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Wendel Scardua2 years ago (1 edit)

I liked the character animations, and also the whole idea of things being random because of dream logic :)

Some things in case you decide to work more on this game after the compo:

  • I felt the levels end too abruptly (even a little pause, maybe with a jingle, would be nicer)
  • Try to avoid placing crystals near the border of the screen (see for https://www.nesdev.org/wiki/Overscan more info about this). I remember seeing at least one streamer playing on a CRT, and they couldn't see one of the crystals because of this.
  • Maybe cap the fall speed, even with the random physics I had the impression that the player falls too fast (and at least one level was almost impossible to win because of it).
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Pineberry Fox2 years ago(+1)

Thanks so much! And I agree that the endings are rather abrupt! I was building for an 8K+8K cartridge, operating under the assumption that that would be cheap, but then went to order parts and ended up with significantly larger ROMs, which means I’ve definitely got 8K to spare for more code!

As for overscan, I had considered it. Every object has at least one 8px row and column wholly within the PocketNES safe area, even if not the whole object. I felt this was a decent compromise between safety and freedom, but perhaps I could have gone for a tighter window.

And the fall-speed is capped! Like in most platformers you fall more slowly while holding jump (especially when you’re a bird!), but everything does seem to be tuned a bit “fast”. A while ago, I went back and played my jam game this was based on and the speed is something I noticed immediately

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Wendel Scardua2 years ago(+1)

Oops, I did miss the fact that I could hold jump to fall slowly 😅

(and my comment about possible overscan issues was based on a streamer because my NES is on a LED TV with the exact opposite problem; so maybe it was their setup that had too much overscan?)

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Pineberry Fox2 years ago(+1)

Overscan is a tricky beast! My usual emulator doesn’t display the top or bottom 8 lines at all by default, so it wasn’t until late in development that I realized some people might be seeing more of the screen than I was! Ended up modifying my level reader so that it would basically duplicate a row of tiles into the underscan. I’m sure bringing my active area inward by a tile in all directions would make it for sure visible on even the bezeliest of screens though

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