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A jam submission

Speed It Up!View game page

Platformer with a twist, objects speed up together with you
Submitted by knox777 — 4 hours, 57 minutes before the deadline
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Speed It Up!'s itch.io page

Results

CriteriaRankScore*Raw Score
Graphics#123.2313.231
Overall#192.7312.731
Sound#202.6922.692
Gameplay#242.5382.538
Mood#272.4622.462

Ranked from 13 ratings. Score is adjusted from raw score by the median number of ratings per game in the jam.

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Comments

Submitted

it seems I'm having a similar issue to what I experienced playing River- for some reason (Mac? new Love?) jumps on my machine are waaaay smaller than they should be. I can't jump over the first step, unfortunately

Developer (1 edit)

Thank you for reporting the bug! Can you compare your jump to the jump in the gif below and let me know how much smaller your jump is (50% smaller, 25% smaller)? Thanks

Submitted

it's more or less 20% of that jump 

Developer (1 edit)

I looked into the code and I can't find anything thing that can cause jump to go smaller. I tried older version of Love2d (ver10.2) and it works fine. Linux also has no issue on jumping. Seems like an issue on Mac only, and unfortunately I do not have a Mac to test it :(

But feel free to look into the source code and see if you can find the issue. The section that controls the jump is in between line 361 and line 380 in PlayState.lua. It is a tiny section of code.

Edit: Released a possible fix! :)

Developer

I think I might have found the issue, I have uploaded an additional file "Speed it up.love (Fix for jumping issue on Mac)".
Can you try that and let me know if the issue still exists? Thanks :)

Submitted

yup, it works :)

Developer (1 edit)

Yeah nice! The gravity is not based on delta time, don’t know how I missed that.

Since vsync is on, for people who have a 60hz monitor, game will run at 60fps and gravity will be applied around 60 times per second. But I guess either you have a higher refresh rate monitor or somehow your game run higher than 60fps, which caused the gravity being applied to the character way more that it should be.

Submitted

As an experienced Mario player I knew I could walk up the game screen and have a shortcut :D One thing I noticed is either players collision from left side or the spikes from right side is shorter so I was able to get passed after the second checkpoint.

Developer(+1)

Nice! Not sure if people will discover that shortcut but you did it! I am still not sure if I should have included the shortcut because it allows player to skip the most difficult part of the level. And yes, the collision can be improved (which will be done in a future update).

Submitted(+1)

I finally completed this game. Great idea of speed-ups of time! Nice game!

But I feel character collision is too large contrary to apparent, and some traps are unreasonable.

Developer

Thank you! I will definitely fix the collision and some of the trap difficulty after the game jam is over.

Submitted(+1)

One of those games that makes me wanna throw my keyboard out of my window :) and combined with this happy tune.

But seriously, it's interesting game and not  frustrating. Very hard and unforgiving though.

Developer

Haha, thanks! This game was even harder initially because the first version does not have any checkpoint. I wasn't able to complete it, so I had to add some checkpoints.

Submitted(+1)

The mechanic of sprinting speeding the obstacles up sounded really cool at first, as it adds choice to something that in a lot of games (e.g. Mario) you would rather constantly be using. However, it doesn't feel very well executed, mostly because I was never sure whether I should speed up or not - you might know as developer, but as a player there was no way to figure it out. Combined with the fact that every challenge seemed to need frame and/or pixel perfect actions and it ended up being more of a game of luck (holding left/right and seeing if I made it through). I think this would work better with more open challenges with combinations of different obstacles - maybe some could slow down when you speed up instead.

Developer

Absolutely, those are some really great points! Currently, most stages only has one solution, it ended up being a "rinse and repeat until you find the right solution" type of game.  Once you know the trick it becomes really easy, I think this also essentially eliminate the "skill"  element in my game that many great platformer has.

The fact that I know all the solutions to clear the  stages has made me underestimated how hard the game is. That is definitely something I need to keep in mind next time while developing.

I think I can improve this by making levels with multiple solutions and perhaps adding some shortcuts that only can be done via manipulation of Speeding Up (for people who wanted the challenge and hopefully player will feel satisfied as well when they find a shortcut by themself). I also need to find ways to make it more obvious when to speed up/slow down, but that is something really hard to balance IMO. If it is too obvious, it will reduce the difficulty, and if it is not obvious, it can becomes very frustrating. Lot of things to consider, making a platformer is so much harder than I anticipated.

Thank you for your thought-provoking feedback! 

Submitted

This talk by Matt Thorson on the level design of Celeste has some quite interesting points that I think might help. Focus more on "stories" as he says, rather than each challenge being a puzzle with a single solution.

Developer

Oh nice! Definitely gonna watch that. And I really need to start playing Celeste as well, been on my backlog for quite some time now haha.

Submitted

what a hard game

Developer

Yup, I will release some update post-jam to address this :)

Submitted(+1)

Decent game; I like the art style, the blocky, monochrome aesthetic is really nice.
The difficulty ramp needs to be revamped though, making it a bit easier in the beginning.
You should also consider making the hitboxes for the hazards smaller; at the moment, the collision feels a bit unfair, as you're able to die without the player sprite even overlapping the graphics of a given hazard.
I love how speeding up the game increases your momentum, allowing you to traverse larger gaps; it's quite creative, and leads to a lot of interesting level design opportunities.

Developer

Yes, the difficulty need to be changed, 100% agree on that.


The hit box is slightly bigger than the sprite art (due to the empty space on the sprite), I will have to go back and make a custom smaller hitbox for the hazard. I am also thinking of changing the hitbox of the player to be slightly smaller so that the game is more forgiving.

Thank you for the feedback!

Submitted(+1)

Waaayyy too hard right out the gate. I'm not given time to learn the mechanic before being presented with a literal wall I have to get past. The second puzzle on the other hand gives you a more controlled environment to see how the speed effects your own movement in a tangible and clear way.

I think the spikes that sink and rise would be more fair if we could see them embedded in the ground, or get some kind of telegraphing that they're about to come back up since the moment they're visible they're lethal.

Graphics look good! You get a lot of mileage out of that monochrome style.  Overall I found the game kind of frustrating but I'm not really that into precision platformers.

Developer

Thanks for the great feedback! I appreciate it a lot!  :)
And I agree with you that the first stage is way too hard, that stage was initially used by me to test the collision, movement, tile etc. I was gonna move that stage to further back but I didn't do it due to the time constraint.

Interestingly, the first version of the spike was actually embedded in the ground, but it looks kinda ugly since all I did was to render the spike on top of the tile. I might actually go back and revert the change due to your feedback. 

Thanks once again!

Submitted(+1)

Maybe there's a happy medium? Maybe display a timer or some indication that a spike is about to be deployed?

Developer (2 edits)

Great idea! So maybe like a traffic light will work too? red while the spike is exposed, green when it is hidden in the ground and yellow when it is about to deployed.

Edit: Oh well, just realized that kinda break the monochrome style. Timer will work too, but I felt like the area with a lot of spikes/hazard will have a ton of timer, making the screen looks kinda hectic? Will have to try it out and see if it looks good.