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Gman8r5 years ago(+1)

This one's gorgeous as heck, and I like the way she controls (I also like abusing the kick to glide in mid-air, cheap as it may be). There are good core mechanics at play buuuuut I'm not sure a lot of them agree with each other from time to time.  For one thing the game kind of simultaneously can't make up its mind on and contradicts itself on what type of skill it wants from you. It takes a while to figure out the burning to stay alive mechanic, but I was pretty down for it when I got the hang of it, since making the player be proactive to sustain themselves is a great dogma, plus I like the catharsis of just messing up the scenery to buy yourself some life. But then it became "oh nope, kill all the enemies before moving on now", and if you missed a single one you had to trudge all the way back while you're on a time limit and can't get health back because you've already burned everything else. And it's hard to tell for a while what counted as an enemy (can't kill bats, cant kill mushrooms, can kill slimes but only by melee) so that made it harder to get by. Then the game became "oh nope, we're a series of platforming challenges with some enemies in it", and the level was designed fine for the most part, but then you'd enter segments that have you jump and navigate around spikes and unkillable mushrooms, so if you're trying to burn to stay alive or use your last-minute-magic to come back to life then you're outta luck. At that point it feels like the game just forgot about those mechanics and you just need a lot of health going in those segments for no real reason. There's also the stuff other comments brought up about the bats and lack of checkpoints, etc., but that's just how game jams go sometimes so no biggie on the small stuff.

Anyway, Hoo that was a lot of critique back there, but I don't mean to come off as a non-fan because this jam game is awesome and has some awesome mechanics and great polish. What I'm going for is that I love the ideas and mechanics, and I think focusing on just one or two of those ideas (or more consistent level design if that's a better way to phrase it) could really improve this game.

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Yawning Fox5 years ago

Thanks for the feedback! I will admit, I kind of rushed that final area. I felt like it wasn't challenging enough and I guess I went a bit too far with it. Next time I will go with my gut feeling and keep it a bit simple. I am glad you like the mechanics. It took a bit of thinking of how to use life and death and I thought, "oh yeah, Mokou revives!" So that was the idea of this. My main regret is not creating a more slope that progressively got harder instead of instantly hard for the final stage. (Also no tutorial. That's also a main regret of mine) Regardless, thank you so much for the feedback. I will definitely try and do better next time!

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Gman8r5 years ago

Here's a tip for game jam success: your earlier levels should be your tutorial, even if it's for non-basic stuff or combinations of mechanics. Here's my game from the first jam  if you want to take a look at that. The first half of the levels were pretty much slowly introducing all the small things you need to know to be able to play this specific game well, all in controlled environments. Then when the game starts to mix them up it's not putting the player in any situation they don't understand and it flows more nicely.

(Also a skip level button in a jam is my other secret technique, if people really get stuck)

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Yawning Fox5 years ago

Not a bad idea. I did try and teach a little in the beginning. The fire from the first cutscene, the mushrooms being in bushes near by and the pit showing you how far you can jump/dash but I suppose I should have made it a bit longer with maybe some text. I've always been a fan of show, don't tell but I guess with a game jam it's better to tell unless I can show it over a good period of time.

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Gman8r5 years ago(+1)

Oh I'm with you on show not tell (besides obvious literal things like control prompts), my suggestion was more about simplifying each stage in the first part of a jam game so the player has to demonstrate a grasp on one specific game mechanic at a time to move on. I do like the progression of hazards in your levels, and tbf I think if it had checkpoints in each level that would show a lot more, bc a lot of the not-learning came from the fact that you'd have to repeat a large chunk of game you already know before getting back to where you were, and I'd always be inconsistent with how much health I had when I did get back so sometimes it felt out of my power and created a lame duck situation half the times I got back to the part I was stuck at. Tbh now that I type that out loud the problem might be more that you have two independent health bars in a long gameplay stretch, and the fact that one of them drains over time can contradict with how you have to be meticulous about killing everything or tackling tricky platform sections.

Since the health bars thing is a more long-form mechanic and not exactly something you'd showcase in one stage maybe my spiel about level design wasn't the best comparison. The best course of action (I mean besides checkpoints) might have been to focus more on giving the player more feedback about it (it took me a while to really grasp the health bars), or just condensing it to one health pool and maybe ditching the losing it over time thing. Burning the scenery for health was one of the most satisfying parts, but after finding out it was just to maintain a separate health bar it felt more like an obligation. Maybe the dots could've been a special bar instead that you could use for something proactive. Or a thin layer of armor that prevents you from losing health once or twice before you have to recharge it by burning more stuff. Or maybe the ghost mechanic could've drained from it, so more things burned means more time to resurrect. If that second health bar had some benefit to it I think that could've added a helpful extra layer to the gameplay imo, or at least I'm just spitballing here.

Also the ghost mechanic didn't seem to really work a lot of the time when I killed stuff so the threshold was kind of unclear? So put that under the feedback part I guess.

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Yawning Fox5 years ago

That's certainly true. I do have a lot of regrets on things I could have done better or thought more about.I suppose, really, I was a bit too ambitious with the time limit I had set. I should have planned it out better. Unlike what I can do with my main game where I can sit down, properly think about it and ask others how they feel on things. I was my own feedback after all, ahaha~ But yeah, it does make sense. I will try and lower the bar a litttllee more next time. Actually, the second life bar did kind of refill your life if you kept it high enough, but maybe i made it too strict and, once again not explaining it, made it kind of tedious.

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