Congratulations on making this game !
I've played your game during a live that you can watch here :
The live is timestamped so you can go directly to your game.
I hope the feedback and live reactions will be useful. Keep it up !
Play game
Aztec's itch.io pageResults
| Criteria | Rank | Score* | Raw Score |
| Graphics | #5 | 4.641 | 4.641 |
| Overall | #11 | 4.353 | 4.353 |
| Audio | #15 | 4.185 | 4.185 |
| Authenticity (use of resolution) | #35 | 4.728 | 4.728 |
| Gameplay | #43 | 3.859 | 3.859 |
Ranked from 92 ratings. Score is adjusted from raw score by the median number of ratings per game in the jam.
Did you work in a team?
2 Members, @SlainteES handing gfx code and some SFX and @vavmusicmagic who worked in the music tracks and SFX as well. It was fun, but stressful... this was a very ambitiuous project.
Was the resolution a challenge?
Animating fluently in a "realistic" way a sprite of 10x13 proved a big challenge, but the extra time and effort put into it paid off... Guatemoc is a pleasure to control and watch while he traverses the temple
What did you learn?
From the coding perspective the learnings are Platformers are incredibly harder than expected (and the big refactor required by this code is proof of it), from the music/sfx perspective... first time for @vavmusicmagic on pico8 sound so it was a brand new experience.
Comments
2 years ago(+1)
Thank you for the full-lenght play and sorry for that couple of bugs. The random waiting/not waiting for checkpoints is a bug I am trying to identify, falling through the floor was quite something I did not expect, collisions are suposedly some the most solid cod areas in the game… Dying while climbing also shocked me a bit… but could be a race condition… the hit puts you “off the ladder” but if you are pressing a direction and I am checking that after the hit but before the next frame calculation you reattach to the ladder and chaos starts…
I’d say the game plays much beter on keyboard (you have more precise control on the jump) but also I have to refine jumping mechanics after all the commments in the jam.
Thank you very very much for the effort of showing all our games
2 years ago (+1)
Thank you for giving it a try! Point taken… seems retro platforming is not a thing anymore :P I will revisit controls post-jam, not sure I will drastically change it to mario-like platforming, but I will try to make things better keeping the spirit ;)
Anyway thank you for the feedback!
2 years ago(+1)
Thank you very much for playing and the feedback. Movement needs some polishing, that’s true… will do a full pass over all suggestions post-jam.
Thank you for playing! Cinematic Jump mechanics are in both ends of the spectrum… some ppl (me included I’m afraid) love them and some others hate them and are more into “air-control” platforming. My goal with those in this game was to run away from a speedrunning experience and turn the game into a slower and consciuous exploration experience. I just hope the experience, globally, was not that bad.
2 years ago(+1)
Hey, thank you for playing! Yep, contrast and easily identifying what’s an interesting thing and what is an enemy was a bit complex in your game due to the big amount of “individuals” in the mob following you sharing space and color range with pickups. I don’t have that big an issue in terms of number of clashing elements, but also I tried pickups to have a distinctive set of colors. Great to hear your experience using the controller was good, frankly I did not even run the game once on gamepad, used the keys during all dev process :P
2 years ago(+1)
Thank you for playing! Jump needs some time to master, but once you get it the challenge is dropping quite a few full points in dificulty. Glad you liked the experience!
2 years ago(+1)
Thank you for playing it. Glad you found it enjoyable. I would have loved an extra week to increase map space and polish a lot of things, but seems it did not require that much ironing in the end given your comments. Thank you very much!
2 years ago(+1)
Thnx for playing and the comments! Seems a lot of you guys are having trouble with the cinematic style… too bad it was the original idea i had in mind then :P Now joking… jumping and collisions definetly need some fine tunning, but I won’t be dropping the cinematic style over full mario-style air control.
Animations ate a lot of the available time (particularly death animation… but seems it paid off ;)
Totally allowing any feedback… how are you supposed to make things better if not hearing other ppl thoughts on them? Some fine tunning on the level can help for sure, and moving for a 2 state jump mechanic to a 3 staty probably will help as well… now you have “no landing” or “heavy landing”… I am thinnking on adding a “soft landing” with lower recovery time and keeping part of the horizontal momentum (maybe a roll landing?), also grading a bit initial boost so the minimal length of a jump is reduced significantly… Still needing to go through many things before fixing on those, but I keep them in the high part of the list. thnx for the feedback!
Thank you for playing it and the feedback… Jumping is one of the things that will require fine tunning post-jam, it can be really tricky on tight jumps. I would have loved a couple more weeks to balance and heavy test everything before the end of jam :P (as probably everyone else participating)
Not too sure on wyhat you mean with the small walls idea… having walls rather than thin posts across a dangerous pit? Looks not so dangerous :P if that’s the actual suggestion
Wow, that was a lenghty one :) Thank for playing the game and taking the time for such a big feedback post. In order:
- Thanx for the comments on the art, this part ate a lot of my time for this entry
- Mirrors: Agreed after all the comments… they are in the “to be fixed” list, and yes, you can finish the game on a single mirror time slot, so in order to make things challenging that needs to go dow, but with the actual number of mirrors it’s non-relevant.
