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Microvania's itch.io pageResults
| Criteria | Rank | Score* | Raw Score |
| Design | #1 | 4.467 | 4.467 |
| Enjoyment | #4 | 4.133 | 4.133 |
| Presentation | #4 | 4.333 | 4.333 |
| Overall | #7 | 4.067 | 4.067 |
| Metroidvania | #32 | 3.333 | 3.333 |
Ranked from 15 ratings. Score is adjusted from raw score by the median number of ratings per game in the jam.
Engine
Unity
Team/Developer
Keydrop
External assets
None
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Comments
A nicely consistent experience with some nice design principles.
PROS:
CRITIQUE:
One of the best games in all game jams. I truly like it!
Overall this is a vey polished game jam entry and pretty fun to play. It's obvious that a lot of care went into it. The visuals are neat and cohesive and the controls are smooth (though I did have issues with double jump in one room in particular, see below). Sound effects are fitting. I thought the music with the warping lo-fi filter was a nice touch. I hung around in the level select to hear the full track. Nice. The level music maybe could use a bit more attention though.
Unfortunately, I ran into what seems like a soft lock. The switch here only gave me one shot and didn't reset after the block got destroyed. After a while I decided to try exiting and re-entering the level, and that fixed it. Weirdly, when I returned the switch reset after failed attempts like intended.
I also want to point out this room, which feels quite a bit more difficult and kind of unfair compared to the other challenges. I almost gave up here, as I felt like my double jumps weren't registering quick enough to make this jump:
I did notice some of the other minor things that other players picked up on: blocks not quite setting into place, an odd collision at one point, etc. I also noticed there were a couple places where the camera was not following properly. But really, these were minor nitpicks in an otherwise well-executed game. Honestly, it's a triumph. Well done.
Super solid game! The amount of mechanics you guys were able to cram and here are amazing! I also really dig the art a lot. I went for a similar 1-bit with a little extra color splashed in aesthetic on my game but you guys pulled it off way better than me. Also really liked the attention to detail in the design of the camera. It was cool how it focused on different areas depending on which area you were in. Did you guys do this with cinemachine? I unfortunately got stuck in the level that introduced swimming and couldn't figure out how to finish it. I wouldn't take this as a knock to your level design though. Even though I love metroidvanias I get stuck in them very often even in ones made by AAA teams.
One very small critique. I think overall the sfx were incredible and especially liked the walking sound one. But I found it slightly odd that the walking sound was heavily reverbed and the jump sound was completely dry. Also the jump sound seemed to cancel out the reverb tail on the walking sound. If you use playoneshot instead of play it shouldn't do this. Either way obviously a super minute critique on any game especially a jam game, but I figured it would be super quick to change if you guys decide to work on the game further and it in no way will effect my rating. Really good job on your game!
Overall a great game!
The controls, the platforming, the art style everything works together quite well.
The only thing I’d say is that the game doesn’t have much of a Metroidvania feeling, in part because of a lack of other living things in the worlds, and because each level feels much more like a puzzle than a place.
Thanks for playing! Interesting comment on the metroidvania feeling. For us, the biggest defining factor for a metroidvania is a non-linear gameplay loop with ability gated progression. What we did here to play around with the formula was compress this loop into smaller stages, a la wario land 3, with some world-level changes as you progress such as the gravity ability switch and the conveyors. Hence why you might have gotten that puzzle feeling!
Fair enough.
Like I said, though, there’s also the lack of other living (or, sentient) things that’s at play too. Like, at least in all of the classic entries in the MetroidVania style that I’m aware of, there’s a shared vibe of the levels and layouts to have a sense of lived-in-ness. Different titles get there in different ways, respawning enemies, bits of environmental storytelling, or littering audiologs or scans around a map.
Especially because the puzzle elements tended to get reset on a per-stage basis, they almost felt more like powerups than upgrades.
Speaking of the conveyors specifically: That reminded me of Super Mario World (SNES) and the switch palaces, heh.
It is interesting to see how playing with the formalisms of a game changes the feeling of it.
I loved this game! The artwork, the backgrounds, the smooth player controller, the level design, the music, the fun storyline -- all excellent. The sound effects were also really awesome and impressive. The mechanics all worked really nicely and it had some great challenges. I felt the NES Mario and MegaMan vibes, but you guys made something your own. I played to the end and really had fun -- A+.
