wroks pretty well, would prob like it more if it was easier to use the rope to keep momentum
Play game
Untitled Rope Game's itch.io pageComments
Thanks for trying it out!
This was a tricky one, because I wanted to give the player control in the air so they can stick their landings, but yeah I also missed the momentum build up. I think I've found something in-between here that lets the player take control in the air to a lesser extent, but still preserves momentum in most cases.
Got to the house! Although its short its very sweet and colorful. I like the rope even if it takes a second to get used to, but once you learn it you can jump around pretty fast. I'd love to see obstacles that can kill you, even if its a few. Also what do the diamonds do? Look forward to more progress and I hope you find a title!
2 years ago(+1)
I only added diamonds for fun. They're not even tracked by anything atm.
From the start I decided on some arbitrary restrictions, and one of them was no fail states, so I've left out enemies/spikes/bottomless pits in this iteration. In the future I might revisit the idea though, as I do think what I currently have is basically one pillar that would need others to support a real game.
Absolutely invaluable feedback, thank you so much! My takeaways:
- Try out a hold/release control system, see if that's more intuitive with a first time player
- Add easing to the rappel action. Always add curves to animations.
- Allow diamonds to be collected by grappling them. Could lead to fun trick shots.
- Sort out collisions like getting caught jumping on the corner of boxes and pushing into the wall when rappelling against it.
- I actually made things slippery to help with collisions. The slippery ramp was intentional to force you to time a grapple as you slid down it, losing progress if you missed - but was that more frustrating than "challenging but fun"?
- Make the outer walls ungrappleable. I've seen a couple of people do the thing you did where you're slowly scraping up the wall. You can't really swing from there and it doesn't look like the free flowing movement I'm going for. The limitation should help me guide the player more too, instead of letting them cheese their way over any obstacle.
- The one way platform needs to be removed or made more obvious or be taught to the player in isolation first. I was screaming at the screen when you finally went to check it out and (sensibly) concluded it was an impassable route.
- Better level design. I might start off with the rope locked to force players to learn moving and jumping first, and guide them through a series of increasingly difficult obstacles to overcome with the rope. An observation from watching you though is that gamers will go after the shiny thing barely visible above them if they think they can trickshot their way up to it with enough tries, over following the well lit path to the right that's supposed to ease you into it. I feel like the gem at the very top was a good use of this "tease" design pattern, but the starting area was a complete distraction.
- Down-roping as I'm now gonna call it is definitely intended, since my inspiration for the "rope" is Worms. In that you can't specifically aim down, but you can end up in the situation where the rope anchor is below you and you can push off of it like a telescopic rod. I'm wondering how I can teach this mechanic better (it's counterintuitive to expect a rope to work like that), but you did figure out exactly how I'd intended for that top gem to be obtain with enough play. I feel like down-roping fits well into my "find the fun" goal at least!
Awesome, I think you're definitely on the right track with how you're taking the feedback. I too yell at the screen whenever someone playtests my game lol, its a part of the process. We spend so long on our own games that we develop an intuitive sense of how to play. But that means that we really play our own games very very differently from first time players, and that's where the disconnect lies. My biggest takeaway from gamedev is how much good games communicate and guide the player, which is really hard to do right. As you said, for your game you should try to guide the player a bit more. Try playing through tutorials of other professional games and studying what they do, how they do it. Mobile game tutorials are good too, there are certain patterns you can follow with pausing the physics and darkening the background until a player does the correct action, etc.
Keep it up and keep following the fun like you said. Telescopic downroping and more levels that focus on specifics of the mechanic could be really fun. Would love to see more of this
2 years ago(+1)
Thanks!
Until yesterday there was no running or jumping. I've got a bit of a dilemma on this - I want movement to feel good, it should be fun to just move around in the game even without any challenges, but I want the rope to be the focus. It was annoying to have the rope as the only method of movement (I was experimenting with a Getting Over It style), so I added in running. So now I could either remove jump altogether, or beef it up and design the level around that (bigger gaps warranting the use of the rope I guess), since I agree that it's currently pointless.
2 years ago(+1)
Yeah jump has gotta go or be beefed up and more control added in-air I think.
That floaty unresponsive feeling - would you say that's the case when swinging, running+jumping, or both?
>for the love of god change the music though.
But it came with the art assets, it's a perfect fit :^)
Leave a comment
Log in with itch.io to leave a comment.