itch.io

You're in a stretch of awesome productivity. Yet another genuine innovation! This one works great in Firefox/Fedora 37. Guess I won't be testing this on a tablet - I might check Chrome/windows.

I'm finding even level two incredibly frustrating for my aging brain.  I'll probably have to focus on just one character at a time to get a look at the higher levels.

Quite a challenge for me to get 3 stars on some of the levels. More on that later.

Per email, it runs great on my Samsung Tab-A 10" (low end Android 8 tablet) with Chrome.

It does work on an iPad Gen 7 with Safari. But dragging is really laggy/sluggish and the click sound-effect is absent 95% of the time - when it does play I have a "what was that?" reaction.

Kudos! Innovative combination of ideas. Slick production.

Just through level 4 so far with Firefox/desktop. I'll check with tablet later.

Good. The difficulty ramps up fast! I'm starting to guess on some somewhere around 6 or 7. (I haven't had my morning caffeine yet - I'm thinking I'll get to 10 later in the day.)  So far only tested on Firefox / Fedora 36 (default/Gnome). No issues while I was playing, but while I was typing this, it "timed out", (10 fails in a row?) and now says my best streak was zero. Ripoff!

Part of me would like to see some sort of grouping/precedence assistance, but I guess that is part of the challenge. Format for MathJax - now THAT would be a programming challenge.

Well done! Simple, nice graphics, runs smoothly, nutritious.. hard to come up with a complaint.

I describe myself as a touch typist, but in truth I cheat quite a bit. Take your eyes off the screen here and it is the beginning of the end. I can see that triage could be a big part of the strategy to really get a top score.

The "world" is big enough that I get lost and can't find my way back to the start or to the Necro. Something is pretty impressive. I'm going to claim it is the size of the world and not my senioritis.

I see something in the sidebar about Boss4 the Necro wants you to but it is only on the screen for about half a second. After the window refreshes / resizes I don't have that sidebar any more. Guess I should post a screenshot. It would be really good if I could read that cuz the bombers (?) are kind of frustrating.

The screenshot does show the lack of sidebar content, but I actually took it as a corner-case issue report. Not quite a bug... One feature of the game design is that once your avatar starts a dash, you can't stop it until it hits something. (More on that another time.) In this case I dashed from the map to the right (heading left) and wound up drowning. Since that was my entry point, I just drowned over and over until I reloaded the game from my previous save. Slightly frustrating that I "lost" 17 souls I'd harvested. But the incredible thing was that after re-harvesting the souls, I did the exact same thing again in the exact same spot. So, dunno if it is worth kludging up a workaround for that situation. Probably not TBH.

On the busier screens, my machine gets sluggish if I've had the game open for a while (like 30 minutes).  Dunno if I can capture anything useful. Gnome task monitor showed firefox under 10% cpu and around 300MB memory (rss) with something called web content like 60% cpu and bouncing for 700 to 1000MB. But system monitor showed total memory usage around 8GB compared to typical of 2GB. More detail later.

Can't get over the number of new screens and features. That was a monster update. Timing on the jumps seemed tricky at first but I think I'm getting better.

The snowman congregation and the necromancer are pretty weird. I haven't figured out what is going on, or what I'm supposed to do, or what the little hearts indicate, or even when the controls are active.

I did get rid of the 3 reanimated a-BOMB-inations at least once (by letting them die in the "pit" - by laser quantum tunneling I think) but that didn't seem to trigger any response from Mr. Necro. But maybe that is the end of the campaign as it stands?

[edit]Oh wait it looks like there is a gate over to the right. Dunno if I have enough souls though. The only way I've finished so far, I wound up in the pit and couldn't jump out. I'll maybe reload from a previous save.

Ohhh. Presumably I would have figured that out pretty soon. Murphy's law that I first encountered the limit at a screen boundary.

Dashing between screens: This is getting pretty obscure/nit-picky. I thought I could dash across the water at the bottom of the screen to get the snowman on the adjacent screen to the left. The screen transition behaves as expected when I dash in the "corridor" two rows up. But when I try to dash to the snowman

• avatar goes off screen to the left
• I never see the left hand screen
• splashing sound but I don't see avatar in water
• after drowing timeout I get start over prompt

This may be exactly what you intended as developer? Players will eventually learn they can't dash across water between screens.