A few minor polishing points: (1) in the first world, with regard to the platforms with spikes that run on the cable, when I jumped on the ones with spikes facing downward, there was sometimes a stickiness to the platform, where I'd push the key to jump off, and the jump sound effect would play, but the player didn't jump. (2) At the point in the attached image, there's something going on with the collider on the wall where I can't jump to full height unless I move away from the wall. (3) In the final scene, the little boxes sometimes wouldn't fall off the conveyor belts and into the little space, so I had to reverse gravity and then reverse it again to get them to fall into place.
Again, minor points in an excellent game, which is all the more impressive given that you guys made everything. Nice work!
Hey thanks for playing! We spent a lot of time trying to get the feel of everything right so glad it worked out. Thanks for finding those polish points too, we'll hopefully get the time to do a quick post-jam update to address them.
Just a quick note, that stage with the gravity + boxes isn't actually the last, so you might be able to backtract after pressing the gravity switch for the real final level.
I went back and played again to check, and I had just misspoken in my prior comment calling that the "final scene." I had played to the end last time. Playing it again made me realize that I had taken a very lucky direct route on the final stage, it's actually quite a labyrinth. I did experience some of the same bug I mentioned earlier, this time with the two small platforms that pop and down from under the spikes -- I tried to jump from one to the other, and it played the "jump" sound when I pressed the spacebar, but didn't jump. It started to feel impassible but after many tries I got it. I suspect the player and moving platform are sometimes not becoming un-parented on jump for some reason. Anyway, I had fun again and discovered some new layers to this game -- nice job!
Hey thanks for playing it again! Yeah i designed that last stage to have about 3-4 different ways to the end, but you'll generally be guided along by whatever the last new ability you got was so you dont get too (hopefully) lost.
Thanks for letting me know about the platforms - we did an entirely physics based solution for that instead of parenting since we enforced a lot more control over the rigidbody than would be typical in order to get tighter controls for the main character.
Unfortunately it seems like a tweak we made to our system later on added that little "bump" at the top of the platforms movement resulting in you technically not being grounded for a split second and therefore not able to jump. Will definitely look into it for a post jam update!
The water moving spikes somewhat reminds me of Ori.
I really like the 1 bit art into a colored background, it just looks cool to me.
As for the sfx and music. I might have muted my laptop on accident.
The level design is perfect.
This game is pretty polished :D
Oh wait, I almost forgot, I found a bug, where when you finished the game, when you play it again, you will acquire the early power-ups (move both and jump) and you will be able to go left of the conveyor belt, plummeting you down into infinity and beyond :P
Hey thanks for playing! For the playthroughs for bug testing we always stopped when we reached the end and never actually checked if the pseudo "new game plus" had problems, which is now becoming clear haha.
This is so well made ^^ I got a bit lost on the second last level but that's just me being dumb and not that big of a deal.
Overall I never had any problems with the puzzles, they seemed just the right amount of challenge, and the mechanics work well and are intuitive to use with the puzzles.
I love the sound design of walking, its unique and it just works really well. :)
Hey thanks for playing! Glad you enjoyed it. Our sound guy literally found a load of old 90s computing equipment and banged them together to make the sound effects. I'm pretty sure the walking effect is him throwing a few floppies around.
Very neat!! I have never been so excited to get move left and right upgrades haha. Also the overworld map is very cool! Overall awesome game~ My one suggestion would be to put a random.range pitch code on your audio manager on things like the jump sound effect. That way it doesn't sound like the exact same jump sound every time :D Once again, great job!
Hey thanks for playing! The left and right upgrades were a very handy and cost effective excuse to have a tutorial haha, but also could expand a bit on it later by doing things like giving the player gravity but no movement. As for jump sound effect - it's actually in there but I think we could probably expand the range a bit further out:
Amazing! So good!
Amazing entry! Solid all around. The final level is a bit too big to my liking, but that is just nitpicking
Strong showing on many fronts! Easy controls, good level design, enjoyable graphics. Could have used a bit more love in the music department, but the solemn vibes of an old factory were cool too... Great work.