lurn moment
Reviews for "Polly The Frog 3: Billy Bullfrog's Decree"
Really cool game, it's really cute! However, it's really laggy and glitchy. Here are a few annoying glitches and issues I noticed: enemies can hit you when your on one of the platforms; enemies can hit you from really far, somtimes when your in the air; the signs that tell you tips come after you need them. There are a few more I can't remember, but the game is still good. Good luck!
Wow good game
This game is incredible!
Seems like a pretty cute game in many aspects, and I was impressed at the ambition of creating a big 3D platformer, but unfortunately a lot of the construction and design left me underwhelmed and feeling like it might've gotten a bit too overambitious (a common habit of indie devs, though nothing to be ashamed about).
First and foremost, the number one thing blocking me was the performance of the game. For some reason, I was constantly getting all sorts of stuttering and frame rate drops which was annoying by itself but especially annoying since it would happen during jumps and cause me to miss my target. I feel like I've got a respectable computer especially for such a simple game, leading me to fear the code must be very terribly unoptimized. This happened even when I switched the game to the lowest quality and I'll be honest, I'm not sure if the quality button even works in the first place.
There were also just a lot of annoyances with the controls and presentation. For example, the game says you can use a controller and while it does work in general, if you try to go into, for example, the settings menu, suddenly the controller no longer works and you need to use the mouse to interact with the options. Furthermore, all of the controls are still listed with keyboard controls like space and WASD when you'd think the game would recognize I'm using a controller and instead display controller buttons instead.
There's also some very shoddy design in the gameplay world as well, such as a camera that both can clip into terrain which blocks your vision and not be zoomed out enough which causes you to have to take leaps of faith too often. There are also bland or absent effects for actions like attacks which just have the enemies blip away with no satisfying visuals or audio, and a lack of a ground shadow for the player to help them be able to tell where they are landing from jumps with any precision.
There were also some bugs like the save system which would sometimes completely lose or not save my progress for no reason I could tell.
But even if we sweep aside all of that stuff, assume that all the menus and performance and camera and such can be fixed up, and instead choose to focus on the core gameplay, I still feel like the game would be a bit lacking because the gameplay is so bog-standard. What I played felt like a rather generic platformer without any interesting or unique mechanics, just stuff you'd see in any other platformer but lacking polish or satisfaction. Potentially satisfying movement mechanics like dashes don't add much and are locked behind an annoying forced movement instead of being an accessible button press.
If I view this through the lens as a newbie developer making his first platformer and being a bit overambitious, I'd say it shows potential and could become something big with this as practice, but considering this is the 3rd version, I'm a little let-down as you'd think this would be incredibly polished by now. Still, hopefully you can continue to move onwards and upwards.
EDIT: I did try playing it in Firefox instead of Chrome and I didn't get the performance issues: not sure what weird compatibility issue is going on there!
Brad-Games responds:
Thanks for taking your time to review my game, I appreciate the feedback!
I'm very new to the Unity game engine, so while this is the 3rd version of the game, it's the only one I actually put a lot of effort into, so it feels like more of a first installment on my end.
As for the poor performance, I'm not entirely sure as to what causes that. I've tested the game on many different devices, including a Chromebook with 2GB of RAM and a slow processor, and it runs just fine. It's possible that it's some browser setting that could cause the game to run poorly, or just a Unity WebGL bug of some sort. I'll look into it more.
Always good to see people taking their time to give constructive criticism instead of getting frustrated and leaving a bad review with not much to say. I'm not sure if I'll make a 4th installment of this series, but if I do I'll definitely take your points into consideration. 😄