Notes:

• 2nd (redundant)  image just shows avatar before failed dash
• Seems like lists and images don't mix very well in itch.io comments
• OK I'm searching for an arrow plugin for the GIMP.
• json file available

Wow, this was a monster update. Dash, bomb mode, secret level(s)... I played for 2 hours straight and was a little stiff when I quit. On the verge of being addictive. I should go back and count the screens. Still haven't been to all of them.

Gameplay is impressive for an html5 game. What it eventually needs IMO is controls for tablet/phone. Dunno if that is feasible though.

The .json load seems to work great. Seems like a better approach for my setup. (I left the itch.io cookie exception though - now I don't have to solve a captcha every time I want to comment.)

Impressive scale to this update. I like "big worlds" and this fits the bill - dunno how many maps I haven't even been to yet.

Trying to come up with a word for the difficulty. For now I'll use fiendish, although it seems like a better word is on the tip of my tongue.

crate positions: I'm of two minds on crate positions, or more specifically, how crate positions reset when I leave a map. At first I thought it was an annoyance. On that map where you have to stack two crates, I got killed and had to stack them all over again. Argh!!

But later I realized that you can push a crate you need into a cul-de-sac (or body of water) that you can't get it back out of. Without reset, you be stuck for eternity. So, crate reset is good.

Recently I pushed a crate from one ledge to another, then thought I'd go "around the back" to get "behind" it so I could push it off that ledge. But "around the back" required me to momentarily go to map-right and then come back. And of course when I did that, the blasted crate went back to its original position on the upper ledge. (This would be much better with a screenshot - maybe I'll provide one later.)

So my thinking now is that it would be ideal if the crate positions were saved even when my avatar leaves a map, and get reset only when I "die". That way, if I accidentally push my crate into a cul-de-sac, I could suicide to reset it. Of course a) I don't know if that is technically feasible, and b) there may be tactical complications I didn't think of.

Evidence that the delete on close checkbox in Firefox does something other than what I'd expect.

• open a window to snowman souls game
• open a second window to preferences
• set delete on close to CHECKED
• refresh snowman window. Game will be at beginning
• set delete on close to NOT checked
• refresh snowman window. Game goes to position saved from previous session.

I can go back and forth and the refresh state of the game toggles with the delete on close checkbox, even though I never close the browser.

Dunno what this means, but it seems a halfway usable workaround for the game. Possibly I can uncheck the box to play, then check again afterwards.

I do have tcpdump and wireshark but dunno if I have the ambition required to track this.

State save notes: (Should have written this one first - I'm already forgetting the sequence.

1. Wed night: Closed browser with clear on close CHECKED with exception for itch.io.
2. Thu morn: launched game
3. Game started at beginning. Went through a few screens and gathered a few souls.
4. Closed and re-started browser (or just that window - not 100%)
5. game started at beginning.
6. Went through a few screens.
7. Closed and re-started browser (or just that window - not 100%)
8. <<argh I split the list into two somehow>>

1. Un-checked clear on close
2. Set enhanced tracking protection to OFF for this page in Firefox.
3. Launched game. It came up in where I left off.
4. got past the bosses
5. closed game window
6. Set clear (cookies and data) on close to CHECKED, but left itch.io as an exception.
7. restarted browser
8. game starts from beginning.
9. closed game window but kept browser running.
10. un-checked clear on close
    
11. launched game. It came up at the saved state (past the bosses).

I'll probably have to repeat, paying closer attention. It seems like as soon as I un-checked clear on close, Firefox retrieved [a cookie] that was supposedly deleted.  [later: or maybe not supposedly deleted, if I didn't close the browser. But then... still can't explain how checking or un-checking clear on close has any effect if I don't close the browser.]

Still don't see hwcdn in Firefox's list of cookies and data, although I saw it in Edge.

Leaving clear on close un-checked doesn't work for me long term.

