itch.io

One additional thing I noted down during a replay: when you're next to / near a switch of any kind, I think the game could visually highlight the relevant object(s) (or at least their icons) that the switch affects. As it is, it's generally faster to just toggle the switch and see what happens than it is to stop and visually scan over the level to see where the relevant icons are. If those icons were automatically highlighted in this situation, it would basically get rid of that time-consuming visual scanning as you could immediately home in on the highlighted bits to see what's going to be affected.

Completed the demo. Game definitely looks and sounds good, which was to be expected, and you definitely have the elements of a fun little puzzler going on here.

For more detailed feedbacks, here are some notes I wrote down while playing the game. Starting with some more technical / UI things:

- I have a huge 4K screen and prefer to play games in 1440p windowed, so windowed resolution options would be appreciated. 1080p is a bit too small for comfort.

- After finishing the demo I wanted to go back to test some extra stuff but the main menu only had "continue" as an option which just threw me into the empty final room. Took me a while to find the "delete all save data" in the options. I imagine the final game will have a level select in the main menu or something, but I feel even for this demo you could do something to make replaying levels easier.

- I would generally recommend for any game to always have two slots of keyboard & mouse binds at minimum. This game could clearly benefit from it too, seeing as how you have some fixed secondary binds for some controls right now.

- While I think this game mostly gets away with it, I would generally recommend against using pure icon buttons like you currently have in the options menu. I had no idea what the last icon was supposed to represent until I navigated to it, after which I point I guess it's supposed to stand for "accessibility" somehow.

Then, onto gameplay UX details:

- I don't like that I have to press interact to grab onto chain lifts. Based on past platformer experience, I would expect the character to just automatically grab on as I jump on them. Similarly, I would expect to be able to drop straight down from the chain lifts by pressing down, instead of jump being the only way to get off of them.

- Similarly to above, I would expect my character to automatically grab onto the ceiling door handles when I jump onto them.

- It also feels weird having to press interact to exit a level. Most level-based games like this automatically finish the level when you simply touch the exit. So far I'm not seeing any reason why this game shouldn't do the same.

Finally, something a bit more tricky:

The general pace of the whole game felt annoyingly slow to me on several occasions. Like, I'm looking at a puzzle and figure out the solution or what I want to try next. Then, actually executing on it just felt like going through the motions for way too long because of how much I have to move around slowly to get stuff done. Or waiting for what feels like forever for all those drills or slowly rising magnet platforms to get in the right position.

I understand that this is a relatively complicated piece of feedback because most of the puzzles have timing-related elements to them, which means that you can't just crank up the player speed without also cranking up the speed of everything else as well. And that the current slow speed of everything probably makes executing on that timing relatively easy for those who aren't all that great at platforming. But perhaps the game could have a speed option / options that would let you crank the speed of the whole game up for those who don't mind the tighter execution requirement? Or perhaps the game could simply be faster by default and the accessibility section could have an option of slowing the game down ala Celeste for those who feel they need a larger window of time for platforming execution?

I imagine this is an area where you will have a lot of variance in the potential audience for the game, and since the focus of the game is primarily on the puzzles and less on the platforming execution (as per your devlogs), I feel that having options to cover your bases on the latter could work out quite well for the game.

With LetsEncrypt, would a wildcard cert even really be necessary? You could just generate a cert for a new subdomain whenever a new user publishes an HTML game for the first time. They do have rate limits but I imagine the public one could be workable, and if not, one can always contact them to work out potential rate limit increases (there's a form on their rate limits page for it).

Hello! One change I would appreciate a lot would be to have player movement and camera scrolling update at 60FPS while you're running around on the map - 30FPS scrolling/movement in a top-down-ish 2D game like this just doesn't feel very good at all. Thankfully the game is slow-paced enough that it doesn't end up making me straight up nauseous like in some faster titles that have been inexplicably locked at 30FPS, but it's certainly not doing the game any favors either.

Besides that, everything here sounds solid! Looking forward to the updates!