I watched the video, thanks so much for playing it! I just wanted to make a few points to address some questions you had in the video, partially because this was the first time we've seen anyone play it that wasn't friends or family. It was very eye opening, at least for me.
1. Yes, this was a group effort between three of us! I did the level design, but you can see the other two hidden on the page somewhere. All the art was handmade by @patrickpatrick and programming was done by @bluspur.
2. You have the patience of a saint. I wish we would have tutorialized that you need to hold "down" while in the air to maintain momentum somewhere. We shouldn't have made you think it was your fault, or that the game was missing that somewhere. It was especially painful for me to watch, because I clearly let you and probably a bunch of other people down there.
3. Maybe we should have made it more clear in the first level, but the coins make the wall move faster, so collecting them and throwing them away is sort of a "choose your own difficulty" mechanic and fulfills (in our mind) the "all that glistens isn't gold" prompt to some degree. We had a message written on a wall in 1-1, but obviously with the wall coming after you, you don't always have time to read it. We'll try to think of some way to make it more obvious.
4. We're happy you used the controller support! We weren't actually sure if anyone would use it or not (besides us) so we're happy you got to play it with something you were comfortable with.
5. I should have toned down the difficulty maybe, or introduced difficulty options of some sort. It's so hard to figure out what's too difficult, especially with platformers. Some of my friends have beaten Celeste with all strawberries (a very difficult challenge) and have been playing Mario since they could hold a controller and they found it to be very easy and beat it within 7-8 minutes on their first attempt and getting all the coins. Other people haven't made it past the first level. With you saying that you've played other platformers and it being too difficult still, it just reinforces the idea that I messed up with the difficulty curve quite a bit somewhere along the way. That last jump you were on I knew was especially difficult (you have to dash, pogo, jump, then dash again) and the tutorial text there is just vague.
6. Audio is coming! You're right, we just ran out of time on it. Clearly it's something we should have made a priority according to the other comments on here as well, but we didn't want to half-ass it and end up with something annoying for the player. It was something that was going to need at least a couple extra days but probably more to get it right.
Thank you for making the video, it was very informative and entertaining for us! We greatly appreciate it. I think I was able to address most of your questions/concerns here.
Eyeslee
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Celeste was definitely one of the games we had in mind when designing the game (a difficult junglegym of a screen where you only have one shot to get through it) so that is one of the best compliments you could have given us. Giving Urist some personality would have been nice, I'm sure they could have a lot going on personality-wise. Probably couldn't make them as well fleshed out as Madeline, but one can dream.
I don't see any problem with us adding the up arrow as a jump button, as it's not exactly bound to anything else right now. I'll look to see if we can get that added in the next hotfix. (See edit below) Yeah, especially on some of the later levels when the wall is moving too fast I can see how people would like to just hold down right to get going. Not sure if that's an easy fix or not but we'll look into it. I'm sorry if the game was too difficult, given more time we would have tutorialized the abilities a bit better. Hope you enjoyed your time with the game anyways, thanks for the feedback!
Edit: After looking into adding up arrow and W as jump buttons, we realized that makes ramp jumps impossible without putting your hands in a really weird position (middle finger on W and index finger on S.) This is because our movement system has a weird quirk where you have to hold down S in the air to maintain momentum after a ramp jump. It would be annoying to make it through the first half of the game only to learn that you can't use that control scheme on the most challenging jumps. Sorry about that, I hope I was able to explain it properly.
That's very nice of you to say, we appreciate it. We weren't really aiming for the player to take damage and lose hearts like you do in a game like Shovel Knight, since if you die it's usually due to falling in lava or to the Hellspawn wall. It's more like Celeste in the sense that it's more about making it through the jungle gym we set up for you in one go, with the light punishment of starting the level over. The messages and abilities were just sort of constrained by how much time we had to work on the project. We considered making the character slower with more coins, but decided to make the wall go faster instead. Changing the player's movement speed sounds good on paper, but making the game feel worse to play and hurting movement options was too much of a tradeoff (plus designing levels around different movement speeds would have been a nightmare.) Audio was clearly our greatest shortcoming, and it's something we'll work on. Thank you for the feedback, I hope I was able to explain some of our decisions!
Shovel Knight was in the back of my mind the entire time during development, so that's high praise to me! Using the pogo in that game is so fun, I'm shocked it hasn't been used in more platformers since. Audio is where we totally dropped the ball, just didn't have enough time unfortunately. Hoping to get that up sometime soon after the voting period.
Thanks for all the feedback, it's great to get this much in one comment! Holding down in the air to maintain momentum is NOT intuitive, but it's something we sadly couldn't fix in time for the two weeks we had for the game jam (which is going to be a running theme for this response.)
More tutorial messages is definitely something we'll note for future reference. It's hard to tell how much is too much with something like this, especially since the player doesn't always want to stop and read everything with a big purple wall behind them. You're right though, we should have had a message for that second platform fall. Sorry for any frustration it caused!
It is possible to escape while holding every coin in the game (I had to do it way too many times before uploading it) so discarding coins was viewed as more of a "choose your own difficulty" kind of mechanic. If you were struggling to make it past a certain screen, you could always just throw away what you had to get through it.
P.S. All spelling errors are the fault of @patrickpatrick, I take no responsibility.
P.P.S. Yeah, the failed double jump seems to happen when the player jumps too close to the edge, so it registers that you jumped while in the air. We're tentatively planning on doing some updates after the game jam's voting period is over since only hotfixes are allowed at this time. One of those changes will probably be adding some "grace period" right after the player runs off the edge, but we'll see.
I've also seen the flashing lines sometimes in recent playthroughs, hopefully we can get a fix for it.
P.P.P.S. We're glad you enjoyed it!
P.P.P.P.S. Weird, not entirely sure why that happens. Might be an itch.io problem, might be an us problem, might be a you problem. Might be all of the above.
Thanks again for the detailed comment, it means a lot to us.
Sorry to hear that. We tried to allow folks to balance the difficulty on their own with the coin toss mechanic, but it seems like that wasn't enough for everybody. For some people it was too easy to get all the coins, and for some people it was too hard to get past the first few screens ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ It's something we'll look to improve upon in future games. Thank you for playing though, we appreciate the feedback.
Nice game! I managed to get 314 before succumbing. I'm mad that when brainstorming ideas for the theme, pirates didn't even cross my mind! I'm a fool! As for gameplay, I basically agree with what CFHM said about the upgrades. Even with the legend in the description it was hard to make them out and the text was small and disappeared quickly. The controls were snappy, and arcadey in a good way. Overall it's a good submission!