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Spartan Ascent's itch.io pageResults
| Criteria | Rank | Score* | Raw Score |
| Overall | #1373 | 3.532 | 3.532 |
| Enjoyment | #1401 | 3.381 | 3.381 |
| Style | #1501 | 3.643 | 3.643 |
| Creativity | #1551 | 3.571 | 3.571 |
Ranked from 42 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?
Scale objects in the world to help the player climb to the top.
Development Time
96 hours
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Comments
One of my favorite games of the Jam so far. A puzzle game by someone who really knows puzzle game design. A very simple mechanic, a great response to the theme, and it's implemented very creatively across lots of puzzles. Your auto-walking approach is similar to the one in my game, but your game feels more lively and faster paced. Excellent game.
very nice pixel art, very solid platformer! Nice how you have to make the pink columns bigger and smaller and time it right. Like the game very much.
Wow, what a great puzzle game! You took a relatively simple mechanic, but iterated and expanded on it in multiple ways to continually grow the puzzles' complexity! I found the timing of some of the jumps to get a bit too unforgiving after the pillars got 3 stages, though. But overall, this is some truly exceptional puzzle design! Great work!
A simple mechanic explored in so many creative ways, this is how it’s done!
It might be a bit too difficult towards the end, though.
Well done game! Explores the pillar scaling mechanic in a good variety of ways. Even if it’s relatively a simple thing, just seeing the horizontal pillars for the first time I found cool.
I do think some of the later levels were a bit too mechanically challenging, though. They made great use of the mechanics but their difficulty could perhaps be toned back a bit, perhaps by adding more frequent checkpoints.
Besides that criticism, though, an extremely well made game! Great job!
Cute and quite polished, though I had to drop because it got too hard too fast. Would be nice at least if the camera was locked in each puzzle room and would zoom out to show the whole room, so you're not blind to what's two moves ahead in some cases like the room I quit on ascending up a couple pillars to a very high height while bouncing back and forth.
I had a real fun playing with this game. The penalty for messing up was juuuuuust on the brink of being annoying, but luckily it doesn't take too long to get back into place. Otherwise I loved the world layout and puzzle design! Nice work!
Glad you had fun. Yea we tried to not make it rage game but it's still pretty hard :) The changes made to the camera should help, we'll upload after the jam.
The artsytle looks great and the gameplay mechanics are interesting but there are some issues that made me stop playing the game (unrelated to that when I tried playing the game multiple times the number of coins was not reset): there is a bug that made me respawn in the spikes and couldn't get out :( I kept dying and my only option was to quit the game (It happened in a level with stairs made of 3 pillar that you expand once to go from left to right and twice to go right to left). Also the camera movement is a bit weird, it should either stay locked in "levels" or always follow the player but not a mix of the 2 (it could also "snap" to fixed positions within a level but its like dividing the level in sub-levels). the camera movement is really annoying in the level mentioned before (the one where I got locked in the spikes) because you have to click on a pillar to activate it, and when you're too fast and place your mouse on the pillar before the player arrives, when it does arrive the camera move and the mouse is not placed correctly. It is frustrating to control, especially on a 3-stages pillar that is only on stage 2. I think that would be solved with a fixed camera (and some "snap" points across the level for big levels) and/or making the hitbox of the pillars way bigger, it would improve the gameplay experience. Nice game though, I tried to collect all the coins :)
I have just fixed the coin counter not resetting. We fixed the bug with respawning in the spikes, and have changed every camera to be stationary (apart from level transition areas without jumping). We have thought about making the hitbox for pillars larger, however that causes us to run into issues with adjacent pillars. Hopefully the stationary camera will be enough. Thanks for your feedback!
Wow you guys are fast ! For the hit box I didn't think about the case of adjacent pillars, but the stationary camera will probably be enough anyways.
Your level design is really polished, each time you can understand what you have to do and it's still challenging in the realisation. I'm not found of coins barely visible behind pillars, but it's personnal. The game is really polished, congrats !
Absolutely loved this entry! It was fun to play, polished, and clever. The puzzles were also well designed. Really, I can’t think of anything to suggest. Had a blast!
my goodness this is one good entry! I instantly got hooked and got the grasp of the gameplay
I don't have a lot of feeback besides maybe splitting the controls into keyboard->jump and click->interact. I don't really know if this would make it better but at times I felt like my mind couldn't deal with the mouse being the two mechanics in parallel. The one other nit pick would be that the clickable area of the objects may (and I mean just may barely) be a bit better if it were ever-so-slightly bigger so it's a bit more forgiving, especially in sections where the camera moves. You already added a bit of coyote time which is oh my god so highly appreciated, so this would be of similar nature
All in all, great submission and it for sure deserves a high spot! well done!
Hey, not the developer, but you could actually jump with the space bar!
holy crap did I miss it in the tutorial? If I did, I feel so dumb lol
Yes, you can press spacebar or right click to jump. The areas with moving cameras are now stationary and zoomed out. We realised in areas where the camera moves (especially vertically), it's generally harder to be accurate with the mouse. We will upload a new build after the jam. Thank you for playing!
THIS IS SPARTAAAA!!! Awesome pixel art style! The puzzles are amazing! Nice take on the theme! Awesome job!
This deserves more love! The Art, puzzle design and well polished core mechanic were all really well done. Great entry :)
Very fun game! I'm surprised its not rated more. It felt like a real video game just without polish. You all are doing very well!
Very fun game! I'm surprised its not rated more. It felt like a real video game just without polish. You all are doing very well!
Really nice game!
Very interesting idea! I think the smartest design decision on display here is the auto-movement of the player, placing the mechanical focus of the game on manipulating the size of the pillars. I think the inclusion of a "freeze time" feature would grant players the time they need to think about the solutions to these puzzles, as right now it can be difficult to think while also accounting for the main character's changing position. Great work overall!
thanks for the feedback and for playing. Some sort of slowing time would have been useful definitely. The player can always pause to think but it’s not a very robust solution.
I like the art style and the concept very much. Cute music, too!
Nice game, but it isn't understandable that you have to leave the screen at first. It needs some indicators where you can leave the screen. And it can become frustrating at times when you fail and have to wait until the spartan has run a circle. Maybe a time warp or an option to turn the spartan around would have helped with that. But other than that it is a great game I enjoyed quite a bit :) Also the graphics remind me of old DOS-games, which is a plus!
we appreciate the feedback thanks! We definitely could make where the player is meant to go a bit clearer. Did you play on a conventional 16:9 monitor in full screen however? Because we know the camera messes up and you can’t see as much of the environment if not. We’ve fixed it and will upload the fixed version when the jam is over.
We have just added a glow effect at the exit point for each level! Hope this helps with indicating where the player needs to go :D
DUDE! This is EPIC! I've seen games like this and this one is by far the best looking one! Player moving faster would be nice though!