Score: 8

"Sweet."

submission: 2 years of animation

date: June 27, 2006

Let's get right down to it, shall we?

Graphics: Truly amazing in some places. Not so good in others. I averaged this out as a seven, albeit, a high one.

Style: Despite the graphics varied from average to awesome, the quality of the animation was consistent throughout. It was all linked nicely together, pretty much seamlessly. Great work on that.

Sound: The song was great, it was synced well with the animation and fitted quite a few of them too. Excellent choice.

Not particularly funny, I doubt it was meant to be.

Overall you get an eight. However, this is purely on an aesthetic basis. Watching this, I felt inspired. There is some abso-fucking-lutely brilliant animation in this, well worth a watch. The eight I gave does not demonstrate the sheer majesty of some of the art and animation; nor the creativity.

Sorry I can't offer much by way of constructive criticism, but you don't need it anyway.

Excellent Job, this is a favourite.

It was mildly violent in places, nothing hardcore. Meh, who really cares.

You only had a play button; no replay button. You only get a five for this. A scene selection screen would have been nice.

Score: 6

"'The Darkening' made me think of action..."

submission: Lights Out: The Darkening

date: June 14, 2006

Not much to say about graphics, they were perfectly functional but not mind-blowing.

Likewise could be said about the style.

I liked the music - despite it being elevator-like, it was pretty good. Maybe you should have had a choice between three tracks.

I gave ten for interactivity, as it's such a novel concept. The gameplay was easy to grasp. Maybe you should have been able to get hints on every move.

Overall I gave this six out of ten. This is because the gameplay can't pull the game by itself. The graphics and style of the game were passable and it's a hard concept to do. If I had designed the game, I would have had it so that the board of the game was a building and as you complete each puzzle, you move to a different building. Something like that.

I can't constructively criticise much, as it's only the graphics and style which brought it down.

4/5 for the gameplay, but 6/10 for the review (because of graphics).

Looking forward to more games, hope this was of some use.

Score: 5

"Okay."

submission: Pigeon Impossible

date: June 13, 2006

Here's what i thought:

Graphics: Pretty good it all looked nice enough. The backgrounds were a bit too bland - work out some details.

Poor style. The only animation was tweening, pretty much. You need to either create more flexable models to tween or practise fbf.

Great sound, fitted the theme and appropriate sound effects where needed.

Not much violence, but only 13 year-olds care about that.

No replay button! Thus you only got a 5 in interactivity.

Not funny but that's due to the length of the piece.

You have attained a British_Moose 5. Your idea is apparent, all you need to do is build on all the things I have mentioned (especially length) and you'll have a nice little series here.

Best of luck.

Score: 6

"Intruiging."

submission: Silhouette of a Breeze

date: June 12, 2006

Let's get right down to it.

Graphics: Pleasant enough - on accasions they looked a bit scrappy and some of the colours were too bright and, thus, didn't compliment each other too well. My advice to combat this would be to use the colour-mixer and make your own colours; all from the lower quartile of it. The abundance of gradients made it lag for me.

The style was quite standard. Nice tweening, when it was there, but you seemed to rely heavily on movie-clips. Try using a wider variety of shots to make it more interesting to watch.

The sound fitted your theme well, so full marks.

No violence here.

I didn't find a replay button, it just stopped on the Union-Jack for me. So, 5/10 for including a play button (the addition of a replay button would've gotten you 10).

Not funny. Not meant to be. Zero.

You get a high six overall. I would've liked to vote higher, but the lagging issue and overly-bright colour pallete made me second-guess myself. Your idea was interesting, I haven't seen anything like it done before, but I would have maybe liked to see more. It seems to me that you were portraying Victorian England yet the British Empire played a small role.

Not bad at all, 3/5 and much kudos for you.

Score: 4

"Hummn."

submission: SkullMask

date: June 9, 2006

This is interesting.

Graphics: 6. Not very good. Nice clean lines but an average style. Easily animatable, so well done there. Nothing spectacular. My main gripe is the lack of colour. You made this in an afternoon, appaently, and you seem to be going for a certain theme. Despite whatever theme you were going for, adding colour can heighten whatever ideas you may be trying to convey.

Style: 8. Nicely animated, real smooth. Compensated for the average graphics. You lost it towards the end, try and keep consistent.

Sound: 5. Not amazing, not terrible. Very average.

Not much violence. What little there was wasn't graphic.

You fail at interactivity. It's on a loop without a play button. You should've at least put stop () at the end.

Not funny. Not meant to be.

This is an odd one, I gave you a 4 out of 10 and 2 out of 5. You clearly have potential to animate well and I would like to see this. Utilise this fbf talent for a future project which should have a clear beginning, middle and end. Keep this style, if you want, but I strongly suggest you add colour - It makes it easier on the eye.

Score: 8

"Another outing from our favourite simian."

submission: Space Monkay 6

date: June 6, 2006

Well, I dunno if he's everyone's favourite...
Anyway, I remember seeing your initial Space Monkay (which would be Space Monkay 1) and not being too impressed. I didn't watch any subsequent episodes because of that. I saw this is the portal and though, "hey, it's that again". And I must say, you're style seems to have developed a lot.

Graphics: eight. Very clean, nice and celery-crisp in almost every scene. The Bgs were a bit plain though.

