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That's a new one, not sure how Poppin ended up there. Were you split up when you entered while this happened?

Thank you for playing! I was working on Chapter 2  but took a break this year to focus on another project.

I've been thinking of making the first crawlspace treasure chest not having a secret sprite, to encourage you to experiment with crawling in and discovering it more naturally. Originally I kept it like that to encourage going back through it in later versions (when you have more items for finding things with backtracking), but I can see it mostly ends up being a weird tease.

Yeah! I want to pay one or more people for it, I've been figuring out the final design of the whole game so I can figure out all the assets I'll for sure need, but I'm glad the placeholders help give off the tone I'm going for. Thank you for trying it out!

Yeah! I'd like to add it there. I won't be able to put it up until I'm further along in development, but when it is I'll make an announcement so people can start putting it on their wishlist and stuff.

I think it was cute, given the time you had to do it. My favorite part was the art style. I hope you give more platformers a shot in the future!

I'm an idiot who didn't realize I saved this as a draft instead of publishing it. Well, it's still the latest version of the demo. For anyone who's been following this before, you can try out the new demo.

Thank you a lot, your comments are always really helpful and motivational, I'm glad a lot of it is working out so far! Next chapter should start having money/shops playing a bit more, as well as exploration. I hope I can get that done soon, so there's more content to play with next time. I don't know if it'll be free like this, but we'll see.

Comments anywhere are fine for feedback/bug reports, I noticed what you were talking about and tried addressing it in version 1.0.7, I think there's still some quirks with it still, but it should prevent some of the weirdness.

For what it is, it's a cute pac-man like! It takes a while for it to get going, I think introducing the "Chasing" enemy earlier would help but it's a fun maze puzzle thing! I lost on round 12 trying to get a good line of candy and moving to all the torches. I like the idea a lot of getting candy and figuring out a path to get all the torches in time, though I tend to mess up while going that quick and run out. I like the pumpkin character, he is cute.

Tried this out with a friend cause the graphics looked really pretty. The backgrounds are colorful and have a nice color palette. I'm familiar with the musician RRThief and his music is pleasant here as well.

I've played some Sonic games before (1-3+K, CD, Mania) but I can't say I'm super into them, so maybe my opinion isn't all the good, but I found the levels sort of a clusterfuck. I just felt like I was being bounced around constantly and bombarded by random enemies. I wasn't really sure where I was going or taking in anything or wanting to explore. As pretty as the levels look on their own they don't read that well. I got to the end boss of the second level, the looney dude guy, and died about 6-7 times before quitting. Having to get up close to a target that spams projectiles is a bit too much for me.

I also find the dialogue and cutscene art a little weird? I'm fine if a game isn't taking itself seriously and this is a test and all, I was bit let down cause the rest of the art style seemed polished. The humor isn't my cup of tea, so I don't know if that's planned for whatever future project it is.

There's some other odd issues here and there, like the shoot em vehicle getting stuck and falling below the camera, but since this says it's a test project, and again is free, I can't pick at it too much. Maybe I just need more time with in the future and could give better constructive feedback, but it feels very rough for myself.

I think I only got as frustrated cause I was really trying to reach the end; I eventually did it though! I hope your future projects go well.

As a huge Mr. Driller fan, who has cleared the arcade game several times without dying, I really want to like this, it's a cute tribute and art style, and a lot of the gameplay is very faithful to the original. I'm not familiar with all the limitations of Pico 8, but about 3 major things here keep me from fully enjoying this and end up frustrating me.

Mr Driller isn't as nimble, half the time when I want to jump up a block he just refuses to do it, and of those half times I end up getting squashed. It forces me to play way more reservedly which doesn't bode well with the timer, and how painfully slow the air capsules want to fall down. Sometimes he doesn't want to drill to the left or right; maybe I'm not close enough, but it feels like it should have a more forgiving range because again, any error tends to cause me to die when I know exactly what I want to do but it seems to ignore my input.

