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(1 edit) (+1)

There's a lot of interesting ideas at play here, but I have some comments I would like to share. Apologies in advance if I sound a bit negative, I want to see this project improve because I think it has a lot of potential.

Art: The art and animations are lively and impressive. The main character and boss are well designed (and cute), and the tile sets are polished and work well. However, the signs are a bit confusing (not sure what they're supposed to tell me), and there's not enough visual variety for me to build a mental map, becoming very lost.

Gameplay: The block throwing mechanic was very interesting immediately and has a lot of potential. However, when it is used repetitively (like to clear a number of floors in a row) it quickly becomes tedious. I really liked it when there was some tricky gap where I had to meticulously set up my blocks, which made for a very satisfying puzzle-solving element. Creating more puzzle set-ups for this would be great, but as a movement mechanic it needs to be quicker and easier to execute.

The powers caught my attention in a great way, as I was very excited to find and use more power-ups. However, I became cautious to use them or experiment as there was only one slot at the beginning, and I didn't want to become stuck exploring just because the right power was not equipped. This was compounded by the lack of save barrels to change them at. However, the idea really intrigued me and I wanted to see more.

Map design: I had to keep looking at the map to figure out where I was. The layouts had some interesting puzzles, but most were monotonous. There were a few too many times where I got to a place and became blocked, having to backtrack to the last fork, which was a good distance away.  If there is a thing that requires a power, it should be tested at a fork so the player can go another way.

Overall, it's very impressive for a month's development and I hope to see more of it in the future.

Thank you for the comment!  Well, when you only have a month to do coding, planning, designing, spriting and a bunch of other stuff I wasn't able to really make as many assets as I'd like. I was even still late because of it. I was supposed to have like, 4 areas for this game jam, but I overestimated my abilities to do so. Hence why places are locked off. I'll try and figure out a nice mix of gameplay with the blocks. By the time I got a reply from another friend it was too late to change much.

As for the powers, powers will never affect if you can progress through the game or not. Think Charms from Hollowknight. An additional thing that can help you, but won't strand you if you get it. Any powers you do get that affect gameplay will be permanent. Like the dash you get at the end of the demo. So no worries there.

I do wish I had more time to add more enemy varieties and looks for areas. I even had pipes for one area but because I pixel arted one of them wrong and didn't have time to fix it I scrapped it till the full game. I will definitely see what I can do with this feedback, thank you!

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Perhaps it was unintended, but for example with the bat powerup and nothing else I could set blocks to get past the gap in the right section of the first room. The extra horizontal height can be enough to make some jumps that you couldn't before.

Oh yeah, I found that as well. It's definitely not supposed to work and I plan on fixing it, but also at the same time allowing people to skip around a bit isn't too bad too if they know how. Just a shame the area it leads to wasn't finished in time. I have every area sprited out just not coded.