Reviews for Dr. Bones' Adventure

[FinalSaber]

Good, but not enjoyable

Music was good, Art was good, story was allright, gameplay....
I hate to say it but the gameplay was crap.
From the very begining, you have jumps you need to space perfectly, you have large lag times inbetween the areas, you cannot harm, hurt, or stun the eneimies, while they can kill you in one hit....
In chapter 2 for example, you have a jumping....er....frog thing right under a vine that you need to swing on. You cannot get past it for as soon as you grab the vine, it jumps into you. If you could kill it or stun it, it would go from being impossible, to merely being difficult.

Overall, your game design is sound, but as things are it's on the verge of unplayable.

PassiveAggressiveDev responds:

The gameplay is crap, we know. We made this as first year students, mainly to learn programming and drawing/animation, the gameplay had very little thought put into it, so we're not surprised there ;)

We originally planned to polish the game after the final exams, but this never happened so we figured we would just release it as it was.

Thanks for the feedback =)

[Psyguy]

Good concept

Looked like you were doing pretty good there. I didn't care of the music at all. I think some sound effects to when he jumps or enemies breach the water would of helped.

[henrybrice]

Hmmmm...

Not bad, but needs quite a lot of work.

1 - the controls are bad. There is a reason most games use the same controls - we are used to them and they work well. You should be able to use arrow keys for movement as well as WASD, I find using WASD and space very unintuitive. In general the movement doesn't work well, it feels very stilted and unnatural.
2 - why do I get stuck and have to wait 15 seconds on every screen change. This is especially annoying when the screen change is in the middle of a jump...
3 - it just gets boring very quickly. You lose any sense of story, there is nothing to do except jump along the very obvious route to the next screen. You can't even jump on monsters to brighten up your day.

As I said, this isn't a bad game, just one that needs more work!

[3zz]

Too buggy

For a school project this is alright (except if you're enrolled in a game design college, then this would be pretty poor). But it's just too unpolished. The gameplay is alright, and I managed to get to the final boss without any major issues.

One thing that was annoying was the time it took to revive. You had to wait around a full second after you died before pressing E had any effect, so every time you died you had this stutter in the flow of the game. The problem got bigger at the final boss, where I kept dying, and you had to shine the light on the crystals to get the boss to appear EVERY TIME you tried again. This was very annoying and just a poor design decision. Any game-dev worth their weight wouldn't make such a simple mistake. Work on this.

I eventually got stuck on the final boss. The timing on the frog in the third screen was just impossible to get for me, and I tried many times. There was too little time for the player to adjust, and it was basically trial and error with every error meaning you had to do the whole light-shining animation again, which was annoying. I kept at it, though, but eventually I just randomly (while transitioning between screens) got some snake/giraffe hybrid easter-egg thing out of nowhere and I had to shut down the game. So I never got to finish

All in all it's a decent game, but many aspects of it are poorly executed and require additional polishing. Better luck next time, I guess.

[killants]

Glitches, glitches and glitches...

I didn't play the game til the end, but only because some things were annoying me. First of all, the load between one screen and another was a little slow, in the level where the lava goes up, I kept wondering if it would reach me because of the load, because it would just keep going up until you passed to the next screen. The music was just playing randomly through levels, it stopped for a few minutes and then restarted out of nowhere, it also sounded like there was more than 1 song playing at the same time, a mute button would be good. The vines were the worst part, like the game wasn't really self-explanatory (you could check the instructions in the beginning, but only for the game controls), I was hard to figure out what to do while hanging in them. Also, if you just swing back and forth close to other vines, you'd just end back to the previous one, it kept happening in the cave. There could be some messages in the screen about the enemies or the puzzles or the new things you find at least. You don't say either how to access the inventory, I happened to pass my mouse over the inventory frame and find it, every time I got a note the guy says to read, but how? The art work though is pretty good. But it looks like you focused too much on the art work and forgot the rest of the game. I do hope to see more projects from you.