itch.io

hopefully

nope, vivaldi

thanks for the feedback! footstep sounds can be disabled or changed in audio options. stepping on already cleared tiles doesn't lower the power by itself, just not marking new ones does - you can make little detours to dodge enemies, quickly get back on track and lose little to none power in process if you're nimble enough.

thanks for playing! in case if you haven't tried that, if you play on the gamepad or rebind the keyboard in options, you can click the right stick and use it to rotate the level around to a limited degree, it helps with orienting yourself during the bonus phase.

made a full loop. i thought i'd be filtered by the first wall jump heavy section after the first checkpoint, but then i read the page and found out it's possible to slow the game down, which was a game changer. ended up holding the space bar almost all the way through and the latter parts were still plenty challenging, though as the other guy said the curve was harsh. the last part with the ability to bounce yourself back to square one if you overshoot the ceiling jump was particularly brutal.

i liked the leniency of the hitbox and the fact that pogo doesn't have to be out at all times and it's possible to roll around, that gives some welcome little breather. i also enjoyed the little touches like ability to change colors (ended up doing that every death to spray the walls in all the different colors) and losing eyesight as the eyes fall off.

seems like there are some slight issues with the mouse control where game doesn't perfectly let the cursor roll around and it hits a skippable "wall" in rotation, but i couldn't find a consistent pattern of reproducing these. other than that, everything seemed perfectly stable.

thanks for playing, idk how that happened but i think you played the oldest demo from a year ago, that one had no sound and had stages with stars

thanks for the feedback. WASD is supported,  just need to remap the controls in the menu and the step sounds can be played by selecting the option. perhaps the latter would be better as automatic on switch.

thanks. i decided against special rewards for literal perfect play, since it's damn hard and i'm not even sure if it's possible to pull off in some of the late-game stages. idk if i'm gonna go back on that one, if i end up doing that the reward probably won't affect the rank.

gamemaker:studio2, from a quick search it appears it might be a windows n edition issue. maybe check this page out, let me know if any of this helps.

https://www.reddit.com/r/PleX/comments/63tw0j/windows_10_pro_n_mfplatdll_missing...

gave the game a quick shake, beat the first dungeon and got the sparkly wand projectiles, finished in the lava dungeon dying in the second room with the laser eye in the middle. i enjoyed the game, it's fun, though it can be felt it's a bit rough around the edges and a lot of things have yet to get their polish (no music, scarce sound effects, etc), you probably know a lot of it already.

i think the introduction could be a bit smoother - the game dumps a lot of info on you right at the start, though it does attempt to get the player to really get the idea in the corridor with the owls (which i didn't notice at first - the doors tend to be difficult to spot in the darkness and so close to the border of the screen). maybe it'd be better if the owls did more talking and mentioned the shift+direction combos along the way.

i appreciated the 8-directional attacks.

i think binding both the X spell and the C ability to the same spell page is on a clunky side - found myself failing to dash, because i was just using the thunder ball.

the writing could use some work, i think it doesn't sell the setting. might be an early development thing. tilesets also have some questionable color choices and a quite a bit of repetitive tiling (the intensely blue, if nicely animated, water and zelda reference forest with its brown litter-looking wooden floor being the biggest offenders), though to their credit it's generally easy to tell where collisions lie and the game has a very clean look.

btw seems like F1 toggles debug data.

good work, keep going.

thanks for playing. as i mentioned in another reply, this might be a thing with some players misinterpreting the result of stepping on a tile twice and being too afraid to step off the beaten path - it's a thing i need to investigate.

thanks for playing. though a chunk of the game's backgrounds will remain photo-based, i do agree some of the backgrounds (in and outside of the demo) need spit polish to be sleeker and a few could use bigger changes or a more abstract take.

i am aware there are some things due reshuffling (the damaging cross tiles gave people a lot of trouble in particular), but this is something i haven't yet rearranged before getting this build out. definitely will consider moving the diagonal jump hint earlier, lose animation speedup is also on the list.

