Score: 5

"Cute flick"

submission: Nim moves to College

date: April 2, 2006

Cute, short, with snappy pacing and nicely drawn characters.

If there were two things I didn't like about it, I'd have to mention that the photo-edited sprites were a bit off. They didn't quite blend with the 2-d drawn characters as well as I'd like. The white outline around the car was particularly annoying.

The perspective was off in a few scenes--distractingly so. Most notable among these were the packing scene, where the boxes are simply squares, while the house has some depth. The two didn't blend. Worse was the scene with the two cars on a road--the road was at a different angle than the cars.

Score: 4

"Switch?"

submission: Junk1

date: March 29, 2006

Decent animation, although it got really old after a while.

Seriously, if you're going to do a monologue against a plain black background, at least take some cues from the Apple "Switch" commercials and vary the camera angle a bit.

Use close-ups, wide-angle shots, partial-head shots, etc.
Move the character.
Do *something* to break the monotony.

Even blinking from time to time would help. It can also be very effective in getting your message across. Play with the eyes to show emotion. Even the Clock Crew folks do that, and they have some very simple animations (though I give them kudos for doing a lot with their simplistic animations).

Score: 4

"Tropical island platformer"

submission: -The Island Fight-

date: March 25, 2006

A competently-executed platformer with decent artwork. It's very rough around the edges and lacks variation, but improvements will no doubt be forthcoming.

The art style was simplistic, but decent. The animation, however, could use quite a bit of improvement. The walk cycle alone was somewhat ridiculous: the character gets as far as the breakdown, and then switches back again, like a skip or chasse'. It seems very strange, and is mimicked in the arm movement, which is jerky. Jumping isn't quite as bad, but could use work as well.

The scripting was great as far as I could tell, with the exception of opponent AI. There was no skill involved in standing beneath the opponents and shooting up at them; they never moved except to die, and couldn't aim.

The level was incomplete--at the end you simply keep walking forever. The intro doesn't exist, I was waiting for several seconds for a poorly-timed fade in that never came. It's just a black screen.

Scripting was smooth, it wasn't painful to look at, but it's clearly not finished. A decent rough draft, I suppose. I await the final version.