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Charlie Smith5 years ago

In the future, list everyone who worked on the project as a contributor on the submission. A submission that clearly demonstrates platformer mechanics whilst introducing some more unique experiences, particularly with the interaction with items.

I may have overlooked something, but the game fails to teach the player how anything in the environment works. If you have unique items in the game, clearly demonstrate or instruct the player how such objects work. Was fairly confused how the world interacted with another which made progressing through the game a test of patience. In addition, the cat seems to get stuck on objects incredibly frequently. Was this intentional? It didn't appear to be the case, but exploiting that fact worked was the only way to progress, due to the lack of understanding of how items worked.

All in all, this definitely demonstrates the fundamental basics of what make a good platformer, but there should have been a focus on actually teaching the player, indirectly or otherwise how the game worked. Think how titles like Mario teach the player about new mechanics. Good work overall.

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PyroManiac635 years ago (1 edit)

Hey Charlie, thanks for the feed back

I thought I'd clear a few things up. Originally we were going to have a intro screen showing the instructions and a brief description of the items, but for some reason every time we added it to a room in the game, the room would just be blank, so we instead decided to just give a brief summary in the description, which we did for the controls but forgot to do for the items so that's on us. As for the cat getting stuck, we did add wall clinging as an additional feature that we were looking to utilize in future levels but just never got round to it. The only thing in the game that I can think of that your not supposed to cling to was the Mushrooms (Spring Platforms) so if you got stuck to them then that is a problem but everything else was intentional


Just to put the point out there the items work like this

Jump Pad(Brown Box): Jump on top, face direction you want to go, press W and it will launch you in that direction. Can be picked up and placed

Ladder (Orange Tub): Press W when overlapping with it to climb it. Can be picked up and placed

Mushroom (Spring Pad): Jump on top and be launched directly up

Buttons: Activate an event but only for 5 seconds

Switch: Activate an event permanently

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Charlie Smith5 years ago

I see. Thank you for the clarification. A key design skill is how you teach mechanics to players, as they need time to figuring out how such things work out and such. Throwing multiple items on the player at once can be potentially overwhelming, and so you should consider how and when to introduce additional items to the game.  Think of the Metroid series, they introduce an item and base a series of rooms around getting used to and mastering said item. Once that cycle is done, they repeat with a new item, eventually introducing rooms which requiring mastery of a range of items to complete. Something like that, but on a smaller scale would have drastically improved the experience. Clearly demonstrate how such items should be used. Great work nonetheless.

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