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duttongames

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A member registered Nov 20, 2017 · View creator page →

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I'm not really a fan of these types of games but it does a good job at being what it aims to be. I managed to get through with almost 50 deaths but I was rushing and being careless at several points. The graphics are decent but could be improved and I don't see what this has to do with the jam theme. You do 'climb' up on certain levels but on others like the disappearing block hill you go down.

Regardless, this is a solid entry. Good job! :)

I'm glad you enjoyed it! :)

And you're right, it could definitely do with some more animations. I figured with a mobile game publisher sponsoring this jam, I may as well try to make the game suitable for phones, hence why you only need one button to play and why it has a vertical resolution. I've never made a game aimed at phones before so I thought it would be fun to do and work well with my idea.

No problem, I'm glad it's helpful to you! :)

The aesthetics and sound are good but the game doesn't really have anything to do with the theme and I couldn't get past the second level because the minigame menu kept disappearing when I tried to interact with it. Apart from that, the instructions at the start are a bit of an info dump and could be handled better as a tutorial. I also wasn't sure whether the camera being white or blue meant it was inactive so I had to find out through trial and error.

Good attempt though! :)

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The aesthetics of this game are great; it's probably one of the best looking games I've played this jam. A lot of work clearly went into making the game look good and unique, the customisation is a nice touch and the sound is decent though it can get grating after a while.

That said, the gameplay needs a lot of work, especially the procedural generation. It's way too easy to end up in a situation where there's just nothing you can do, either because platforms spawn too far apart from each other, because there are too many enemies blocking your only route(s) or both. I like the chaotic feel of the game, but it feels like getting a good score is more luck than anything else. Sometimes I'd have a clear path up and other times I ended up with all the platforms too far away from each other to jump and enemies/obstacles taking up almost every pixel of its space. Bullets you fire should go through platforms because it just makes it frustrating to shoot enemies, especially when they're blocking your path up. You could also do a better job at explaining the game's mechanics. Instructions appear extremely slowly as the camera scrolls up and aren't specific enough. For quite a while I had no idea I could double jump lol. Finally, the player character is just way too floaty when jumping and it's too easy to get killed by enemies off the screen. Half the time I didn't even know what killed me.

That said, this is a great entry with some of the best aesthetics of the jam. Nice work! :)

Oh, nice to hear! It's good to see people taking feedback to heart and improving their games. :)

I'm glad you enjoyed it, thank you! :)

Thank you, I'm glad you liked it so much! :)

Yeah, I figured it has the high score format for the jam, I just thought it might be an idea if you decide to develop the game further.

I actually enjoyed this one a lot despite the simple graphics. Maybe I can relate because my art also isn't too great haha.

The core gameplay loop is pretty funny and it's amusing to kick monsters off the ladders and watch them fall off the screen. The difficulty curve is also pretty nice and it gets very intense and frantic very quickly. I liked the music too, there's something charming about the game.

All I can really think to improve apart from the graphics is to add more enemy variety and maybe include some levels that progressively get harder as well as the endless mode.

This is a really nice entry and I had fun playing it. Good job! :)

Thanks for the explanation. It explains a lot! I would really recommend including instructions in-game or making up some kind of tutorial so people can understand the game and its mechanics better.

Thank you for the comment, I'm glad you enjoyed it! :)

I'm not sure whether I'm missing anything with this game, it could really benefit from a tutorial or even an Instructions menu. I found I could just hold 'W' and ever so slightly adjust my position if I saw something on the minimap and get to the top pretty easily. I'm not sure what the point to the energy bar is since it seemingly does nothing, runs out really fast and as far as I can tell, there's no way to restore it. Racing the AI to the top while shooting them to slow them down could be fun, but they start ahead of you and I don't have any clue how to catch up other than holding 'W' and avoiding everything which still wasn't enough for me to beat even half of them.

The aesthetics, sound and idea are nice though. It's a solid entry, good job! :)

Solid entry. The music is nice and although the graphics aren't great, they're suitable for the type of game. I really like the idea of the gameplay and think it could be really fun but the grappling needs to be more forgiving and easier to do. As it is, you need to not only click on the block but on a certain part it seems or you won't fire the grappling hook towards it. This is especially frustrating when you're falling really fast and it's not helped by the fact that you respawn falling at a high speed as well. You should be able to grapple onto the blocks just by aiming in their general direction and you should respawn on a platform that disappears after a short while rather than just continuously falling.

Nevertheless, this is a good attempt. Good job! :)

This game is definitely among the best of the ones I've played so far! For a game made in only a few days, it feels super fleshed out, well-made and polished.

The retro aesthetics and audio are really good and gives the game a classic feel, and the gameplay is really nice too. The procedural generation is really well done and keeps the game interesting and replayable for a while. All the powerups have their place and feel good to use as does the grappling hook.

To be honest, I'm having trouble finding a criticism. I suppose there could be more enemy and obstacle variety and the procedural generation could be improved so certain coins or powerups don't spawn in places that are impossible to reach without dying but that's nothing that can't be solved by a little more development time. I also wish you could see your best score while climbing so you know how close you are to beating it.

