Seems like the game isn't in a ready state yet. No sound, no apparent way to interact with the one visible object aside from the character. Walking to the right leads to you falling off a platform and getting stuck off screen. The only keys that seem to do anything aside from WASD to move and space to jump were tab, caps lock, and shift, which only opened slow unskippable text boxes that implied the powers associated with them were not unlocked yet.
Was the wrong build uploaded?
Thanks to you both for your interest! This game is super alpha and I am looking for exactly some of this kind of feedback (like the unskippable text being annoying.) Sorry if it wasn't clear about the state of the game, I put another note about it at the top of the page.
I removed all the starting exposition. The orb is now collectible. In the devlog I mentioned wanting to reparent it to the player, but I haven't done that bit yet. I think I'm moving on from that for now and I hope to have the stats screen completed by the end of the weekend so you can actually see the EXP gains happening.
Thanks to you both for the feedback!
I like the idea presented for the game, and kudos on actually getting things going. I know criticism can come across as someone is upset, so I want to make it clear that I'm presenting the negatives to highlight areas of improvement as I see them.
First, I'll describe my experience thus far. I was intrigued by the idea of the game, and so I opened it to see how it was implemented. By the time I had identified my character and how to move, I ran into the end of currently available content. I thought, surely there's more to this, maybe they just haven't put in the explanation of the controls yet. I'll press every key and see what they do. Nothing. Ok, maybe I need to walk to another area and come back to check out the orb, sort of Metroidvania-style. A bit early to do that, but it's early days for the game. Jumped the gap into a pit, had to reset the game. Had to sit through the slow intro again to find nothing did anything. Left comment to see if I was missing something.
Secondly, feedback as I understand it. As I said, I like that something has been made, but I feel it's been posted far too soon. The experience I had left a bad first impression, as it's little more than a starting template you might expect Unity or whomever to provide. Generally, when working on a project, it's important to release work in deliverable increments. If the audience can't experience whatever feature you have, it doesn't appear to exist for them, and asking them to just know the context you have is unreasonable. They can only know what is presented to them in game. Communication with the user is also vital, and it needs to be in-game. Expecting everyone to get confused and stumble around until they eventually look elsewhere for info, like the dev logs, is too far when you don't have people invested yet. Dev logs and external resources are only useful if you have people interested and they know the importance of them, two things that haven't been established by the game yet.
I would recommend that the initial release have something for the player to do. If there's nothing to play, there's nothing for them to playtest.
I genuinely appreciate all the feedback! I did weigh the options here of putting this live too early, but I decided to just go for it because I have the terrible habit of seeking no input at all. So now I'm doing the opposite extreme of that, LOL.
I've posted another update and quickly focused on implementing some progression. I'm going to also do a tech post soon as I'm going to try to quickly implement a map system using an add-on.
https://arnick.itch.io/quick-level-up/devlog/634190/update-and-taking-some-feedb...
Thanks again for your input, it's a huge help.
