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(+2)

Well, I was pretty blown away by this game, and it's my favorite of the competition by far! After I started, I had to play it all the way through, and pulled off a victory! It certainly wasn't easy. I do have some feedback/criticisms though, so I'll mention them here.

First, what other people mentioned - it's a bit annoying to restart and die immediately because you're holding a direction. I like the fast restart & it makes it less of a problem, so I'm not sure I would get rid of that. To some extent you should be able to fix the problem with level design. Start the character off in an area with short ledges on the side so they can't run off immediately. 

I also had trouble with one electric floor room. The one where the different platforms are very out of sync was a bit too hard to adjust to. Most games let the player find a rhythm with mechanics like that, but this room couldn't really work that way.

It is very difficult and I would like to see a smoother difficulty curve, at least if the game becomes longer. There wasn't really a problem that made it hard, just the kind of difficulty I would expect in a hard precision platformer. By the way, is this inspired at all by Dispersio? It reminded me of it a lot.

There were quite a few things I really liked. First of all the controller support and fully featured start menu, that was great. Second was the amount of content. I couldn't believe how long the game was compared to others in the contest! I'm shocked you came up with that many rooms within a month.  The graphics were very good and the main song was very catchy. I really like how the enemies follow a color scheme, it made them stand out easily. I also like how the enemy attacks were telegraphed.  The first few times I died when grappling an electric enemy, I didn't understand why I died, but it became obvious because of the electric animation and the electric border on the player's corpse, so that was well done. I also really like that when you enter a room from below, you can't fall back down to the previous room. It was also nice to see the extra platforms to help you up if you reenter a room you've beaten.

One issue for me, it would be really nice to disable screen shake since I get motion sickness very easily. It wasn't as bad in this game as it is in others, but there are games I had to skip playing because of screen shake. It's also one of the easiest things to make optional. You probably have a function that basically says "shake the screen", so just wrap the whole function with "if screen shake is enabled" and put an option in the start menu to disable it.

Anyways, it was a really fun game and I didn't expect to see anything so professional and well designed in the competition. Great work!

(+1)

thanks thats alot of great feedback, glad you liked it

my thoughts about the restart thing is to change the button to something like the grapple button instead of jump so restarting is more deliberate
havent played Dispersio but sounds like something ill need to check out
the difficulty is a tricky thing. i was hoping for was a smooth experience for the first 20-30 rooms and what comes after that is less curated for whoever wants to subject themselves to that but was running out of time and had to use what i had set up. but ive gotten some good feedback to work with now

would add a screen shake slider (really wanted to do a volume slider to) if i add an options menu but was focused on just getting it ready for the jam
also good job beating it!

(+1)

I tried some of your other itch games last night & can see that you've been working on some of these ideas for a while! I can see that the screen shake is actually toned down from previous games so that's nice. One of your older games was actually unplayable for me because of the shake. kafaildalf seemed slightly more severe than Apocalypse Angel too, although I was able to play that one. I can understand leaving features on the table because of the time limit. Like I said, I was shocked at how much content the game had considering the time limit.

Switching restart to the grapple button sounds like a good idea to me. I did forget to mention one minor thing, I think the "Press jump to restart" text would be better in the center of the screen. It's not a big deal since you learn how to restart early on, but there were a few times it took a couple seconds to figure out I was dead because the text was hard to spot.

Thanks again for the game! I'm following you on itch now, so I look forward to any revisions you have as well as your next game!

(+1)

yeah i was told the screen shake was a bit much, i get motion sickness to but mostly from a lack of fov sliders not so much screen shake

kinda like to think you went chronologically to see the progression
the messenger made me think of the hit to jump.  in hollow knight, hitting an enemy also recharges your double jump (a lot of games use this mechanic actually) but it was used for combat and i did platforming game play because i like designing levels.  kafaldaf was a much more thought out implementation by using a flail as the weapon but people weren't resonating with it (being about pure platforming) so i wanted to make something action-y and the outer space theme helped a lot with implementing the new mechanics
probably should mention that the rooms are really quick to make (at least for this game)
was a busy month so i just worked on the game at a leisurely pace
and there are people who are way faster at game dev than me
it just takes a lot of practice
thank you for playing, its my pleasure