Great stuff! I have been playing this over and over, trying to get an any% run under 60 seconds. My best time atm is 1:08.
Controls are responsive and mechanics are engaging without over staying their welcome. Music and SFX are top notch and I appreciate the small character sprite for a fast paced platformer such as this. Level design is pretty tight. You have done well to ramp up the difficulty and allow the player a relaxed screen to learn a new mechanic when each one is introduced which is great - although there are a couple of jumps (and wall jumps) that are more or less frame perfect that can lead to frustration (Don't worry, mine has some hairy jumps too which I will fix after the voting period - polish is often the last thing to take care of in a jam and we run out of time, of course). The player character was sometimes continuing his movement after I took a death and spawned back in, and I would just collide with spikes on spawn? Not sure what was happening there.
I would love to see the ability to retry at the end, and really to retry any time because trying to go super fast for a low time is the game at its best. It would be better to not have to reset the Game Boy to retry. Finally, I think, if you have a free actor, it would be cool to see a little dust mote or something kick off the wall when you do a wall jump. It would just make that wall jump feel extra nice to me.
All in all. this is a solid entry and I hope you keep working on it a bit more. Its kind of the perfect length for a quick arcade style speedrun but if you come up with more ideas, maybe there is another mail route or something the player can unlock for more content? Great job! Keep it up!
Viewing post in Postie jam comments
Wow that's a really impressive time. I haven't been able to get under two minutes so far.
Thanks for the detailed feedback. I'm planning to do a little update after the voting has ended which will address some of the points you mentioned. I want to make a few (wall) jumps a bit easier and being able to restart the game (from the finish screen) is a good idea to keep up the flow.
I don't know whats up with the player character after respawning. The spikes and holes are triggers most of the time. On enterI set the position of the player to the start position. GBStudio seems to keep the momentum of the player anyway. At the moment I have no idea how to fix this. Maybe I will have to modify the engine.
Initially I did not plan to continue to work on this after the jam but designing these small one screen levels was really fun. So maybe I will add an extra level. I still have some ideas for new game mechanics, like moving or disappearing platforms but am not quite sure if I will be able to realise them in GBStudio.