Overall, this is an amazing entry that you clearly put a lot of time into. Good job! :)

This is a really cool idea and I could easily see it being a bigger, commercial game with some more work. The gameplay, aesthetics and sound are all really simple, but that's not a bad thing. They all work well together and make a game that feels unique and fun to play.

My biggest problem with the game is the controls. They're just too floaty. Your character falls and moves too fast and it feels far too light. I was probably fighting my character's movement more than the falling rocks haha.

Other than that, a really solid entry. Nice work on this! :)

I don't know why all these helicopters are so adamant in taking down my tower that they're willing to kamikaze themselves into it but fighting them off is pretty damn fun!

The aesthetics, sound and presentation are all really good and the gameplay is pretty fun too. As others have mentioned, the game could do with some autofire and I also think the game could use some rebalancing. At first it's extremely difficult to stop every helicopter but as your tower gets smaller, it gets too easy to camp a small chunk and survive a long time. Maybe you could make it so the tower gives you a score multiplier or a stronger weapon based on how much is left? Or maybe the game would be better without a tower at all? It feels like it could be removed without affecting the core gameplay loop much at all and I always ended up losing from getting hit rather than the tower being destroyed.

Anyway, those are just some suggestions. This is a really nice entry, good job! :)

Thank you for the comment! :)

Thanks, I'm glad you enjoyed it! :)

Thank you for the comment! :)

Thank you, I appreciate the comment! :)

Ah, it's really cool you're taking feedback to heart like that! Nice work! :)

Really nice and fun game presented in a unique and quirky way!

Ragdoll physics are always fun to play around with and this game is no exception! Watching the stickman hang on for dear life is hilarious and it's always funny when you manage to get him into an unorthodox position. Despite the simple graphics, the aesthetics are really nice and I'm impressed at how interesting the game is visually with so few assets.

The gameplay is okay but could use improvement. It took me a while to get used to it, but eventually I managed to get into a fairly consistent climbing pattern. While the ragdolling is amusing, the gameplay loop gets stale pretty fast. It could use some more obstacles and mechanics like maybe handholds that appear and disappear periodically forcing you to speed up or handholds that break after hanging on for a while encouraging you to choose your path carefully.

Overall, this is a really nice entry and I had fun playing it. Great work! :)

The game is really glitchy and hard to control. Sometimes when I jump I barely go a few pixels, yet if you spam the jump key at the bottom you can build up speed and launch yourself without using any extra fuel which I don't think it intentional. Missing with the grappling hook is frustrating because it doesn't return so there's nothing you can do to recover. The art and aesthetics are decent though.

It's a neat idea, but it just ends up being a waiting game where you wait for the easy to avoid boxes to fall so you can get just a little higher. There's no real strategy you can employ to speed things up once you get the hang of the game. It would be better if the game sped up as it went on so it becomes harder to avoid boxes in exchange for giving you the opportunity to climb higher faster. The instructions at the beginning are also a bit of an information dump and don't really do much to help.

Despite those issues, this is a solid entry. Nice work!

Hey, as adamboross802 said, we can't play the game. You should just need to upload a ZIP file with your game build folder in containing the exe, game data etc rather than keeping everything separate. Either way, we can't play the game without the game data.

Yeah, but even a little bit of extra stretching room would be nice. 

That's pretty wise! When you've tested your game 100 times over the course of its development it becomes all too easy to fall into the trap of making the game too difficult for people who haven't played it before.

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Extremely impressive considering this is a game jam entry made in only a few days. This is probably the best entry I've played so far and I'd be surprised if any future entries I play manage to beat it.

Aesthetics are easily 5 stars, sound design is nice, the procedural generation feels natural and everything meshes together really well. I'm having hard time trying to find a genuine criticism. I guess there could be more enemy and obstacle variety as well as more interesting procedural generation? It can also feel like you're screwed if there's a flying enemy right at the start and no bones for you to pick up to get past it. The camera also feels a bit snappy and jerky.

Apart from those nitpicks, this may well be the best game of the jam. Everything looks nice and I love the Wall of Flesh or rather "Floor of Flesh". Really good job! :)

Pretty nice game! Launching yourself by stretching is really satisfying and it's fun to see how high you can go. I also like how the camera doesn't start moving until you get to a certain height because it took me a while to get the hang of launching myself and it would have been a lot more frustrating if I had the threat of the camera hanging over me while practising at the bottom.

The main problem I have with the game is that you can only stretch as far as where you click and where the end of the game screen is. It can get really annoying when you're near the bottom of the screen and you can't stretch out because it just stops as soon as your cursor goes outside the game bounds. Maybe it's better on phone? On browser at least, it's killed me more than a few times and it can feel unfair.

Other than that, great work on this! :)

Thanks for the feedback, I'm glad you liked it!

