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A jam submission

Belly Of The Beast DemoView game page

Third place for Platformer Challenge #4
Submitted by Ng Kai Yan — 3 days, 9 hours before the deadline
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Belly Of The Beast Demo's itch.io page

Results

CriteriaRankScore*Raw Score
Art / Graphics#164.0004.000
Sound/Music#193.8573.857
Overall Fun#223.8573.857
Controls / UI#382.7142.714

Ranked from 7 ratings. Score is adjusted from raw score by the median number of ratings per game in the jam.

If you have competed before, how has your game changed?
Improved on and added new mechanics, levels and an enemy.

Game Genre

Action

Shooter | Platformer | Slasher | Beat em Up | Base Defense | Survival | Racing

Genre #2

None

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Comments

Hello! Welcome to Feedback Quest 5! It's nice to meet you! My name's Hythrain. I'm part of the FQ team and a hobbystreamer. I'm writing this review live after having played your game.

I find the concept of this game interesting, though right now I do feel parts of it need a lot of work. Hopefully my feedback will give some indications. 

The first issue I ran across was how unresponsive jumping could be at times. Usually, jumping was okay. However, there were times where I'd press jump and either get a weak jump that led me to my death or I didn't jump at all. Given how important being able to jump is to a platformer, this is the first thing that should be dealt with. Whether in the middle of the platform or on an edge, the player should be able to jump. Speaking of jumping, if you're running across a wall and you jump over and over, the height gained isn't always the max height despite holding the jump button in full.

The next issue was the wind blowing you back when you're running over the jaws. Not only is this wind excessively powerful if you stop moving, it works well beyond the limits of area. Meanwhile, if you jump before going over the jaws you can skip half of it. I also had an issue when I got to the area with three sets of jaws all together where I was being affected by multiple winds at once.

What I would recommend is keeping the wind active at all times but it only affects the player once they're in the jaw area. In addition, if the player is blown off the jaws they should just stop immediately instead of being sent flying back. Making these changes would fix every issue I saw with this mechanic.

Next, sliding along the wall. While it's an interesting idea to make sliding on the wall trigger the wind up, I can also see this being very limiting or, even worse, annoying players. In some places, the player can kill themselves if they accidentally slide on a wall and get pushed up into spikes or some other obstacle (this happened to me at the demo's end, where I slide on the wall briefly while getting the 11th strawberry and wind pushed me up into the constricting area). Instead, I'd say disconnect the wind from sliding and instead just make those winds exist all the time (and any challenges for berries in them should be about getting it the first time. You miss? You gotta start the screen over). You could then use sliding down walls as a mechanic for getting around when going down and would work well with the axe the player gets at the very end.

Another issue is the sliding and the saliva. When you slide on the saliva, it makes you slide VERY far. If you end up colliding with a wall and then try to jump, you'll just have a bad time. Similarly, if the saliva is on a set of jaws or the end of the jaws, you'll have a bad time as you can't get across. Attempting to slide will push you back, jumping won't work and you lose your momentum from running on the saliva. What I would recommend to fix all of this is give the slide a set movement distance. The player slides, they move a set amount. This amount is higher when on saliva. This way, you can directly control how far the player can slide.

The last part I want to comment on from the game itself was the constricting area. You clearly know how to make animated walls closing and opening, as you have this happening for the jaws. This needs to happen with the constricting area too. It looks awful right now with the snapping open and close.

I also want to cover one general is in regards to controls. A good platformer should have tight controls, aka responsive and easy to judge. Jumping can still be floaty like how you're doing it, so long as movement is quick, jumping is immediate and the player can easily predict how things will go. If I'm right, you're using a physics engine for this rather than manual inputs. While I know the physics engine can help with stuff, I would recommend trying to avoid it for a 2D platformer. It makes controls less tight and makes artificial difficulty for the player.

That's all from me. If you want the VOD, I can share it when it's uploaded to my YouTube.

Submitted

Excellent charming graphics, great music to support them, original idea with the whole "you get eaten by giant wolf and then must survive their digestive tract that's filled with teeth"!

But as others pointed out, the mechanics/difficulty need some polishing, really hard to predict the hazards.

(+1)

Pros

Nick: Great music, cool premise, lots of potential to expand on the idea.

Ryan: Beautiful art, beautiful, beautiful, beautiful boy. DO NOT SAY THAT. Animations look great.

Cons

Nick: Floaty platform physics, wind mechanic more frustrating than fun. Saliva pursuit needs tuning to feel fair/functional as intended.

Ryan: Saliva throw and spike timer seem random and not set to a particular clock or position.

Wishes

Nick: My number one wish is some kind of forward dash so it feels i have more direct agency to combat the wind mechanic.

Ryan: More vertical wind sections

Developer

Thank you so much, Nick and Ryan, for your detailed review! Much appreciated!

Submitted(+1)

This art style is absolutely gorgeous. It's clear you've put some real work in here, and I really want to see more.


The controls need a lot of polish unfortunately. The jump feels super floaty, and it loses momentum if you're up against a wall when you jump, meaning I couldn't clear small changes in elevation sometimes causing me to die. I would look into GMTK's tutorials regarding what makes a jump feel good. It would definitely help you

The axe climb feels a bit janky. I think you'd be better off only having the axe stick you to walls, and allowing the player to jump from there similar to wall jumps in a Mario game for example.

With the slime chase, I think you could improve the sequence if instead of having the slime balls on a timer you had specific parts of the level that just before the player reaches them gets slimed, that way you don't have impossible scenarios where a breeze blows the player across the slime into a closing mouth. Can't wait for the slime to dissolve or you'll get eaten by the slime, can't go forward or you'll die to the mouth trap

Also, I would really appreciate a small visual queue just before the spikes emerge from the floor, that way I know when to time my jumps if the spikes come on screen while they're in the floor cuz then I can't just use timing since I don't know how far into the sequence they are.

Regarding dialogue, all the keys for the controls are bound to left handed keys (WASD, Space, and F), so having to reach my right hand to press the enter key feels very awkward. Would recommend changing advance dialogue to space

One last thing, with the music, the music for the chase sequence is wonderful, but while it's thematically appropriate, the short loop in the rest of the level gets tiresome after a while. It's too short and starts to slowly drive you mad after a few deaths


I really can't wait to see how this improves. The art style is amazing, and with polish I'm sure the rest will be too

Developer

Thank you so much for your detailed feedback as well as suggestions! I will look into improving the controls and gameplay.