Style: Nine. As I said, your style has really developed. A nice mixture of frame-by-frame and tweening here, it looked real good. For me, the lip-sync was a bit off at times, but that may just be my horrible computer - I only deducted one mark for that.

The sound was fantastic. Great sound effects and some good voice-acting.

Not much violence, but that's not a bad thing.

I liked the interactivity. It might've been better to have selected the floors from inside the lift, pressing the lift's buttons, but that's your design. The "Click here when done" when done seemed kinda lame, but I don't know how else you could've moved on.

It was funny, but not amazingly so. Maybe it's just not my thing. It raised a smile, but no laughs.

A very solid eight for you. And I feel I may have been a bit harsh... I liked this episode a lot but I hope to see your humour develop a bit more.
You're going to have a great series here sooner or later, keep it up.

Score: 8

"Very nice."

submission: X-Treme Tugboating

date: June 6, 2006

I think it was the gratuitous use of the word 'Extreme' (Xtreme) which won me over :)

Anyways, graphics: 7. They were nice to look at, bright and colourful. Really attractive, but quite simple in design.

Style: 8. The style of this was brilliant. The way the physics worked and how everything moved was, really, quite specatcular. My only gripe was that there wasn't much animation - you lost 2 marks for that.

The sound was near flawless. Great feel-good muzik (yes, muzik) in the background and appropriate sound effects wherever they were needed. They got a bit repetitive.

No violence.

Interactivity, that's always a hard one with games. You had a menu which was set out nicely and all that, but the actual content of the game was limited. All you do is press two keys (to my knowledge). For a game, that's quite a small ammount of control. However, the gameplay was nice and easy to pick-up, so you get a 6 here.

Not much humour, really - But it will definately make you smile.

Overall you get a very high 8/10. This game is really entertaining - I couldn't find much wrong with it at all and I really enjoyed playing it.
Excellent game, well done.

Score: 3

""Nonsense" is the word."

submission: Stickman fight nonsense

date: June 5, 2006

I expected as much from the title. Anyways, here's what I think:

Graphics were...well...not very good, to be frank. You clearly had an idea, but it seems you didn't fulfil it. If you have a stationary bacnground, I'll always suggest using the line tool to make it.

Style wasn't terrible. Nice opening - made me expect more than what I got though. If you're doing sticks, animate on a higher fps - it was pretty jittery. Try 18, then move onto 24 (if you feel like it).

You had appropriate sound effects where ever they were needed. Got a bit repretitive though. Add music next time.

Violence...well, there wasn't much. I'll just give you a 3.

Humour: None here.

Overall, a 4. You're clearly geting to grips with fbf animation - it's a good start. However, it felt very random. You might've pulled this off better if the stickmen had been fighting ot interacting with each other in some way. What it seemed to be was you practising animation by making sticks to random things. Heck, that's great. I learnt to animate that way.
Try animating sticks doing normal things, then put a basic character design over them on a separate layer - that way you'll progress your animation.

Nice start but a long way to go.

1/5

Score: 7

"Gotta love the techno beats."

submission: NSG004: Pico Jr. Jr. 0.6

date: June 2, 2006

This was quite a fun game - I kept getting killed, but I kept replaying it. Well done on making it a compelling game.

The graphics were very normal. Nothing mind-blowing, but pretty enough and certainly watchable. I haven't seen any of your othersubmissions, so I don't know what you're capable of, but from this game I'd say: Work on the graphics a bit.

Style was great. All the animations seemed fluid and the "game over" screens, drawn in...what looked like coloured crayon (?) were something new and.

Violence: Five. Not a little, not a lot. Usually I'd applaud this, but given that it's a Pico game (and the nature of Pico is that he's a badass killer) I would have added more blood, etc.

Interactivity. Hmmn, this was an odd one. The game itself was simple enough (being able to pick up bodies as cover was a nice idea) but there seemed to be little to actually do other than keep clicking the mouse button. I only gave you a 6 because it seemed that there wasn't much for me to do, I don't know if there were power-ups or alternate weapons (I didn't do too well at the game >.<).

Humour: Nill. It's not meant to be funny, so bleh.

Overall you get a seven. This is a pleasant game, took me a while to get to grips with the gameplay. Having not played it in a hardcore manner, I don't know what else this game had to offer. However, if I did manage to see all the game's features then I'd deffinately work on those for future submissions.

It was fun, but limited. I'm sure the deadline didn't help much :)

Score: 4

"It's a start."

submission: Here by me

date: June 2, 2006

The crying MC with the spazzing out hands made me chuckle ^^

As I said, it's a start. The drawings were sorta bad, but the black-lineless style of some of them was very nice (even though you did outline some more images in black). There was very little animation, there only seemed to be tweens.
Your characters were quite simple so I recommend that you hit the onion-skin button and get down to some badass fbf instead of relying on shitty loops.

You may also want to re-focus on capturing the meaning of the song, you didn't really create any mood or atmosphere with this (which CAN be done with flash). My advice on how to do that is: to watch films and see how they frame the shots that create atmosphere, any films and for any atmosphere. There are also numerous "How to draw" books, which explain how to set up a certain scene.

The sound quality wasn't bad, the song was questionable.

Overall: 4. You do have some mildly interesting ideas and there's clearly some potential here. If this is only your 3rd submission, you have a lot of time to work on your next.

Good Luck.