I really liked this game! The artstyle is calm, and the music matches it perfectly. The use of the theme is very clever here, and I would like to see more done with this game in the future! But my one complaint with the game is the double jump. It feels very inconsistent, and did lead to some frustration on my end at the last level. But putting that aside, this game is extremely well done for a game jam. Nice job!
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Thank you! I'm glad it felt calm to you! Semi-related: I've been thinking about Miyazaki lately– how he touches on heaver themes like overconsumption in such a calm way. A friend of mine does incredible ceramics art on labor that is loosely inspired by him. The music was done by my partner in about 5 minutes on one of her new instruments she was playing with at the time. :) She's incredible.
I am planning on doing a bit more with it! There were so many other concepts I wanted to play with, like the benefits of eating more flies leading to animals not being able to eat you, or being able to walk on spikes. I hadn't wanted to use spikes at all, in favor of natural creatures, for example a pit with an animal that moves so quickly it is effectively spikes. I also wanted to build out the levels and pacing and introduction of concepts a lot more slowly.
I'd love to understand what felt inconsistent about the double jump! I actually had double jump, wall jump/slide, and dash coded up and toggle-able but decided to keep it clean and simple with just a double jump (I almost left that out, but it did feel like it added more control.)
One thing a friend mentioned was– sometimes he would walk of a ledge and miss the coyote-time window but hit jump, so he was really falling and hit his double jump, but it felt like it was glitching. I had wanted to fix it but it was at the 11th hour :)
Thanks for playing and the thoughtful feedback!
Wow, it’s awesome you put so much thought into the theme and atmosphere of the whole game. That pottery is very cool by the way.
I’m looking forward to where you take the game in the future with all these ideas, I especially like what you were saying about taking a more natural approach instead of using spikes and such.
Now, it’s kind of hard for me to put into words, but I think my problem with the double jump could’ve been from how it scaled with the player. As the player gets bigger and they can jump higher, the double jump stays at the same height, and when you can jump very high, it feels a little frustrating to only have a tiny “bump” in the air.
And no problem, I love giving detailed feedback for games I enjoyed as I really do want to see them improved. Best of luck with your future projects!
Aw, thanks! Yeah, my friend's ceramics work is out of this world.
And yeah, spikes are interesting! They give such immediate feedback and we all know what it feels like to step on something pokey. I wonder what it will feel like if it's an animal roaming– it might be a bit frustrating with the delay between "hit ground you're not supposed to" and room restart. But it was game jam time so spikes it was 😂
For the double jump: oh, yeah. Do you mean after you've increased size so you can use the lilly pads to bounce, and then you just get the tiny air jump? I could see how that would feel a bit anticlimactic. It makes sense that it's more proportional to your "jump height" even if you're using an object to get up there. If you were really, really heavy the button effectively wouldn't do anything, which would feel bad.
Great feedback! Thanks!