Newgrounds.com — Everything, By Everyone.

the idea behind this game seems very good but the main flaw in this game is that i could be pressing the Q,M,I,C keys all at the same time and all the obstacles would disappear making the traversal of the block extremely easy.

Congrats on your first game! And, what's better, congratulations on making a game that feels like you did at least put some thought into the design. I thought that the overall concept of the game felt solid, and I thought that the level designs (for the most part) were at least okay, and occasionally quite good.

Unfortunately, the controls left me as frustrated as the narrator of "Evidently Chicken Town" which may or may not have been intentional. What I ended up doing was let myself die a couple times as I scanned the map and memorized it, and then had to keep my eyes on the keyboard while I actually navigated the level. I doubt that's exactly the experience you were hoping to give people. Perhaps a more generous learning curve would have been nice, too.

Personally, I didn't find much to complain about with the aesthetics. That "death" noise was far too loud in proportion to everything else, but that's a fairly minor complaint.

All in all, it really isn't that much fun to play, but I think anyone with an eye for game design will see that the positive qualities outnumber the annoyances...it just so happens that the annoyances will be the first and most obvious thing anyone who picks this game up will see.

lol this sucks

funny game, but not really good or something

I commend you for taking the initiative of doing something creative! The feeling when you create something yourself and watching others enjoy the experience you crafted is something unplaceable and irreplaceable. That said, my thoughts:

- The game has great conveyance, you know what to do immediately and the means through which you achieve your goal are apparent. It can always be improved with clearer identifiers, like symbols to represent your objectives. For example, in Super Meat Boy, the plot made clear the goal of every level: to get to Bandage Girl. Setting a unique and indistinguishable goal for the player will motivate the player more than making them feel like they're just going from room to room.

- I understand that with a one-man-show going on, it's hard to accomplish graphical fidelity. However, I don't think aesthetics are impossible with a small team or even one person. I can see how making the backgrounds black and white and the character green with the lasers red brings out the main two objects, but I felt that the aesthetic discord between the setting in which the game takes place and the objects within it brought me out of the environment and sort of brought me out of the immersion. It can be possible to achieve clear conveyance of objects using a limited colour palette. See Shatterhand or Castlevania for the NES. LIMBO is all greyscale and the player character was easily seen from a mile away due to smart design, and when he wasn't it was to enhance the atmosphere of the unknown established through the game.

- I know that in Sequelitis, Arin harps on 'game feel' a lot. And it is something that varies from person to person, but I don't think that makes it any less of a factor of a game's ability to make itself enjoyable. In this the lasers felt unimportant just being a red line and the (grating) sound effect made it seem like something it didn't look like: dangerous. The main character was a block and that gave me no motivation to continue. Whether due to technical or skill limitations I don't know.

- Controls. Controls controls controls. The decision to map the keys of the game to QMIC makes the player feel clumsy and it isn't satisfying when you clear the obstacles. I thought maybe it was to prevent players from mashing all the buttons at once, which is a major design hole right there, but I could do it anyway while still controlling my guy. The movement is floaty and doesn't feel tight and getting around corners was a pain. This could be reference to the source material, "Evidently Chickentown", which expresses exasperation and futility, but no matter how indie or profound you are I seriously don't think the message is gonna go anywhere if your game isn't fun to play.

It's at this point where I feel I may have come off too harsh. Please do not take this as a knock against your game because that was the opposite of my intentions. These were just my first impressions, and I may change my mind with more time to think about it. I just wanted to share my thoughts on the experience I had playing this game so you can deliberate and maybe evolve artistically on your next project, if you have one at all. I really hope you do, because I know that you're passionate about the medium. For a first venture it was alright, and no matter how cheesy it is it's true that if you keep going you'll get better and better.

I don't really want to give this entry a rating because it nullifies the concept of multi-faceted reviews. But if I had to I guess I would give it a 3/5. It isn't the worst thing I ever played, but it needs a lot of work.