I liked the main mechanic it creates an engaging cycle where if you want to be safe and fend off the shadows you need to hold the torch, but the game forces you to leave it behind in order to progress, which makes you feel unsafe again. My main critic of the game is that it's pacing feels too slow, and the levels are too big which makes it feel dull at time this feeling is amplified every time you die and need to do the level all over again or when you have a long walk back to get the crystal to its place and advance to the next level. This criticism is very much hinges upon personal preference, I like it when a game is split into short segments you have to beat one by one, like Celeste or the boss in Furi. Btw I also liked the player walking animation it's very efficient. it can be made quickly in engine, and it looks great. It's a good trick, might steal it for my next game.
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Even if it's personal preference, I think you're right about the levels, dying in a big level isn't very rewarding, so I gotta work on level design
About the animation, it's a little programmer trick I used to not waste time doing art, I'm kinda surprised it worked so well xd
Thank you so much for this feedback! The best part of developing is to receive this type of comments ❤️
At the end of the day every thing about video games is personal preference, you know some people like playing league.
A thing that really helped me with level design was giving friends and family (It's good to get some people who are good at video games and some that have very title experience playing games) my games and telling them to play it without helping them. When they are playing the game, I try to take notes about what they are doing how they are reacting to different things and ask them questions to clarify how they are feeling about this or that or why they took a certain action.
I love this type of small tricks, they can save you so much time and make your game come alive. In this jam I fell in love with animating a node's scale to create a squash and stretch effect it is super easy to do using code or even the animation player and it makes the game so much more alive and fun to play.
I too enjoy getting this type of comments, it feels so good knowing that someone else played the game you worked on so hard and had fun with it. I wish I had gotten more feedback on my game this time. All the comments I got were really nice, but none of them had feedback about what didn't work about the game for the person playing, and those are the comments I learn most from.