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It looks nice, and it feels like it's got a ton of dev time put into it, but I am very confused. Some notes:

- In the first level, the plant that attacks by shooting some brown balls, the balls merge with the environment too much. They're the same brown and all.

- The character will constantly drop grabbed gears when platforming around for seemingly no issue. Seems like it has to do with hitboxes. Similarly the times when I can pick it up or end up hitting it instead seems to not be very consistent as well.

- The climbing animation is sorta bizarre. I notice it still adheres to the pixel grid properly and all, but it feels oddly smooth in a stiff way.

- I don't think you should be slowed down every time you walk in front of a gate.

- Rewinding feels too slow.

- If I release a charge attack before it finishes charging, I think it should do a normal attack instead.

- In the metallic cogwheels room with the balance platforms on a chain, I seem to be making them lighter by standing on them?


I am overall very confused, and the whole thing seems to just be a death trap requiring me to rewind every couple seconds rather than an intricate puzzle that makes use of the time mechanics in some interesting way. Many of the enemies seem to do attacks that are very poorly communicated and as a result I'm just going "what?" every other room. I also don't understand why some enemies get rewinded while others get killed, and sometimes rewinding an enemy rewinds them out of existence... it all feels very random.

(+1)

Thanks for the detailed feedback. Yeah that first turret could use some improved visibility, that's one I'll touch up first. The nuts it fires are exploding into clumps of flowers, its even less easy to see on ground with flowers already on it.

I think I'll rework how the held object system works significantly. Right now it tries to block your movement by giving an additional hitbox over the player's head checking multiple points along the size of the object, to a priori stop movement. If you jump up and down, you'll notice you bonk into ceilings like you're that much taller. But if you do clip into a surface anyway, it dislodges it and you drop it. And that keeps physics objects from ever clipping into walls and getting stuck. But I could either just allow it- and try to recover physics objects if they do get stuck, and force them to be kept held even if the player clips into a wall. No reason the player should drop an object being carried without an input (or being hit, or I also make it dislodge if a huge physics force is applied to it like an explosion or another object hitting it)

You're the second person to say something about the climbing animation and I'm curious what people see in it, I know its a bit different than other animations because it mean the whole body of the player had to sort of tuck over into the crouch animation and flip in place which was awkward to animate, but also because its playing at 60 FPS whereas other player animations tend to be 15 or 20 FPS. That probably makes it seem "too smooth", but without it, either the climb is unresponsively slow, or he looks like he's teleporting. For comparison, the idle standing loop is 16 frames at 15 FPS in a 60 FPS game (4 gameplay frames per 1 animation frame). The ledgegrabclimb animation is 16 frames at 60 FPS.

If you want to test out a faster rewind to see if its more to your liking, try activating the cheat debug menu, go to "edit save file" and change the "rewindspeed" parameter from 1 to whatever you want. Hell, you can rewind at 500 fps if you want, the game engine is STABLE. I had it set to 2 for a long time, but I think the precision platforming lends itself to 1x rewind speed, I dunno, its not set in stone.

I'll test out 'release charging = normal attack', good idea, I'll see if its better

Important bit about the chain scale platform in the castle level: All the traps are reversed in time. If you see that lever in the middle area next to the fireball spitting gargoyle, if you hit it with a charged attack, you'll reverse the flow of time and make the traps all go forwards. Every trap can be forwards or backwards, its the planned dungeon gimmick for that area (3 main dungeons with 3 gimmicks, ex all the volcano area rotates 90 degrees gravity at a time). So the chain scales in forwards time act like you'd expect, but in reverse time, adding weight to them makes them go up! Because, uh, reverse-time physics

Thanks for the explanations.

About the climbing animation, I think it feels like the whole sprite is contained within a square, and then it goes right side up left side up etc. deforming the insides, rather than looking like someone who's actually climbing. I think coming up with a few keyframes would be better.