Hey, thanks a lot for the kind words! :D
Erasmus Magnus
Recent community posts
Haha thanks a lot for the re-release! Really appreciate the time capsule, from one old school Game Maker user to another on the same friends list. If it's anything like Dubloon, it too should work flawlessly on modern systems. Thanks again for going to all the trouble just for an email! Cheers :)
PS Prophecy says hi (not really but he's doing better)
Strongest part is the atmosphere and presentation. I especially liked going underneath and being spooked by the extra bassy ambience. And the anglerfish was a bit spooky as well. But after grinding up levels, defeating the angler with my almost forgotten about and strange attack, grappling with rather floaty mouse controls, and clipping through geometry when not going out of bounds, I rather lost track of the ultimate point of the game. I was literally going in circles, both eating the fish to level up, and within the world geometry figuring what I had to do. Maybe there was more to the level but I couldn't be certain since I kept phasing everything. But the art style is excellent. A stronger focus on gameplay, and particularly its structure would aid in engagement.
Good title. Bonus points for that. I love that the main guy is BUILT to SCALE walls. That got me hyped right away! Plus his little stupid simple face on top of his jacked Baki-esque musculature is beautiful. The little details were truly golden like the cheers lifting up the gate. The premise and presentation were absolutely golden, even if I'd be happy to live the rest of my life without another Kevin MacLeod song. But what's there is really good, no complains in the graphics or sound department, it works and it's charming in its own idiosyncratic way.
Gameplay-wise, the premise is great, but the execution leaves lots of room to be desired. I finished the game after some persistence but it honestly felt like a coin toss if I could by the 3rd castle. Because you're so beefy, it seems like your hitbox is pretty large (even if it necessarily isn't), but more importantly, there's not enough time or screen space to easily dodge projectiles.
The camera could have the player at the bottom of the screen to give them more dodging room, or simply zoom out, slow the projectiles, etc. You can't be fast enough to act, and if you are, the button mashing controls make it difficult to navigate smoothly and intuitively. I mostly just made a mad dash mashing the keys and screaming like a maniac praying I wouldn't hit anything like how people in the olden times would drive AT FULL SPEED AHEAD in pedestrian main streets, basically just not slowing down for anything. Because if I did, it was sluggish and there wasn't enough of a heads up to act quickly or smoothly. It felt like psychological torture not knowing how high up you were (or at least I couldn't, maybe the HUD told you but I was too panicked to figure that out in the moment)
But because it was short, and it was just fun to look at and mess around with mechanically climbing like Spider-Man on speed, I persisted after dying about 4 or 5 times. Fun stuff, I could easily see a polished version of this playing as a well-placed mini-game or something on mobile.
I have to be honest, the game caused me a lot of actual negative feelings. Puzzles are fun and I enjoyed some of their concepts. The concept is creative, I was interested to see where the concept would go from the screenshots and beginning first levels, and the usage in puzzles is used theoretically very well. But the frustration factor was too high.It's the controls. They're way too strict. The corners to the character around drag around are tiny. This precision clicking combined with the camera zooming in and out with clicking, that your mouse does not automatically adjust to, plus the punitive action of slightly moving your mouse to an invalid area and touching a wall resetting your length, or worse, being affected by gravity, is very stiff and feels like coaxing a boulder through a narrow canyon. Or maybe solving a maze on a moving bus without touching any of the walls. You have to constantly baby it around any surfaces, making it very sluggish and slow going.
The design of the puzzles themselves is nice though, it's just this stiff movement that's the major barrier towards gaining a fun sense of flow vs frustration. In one instance, the block resetting position made me accidently bypass level 16 without meaning to do anything, which is a shame since I wanted to try it out seeing as it was your favorite.
The aesthetic quality is very well done. I appreciate the flavor text, sense of humor in the levels, the attention to detail with the music, adding more instrumentation with dragging and with the advancing levels, and the credits were nice after everything I went through.
Thank goodness for a level skip feature. I noticed it rather late but I used it to skip a puzzle since I kinda ran out of patience by level 19 and just barely finished it. I appreciate what you're doing conceptually with the game, and it's well polished, but I don't ever want to play it again. Not without it spending a month's sabbatical in the Jiffy Lube factory with attached winning lotto numbers.
Here to claim my dominant place as the best player of this game besides the creator as of this comment. Worth it too because this is a damn slick game. Fully enjoyed myself playing this game, and replayed it quite a few times too. Simple to pick up, only one control, mouse movement, diegetic health indicator with your ship damage, and there's neat strategy in dodging and weaving within a large circle, choosing how much time to linger in the tiny circles and how they physically affect your score multiplier. It's a simple concept, and has potential for more depth or creative liberty, but what's there works well.
Aesthetically, the game is very slick, with only a couple minor nitpicks. The music choice is absolutely phenomenal, and the visual style is great—very clean and readable. The overlapping red colors of the balls and lasers tends to get a little muddied up and could be differentiated, and I recommend using vectors next time because they are just shapes after all, so no need for pixelly rasterization looking close. The sound effects aren't super impressive, they're extremely low key outside of getting damaged, but the particle effects when scoring and smoking are just joyful to look at and great and naturalistically conveying information along with the score multiplier.
Also, I couldn't get the offline Windows build to work, but this is all easily forgivable because this is an excellent game to make in the course of 4 days. The loop is just solid playable, very simple and easy to introduce, and has all the bells and whistles to keep me coming back until I was the best non-creator scorer. I kind of want to actually see it in an arcade now! So very well done.
This is all I see, so I can't hit the play button. I'm on 1920 by 1080 resolution.
I like the concept and the presentation, though the controls on the keyboard make it difficult enough to just steer myself, and I also couldn't get past the first gate. I see this was designed with a controller in mind, and that said, I would probably go for a system where you use the mouse to steer for the PC.