Thank you for playing!
That level gave a lot of people trouble, haha. We've written up solutions so that you can keep playing even if you get stuck ;)
Thank you for playing!
That level gave a lot of people trouble, haha. We've written up solutions so that you can keep playing even if you get stuck ;)
Thank you for playing & for the feedback!
Better presentation of the mechanics was defo high up on our to-do list; our few playtesters had the same criticism. Sadly we didn't have enough time to get to work on that :(
Glad to see another puzzle platform submission! I'll defo be taking a look at your entry soon :)
- picopau
Worked with Unity for a year, switched to Godot recently because of all the Unity drama.
Godot is much less mature than Unity. That comes with it's own limitations - but also means it is much more streamlined than Unity. I was shocked at how straightforward Godot was compared to Unity in so many aspects - animating, input handling, UI design, particles, etc etc etc. just feel SO much more intuitive than Unity.
I could go on a very extensive list of all the pros and cons switching from Unity to Godot - for me personally, that list has more pros than cons. I wouldn't recommend it for any studio that wants to created polished, triple-A, 3D games (though it is certainly capable of 3D, Unreal just handles this so much better). But outside of that, I would highly recommend at least giving it a go and seeing how you feel about it! :)
We had a very similar issue in our game (spoiler: you have to scale yourself up/down in a later level). Changing an object's scale messes with the physics engine - ours in Godot, but I remember having a very similar issue with Unity. Animating/tweening the shape of the actual collider rather than the scale of the game object usually makes it behave a little more reasonably!
Will reply once I've had a chance to have a 2nd playthrough :)
My first impression was that the banner for this is NUTS. then I got into the game and found that the whole art direction in general was absolutely incredible. Big thumbs up to your artist; they have absolutely NAILED the retro side as well as the itch.io assets!
Unfortunately, when I first got to the scaling part of the tutorial & scaled myself down, I was able to clip through the walls & couldn't get back in (see gif). Annoyingly, it doesn't happen all of the time, so I'm not exactly sure how reproducible that is.
I'll be coming back to this one later in the game to give it more of a playthrough; but I'm really impressed with what I've seen so far!
Agreed with BiggestBoof - the opening cutscene to this was so sweet. Really appreciate the effort you put in to giving the game a bit of a story!
After that, I felt a little lost; like I was just sort of swimming in the dark for a bit, the walls were kinda hard to see and it felt like I was already doing something wrong haha. Weird that you have to do that before seeing the controls; would have been nice to see the controls sooner maybe?
Having said that, a very cool and unique take on the theme. I love the gecko's movement - though it can be a bit fiddly at times, it's really cool how his tail moves & how the movement changes based on if you're swimming or not.
Great entry, really enjoyed!
I love platformers, and spent a lot longer on this than I planned to haha. I did also have the same problem as the below commenter though, which was a mild annoyance.
Having said that, as a core mechanic, this was just good ol' platformer fun. Like you said in the description, it lacks polish, but with a bit of time, this defo has potential.
Congrats on the submission!
We've ended up writing the solutions now. We would love it if you could give it another go :D
Thanks again for playing!
- Chris
We've written up solutions in an attempt to make the game a little more accessible. We would love it if you could give it another go; we put a lot of love into the later levels and hate that we've made it too difficult :(
Thanks again for playing & looking forward to checking out your submission!
- Chris
The mirror does work; but unfortunately, we shifted the position of it a tiiiny bit immediately before release, and forgot to move the collider with it :(. We've emailed Lee and addressed the fix for this - thank you so much for bringing this up, and also for playing!
If you're interested in playing more, we've written up the solutions in an attempt to make the game a little more accessible.
Thanks again for playing, looking forward to checking out your submission!
Thanks for playing - and thank you for the feedback!
Yeah - that "escape" issue is a super annoying limitation of full screen on itch.io (and web games in general AFAIK). We DID make it so you can pause with "P" also; but we only mention this during the tutorial level of the game, which is a little hidden.
Thanks for playing!!
Sorry to hear you got stuck. We considered writing up solutions, or an optional "hint" functionality in game. That unfortunately got tossed onto our very long "if only we had more time" list. Instead, we opted for pause-and-restart functionality to make it a little easier to solve.
