Hey, just played through the first world again. Will finish the rest of the demo soon. The puzzle design, progression, and feel of the game are all excellent. So my feedback will wander a bit, and share a few things I've been pondering.
It's worth thinking about whether or not you want to use your real name in distributing the game. Personally, I like it and think it's a good idea. It didn't seem to hurt the Stardew Valley dev so who knows if it matters.
You should start your game fullscreen. It's similar to the difference between watching a movie on your phone, vs. in the theatre. A fullscreen game is implicitly asking the player for their attention, and promising that it will be worth it. This game is worth it. A windowed game is not really occupying the players mind, their email tab is open behind, their calendar is shooting up notification in the corner, their discord icon is flashing. Giving the players the option to window the game is plenty.
After a ton of trial and error and experimenting, I have personally found that breakpoints are a far superior method of scaling for a pixel-perfect 2D game than letterboxing. The idea is this: At 1x resolution, there is a min and max width, and a min and max height you are willing to allow. The "ideal" 1x resolution might be 480x270, or whatever. But the game is guaranteed to work down to 420x230, or whatever, and up to 520x300. Once you have determined that, you can look at the size of your window, and determine whether you are going to be at 1x, 2x, 3x, etc.. I go all the way to 8x. The end result, if you take the smallest window and slowly start increasing its size, the screen area will grow, grow, grow, then snap to 2x, then grow grow grow, snap to 3x, etc... All the while, it fills the entire window space as best as possible. With well tuned breakpoints, the vast majority of screens will be completely filled, with pixel perfect scaling. I made a video showing what it looks like
On your sound toggles, the control should be exponential, because hearing is logarithmic. Read here for more info: https://www.dr-lex.be/info-stuff/volumecontrols.html Simple fix that really improves things. With this, a sound control halfway down will "sound" like its at half volume, instead of staying mostly the same, and then getting really quiet at the end.
It's worth thinking about whether or not you want to use your real name in distributing the game. Personally, I like it and think it's a good idea. It didn't seem to hurt the Stardew Valley dev so who knows if it matters.
I'm still deciding on that. I like to keep my hobbies and real life separated, but it would be nice to have something with my real name on it.
You should start your game fullscreen.
Good points, I will change it.
Resolution
The game works like that for windowed mode, but as default it stretches the image to fit the screen. Before that it was pixel perfect, but people in general really didn't like the black bars on the side of the screen, so it is turned off by default. The technique you are using to increase the field of view for non-integer scaling sizes is very interesting, but thanks to the way my backgrounds are created it would be complicated to implement it. I will keep the technique in mind for the future though.
Love everything about the looks and humor especially, but I wasn't expecting the game to hook me in like it did. Played to the end of v0.20, but I could not get passed the second bonus stage at the end. Skill issue I suppose.
Only thing I can really add is that the fairies look odd and a little jittery when the camera is panning from left to right.
Comments
Hey, just played through the first world again. Will finish the rest of the demo soon. The puzzle design, progression, and feel of the game are all excellent. So my feedback will wander a bit, and share a few things I've been pondering.
Thanks for playing!
I'm still deciding on that. I like to keep my hobbies and real life separated, but it would be nice to have something with my real name on it.
Good points, I will change it.
The game works like that for windowed mode, but as default it stretches the image to fit the screen. Before that it was pixel perfect, but people in general really didn't like the black bars on the side of the screen, so it is turned off by default. The technique you are using to increase the field of view for non-integer scaling sizes is very interesting, but thanks to the way my backgrounds are created it would be complicated to implement it. I will keep the technique in mind for the future though.
Just sticking my nose to share this video since you talked about pixel perfect upscaling, it's pretty cool:
Love everything about the looks and humor especially, but I wasn't expecting the game to hook me in like it did. Played to the end of v0.20, but I could not get passed the second bonus stage at the end. Skill issue I suppose.
Only thing I can really add is that the fairies look odd and a little jittery when the camera is panning from left to right.
Thanks for playing!
The bonus stages are difficult, so don't worry about it.
Only thing I can really add is that the fairies look odd and a little jittery when the camera is panning from left to right.
I will look into it. The game is rendered in an odd way to preserve the pixel art look and it can cause some issues.