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A jam submission

Apocalypse AngelView game page

Submitted by Lerg Bwo
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Apocalypse Angel's itch.io page

Results

CriteriaRankScore*Raw Score
Engagement & General#14.1104.222
Gameplay#14.1104.222
Overall#23.5693.667
Graphics#33.5693.667
Audio#43.4613.556
Story#52.5962.667

Ranked from 9 ratings. Score is adjusted from raw score by the median number of ratings per game in the jam.

Engine
gamemaker studio

Team/Developer
lerg bwo

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Comments

Submitted(+1)

Really cool mechanic! Really difficult to use, especially at the game’s low resolution, but You’ve come up with some neat uses for it.

Submitted(+1)

This is a really well-made game overall. I would point out three things;

1. Grappling and hitting those electric grapple guys are hard enough without them also being electrified every five seconds. The electric platforms were *mostly* okay, but every other grapple room felt trolly.

2. In one of the already-more-frustrating rooms with a grapple-those-guys mechanic you can softlock after completing the room (respawning or leaving and re-entering the room doesn't spawn any mercy platform or respawn the enemies.)

3. This is a mechanically solid game and it's good to have to think about placement and even the directionality of an attack; it's very engaging overall, and kudos for that.

I'd love to play more of this if you're planning on a post-jam release.

Developer(+1)

thanks for the feedback!

yeah i dont want the electric enemies to feel trolly at all
i do think that they need to be telegraphed better for one
ive thought of some variations to fix the problem like having the timing inverted (on most of the time and a window to strike) and they dont turn on after theyre hooked 
there were also like 3 rooms that got cut that lead up to those particular rooms (after getting the grapple and before meeting the electric guys) so something like that wouldve hopefully smoothed the difficulty curve there a bit 
itll get fixed one way or another

Submitted(+2)

Well, I was pretty blown away by this game, and it's my favorite of the competition by far! After I started, I had to play it all the way through, and pulled off a victory! It certainly wasn't easy. I do have some feedback/criticisms though, so I'll mention them here.

First, what other people mentioned - it's a bit annoying to restart and die immediately because you're holding a direction. I like the fast restart & it makes it less of a problem, so I'm not sure I would get rid of that. To some extent you should be able to fix the problem with level design. Start the character off in an area with short ledges on the side so they can't run off immediately. 

I also had trouble with one electric floor room. The one where the different platforms are very out of sync was a bit too hard to adjust to. Most games let the player find a rhythm with mechanics like that, but this room couldn't really work that way.

It is very difficult and I would like to see a smoother difficulty curve, at least if the game becomes longer. There wasn't really a problem that made it hard, just the kind of difficulty I would expect in a hard precision platformer. By the way, is this inspired at all by Dispersio? It reminded me of it a lot.

There were quite a few things I really liked. First of all the controller support and fully featured start menu, that was great. Second was the amount of content. I couldn't believe how long the game was compared to others in the contest! I'm shocked you came up with that many rooms within a month.  The graphics were very good and the main song was very catchy. I really like how the enemies follow a color scheme, it made them stand out easily. I also like how the enemy attacks were telegraphed.  The first few times I died when grappling an electric enemy, I didn't understand why I died, but it became obvious because of the electric animation and the electric border on the player's corpse, so that was well done. I also really like that when you enter a room from below, you can't fall back down to the previous room. It was also nice to see the extra platforms to help you up if you reenter a room you've beaten.

One issue for me, it would be really nice to disable screen shake since I get motion sickness very easily. It wasn't as bad in this game as it is in others, but there are games I had to skip playing because of screen shake. It's also one of the easiest things to make optional. You probably have a function that basically says "shake the screen", so just wrap the whole function with "if screen shake is enabled" and put an option in the start menu to disable it.

Anyways, it was a really fun game and I didn't expect to see anything so professional and well designed in the competition. Great work!

