NoperDoperTrooper's Reviews

[The Beast Snacks 1]

Good Effort

I can see you worked hard on this animation, and it shows.

However, there are some issues. Firstly, sound and voice acting are all over the place, which detracts from the movie. Voices crack a lot and volume is all over the place. Secondly, characters' appearances change at random, so there's not much consistency in face shape or stature. Also, it's fairly obvious that some parts were traced directly from copyrighted work, something which I personally have no tolerance for. Thankfully, the extent to which you did this is limited to very few scenes.

Overall good work, and I look forward to seeing your improvements in Episode 2.

[Suramongo]

Plagiarism is Plagiarism

For all your talk about form and color and its insignificance without taking into consideration the form of the whole, what you did is pretty inexcusable in my eyes. That is, taking another's work and putting your name on it.

This is tantamount to copying and pasting large portions of other peoples' essays and placing them into your own. You can argue all you want about the insignificance of form and argue that because letters can be arranged in limitless ways to form words and convey meaning, these atomic parts can be copied without discretion, but I doubt any competent English professor will buy it.

I can knowingly copy others' work with full understanding and know that what I am doing is making a copy of a copy and that just because this version of a sequence of letters and words is more popular, you have a different opinion, and it will still be plagiarism. Same thing happened here. Animation IS motion, so if you copy the motion, you copy the ANIMATION.

Tips for improvement: Don't steal other peoples' work.

[The Last Fight: Final Ep]

Good presentation

Style was superb and stayed mostly consistent. Scene progression was interesting and used a lot of camera angles to show the fight, which I liked. Animation-wise, I felt that the sword looked too weightless the way it was being handled. Slicing through something with a sword requires the body's full force behind it, with proper technique of course, so there should be more movement in the legs and lower body to provide the momentum for each swing. Overall nice work though.

keepwalking responds:

Its true I forgot or missed some details about that, Ill try to improve this kind of things on my future animations :)

[Dungeon Team]

Game's mechanics are fun if you liked turn-based stuff. Has a lot of potential. Imma back-seat design a little bit so bear with me.

UI:
+ The menu icons look very nice, would like to see that style more throughout the game. Especially the units and loot look bland.
+ Layout is relatively clean.
+ Defeating a unit is satisfying.
+ Damaging a unit is satisfying.
+ All the information for equipment, stats and skills are there and relatively easy to access.

- When I first open the game the row of all the classes was intimidating. Got used to it though. Changing this might impact the flow from inventory management to battle.
- Classes are hard to tell apart.
- Can make it easier to access info with mouse-over UI.

Quality of life:
- Would like to see the order units will be able to move on the side.
- Would like easier to use battle UI.
- More distinct class art?
- Grey out actions that unit doesn't have enough AP to perform.

Design:
+ Game has nice systems and potential for varied gameplay.
+ Flow from inventory management to going into battle is very smooth.

- Battle flow is kind of slow and repetitive.
- Individual actions don't seem to have a lot of impact, which means each match takes a lot of actions to finish. More significant individual actions will speed up gameplay and maybe streamline the game. Also will have to re-examine random mechanics.
- More incentives to use prayer.
- How to create more player interest? Unlock classes through a campaign? Limited-time events for special classes or unique loot?

WakefieldStudios responds:

Incredibly thoughtful feedback - thanks so much! I hope you'll keep coming back to check for updates as we make changes based on very good critiques like this one.

[Totem Destroyer]

Amazing!

Really addicting! If an expanded version was released for the iPod Touch or something I'd totally buy it! The only problem I had with it was that when blocks fell past the sides of the screen, I couldn't click them to remove them. Other than that, perfect.

[Final Pacman]

Nice game, but..

I think Neave deserves more credit, because it looks like you just changed the graphics, music, and menu whereas all of the programming was done by Neave.
I've seen this Pacman game on too many sites that don't credit him at all, however, so I'll give you some kudos for that.

Sgtpepper17 responds:

I already put a link in the main menu and in the comment (both here and at DA where I've put a lot more info). I think it's normal to credit. I'm not good with ActionScript and I did use his programming. I must admit that. I don't really like it when people tell me that I dod a great job couse all I did was making some changes to the art.

[My concept]

Variations galore

I always have a lot of fun listening to pieces that are composed of variations on themes. They're always so interesting to listen to, and this one is no exception. Loved the use of dissonance and the way each variation flowed into another. Could hear influences from many modern styles of composition, which was really awesome. The recording sounded very professional and really did this piece justice. Really sounded like Chopin brought into the 20th century.

[Justice Day: Recording]

Dynamics and tempo

The beginning of the piece was much too loud in my opinion, forcing the swell at :19 to be a bit underwhelming.

A slight ritardando at :38 would have been greeeeat.

I would exaggerate the swell at :59 and drop to maybe a pianissimo at 1:01, exaggerate swell at 1:13, and build up to 1:28 fortissimo. Dunno what was written in the score, but bringing the lows very low will make the highs sound even higher, from what I understand.

Maybe it was the recording quality, but the entire song sounded rather tepid. The entire dynamic range seemed rather limited, but harmonically the piece sounded good, albeit a bit cheesy at times (Not because you did anything wrong, but because there are tons of pieces like this one already). Still, I managed to find the piece pretty melodically varied on the whole, if not melodically original.

Anyway, as good as this piece is, more liberties with dynamics and tempo and this piece will be phenomenally more awesome sounding.

[Trance love [final?]]

Not bad.

Not good either.
The melody, bassline, and accompaniment were in different keys.
So unless you did that on purpose, (and if you did, my bad :P) I suggest keeping all the voices in the same keys at the same time.
The good stuff was in the way the voices fit together. Different sounds float in and out at pretty nice intervals.

XELAPA responds:

Ok, thanks for advice, I would try to take into account it.