UmbraObscurum's game Reviews on Newgrounds

[Anti Chess]

It has nice quality character designs. HOWEVER, the fact that you MUST kill an enemy when they are within range of an attack from one of your pieces is not a smart decision, it doesn't let you plan out a strategic way of defeating the enemy. and I was confused when I could beat the AI on the hardest difficulty within 5 minutes of starting the game. I also feel that more animations could have been put into the characters to give them a bit more life.

devilsgarage responds:

Thanks for that feedback - We had designed many variations to this game - even the ones you had mentioned, but the 'daisy-chain' was most loved aspect of the game by almost everyone who had played it. It was that 'argh' moment to the 'checkers kill' moment of watching the opponent fall for that move.

Most of us indie devs working on the game grew up playing the Battle Chess （*＾3＾）<(Oh, Interplay! We love you) and when we started building this game we had a lot more animation - (attack and death scene), but sacrificed that for a quicker game play

Well, you are one talented Anti Chess player! Tell you what the best challenge is... download the iOS version of the game, https://itunes.apple.com/fr/app/anti-chess-free-fun-new-chess/id1141698765?l=en&mt=8 - and play with an equally challenging opopnent in the "Pass and Play' mode - it's a ton of fun defeating a hooman than a puny bot, yeah? :D

[Cave Runner]

The concept of it is really nice and appealing. However, there are a few problems with it. First of all, the controls only work 70 percent of the time, meaning for about every 10 times the player jumps, the controls don't work 3 of those times. so I would fix that bug ASAP. Next there comes the problem of the character being teleported to the gap in between platforms or to the next gap without any warning, so yet another thing worth fixing. Now I come to the point of graphics... I understand that this is an ameteur game, so I can look past some aspects of this. Here's a good pointer for the graphics, starting with the background: You want to fool people into thinking that you AREN'T using one background, and the way to do that is to make one long background that you can loop without people noticing, and a good way to do that is to draw the background in a way that you can mirror flip horizontally and it looking somewhat different. With the platforms, may I recommend making at least 5 different platform sprites so that the game doesn't look graphically unpolished. And finally, i would make the character model smoother by adding in-between frames between the frames you already have with your character model. If need be, ask an animator to make a character model that is fitting for this game, and don't ask bigger animators, ask smaller animators who are looking for work. And finally, I would add sound effects (and for extra effect, edit them in Audacity [a free audio editing software] and give them a reverb to make it SOUND like you're in a cave.) Also I would maybe change the music to a more fast paced song that can loop really well (ex. being Megalovania from Undertale, it loops really well on itself.)

Anyways that's how I would improve it. Good luck!!