- Collisions: hitbox is 8px wide… probably should be trimmed to 6 to match more the actual “build” of the sprite… gave it some testing at the beginning of the development but some issues detecting collisions on ladders and having you “falling through” put that in the waiting list and honestly I never came back to it
- Jump style: I wanted something that was closer to real jump physics and not to Mario the jumping wonder… this alings better with the dangerous exploration requiring you to stop and think how to go through a particular tight spot (or at least that was my hope)
- Map/level design: The ideal end-goal is having a considerably bigger map with much more puzzling and backtracking… lever A frees object at X, or activates ladder at Y that you need to go back to pick key for door N the you need to locate and so on… Time and pico8 base constrains did not allow for this. Doors potentially are another good mechanic and can separate/extend the map greatly (going multicart)
- The future: I need a big code clean-up and refactor… first solid platformer ever and a lot of rushed decisions due to jam time window limitations ruined a lot of things. With the platforming states solved, the ladders fixed and some of the fine tunning needed in other aspects I want to move to native pico resolution (128x128 and the game art really works great at the resolution but requires a tad bigger map for sure) I want to make it into a big / long game… including intro/outro animated seqquences and all.
Again, thnx for playing and the great feedback
Mirrors: "you can finish the game on a single mirror time slot," Now this gave me the idea I shared in the Discord. I think you could make it so that there is a checkpoint at the skull bench and when you arrive, it's a checkpoint and then every time you drop off a skull it's a checkpoint. Then you could drastically reduce the time that the Mirrors will save you at death, and if the tie runs out before the player dies (hopefully it typically runs out on their way back through the challenge a second time to return to the mirror) then they'll die and lose any gems and such that they had acquired since the last skull was placed. You could expand this idea to a full game as well, but I'd have to see how the game is formatted to be able to give additional help for that.
Collisions: "[...] probably should be trimmed [...] some issues detecting collisions on ladders" I think you should do a hidden player mask that is larger for the ladders as there was multiple times that I was unable to go up or go down them when I expected to grab them easily. Though I think it was you who was saying in the jam discord that the trouble with ladders is that everyone expects them to "just work" but everyone expects them to work differently. I am definitely in agreement with that sentiment, even if it wasn't you that said that. Then you could make the player hitbox smaller without issue.
Jump style: "I wanted something that was closer to real jump physics" I figured this was the case, and I respect your decision to do it this way. that's absolutely a core part of the experience and if it was different, the jumps would've been designed differently. I'm partial to games like Hollow knight where i have a lot of control over the jumps, so that's part of what's going on here. It is a bit weird that my game is the opposite. you can move left and right while jumping with exact same speed and control as when you're on the ground BUT your jump height is fixed. isn't that funny?
Map/level design: Loving this part of your response. "pico8 base constrains did not allow for this." It's interesting that in the next section you say you're going to stay within pico 8 after reading this. "going multicart" Do you mean like multiple different Pico 8 game carts?
The future: absolutely ambitious and I love it. Don't be afraid to put it down for later to go and work on other stuff. Coming back to an idea is always an option :)
2 years ago(+1)
Interesting ideas about the mirrors… will need to digest thigs a bit but adding those to the design bench, thnx!
Collisions need fine tuning, once they are fixed and I kind of make heas or tails on the ladders we’ll see :P
Curious how everyone makes their own ideas on how jumping should work, all them valid, all them different. I was aiming for this kind of jump and works for my expectations ;)
Multicarting allows you to separate things in up to 16 carts in different ways… transferring control from one to the other, using the secondary carts just as data stores… Actually the game is using 2 carts already as I pushed some compressed data initialization in a companion cart. So yes, for now it will be PICO-8… for now… If this goes too far out of what’s possible I might switch to maybe love2D as that’s a supossedly easy port from pico.
And for the future, I want to really nail this one :) I will move back to complete a few stray bits around XOR (completing the music and the level editor) and probably get back to this.
2 years ago(+1)
Thnx for playing! jump length is not fixed :) depends on jump button press-time It just lacks air control
2 years ago(+1)
glad you liked the music! first time tracking with pico 8 so I hope to keep learning and growing. it was very nice of SlainteES to let me tag along!
2 years ago(+1)
Thank you for playing and the feedback. a part (a big one…) of me is quite an obsessive perfectionist and you don’t really want to know how much time went into those animations moving 1px here, one there, rechecking… But I think the effort paid off… even if it’s just for the visuals. Really happy how well such a small character gained a personality and fluid flow in the development process.
The fadeout sequence sure could benefit from some speeding up… it’s not a performance issue but an arbitrary design decision on how many frames to wait betwn palette rotations and wait until all them are done… so quite an easy fix.
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