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I just finished it!

Nice little game, a good iteration on a classic!

Feedback:

  • The controls are a bit janky: sometimes it drops the input, and sometimes it makes you move quicly two squares ahead. I'd say the controls made forced me to retry at least 5 times. Far from as much as my own stupidity did ^^
  • Also, in this kind of game, I love to move really quickly if I see the solution or just retried and want to reach the state I was before I screw stuff up ^^ But right now, if I spam the arrow keys, it won't work (might be related with the above point).
  • The box/character collision is a bit rough too when you try to push an unpushable box, as the sprite of the character can be seen moving briefly inside the box.
  • Another cool feature could be to be able to cancel your moves. It would it less punishin when you screw over. I have already implemented that kind of stuff before and I know it can be a lot of work, so I can understand it wasn't doable during the jam. But if you plan on making an update, think about it!
  • I loved the mechanic of filling holes, it got me really engaged in the game
  • You also have a generous amount of level, which is really nice! And the level design is coherant and fair for this type of game.
  • The music do the job, the game could have use some sounds to give more feedback to the player

Overall a fun game that got me engaged until I beat it, thanks to the addition of a little thing to a proven formula, and efficient level design, and despite controls being a little janky sometimes.

Thank you so much for your feedback! I do have some questions/comments about your points

1. for the controls, is there some way you could suggest that could make the controls better? we had the approach of not checking every frame to slow down how fast he moved and were struggling with coming up with a better solution (this caused some dropped inputs and sensitivity). I'm glad it wasn't too hindering to your enjoyment though :D

2. The way we were handling collision was also a bit janky, we ended up checking for collissions and then correcting the characters position after the collission had happened to give the illusion you weren't moving. It did work but wasn't ideal, I'm wondering if there is a better way to do this as well, maybe with clamp!


3. Cancelling moves did cross our mind, but due to time limits we couldn't implement the tracking of previous moves :( maybe if I ever pick this project back up again that'll be included :D


4. same situation as above, we didn't have time to throw in the sound effects but definitely planned for future iterations and games :)

this was my first jam entry, so thank you for your feedback and praise, it really means a lot :)

For the movement I would have checked for input every frame but only register a key down if this key was up before. For example if you hit right arrow key, the key goes down, you register input, then you don't register anymore input for that key until it goes up again. This is just how I would have done it, maybe it doesn't work :P

I wanted to answer just that. By checking for change in the state of the key (ie from up to down or vice versa) you can implement snappier controls. In your case, you could have made the player move right only when the key was just pressed, but not move if key is pressed but was already last time you checked.

I don't know which tools you used to make your game, but a lot (if not all) game engines should have a "GetKeyDown" function or something equivalent, which does just what we discuss.

Hope this helped you, and have a great day!