Awesome game. but where's the keen secret?
Reviews for "Neonball"
Pretty neat game, however starting level 11 it got impossible for me
But damn tammleandbass, what the hell?
This puzzle game is pretty good, but it could be great. With just the slightest bit more of control over your ball once you launched it, or maybe a line showing its trajectory at any given point, or slowing it the hell down a little, it would be a lot easier and more justified, especially with such an instant learning curve.
Because honestly, the biggest problem with this is that it tells you to collect the stars and get to the exit both within the time limit. This is a problem because the time limits are ridiculously short and when I retry, because I don't ever know where my ball will go and I have to guess instead of just knowing, even if I felt like I mastered getting the stars after a couple tries, the slightest little slip up, the ball only a couple pixels over from where I want it to be, and I go way off my intending course and fail the time limit again.
The reason it's aggravating is that it feels unjustified. Failure, in a player's eyes, is only ever justified if it's their own fault for failing. When your requirements are too high and when your controls are too difficult so immediately after starting up the game, it prompts people to quit earlier, and to get mad easier. Because when I fail because I make a mistake, it means I just need to try something new, but when I fail because the game has bad design, until I succeed, I don't know for sure that I need to try something new, and I end up trying the same thing over and over until I'm mad.
And I know that once you beat the level, you can continue, because I started doing it because I was getting pissed off, but even then, it wasn't much easier. You've got a great score that's pretty varied, even single tracks are varied, and the colours are beautiful, but ultimately I feel it's the programming that makes this frustrating. It's not unforgivable and I still enjoyed some of the levels, but there's not much of a learning curve, they just throw you right into it, and the overall experience is made frustrating by the fact that the ball moves insanely fast and is nearly impossible to control.
The final and possibly most aggravating thing is that the stage complete screen takes forever to finish all of its lighting up and whatnot, counting off all the unused seconds and making each star light up individually. In another puzzle game on Newgrounds, Together Alone, you get stars not by collecting them, but by finishing each level under certain circumstances, and as you play each level, it gives them to you very clearly and can even take them away as well if you need to do something again. In both of these games, the stars are things you obtain through a physical task throughout each level, but the difference is that in Together Alone, your three stars are the biggest thing on the screen once you beat a level and then it instantly goes to the next level without me asking it to or anything. I don't need a stage complete screen. If you present all the information I need before the screen fades to the next level without taking forever, that's enough. The reason this is aggravating out of all the other things is that because of the stuff I mentioned before, I kept retrying levels and I was getting mad at how long it took for the stage complete screen to show the retry button. I found out you could press space, but because of how annoyed I started getting, I started pressing space more than once. And after the stage complete screen shows the retry button, if you press space, rather than retrying it just goes to the next level. That's why the best retry buttons are available during each level, usually without me needing to pause and press a second button and then a third when the game asks me things like "are you sure?" even though I'm the one that pressed the thing. I think you should make your retry button the letter R.
Finally, at the end of all of the design issues, let's talk about the story. So you're telling me that due to an energy crisis, some kind of crucible was adopted by the government to act as a test to see if people are worthy of using up energy, and that the puzzles themselves are utilizing energy?
These puzzles use dozens of lasers and bombs and a remote-controlled robot with laser-path-following-sensors that are apparently so disposable I get an infinite amount of tries, and that all that stuff is covered in neon lights? Neon is a gas that glows naturally for a substantial amount of time, and rather than using this precious, naturally occurring light-source in their towns and cities, they line neon balls with them? I mean, if they want to conserve energy and still have their tests, they could just as easily make puzzle games drawn with fingers in the sand and they wouldn't use an ounce of power. If somebody fails the tests, they've already wasted all of the energy these puzzles require to operate without even getting their energy-use license or whatever. If you're going to go with a premise you invented, you have to think of the consequences that premise would bring to light simply by its nature.
In Inception, almost everything was planned and well thought out and despite its many flaws, it's about as close as you could get to a fully fleshed out world in a film. There are consequences to every action, ways of preventing various conditions and a set of rules that may occasionally seem unclear, but that are followed as much as possible. As I said, Inception has problems: they utilize jolting movements, what they call a "kick", as a method to wake up sleeping people, but once they begin their heist, "the chemist" jumps a van full of sleeping people off a hill and they don't wake up, but his intended "kick" is jumping the same van full of sleeping people off a bridge, and that's when they wake up. And kicks in progress seem to affect deeper dream states, but not all of them. The gravity only changes in the dream state directly below the one the van is falling in, and in the one deeper than that, at a ski lodge, the gravity is fine.
Like I said, not all about these rules is made clear or followed all the time, but they stay as faithful as they can. Rather than doing this, you flatly denied the opening statement of your piece when you tell me that I'm about to enter a series of tests that will determine if I'm worthy of using energy by making me use energy. And even if these tests are supposed to test my knowledge of technology at the time and how to use it, you could have just given me a written test. The premise of a energy crisis world with an energy license is a really cool one, and you could have used this opportunity to raise questions about the nature of this society you invented, as well as creating a really cool world. This could have been an adventure game where they can only use mechanical technology because you have to get your energy license first, and the people without them live separately from the people with them, or they are some kind of tribal society where like the only person who can use energy is the chief, and so on and so on.
I can't really judge this game based on another game you didn't make, but I don't think it's unreasonable to judge it based on the insane learning curve, impossible controls and nonsensical plot. I still enjoyed what little of this I played and despite the fact that the few problems do lower its playability, at least for me, is made better by the fact that a couple of tweeks could make at least the gameplay great. But the story still makes no sense.
Nice Game Little challenging :3
Fun game. Challenging but not impossible.