I know there's only so much screen space, and the scrolling works fine when going down, but if my vertical descent stops it really ought to scroll UP... not down. A lot of times I'll be trying to make my way towards an air capsule and be crushed by a forgotten colored block that I couldn't react to because I have all of two blocks of vision above me.

Third, the game seems to bug out randomly, and worse yet, when I'm really close to the end. What happens is it looks like the background disappears, and the game crawls to like 2 FPS or something, becoming virtually unplayable.

The closest I can get is 4830ft, and I played as much trying to get to 5000 feet. I wish these issues were kinda ironed out cause there's a lot of potential here, but it's not quite hitting the same fairness as the original.

Thank you for playing and giving feedback! I've updated it to have a more unique sound when taking damage.

Thank you! :D

I've been trying this game out so far, the graphics are pretty cute!  like how the main character looks and the colors chosen. The puzzles seem alright so far, though the collision a bit glitchy (in the underwater puzzle, the same one in your screenshot, I accidentally went under one of the blocks, thankfully restarting got me out). The camera also makes it a bit hard to know what's coming up, in an early part where the moving spike obstacles were in place, I was stuck cause I assumed there was an invisible wall when it turns out I had to jump to reach the next screen. A lot of little stuff like that tends to make it kinda rough, but I think this introduces enough new elements every part to keep it interesting. There's also enough checkpoints that it wasn't frustrating to complete things, so that helped.

WASD is fine for movement on it's own, but having to use E to grab/use objects was tricky to get used to, and there were a few times where I accidentally hit R instead and got set back to the check point. I basically have a few hand while playing this, so I think it'd be nice to have movement on the arrow keys instead.

I did beat it and get to debug mode, I hope you revisit this type of game or character sometime!

Thank you! These kind of reviews help a lot. The tie between story and gameplay was a major focus for me, so I hope later chapters continue to improve on that, as well as how Poppin and Jupa work together as a team.

I haven't looked into the hug for a while, but I can see what you mean. It has no business being that slow. I'll take a look at holding up and jumping too; I have noticed similar quirks when holding down.

I tried out a lot of different things with the charge, and at one point that was the case (as well as slowing down). What I found was that it felt too restricting to commit to a direction that early, since now they have to fire the glove and wait for it to retreat if they happen to face the wrong way when charging. I think missing with the glove is punishing enough.

With crawling, the main difference should be that Jupa is small enough to crawl into tinier spaces, the reason I only have her crawl is to help highlight that difference a bit more. I could try having Poppin crawl too, but probably slower compared to Jupa.

The partner revival is something that I'm still playing with, erring on the side of being forgiving for now (same thing for the rest of this demo, it's the first part). There is some punishment to it: the more you do it in a single area, the longer it takes each time. It can be time consuming while exploring, but very dangerous while a boss or a group of bad guys are after you. I did have enough people who game over'd on enemy waves and the boss, so I feel this is balancing out. Ignoring your partner and being too far away when they revive on their own will have them drop some money.

Some aspects I'm considering is reducing how many hearts they start off with on each revival. In later planned areas, some enemies/obstacles can make it harder to reach/revive your partner.

I thought of dropping money on subsequent revivals but I'd hate people to feel like they need to reload a save over losing too much cash. A "hard mode" that game overs on any KO is something I've considered too, but that'll have to be a ways away, I want to at least complete chapters 2 and 3 before fooling with that idea.

The demo has been a big help in figuring out what's working and needs tweaking, so the past few months have been addressing stuff like this. I'm hoping the next demo feels better and less glitchy. Chapter 2 has it's structure planned out, but I'm only partly through coding in the new obstacles, enemies, and finishing the Drill tool. I feel bad for being slow, but I hope when it releases that you and others will enjoy it!

Thanks for playing! Yeah I hope in future areas I can play around with the springs and enemies/objects more. I'll be sure to fix the menu thing, thank you for mentioning it!

Thanks! That's some high praises. I think it has a long ways to go to being perfect though, especially with how the partner follows you around. I'm glad you enjoyed the boss; I had a lot of fun designing him (though feeling bad for making him so hard initially, this past week I've been toning him down).

