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(+2)

Wow, I was so impressed with this game! I just sat here for a few hours and played through the whole thing until I had almost 100% of the map, only missing a few spots that seem impossible to get. I doubt I will find a better game in this jam in terms of gameplay, it was so fun!

The roll was really interesting, especially after getting the double jump. You can move very far and very quickly vertically by rolling in the air, and you can do your 2nd jump after the roll to get across really vast distances. I also noticed that you can gain height by wall jumping and rolling into the wall if your timing is just right. You can sequence break & get to areas without the sprint, although I don't think there's any point in doing so with the current map. Anyway, it was really interesting to see the synergy between mechanics.

The graphics were not bad, & I kind of liked the hero, it reminded me of the hero of Iron Sword. All the particle effects really added a lot to the visual aspect. I liked the sound effects & ambient sounds, but I really missed having some music.

I noted a few things that I thought could better. Don't take it the wrong way, the game was awesome! First, I wish the save bonfires were more conspicuous. There were some times I was exploring and I was jumping and rolling to go faster & skipped right over bonfires. A few bonfires are in a position where you can miss them even if you're just walking. If they were more visible, there wouldn't be any issues. It would also be nice to see them on the minimap.

As I mentioned above, there are some things that can be exploited by players to break the intended sequence of upgrade. The ones I noticed were climbing the wall by jumping & rolling, and also jumping off bats to get extra height. A lot of metroidvanias put in stuff like that on purpose since they can be really fun for players that are looking for stuff like that. I wouldn't consider it a flaw or something that needs to be taken out, but it's good to be aware of the existence of anything like that while building levels.

I would have liked the wall slide not to trigger so easily, perhaps making it trigger only when holding in the direction of the wall, because it was easy to stick to the wall by accident. Going up the stair-like sections was tricky, and some areas with a small gap were hard to get through because of it too.

And just a couple minor things - When there were 2 of the giants (the first boss) in a room, one would just kill the other if you waited. Also, if you were directly above an enemy, it would constantly switch from facing left to right, almost like it was spinning.

Anyway, I'm really impressed, & I'd love to ask some questions about the programming too if you wouldn't mind. I am using C with Raylib to make games right now so I think I could learn a lot from some of the things you've done, & I was wondering how you did some things while I was playing. Thanks for the great game!

(+1)

Thank you very much, that means a lot :D! I do agree with all your points. Most of the jumping things you can do were accidental, but I got so used to it during testing I could not bring myself to prevent it, It does need a lot of tweaking together with the map though.

With the programming stuff, feel free to ask me anything, and I will do my best to answer. : )

The movement felt really good after I figured out how to exploit rolling + double jumping, it gave me that ninja feeling :)

I don't know if there's any private messaging on itch, but I'll ask some quick programming questions right here for now. First, did you seperate the world into sections for graphics rendering and/or activating enemies? I've been thinking about this myself when programming & reading about how other games do it, but wondering if it's even necessary for a 2d game considering how powerful modern computers are. I thought maybe you just have everything activated all the time after seeing how bats follow you between areas & there's no loading or transition when switching areas, except the camera panning.

The other main thing, how did you do the minimap? I was wondering if it was just rendered from the collision tilemap. It also looked like there was some kind of "fog of war" or "line of sight" used for revealing the minimap. I have never implemented a minimap, but I want to work on it soon since it's such a big deal in metroidvanias. I kind of like the idea that you can approach minimap programming like it's a sub-game where you control the pixel moving around the minimap while you control your hero in the real game. It looks like you might have used a system like that & I was curious how it worked exactly.

Thanks!

(+1)

Haha, awesome :D!

 Yeah, I forgot to add a way to contact me, it's MinorLegato#1011 on discord : ).

The chunks were more of a design choice to separate the biomes/background images. In the beginning, I also thought about deactivating stuff outside of the current chunks, but as you said it was not necessary for any performance reasons. there is around 800-900 active entities in the beginning and my 6-year-old dying laptop was running it alright, I might change that system in the future though. But I do cull everything outside the view of the camera before rendering.

For the minimap, I marked the tiles that have been in the line of sight of the player with a flag, and then only rendered those tiles in the minimap. but you could keep track of that in a completely different structure if you wanted to. the line of sight algorithm I used is just a line trace between the player and close-by tiles and detecting if I intersect anything.

Feel free to tell me to elaborate on anything, on here or discord! :D

Thanks for the info! I'm Azecy#8992, I just sent a friend request on Discord.