Trivia first: I worry a lot about creeping (or fast moving) senioritis). I'm going to call the home screen A+0 and the first screen to the right B+0. My question is whether you changed B+0 since initial release. I could have sworn that I went down a screen (to B-1) and gathered several souls in an early session. But I can't get there because of the water hazard. Maybe I filled that hole the first time around and have forgotten how. Dunno.

Trivia 2: In this location, cursor up makes my avatar hit its head on the block above. It is the only location I've found where that happens. It is the map or screen above the one in the previous screenshot. (B+1 in my lingo.)

Deleted all data; cookies, cache, the whole #! from Edge. Still after first gate, zero souls on launch. Tried twice with same result.

(Almost off topic: At first I left Edge nearly in the default condition, including the startup page. This results in around 100 cookies as soon as I start the browser! Once I changed the start page to point to my internal server, I was able to check after start and see zero cookies.)[Edit: changing the startup page had no effect on what I would call the home page - MS calls it the new tab page. Seems I can make only cosmetic changes to that. From some reason I'm reluctant to call it adware. Dunno why - that is how it behaves.

Laptop/win10/Edge 90.something. Starts (drum roll) after 1st gate with zero souls. (!!) Didn't expect that. Must be storing part of it on the server side, or in "the cloud", based on [IP address] or - dunno clueless.

I was gonna say "might want to consider a reset-game option at some point". From my pov this little experiment bumps the priority up a little bit.

Dunno how you puzzled out hwcdn. Edge does show 67 bytes stored there, while Firefox didn't show it at all. I'll try deleting that after I post this.

started firefox as gamerb (different linux user). Still starts after 1st gate. Didn't expect that!

Could be red herring though. Firefox seems to have config issues when started from command line as gamerb. Same error message over and over.

(firefox:7322): dconf-CRITICAL **: 09:59:50.291: unable to create directory '/run/user/1000/dconf': Permission denied.  dconf will not work properly.

(itch: all these cute formatting widgets and no [code] option?)

Here are some notes before I forget. More research required.

1. read your message about site data
2. unchecked "delete cookies and site data on close"
3. launched game
4. Game started after gate1, but with 0 souls
5. got 4 (more) souls
6. quit and closed browser
7. restarted
8. state and (4) souls were correct.
9. firefox reports 7 cookies from itch.io
10. firefox reports storage only from the 3 sites I always have
11. closed and reopened browser.
12. told browser to selectively delete cookies from itch.io
13. game still started in correct location with 4 souls.
14. deleted itch.io exception and checked the "delete on close" box
15. restarted browser.
16. starts after gate1 with zero souls.

OK, everything** including cutscenes seems to work great. I just needed a hint to get moving. Too bad I didn't capture the Bosses have been defeated screen. Wow there is a lot of new stuff in this level, even if one ignores the time involved in creating the level itself. The Ground Power, and the one-way slides... It is gonna take me a while to get 42 souls - I only got up to 19 so far I think.

**except for saving the state

Hmm. I'm clueless as usual. Snowrisu dead. What? Snowrocco. What? I didn't kill the snowrisu - I just tried to escape through the 2nd gate. Am I suppose to lure him to a laser or something? Maybe I'll try that. (Sorry, didn't try windows - but maybe the browser isn't the issue.)

Didn't seem like it saved my state. I have browser set to delete cookies on close. I entered an exception for elgrandiablo.itch.io, but only after two "runs". Firefox now says it has 7 cookies, but I still start from the beginning. (I'd forgotten where to collect all the souls - took me a while.)

Seems like I can get just the tiniest bit farther after the second gate. My avatar leaves the screen but I don't get a new map. At least once I was able to get the avatar to come back to the screen with cursor left. If I let go of the keys as soon as I leave the screen, apparently the Snowrisu kills me and I get the try-again message. Try again works OK - that is to say I can evade the snowrisu again and open the 2nd gate again. If I hold down cursor right after my avatar leaves the screen, apparently it gets to shelter(?). The snowrisu still shakes the screen but I don't get the message that I've failed and try again.

Dunno about the no input allowed messages. On the first run I thought I was getting those when I hit cursor up in a disallowed spot. The second run I didn't see any until the second gate.

I might try again from Windows on Tuesday.

