itch.io

Very good for a first game. Kept me entertained over lunch and the end of the day. Visuals and music / sfx are all really good, though that might not sound like praise if you saw my artistic abilities.

The wall jumps all slightly increasing in pitch feels good.

I've only noticed a few minor bugs:

• Momentum is kept through death (excluding your 3rd death where you fall over for a second or so). This is hardly likely to be abused, however, and doesn't negatively impact a normal playthrough.
• Running into the sides of spikes seems to trigger a death twice (Two lives are lost and if you do this with 2 lives left you respawn dead and respawn again after a second).
• Wall jumping while pressing the button away from the wall causes what I'm assuming is a wall jump into the wall which causes a small hop directly upwards. It takes a while to get it consistently but can be accidentally stumbled upon when doing successive wall jumps. (NB: This might be intentional on your part and feels like on level 2 it could be faster than the intended route but some visual / audio feedback would probably be needed to make it feel like a "move")

Each level feels well laid out and feels like it logically progresses from the last level, I like the camera movement in level 2. Level 3 feels a little short in comparison to level 2 but then this is only a prototype.

It'd be good to have something at the end of a level, say on the billboard to show you your best time. I'm frantically smacking print screen to try and get a screenshot of my best time at the end of a level. (I claim the current WR for level 1)

Only other gripe (I was playing on Keyboard because I couldn't be bothered to find my controller) was needing to use the mouse to restart the level instead of using arrows/WASD and space/enter to hit restart, though given you have "Partial" controller support I imagine this would come for free as part of full controller support.

Very good for a first game and a prototype.

Cheers, I was a little worried I had taken roll of the dice a little too literally but it was the first idea I had that made me laugh.

Thanks for the feedback. Completely agree with the movement stuff, it's quite anoying not being able to move between turns, it's a little unresponsive as there's an extra pause after the orb's final move where all player input is ignored, I think it could be improved if I'd communicated before your move where the orb would go, then we wouldn't have to wait for it to make each and every step along its path, it could jump to the spot like a knight does in chess.

I feel like the orb having that many moves per each one of your moves limits the options for puzzles as it catches up to you way too quick, which also makes each level feel like guessing a path and giving that a try until you win. An idea I had towards the end was to have jump pads or disappearing tiles that the orbs wouldn't be able to step on and have to re-calculate their path and take a long way around but I hadn't appreciated the time restriction of the Jam.

It seems to be a common comment, the idea was to force the player to realise it in the first level (what with the only valid option to be to go forward) but I don't think there's enough information given to the player visually to make that realisation. I tried adding a highlight over the die and forcing the player to stop and watch the enemy slowly move but I think that only made the movement mechanics feel unresponsive. I guess that's part of the problem of me making the level but already knowing the mechanic, I can't discover what I already know.

One suggestion I had was to highlight in advance the steps the enemy would make and show the number of tiles you make it move but it may well have been better to explicitly state the mechanic.

Thanks,

I'd had a similar idea about the WASD movement but didn't get around to implementing it in time A friend I showed it to moved the camera about and quite fairly expected W to go in the "new" forward direction. 100% agree with the gimmick comment. I threw together that weird rectangle highlight after the cube moves at the last minute but as you say having it explicitly stated would make it a tad more obvious.

For sure, I'd had it a couple of hours in moving every time you pressed the keys but was worried about the main gimmick not being conveyed. By looks and from what I saw when a couple of friends played it, though, it wasn't immediately obvious (one of them almost did all 4 levels without understanding why the enemies move fast sometimes). Every day's a school day.