I checked my code and forgot to uncomment out a line that of code that lets the credits scroll. I'd been using it for making the trailer footage beforehand. As for the Quit button, that *does* work... but not if you were using the jump button, which cancels it out back a menu. I realize now that's not intuitive and can see where the confusion would come from.

Hoping to get Chapter 2 and additional content done in the future, hopefully I can keep improving it! Thank you for taking the time to play it and I'm very glad you had fun.

Did you know that Dominos stopped using the Noid as their mascot after Kenneth Lamar Noid held up a pizza joint and forced them to make him pizza, thinking the Noid ads were a personal attack against him? Pretty interesting stuff.

I'm glad to hear it! Thank you for your support Wolfie!

I sent the copy of the keys to Remute the night the game launched, and got a reply from him the night after that they were going to be distributed. I'm not involved in the distribution process of that, but I'll be checking up a few days to see if they've been all sent out or not.

Love the game, but I'm curious: Is there an actual end, as in can we find Princess Mango? Would be fun having a "goal" to work towards!

Yeah! I'm doing some final touches. I really apologize, combination of MFA classes and burn out has been causing the huge delay. Thank you a lot for your patience. I'll be sending an email on news of the release soon. Maybe a week or so!

I played this game in its original version some time ago. It's a really cute and fun experience. You can do neat combos like making one enemy into an ice block that you push and hit multiple guys in a row. It reminds me a lot of Bubble Bobble!

Kune worked hard on this originally for a game jam, and has been polishing it since. It can feel clunky at first getting used to spell switching and moving around, but the challenge is fair and I enjoyed practicing until I could beat it without using a continue. While the graphics look simple, I think they're still cute and charming, and they aren't confusing or anything.

I love this game a lot and Kune deserves support! I look forward to the sequel in the future :D

Hope it's not too late, but I finally added it to Steam! Took a while due to school ha. http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=607519887

It's really hard to pick just one game, and if I started listing favorites it'd go on forever. The ones that most consistently come to mind are Wario Land 4, Symphony of the Night, and Metal Gear Solid 2. You can tell by the first two I really like pixel art, and MGS 2 did a lot of really neat themes and ideas that work well in the game medium. Usually when people think of 4th wall breaking they look at that goofy psycho mantis fight, but MGS2 did a lot by commenting on game sequels in general and subverting expectations.

Wario Land 4 I love the personality and pacing of, as well as it's sound track (too bad GBA isn't that good at outputting sound). SOTN I think most people know is great already, I love all the options it gives players for how they want to go around the castle and play.

I think I chose these three because of all the games I like, these are the ones that I would like to make something most similar to one day, or at least let influence me the most. I don't think I'm skilled enough for it yet though (maybe for Wario Land 4, but definitely not the others).

Hee ho, I'm Cleave! I'm still in college but I'm trying to make games on the side. I really love 2D games and working with characters, I can do some art and programming but only enough to realize game ideas.

I submitted a game about a week ago, Carrie's Order Up. I'm making some updates based on feedback and am currently juggling some ideas for the next project. I like itch.io so far and it's really awesome it started up a community forum after joining it, I hope I can meet some cool people.

Visual Novels are cool, I'm messing with one in Game Maker as a side project. I never heard of Fungus but I looked at Ren'Py, what kind of VNs have you worked on?

Damn sounds like you do a bit of everything! I saw your pixel art elsewhere, do you have any of your music or works posted elsewhere? What kind of projects are you juggling?

Ohh neat, I remember looking at Joylancer while browsing itch.io, I really liked its aesthetics and the gameplay looked really fast-paced and kinetic. I wanna try it but there's a ton of stuff I wanna finish before getting around to new games.

This was a pixel-dailies thing for making a mock-up rpg battle screen, that I was late for (I think). I did make the menus and stuff, but I've omitted it here, since I might work on it more one day.

I referenced Mario & Luigi Superstar Saga for it, you can see it with the water. I'm terribly unconfident with backgrounds so it's surprising when I can finish one.

It's pretty neat, I like the subtle wall texture. What was the game going to be about?

Really great colors, I only did one pixel-dailies though, it's from last spring through