under the assumption that you are NOT Tristam.

While you have provided reference to Tristam & Bracken and claimed that it's their work, the Newgrounds Audio Portal is not for sharing songs you like. It's for sharing songs you made yourself. Here's a quote:

"This is a place to share your own original works, not to post your favourite Eminem songs or the song your friend asked you to upload. If you didn't make it, do not upload it."
Source: https://www.newgrounds.com/wiki/help-information/terms-of-use/audio-guidelines

I will now report this piece of music. Have a nice day.