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A jam submission

A man in ShadowsView game page

Submitted by TwoWeekGuy — 37 minutes, 32 seconds before the deadline
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A man in Shadows's itch.io page

Results

CriteriaRankScore*Raw Score
Graphics#973.7733.773
Innovation#1033.4093.409
Theme#1213.4093.409
Game Design#1503.4093.409
Overall#2173.0983.098
Fun#3212.8182.818
Audio#5711.7731.773

Ranked from 22 ratings. Score is adjusted from raw score by the median number of ratings per game in the jam.

How does your game fit the theme?
You cannot avoid death. Though, you can still make progress.

Did you write all the code and made all the assets from scratch?
Yes.

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Comments

Submitted

It is very easy to get stuck from the beginning, I put "a little too much" head and it becomes impossible to advance, it should disappear

Submitted

A platformer with the unique mechanic of throwing your head.

Pros: really cool art style, truly unique mechanic, platformer is always a ballsy choice for a jam

Cons: (please bare in mind that I didn't enjoy this game. I'm sorry if any of my feedback comes off as harsh, it's all purely meant to be constructive criticism) I REALLY wanted to love this game. It starts off so strong and has a really interesting mechanic. Unfortunately, the core mechanic was just too frustrating. The fact that the heads slowly drift downwards coupled with the slidy physics makes it feel almost impossible to platform with the heads with any kind of precision. Add to that the arbitrary time limit of dying every x amount of time and it felt insanely difficult to move as quickly as needed while still being able to perfectly line up your jumps for the incredibly unforgiving heads. I found myself spamming heads just to have a platform big enough to jump on consistently, which never left me enough time to reach the next platform before dying, and because they were constantly drifting down the platforms I made wouldn't stay in place long enough to be useful for my next life. Because of this, I wound up in a situation where I died so many times that the platform that raised with each death became permanently out of reach and I had to progress with only stacking heads which would also trap me in the second to last spawn area causing me to have to brute force my way out every time. I loved the energy and concept behind this game, the art was fantastic, the style was creative and super cool, the core mechanic was incredibly fun and intuitive, the whole thing felt well polished, I expected to love it, but the gameplay just became so frustrating that it killed the experience for me. It took me roughly 45 minutes to complete and it feels like my eventual success had nothing to do with developing any skill and was only the result of me being stubborn enough to keep beating my head against a wall.

Again, I'm sorry to be so critical. I think this was an amazing idea and I think you're an excellent and creative dev who likely went a bit too ambitious with your concept and therefore didn't have time to fully refine the gameplay. I plan to watch future games you release because I think there's SO much potential here the execution just really didn't do it for me in the time you had.

Some other minor critiques are the lack of audio, the fact that the controls aren't displayed in-game (not a big deal since you have them on the page but it's still nice to have), the lack of a pause screen or any accessibility options (again, not strictly necessary but always nice to have in a jam), and I feel like the death mechanic doesn't really encapsulate the theme. Death is unavoidable but dying doesn't feel like it impacts the gameplay to the point of being a "new beginning" imho.

Overall I think this was an incredibly ambitious and awesome game concept and I suspect the scope wound up being a bit more than was possible for a week. Still mad impressive that you got it submitted in a playable state and it's always cool to see 100% custom assets. It also seems you did this solo as near as I can tell? And this appears to be your first game at least on itch. Considering all of those things the fact you created this at all is still mad impressive and in no way do I mean to insult you, only to give you feedback that might help your next jam. You got a follow from me and I can't wait to see what you make next.

Submitted

Really fresh mechanic, I liked it. But the absence of music is bad.

Submitted

Was I supposed to be doing this? :-) (see image) I think I'm losing my head!


Submitted

Great aesthetic and a really clever game mechanic. The controls are quite finnicky, a combination of sliding too much and what I'd guess is a rounded collision box on the heads. However, its fun to play, and simply an amazing game, so well done!

Submitted

nice game, I liked the art style and the game idea, my only issue was the head, it was easy to slip from it and sometimes. Good thing you added checkpoints I struggled passing the void area but thankfully I passed it 🙂.

Submitted

nice game, I liked the art style and the game idea, my only issue was the head, it was easy to slip from it and sometimes. Good thing you added checkpoints I struggled passing the void area but thankfully I passed it 🙂.

Submitted

Really cool artstyle. The concept and execution was really well done too :). My only advice would be that the head can at times be a bit slippery to stand on. Other than that great work!

Submitted

Really unique idea and mechanics! I really liked the art. I though the movement was a it to slippery, I would  land on my head and just slip off a lot, other than that I still had fun playing this, great game!

Submitted

liked the idea of throwing your head and using it!

Submitted (1 edit)

I liked the grahpics and the mechanics of throwing heads to create platforms to jump on. The movement was a bit slippery but if you had enougth speed it wasn't noticeable. Sometimes you couldn't jump if you were standing on a head, but overall great game ^^

Submitted

Like graphics and throwing heads, but movement is quite frustrating. Coyote time and better ground detection is what this game needs. I guess you propably used raycast, because we can stand on objects and has a little gap and then we can't jump and we are sliding. Overall like the concept and love pixelart, but coulnd't beat it.

Submitted

Very cool idea with the shoot from the head! XD

The style is also very impressive!

Submitted(+1)

Great Idea, love the art style !

The controls are not precise enough, aiming for the tiny heads  while sliding gets frustrating (maybe I'm just not a good enough gamer tho)

Submitted

Love the art style! And the idea of shooting off your head as  a platform I thought was really clever! A couple things I did notice:

- Sometimes I would slide of my platform heads?

- The platforming would feel a lot less punishing with some platforming staple mechanics like a coyote jump or a jump buffer! 

- I would sometimes die randomly after jumping.


Overall, great submission :)!