In retrospect, maybe we should have prioritised the hint functionality more!
Thanks again for playing :)
Thank you so much for your post!
I watched your stream recently (sadly didn't have the chance to catch you live). It was such a special moment to see you playing and enjoying our game. Your positive energy really made me smile, and I really appreciate the effort you put in to playing everyone's games as well as leaving kind yet well-thought-out feedback.
Thank you again. I hope to see more of you again in the future :)
- picopau
Thanks so much for playing!
That’s strange, we’ve not had anyone have any input issues as of yet. There is a feature whereby if you run out of stamina, you’re locked out of blocking and/or punching. Could it have been that?
Admittedly, we rushed that in pretty late - so it’s very poorly documented in game :(
Hi Joe!
We're a small team of 3 (programmer, 2d artist & project manager) who would love to work with you. We recently worked on a submission for Jump Ship Jam 2023 (though sadly our 2d artist was unavailable).
We hadn't originally planned on expanding to include a sound designer, but re-considered once we heard your work on Steel Spice and Everything Nice. You are incredibly talented!
You can reach out to us on discord (picopau) if you'd like to chat more :)
Thank you for sharing! That’s a smart way to give planets good depth and variation, and I appreciate you breaking that down for me. The SubViewport I think is the key for me here! In the absence of Unity’s pixel perfect camera and workflows, we built our whole game with the project scaled down to our reference resolution (320x180), which ended up causing us endless issues (like with the UI, for example). I had a play around with SubViewport and wish I’d thought of that sooner.
Thanks again for sharing. Feel free to add me on discord (picopau) - we’d be thrilled to work with you in the future. You are super talented peeps :)
I'm so mad - I got wayyyy too carried away boosting around that I crashed after a measly 7 planets saved!
In all seriousness - this is one of my favourite entries so far - potentially my favourite. The audio, polish, art, movement - aaah, it's all perfect. There is so much I want to pick your brains about here, but in the interest of keeping it brief, I'll only ask 1 question! The subtle pixel differences in the spinning planets/moving spaceship. Were they done using shaders? I find it super endearing and it really fits the art style well!
The only nit-picky thing I found a bit unengaging was that you could just stay at a planet to max out on that resource. It means the winning strat is to just permanently hold E as you fly around.
Overall, really glad I downloaded this. Congratulations, hope this steals the show!
Very fun game! I lasted for ages once I got pimped out with power ups. Really impressed with the polish here too - particularly the particle effects when the numbers explode. I'd love to know how you achieved that!
There is a smalll bug in that, when you die, you actually still pick up powerups that would have passed through you.
Having said that, hard to fault this entry - an overall fun experience. Congratulations :)
Really fun game! I really liked the take on the theme. The audio was great too - the SFX when you gain a villager is super satisfying.
Unfortunately, I mistakenly took the wrong upgrade constantly, on account of me spam clicking to attack. And I think I collected too many followers, since it started to lag pretty bad :(
Nonetheless, fantastic entry. Congratulations!
Managed to beat this on my first playthrough! Once I figured out the targeting system, I felt so OP haha.
It could do with being a bit more challenging; but not through just buffing the boss as that could very quickly become unachievable. Maybe the boss could have had different moves? Like the boss does a grand sweep, and you having a team-wide invulnerability that you could use to counter?
All in all, was a fun game. And I really really enjoyed the sfx, as well as the boss animations. Great job with this!
Ahh thank you for the kind words! This was our first experience with Godot - we struggled a lot getting to a point where the end boss was achievable, but also distinctly difficult. Through all our testing we've only managed to beat it a handful times, haha.
Glad to hear the keybindings came in handy! Jaydox made a point to make this as accessible as possible, so he'll be very happy to hear it came in handy.
Thanks again for playing - and congratulations on your super fun entry!
I looove these kinds of Bejeweled-style puzzle games. This has absolutely nailed it for me. The sound is pleasing, and it's an interesting twist on an aged genre that doesn't feel like it had an awful lot of twists left. I also love the literal interpretation of "strength in numbers" - we did very similar in our entry! ;)
All in all a very addicting, enjoyable entry. I'll certainly be revisiting this in the coming days/months for some chill gaming time.
Congratulations on the solid entry!