I actually planned to include an even larger variety of obstacles but some of them didn't work out before it was time to submit. I mentioned a geyser obstacle to someone else which I didn't think the animation was good enough for it to be included and I also planned for there to be some kind of jellyfish enemy that floated down the middle firing some kind of projectile on its left and right periodically.

The camera could definitely use some work. I didn't want the player to just be able to jump up off the top of the screen but I also didn't want to make the camera too fast in case it ended up too jarring and snappy. I probably should have coded the camera to speed up the closer the player got to to the top of the screen and it's definitely something I'll consider for next time.

Thanks again! :)

Hey, I've actually entered a few other jams before on Kongregate though admittedly my art hasn't got much better in any of them. I'd love to work with you on any future game jams so I'll be sure to add you on Discord.

Thank you for the feedback, I agree! :)

Nice job!

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Haha, no worries. I tend to go off on a tangent sometimes and this is one of those cases.

I don't mind games that have a high skill ceiling, but the controls need to be 110% rock solid for them to feel fair and fun rather than frustrating. Take Super Meat Boy for example. Pretty much every death in that game is due to my own mistakes because the controls are tight and responsive. Any 'impossible situations' I end up in are due to my own error and that's why the game got so popular in the first place. In Gravity Grapple, it's just too easy to end up in a situation where you're at the game's mercy regardless of whether you made a mistake or not. I've since played it a bit more and got a bit better but it feels like even if I became a master I'd still end up dying to stuff out of my control. The randomness of the rocks, the floaty space movement and the weird grappling hitboxes are just too unpredictable and unintuitive to ever gain full mastery over. Whenever I die in Super Meat Boy I know exactly what I did wrong, but in Gravity Grapple I just question whether there was anything else at all that I could have done to survive.

I get what you're saying about aiming the grapple being an extra skill factor but I'm almost certain there's some kind of  issue with the hitbox of the rocks. It seems like you need to grapple a very specific point of the rock that differs with every one. Some are close to the centre and easy to get but others seem to be on the top or bottom or in some cases off the rock entirely. I know this because there have been a few occasions where the line(I assume it uses a LineRenderer) ends at a point behind the rock  or slightly off one of the sides rather than on it. I should just be able to right click on any point on the rock and be able to grapple to it, but it doesn't seem to work like that for some reason or another.

I hope that explains my thoughts a bit better. I went off on another tangent again but hopefully it's helpful for you! :)

Aesthetics and sound are really nice but the controls are just extremely awkward and bring down an otherwise great game. I get you're supposed to grapple onto the rocks to build up speed but it just doesn't feel like you have much control over it. The hitbox or raycast or whatever you're using for the grappling seems really off. Sometimes I'd grapple a rock on the other side of the screen easily despite my cursor not being that close to it and sometimes I couldn't grapple a rock that was pretty close to me no matter how much I clicked and where my cursor was in relation to it. Can certain rocks not be grappled? It also seriously sucks that rocks can't be destroyed with your blaster. It just results in situations where you slowly hurtle towards your impending doom and there's nothing you can do about it because there's no other rocks to manoeuvre and the lasers from your blaster do nothing to damage it. It ends up feeling frustrating to play and not in the "Damn, I should have done X instead" way but the "I was not in control of that situation" way.

Despite that, you did a great job with the graphics and this is a solid entry. Nice work!

The game is a bit messy and hard to understand at first but it's pretty fun to slash through a bunch of enemies. Maybe it's just me but I found that sometimes portals didn't register my clicks unless they were closer to the centre which made for some frustrating moments. Decent entry, good job!

Thank you for the comment!

Personally I think a lot can be done to improve the gameplay, making it more interesting, fair and including a difficulty curve but I'm glad you enjoyed it enough to think the gameplay is perfect for what it is. Graphics/animations/UI is definitely what I could improve the most. My artwork has never been all that great haha. Thanks again! :)

The aesthetics for this game are really great and I like the witty dialogue at the beginning but there are several problems with the gameplay. Although I like the dialogue, it's also an information overload. The keywords being in all caps helps a little but it really didn't help me understand the game much at all. I feel like the game could benefit from a short tutorial just to explain the basic mechanics.

Furthermore, while I like how out of control the game feels, I don't like how little of an impact I seem to have by flying around. Boxes freezing randomly is extremely frustrating and often I was left with a couple of blue box towers that I could do absolutely nothing about because they were fixed in place which wasn't a good feeling. The box physics are fun but also glitchy and it's possible to glitch boxes through the bottom of the platform by pushing down on it. If several red boxes fall down at once there's very little you can do about them just annihilating most of the boxes on the platform.

The key with games like these is to create a situation that feels chaotic and out of your control but still fair. Freezing boxes and the overwhelming randomness just makes you feel like you have no impact whatsoever and good money scores often feel more down to luck than anything. 

Overall, it's a great idea presented in a unique and charming way, but the execution could use a lot of work. Regardless, this is a pretty solid entry considering this is your first completed jam and I loathe to admit that I did a lot worse my first time lol. Nice job.