Didn't realize there was a 2nd gate until today. I thought there was no escape from the Abominable Snowrisu. Seems for now I can only escape into oblivion?

Well, you did have the "buggy - you've been warned" message. I see it fixed now.

So apparently the time-stamp on the itch.io-reply notification email was correct. When I saw the time I assumed there was yet another glitch either in my email client or somewhere in the server chain.

May have been browser cache issue of some sort. I was able to reproduce it, but only once. Then I restarted the browser to take some screenshots. Now the level to the left behaves differently. Sounds like "out of bounds", as you said. I can still sort of move the character to that location - it goes off the screen and I'm stalled until I hit page-reload. But a) it doesn't load the map in the screenshot, and b) page-reload resets the entire map, including character position, to what they were when I first entered it.
Kinda weird that I was able to reproduce it once - PC was off overnight. But I'm clueless re cache behavior. Maybe I refreshed the page whilst taking screenshots - at the time I wasn't suspecting a cache issue and wasn't paying much attention to that.

My recollection is that I did get there from the map to the left. But I'm not 100% certain.

Hah! Abominable finale fer sure. (Re-starting the browser got me un-stuck.)

Timing seemed tricky getting past a couple of the rotating lasers - the one to get the final snowman/bridge, and then the final 3. Surprised you could get it that close with an HTML5 game.

Difficulty seemed "about right" to me - easy enough that I didn't give up. Which means it is probably way too easy to be entertaining for any (ahem) less senior visitors.

[later] After finish I was accidentally "hiding" under some blocks in the center. Didn't realize the snowrisu would crush me when I came "out"!

Later on I did manage to collect 4 souls (actually I had 5 at  one point but had to trap myself to get the 5th). Then I got stuck at - couldn't move.

quick fix! Seems to be working now. Still haven't collected any souls but I've been drowned and fried or electrocuted numerous times. What an improvement. :)

Probably too early to comment. I can start the game. I see the level and can move the [ghost-chasing-cat] with my cursor keys. But after ~3 seconds the level ends(?) and I get a blank screen with "Souls acquired: ☃x0". Doesn't matter whether I moved or where I am. I tried a few key-combos but didn't get to another level. Browser refresh restarts the game.

Fedora 33, x86_64, LXDE, Firefox 87.0

[Edit: OK, now I grasp your FULLSCREEN comment above. And I now see that Firefox has a "show only this frame" option that I could have been using.]

Oh boy. I'm not going to be experiencing any bad side effects after 10K anytime soon, at least not on my desktop. I finally downloaded the game and I like the downloaded version a lot. It fills the browser window. I assume itch.io constrains your format here.

The only thing I saw that I'd describe as a bug: In one game I had two birds so close together that the first bird covered the "equation" for the second. I didn't get a screenshot.

The only "data" I have at this point is the time it takes for the next bird to cross a 1920 pixel screen after I let the character die, right at the beginning of the game. That is ~23 seconds on the x86_64 desktop, and ~45 seconds for the odroid-xu4 Arm mini-PC. I didn't have a good way to time this - I used the stopwatch widget on my phone.

It seemed to me the mini-PC began to slow down even more around ~2000, but I don't have anything quantitative. Actually I kinda liked playing on the mini-PC; I can stay alive long enough to practice my 10-key skills. That's gonna be a long slow (and almost off-topic) process if it happens at all tho.

Later I'll try to provide crossing times for a bird at ~10k on the XU4. I can't make it that far on the desktop. I also have a Raspberry PI 2 somewhere that I might fire up.

(Even farther off topic: I wanted to check this earlier but the batteries in my second keyboard were dead, and it was such a PITA swapping the dongle back and forth between desktop and mini...)

Good job on the bird entry backgrounds. That wasn't at the top of my list of complaints/excuses but it was on the list. I like the translucent clouds.

I'm not good enough with the numeric keybad <-- (I'm gonna leave that). I have to sneak a peak at it now and then, and as soon as I do a bird always gets me.

I like the smithereens effect. Impressive indeed. Whew. I retract my request to make it harder as the score goes up. This is hard enough already! I can't say whether I like the new double jump code because I haven't made it that far yet.

