Nice game! I like the art style, and general vibe. Unfortunately I found it too difficult for me and I gave up. There were a lot of spots that seemed designed to just be really annoying / next to impossible to get passed. That could just be a my skill issue but that was my experience, I got frustrated with constantly feeling like a ping pong ball with little control. But, putting that aside you've done a really good job! The only potential issue I observed worth noting was sometimes I had the camera stutter instead of smoothly follow the player, not sure if by design ^.^
Viewing post in Draco's Kingdom Climb jam comments
Thanks for checking it out! Sorry about the difficulty! Part of it is it’s tuned to be like three levels taken from the beginning/middle/end of a longer game, not the first three levels of a game. I think the second level in particular is very poorly tuned still, one of those “I playtested this too much and lost track of the difficulty” things. After a break and coming back to it the section right after the checkpoint where you have to drop by the bouncing mushrooms is, uh, annoying at best D: I’d be curious to hear what specific areas you struggled with - particularly if the first level was a problem, which in my mind feels about right, though the last gem is pretty difficult. Especially would love to know where the camera was stuttering, since that’s not by design, though there’s some camera transitions in the second two levels that maybe are a little awkward. No worries if you don’t remember and/or don’t have time to get back to it though :)
Don't need to apologise friendo, it's a game jam, difficulty tweaking is usually the hardest part to fit in and get right haha. Play testing a lot can definitely cause that effect haha, also you might lose track of what is an obvious trick vs "your trick" if that makes sense. The mushrooms honesty made me feel like you did it intentionally - you know those games intentionally designed to annoy you? Hahaha xD. But, the one where the camera stuttered for me was first level on the bottom path/early path. It caused me to drop down a bunch, making it hard to complete with less lives. So my actual experience was not getting a gem on the first level, trying the second and getting the first 2 gems easily and then hit by a brick wall. The 2 bees, jump over on top of a bee to hit the mushroom up to the path to checkpoint I found you needed a near perfect run. If the two bees on top of each other didnt get you, then you gotta time the bee just right near the mushroom to get enough height to hit the mushroom (otherwise you just fall) for it to yeet you into a wall of bees that will just knock you down and you''ll lose a life and reset. I didnt expect there to be a checkpoint, so I thought "it resets me back to the start where I can get these gems easy". So I just kept trying to do that hard part. Got it *once*, found the checkpoint, saw the mushrooms realising my plan didnt work and just stopped. I will of course try play it again to try give more targetted feedback, just when I get a chance time wise :)
Super appreciate it! :) Yeah, I’m going to rework like… all of the second level. The first level doesn’t havee any camera changes in it so there shouldn’t be stuttering, but I’m doing some wacky shenanigans to get it to move smoothly and frame the player how I’d like, so there’s plenty of ways for it to mess up that I’m unaware of I bet :P
The gems are meant to be slightly on the difficult side, especially the third one in the first level which even I can only get every few tries.
I’m hoping to have a pretty big update ready in a few days that if you are planning to check it out again you might as well wait for :)