Developer(+1)

thanks thats alot of great feedback, glad you liked it

my thoughts about the restart thing is to change the button to something like the grapple button instead of jump so restarting is more deliberate
havent played Dispersio but sounds like something ill need to check out
the difficulty is a tricky thing. i was hoping for was a smooth experience for the first 20-30 rooms and what comes after that is less curated for whoever wants to subject themselves to that but was running out of time and had to use what i had set up. but ive gotten some good feedback to work with now

would add a screen shake slider (really wanted to do a volume slider to) if i add an options menu but was focused on just getting it ready for the jam
also good job beating it!

Submitted(+1)

I tried some of your other itch games last night & can see that you've been working on some of these ideas for a while! I can see that the screen shake is actually toned down from previous games so that's nice. One of your older games was actually unplayable for me because of the shake. kafaildalf seemed slightly more severe than Apocalypse Angel too, although I was able to play that one. I can understand leaving features on the table because of the time limit. Like I said, I was shocked at how much content the game had considering the time limit.

Switching restart to the grapple button sounds like a good idea to me. I did forget to mention one minor thing, I think the "Press jump to restart" text would be better in the center of the screen. It's not a big deal since you learn how to restart early on, but there were a few times it took a couple seconds to figure out I was dead because the text was hard to spot.

Thanks again for the game! I'm following you on itch now, so I look forward to any revisions you have as well as your next game!

Developer(+1)

yeah i was told the screen shake was a bit much, i get motion sickness to but mostly from a lack of fov sliders not so much screen shake

kinda like to think you went chronologically to see the progression
the messenger made me think of the hit to jump.  in hollow knight, hitting an enemy also recharges your double jump (a lot of games use this mechanic actually) but it was used for combat and i did platforming game play because i like designing levels.  kafaldaf was a much more thought out implementation by using a flail as the weapon but people weren't resonating with it (being about pure platforming) so i wanted to make something action-y and the outer space theme helped a lot with implementing the new mechanics
probably should mention that the rooms are really quick to make (at least for this game)
was a busy month so i just worked on the game at a leisurely pace
and there are people who are way faster at game dev than me
it just takes a lot of practice
thank you for playing, its my pleasure

Submitted(+1)

I liked the hit to jump mechanic.  I got stuck in a couple places because I couldn't get it to strike in the direction I wanted, but the quick "try again" cycle kept me hooked to try over again more times than I care to admit.

I also liked how the level design and enemy placement became a puzzle to solve to get past an area.

The yellow platforms were a bit frustrating and respawning after a death sometimes lead to another death because I was still holding forward when I died and ran right off the platform when I respawned.  Maybe some sort of short break either when you die or after a respawn so it can register in your mind that you died?

Good job!  Very engaging...

Developer

will probably change the respawn button to the grapple button to help with that

the yellow platforms do need some work, or will be replaced with another mechanic for the most part
thanks for the feedback

Submitted(+1)

This game is really fun! I think that the hit to double-jump mechanic you put in and designed around is quite fun and challenging too! Very fun gameplay and controls as well, and game pad compatible! I like the hook as well but I got stuck not too far after I got it. Should have taken a screenshot but it is a screen where you come up from the bottom and there are 3 circle enemies at the top, each with one of the rocks/spikes that can kill you underneath them. I could not figure out how to get past this part! Very fun though, kudos!

Developer

thanks for checking it out!

the grapple is stopped by walls but it will just go through spikes so you can hook the enemies at the top of that room and letting go before hitting the spikes to navigate it
that makes me rethink how the grapple gets introduced
thanks thats good feedback
ill just warn you in case you attempt it: you can get stuck if you take the bottom exit of that room because of an issue i forgot to fix

(+1)

Awesome concept with the jump/attack chaining, etc. Really well thought out and executed!

I did find that the platforms that turn yellow and hurt you were frustrating to predict - I wished they would change to a warning color for a second before they become lethal so that you could read the room better. 

Developer

thanks for playing!

yeah thats was something i was worried about
i did try that and they do get brighter before turning on
interestingly enough it doesn't help, you have to internalise the timing, its not really a thing you react to
i think having a progress bar/countdown on the platforms might for help learning the timing but idk its tricky