I think there is gonna be an issue where the bird passes over a stationary answer box after you enter the 1st digit but before the final one(s). I guess you could say it is up to the player to see that situation coming and not start entering the stationary answer if you can't complete it before the bird gets there.

LG V520 8" TABLET (ANDROID 7) with wired keyboard: Everything works fine, but it runs slow like the Odroid mini-PC.Dunno what processor the V520 has but it is some flavor of Arm 64 bit, like the Odroid. Chrome  browser - dunno how to check version.

Hmm. OK I'm back on my desktop x86-64 with Firefox 74 on Fedora 31, and it runs a lot faster than on the Odroid Armhf64 mini-PC. Subjectively it is about twice as fast. Fedora has a screencast recorder built in; I was able to capture 30 seconds of that. I'll have to see what is available for capture or debug on Arm/Ubuntu.

[Edit] I think that was a waste of time - I need to learn a lot before I can do useful screen capture. But I'll post what I captured. I'll post links first then experiment with that little video icon in a separate post.

alien-x86_64.mp4 I suspect the main problem with this is that the screen capture built in to Fedora probably defaults to a low frame rate. The speed of the video seems similar to the real thing, but the video is more jerky, like it is missing frames.

alien-arm.mp4 I installed something called simplescreenrecorder. I said the Odroid was already slower than the x86 box. When I started the recorder, the browser frame rate dropped to ~3 fps. Underwater molasses.  The speed shown in the video is pretty much like what I saw on the screen during the recording. But when I turn the recorder off it is a lot faster than that. So, more research required for sure.

Yeah, I'm impressed with this one. I used backspace several times, and I entered a # whilst holding down the space key at least once - both of those work fine. I like the posture changes of the character while "he" is in the air.

I practiced enough now that I'm thinking you could tune it by making it harder as the score goes up.  Tricky process though. You don't want to speed up a browser game too much, especially when the browser might be running on an older Raspberry Pi.

OK - This is pretty good now! I got something like 3577 (lost the screen when I logged in to comment) before hitting the space bar too soon on a double jump. I'm running Chromium 80 - Ubuntu 18.04lts - arm64hf - (Odroid XU4) and it seems pretty smooth. I'll go back and check Firefox & win10 shortly.

Kind of surprising / embarrassing how easy it is to screw up. My most common error is mistaking + for x or vice versa, but sometimes I just hit the wrong key, or subtract wrong!

So then I was hitting enter after each #. That also seems to cause the double entry. Once I stopped clicking and hitting enter I've not seen the double entry bug.

I'm still getting these ?bugs? where the character jumps, but only makes it halfway across the pit. Always seems to happen when the pit is ~320 pixels.  Maybe that is per design and I have to enter the answer earlier as the game goes on or something... [Edit] Got one where the pit was more like 255 pixels. Then I got one where I'd entered the answer for the next pit before he jumped but he still didn't clear the previous pit. Dunno if you have a log but the score was 1095 and it was about 7:50 CDT, or maybe 02:50 GMT.

I'm getting the double-entry bug almost all the time with Firefox 74 on Fedora 31 x86-74. Hitting R, reloading the page, or re-starting firefox don't fix it. About 1/3 of the time the first box is OK. I don't think I've seen the second box OK yet. [Edit} Just had one where the first 3 boxes were OK. (I was too slow on the third but entered it posthumously. The 4th had double chars.)

OK OK. I was clicking in each box. (Didn't read the instructions)  This last time I swear I entered the correct value for the [4th or 5th] pit before the jump but still fell in. I'll report if I can duplicate.

Impressive accomplishment in what I assume is a tiny code size. I love the fading trail. A couple of things don't seem quite right to me but I really don't know what. Some guesses: a) Perhaps there is a decay/friction fudge factor that you have set so it actually adds a little energy on each iteration? Makes it a little more exciting to begin with, but then it just goes berzerk. b) This one is more subtle and may be my intuition playing tricks on me. Sometimes it looks to me as if the joint between the two arms is "too stiff" - little or no change when my intuition tells me it should be changing more. (But other times I don't see that; in fact sometimes the outer pendulum spins more crazily than I'd expect. Dunno.)

Anyway, impressive.