Haha thanks, the ending cracks me up. Its so goofy.

Yeah, originally I had planned to participate in the SMVM with this entry, but I changed my mind and scrapped the more metroidvania elements and focused on making sure people could play through in a reasonable time. In the future, I plan to lean more into the classic metroidvania with save rooms and teleport rooms.

Thanks for playing! I'll be playing your submission in a moment!

Also I took a lil video. Apologies for the super-low game audio.

Thanks a lot for attaching your playthrough video! Like Life of the Party, I had a lot of fun with the pixel art. In regards to clearly communicating whether a jump is possible or not, I noticed that was a consistent issue among the people I watched play. The lava pool I assumed people would dash and jump to pass it, but very few people did. I like how you pointed out the skeleton grooving. It wasn't intentional, but I did notice it when I was finishing the animation up and it cracked me up. 

Thanks for playing!

I found my self surprised with how far the character could jump when judging platforms, but I don't think that's a terrible thing. Maybe hell only has a few G's

Yeah it's definitely time for a tighter to player controller. Floaty was fun, but it presented some challenges in room design.

Maybe hell only has a few G's

Whenever I was in doubt about something, I just leaned into the theme haha. Maybe Hell has less G's.

Haha thanks for playing! I'm glad you enjoyed it!

I love how much you leaned into the concept.

Whenever I was in doubt about something, I just leaned more into the theme.

designing your map to be a pentagram

This was an instance where I leaned into the theme. Unfortunately, I spent so much time thinking about and attempting different ability mechanics, by the time I had what I thought was acceptable it became harder to design a map around the abilities. My goal was to have the starting room at the top of the map and being dropped into the very depths of Hell by Death. The super jump was always going to be the last ability to make the last section a large ascent back to the starting room. It didn't work out the way I planned so I tried multiple different layouts. Eventually, I had the idea of the pentagram because I just made the seal. I liked how it turned out.

the single-height jump helped me read your level design "at a glance" quickly and know if I could make a jump or not. 

I really hoped that was going to be the case across the board but from some comments here and feedback from those who gave it try when i was nearing completion, it wasn't . It definitely helped me read my own design at a glance though haha.

The map screen was very helpful and super well made! I managed to miss the final superjump ability, but was able to easily backtrack thanks to the map

Thanks a lot! I definitely think this is my best looking map so far. And thanks to the people gave it a play before it was polished, I noticed that a lot of people were missing the super jump ability. So I added the power-up counter on the map. 

the shredding victory fanfare is a 10/10 choice

I still pretty new to art in general, let alone pixel art. The animation was one of my proudest pieces. The sound is an external asset I forgot to list because it wasn't in my original doc. A friend in a discord channel was watching it be played and was like "l've got my guitar right here, let me whip something up." A minute or so later, he linked a sound that was pretty good. I definitely need to update that.

Overall I enjoyed the game, and despite some of the issues I had making it, I think its my best game so far.

Haha I'm glad you enjoyed it.

as others have said, the jump is a bit floaty, but what bothered me more was having to fully commit to each very long jump, you couldn't do little hops. There were a few places where you had to climb some little steps and this made those areas a bit tedious.

Yep, its definitely time to move away from floaty characters. I get the committing to a jump. I would have loved to implemented variable jumping, but I haven't tried since Shapeshift Shatter. My implementation worked, but its one undesired behavior was that you'd get this extra little hop. Although I thought it was neat during development, like a reward for a solid jump, players absolutely hated it. It wasn't until I played it a week or so ago that I realized, its awwwwful.

it was never clear to me if I was breaking the game by using the dash move to jump in mid-air. As I progressed deeper into the game, I began to feel more and more like this was intentional, but the first few times I did it I couldn't help but feel like I was cheating.

I didn't initially intend to have jumping be available during dashes, but decided it might be nice to use it to jump long distances or cancel it out.

The opening area is quite small but I looped through it quite a few times before I realized I was missing the exit leading to the first power-up. I ended up having to check the map to see that there was a door I had missed, which in itself isn't really a problem, but I think a bit more sign-posting that there's an exit there as you're running through that room (maybe some lead-up platforms or something) would have helped.

