Fun concept and well executed!
Just two comments:
1) A shadow for the player character would help alot with judging the jumps.
2) Why can't he swing that giant sword? did I miss a button?
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Thanks for commenting!
Because I was using the Compatibility renderer in Godot to have it work in the browser, I wasn't able to put in shadows. But I guess should have changed the renderer to Foward+ (which I don't think it supports HTML5), or make custom shadows.
Oh, yeah. About the sword... one of our pre-release play-testers asked the same question. It did function in early development. We wanted to have the player move whenever he attacked to give the game a dynamic ninja feel. So, we initially had the sword swing when you jumped, but it didn't feel good because you had to get at the right angle to an enemy to use it. So, we took out the functionality and left the mesh in because it looked cool (but perhaps it is a bit too misleading).
Does the grenade make up for the sword? :)
gotcha about the shadows. I was able to make the jumps without them so it wasn’t a game breaker or anything but definitely something to look into if you ever decide to expand on the game. Depending on how deep you want to go on the technical side of things, there are lots of low-fi tricks you could use in place of GoDot’s built in shadow stuff.
That’s funny about the sword, I had a feeling it might’ve been a cut feature. The game is probably stronger without it anyway because without an attack the focus is solidly on jumping around and dodging the enemies.
While it does look cool, probably would be best to remove the sword because if the character is holding a sword the first thing a player is going to do is try and swing it. That was definitely my first instinct.
Grenade was a fun treat, maybe not as cool as an awesome ninja sword, but probably better suited to the gameplay style.
I agree with with the love studios, an old school trick like a blob shadow would go along way into giving the player a basic understand to where they were going to roughly land. It is not a gamebreaker with the current respawn system, but it would shave a few unnecessary deaths off of a player’s run through the game.
As far as the sword, I agree, leaving it in makes it confusing to the player. Maybe remove it from the player at the start of the game. That way it conveys to the player that they are going to have to make it through with the rolling/jumping options instead (until the grenade :) shows up). Plus, it buys you time to tweak the controls, and you may be able to add the sword back in later down the line. Kind of the classic show the player the cool thing they have, then take it away from them and make them earn it back through gameplay.