Bravo for making a metroidvania and a good one at that too, it's certainly an ambitious thing to do for a game jam. The opening cutscene with that comic book style is done really well and tells the story very clearly. I really like the artwork throughout the game but I think the outline comic artwork is better than the pixel art even though both are absolutely gorgeous by all accounts. I didn't get to explore all of what you created and it's mainly because I am not used to the controls (for me W to jump, space to dash is my norm) and I need to stop to make food so ran out of time. I got 4 health eggs, saw a 5th but couldn't get past the spikes and got the glide ability in the pink area. I enjoyed what I got to see and I appreciate the checkpoints and minimap and at no point did I feel lost. I think marking the nests on the minimap and any powerup that you see but didn't get on there would be a good thing to do if you expand the game. I think it would an improvement if the enemies died in one hit and the general difficulty was lowered at least to begin with. I liked the bees, but I found the bats difficult to defeat and think if they stayed still it would be an easier time and I think an even easier enemy like a snail that crawls around the walls could be cool. I think it was the spikes that I died most on though. There were times when I had a powerup and it said click any button and in my haste to dismiss the prompt I would click my mouse to close the window and end up dashing to my death. There was also a section where I dashed through to the next room and I immediately fell down into spikes as the momentum carried over or maybe it was just me I forget but that section was a tough one to get past but I managed it a number of times and was probably more difficult for me because of jumping, gliding and dashing all at once with controls I'm not familiar with more than anything else. All in all, I think it's a really great game with a lot of great platforming in it, which is exactly the type of game I love and the artwork is stunning and some really great upgrade abilities in there too. Hope my feedback helps in some way. One last suggestion: I think the dash ability would be more rewarding if it were earned rather than available from the start and if that flower above the spikes wasn't there as I was looking at that instead of the spikes
Viewing post in Enfeathered (JAM VERSION) jam comments
Thanks for playing! I really appreciate these long comments as they are providing me a ton of feedback to work off of. The art style was chosen mostly because I don't think I would have had time to hand draw sprites or make pixel art bigger than 8x8. The difficulty is way too high for most players so I'm not surprised that you struggled a bit and didn't finish. I didn't really expect as many people to play through the entire game as they have, I don't really mind people stopping partially through as the high difficulty and way longer than intended length is a bit much whilst most of what the game offers can be experienced in the first 5-10 minutes. The room you dashed into and instantly fell into spikes is definitely my fault, in the full game I want to have much larger rooms but for this one I had to pack a lot into single-screen rooms as I don't think I would have had time to make a more complicated room and map system (and the map system will have to get an overhaul too anyway so I'll definitely add more markers). I wasn't initially planning to start the player off with the dash but as it's their main way of attacking I needed them to have it for most of the game and wanted to show off it's use in the tutorial section. Thanks so much for playing and for all of this feedback!