That issue was something that popped up a lot the few times I was able to watch people play. I really should have just added a tile or two to indicate you could jump up.

I managed to get the last seal and be teleported to the center while still missing the super jump upgrade, which was kind of confusing until I saw the upgrade count on the map.

Yeah, a day or two before submission I realized that was going to be a problem. I noticed from watching some people test it out. Thats when I chose to add the upgrade count on the map. Honestly I should have provided a confirmation to go letting the player know that they havent collected all the power-up. I was just too tired at that point to make that change. 

 The fact it respawns you on the same room makes the loss of progress quite meaningless imo. I almost thought the boss fight would compensate on that, until I realized the boss's health doesn't reset at all when you die.

Unfortunately those design decisions were made to compensate for jams and participants experience with metroidvania's.  I think next time, I'll just throw out consideration of experience and assume participants are huge metroidvania fans and know what to expect when they load the game up.

I'm glad you enjoyed the game overall and thanks for playing!

Thanks a lot! Yeah, there's a common consensus that my character is too floaty. I wanted to tweak the skeletons during the polishing phase but I didn't have a chance. If i had the time, the knockback would have been shorter and they'd also have invincibilty frames of their own. Once you get in there, they're pretty much toast between knockback and how fast the player can attack.

I'm glad you enjoyed it. I actually used to use camera shake as a method of player hit feedback, but I've moving away from it. Of course, I need to make sure that its clear enough. A commonality I've noticed is that people are mssing the gradual change in transparency during the invincibility frames. I probably should have just animated that too. Its definitely something I'll keep in mind for the future.

Thanks for playing. There are two hit fx for the player. One is missable because its not prominent enough. Instead of the white flash in the sprite, I just changed its alpha back and forth for the duration of the invincibility frames. Theres also a sound effect when the player gets hurt. I do agree that I should have made a hit flash sprite rather than animate its change in transparency. I'm just surprised that you didn't catch sound. Do you think it was due to having too many sounds happening at once? Audio is on the list of many things to improve/learn.

I'm glad you liked the music choices. I was worried about the main gameplay music. I wasn't completely sold on it in comparison to the rest of the music which i did like. I was surprised I found those assets. Maps I've managed to include in every MVM entry. I've been trying to find a way to streamline the current process, but I think this was the best one yet. 

Thanks. Yeah design went out the window because I got caught up in the art. Some of the progression mechanics didn't get implemented so I had to pivot a bit and decided to just make my map a pentagram/rams head to just lean into the theme more. I do intend to mess with the camera at some point to provide a little more insight into your surroundings, but in this scenario, it was just poor placement of obstacles. Non-floaty character movement is another goal for the future.

Thanks again for playing!

Thanks for playing. The end cutscene is my favorite part! Nobody encounter that bug before. I'm sad that it wasn't caught until now. Skeleton projectiles were supposed to be faster, but I forgot to put it on my last minute polish list. As for death, I actually implemented classic metroidvania save rooms and respawning. But for the sake of keeping the player's attention I ended up switching to loading at the last entrance point. I also just chalked it up to being part of the theme. You're in Hell, so why not? I leaned into the theme when in doubt. So the rooms being not very distinguishable was a mixture of that and just being new to art in general.

Thanks. Its shame because I love the ending. The map should help. If you pull it up, just look for openings in the room layout. I had a few people playtest and it seemed pretty common that those who weren't into metroidvania's had more trouble than those who play them. So that's something I still need to think about. Who my target audience is and how to make it more accessible to those who don't usually play metroidvanias. If it helps any, the map is symmetrical, so if you found any power up after the first, you can find the other powerup easy enough once you notice that the map is symmetrical.

Thanks! I'm glad you enjoyed it. Yeah, my characters tend to have really floaty and long jumps. I've been thinking about changing the x velocity when it switches to jumping, but I don't want it to feel abrupt. So I need to really toy with that and movement speeds in general to find what feels exactly right.