thanks for playing. while staying on the move and getting the trinkets and such is rewarded with higher end-stage ranks, the only thing strictly required to progress is painting the target % of tiles without getting a game over. stepping on a tile twice outside of the bonus phase also isn't punished in any of the demo's stages, so stepping off the perfect path to nab an item or dodge enemies is very often fine even if you want to keep the power high - perhaps this is something that needs to be better communicated. i will be looking into this.

start button should work in the options as well, took me a sec to figure out i can only A out of it.

the controls are heavy and the collisions are very unforgiving. you need to just as much as brush against the objects by a hair for things to register, it gets punishing especially when the game expects you to squeeze into tight corridors behind the enemies you just bounced off from. this happens a few times on level 4 and is highlighted by the single tile of spikes at the beginning of that map.

level 3 also had a spot in which i had no idea how to progress other than damage boosting from an enemy, wasn't a fan of that.

it took me a moment to get used to the fact the double jump you can do with the grapple has to direct you forward and i still think it's weird how useless clinging to the wall right next to you is. i think making things less punishing and introducing more margins of error (smaller hitboxes, snapping to the ground tiles, etc) and options for the player (hanging on to walls? directional double jumps?) to lean on would go a long way to make this game more enjoyable and less frustrating to play, along with giving the level design a lot more tools and toys to challenge the players with. i don't know how much you want this game to be hardcore stuff for people who cut their teeth on the bang-your-head-against-the-wall-until-you-win breed of platformers, but i think it's worth a consideration at the least.

that said i appreciated the health recovery pickups that were placed at exactly the right places and the autosave. the graphics and audio were slick for what they are as well.

i liked the game, it's very juicy and consistent with its monochromatic graphics, but i felt it's quite hard to get into. the movement was difficult to adjust to. the hover from shooting down helps, but the reload is very slow at the beginning and it leaves you defenseless against the enemies, which have the unfortunate tendency to bump you from offscreen at sonic speeds. i think it would help by a lot if the player started with some cash money in the pocket.

i probably wouldn't have been able to get very far without cheesing near the shop for reload with invincibility and shooting some off-screen point that gave me insane combo until i could get the passive damage ring upgrade, which helped mitigate the surprises. even then, the game gave me an F after i almost completely emptied the two shops that i've seen (thanks for the cute little cameo, by the way!)

looks like a cute little masher that would excel in large scale multiplayer battles and i enjoyed the 2 minutes of an online match i had with it, but the batshit counterintuitive menu interface sapped 98% the enjoyment i could've had from this game, didn't even find a way to activate a player vs cpu match

not sure if you're going to update this game, but i'd say you should really focus on ui with this one, i think it shows promise

thanks for playing and recording the footage! there's actually no randomness to enemy/item spawn order, it's fixed per stage with bonus fruit interrupting the queue when certain clear % are hit

yeah, i see it now. i'll look into pointing out the currently set up controls to the players, thanks for bringing this to my attention

thanks, yeah i still need to look further into the audio stuff. not sure about a timer, i might look into implementing something time related somehow, but right now i don't think it's gonna be part of the main game

thanks for playing, good insight about that red portal, i'll look into changing the colors and the retry option. i test the game using a keyboard most of the time, if there's anything more specific you think is weird about the keyboard controls let me know

the crash is a known issue, still, thanks for playing and reporting!

thanks

brutal physics, every ascent is an exercise in sphincter clenching. the very first challenge the game throws at you is a 4-screen tall climb where you will likely drop to the bottom a dozen times before you get some grip on the controls. the fact that nearly every action needs to be confirmed with a W press makes this a lot harder than it looks on clips, and a single accidental rub against a slope or a wall can send you plummeting, oftentimes straight back to beginning of the whole part. by the time i was done with the game, the bump sound the character makes when it collides with terrain became anxiety inducing.

i'm going to have my gamer card revoked for this comment, but i'd like to see an easier difficulty mode where you could set your own checkpoints to return to or less unforgiving physics with regulated launch power. unless you want to appeal only to the hardest among the hardest men, then it's fine, i probably am just not good at this game. i made it only slightly further than the other guy before getting knocked out by the downwards-point arrow all the way to the bottom.

i also agree that the obstacles easily crossing over the screen boundary and acting like a "gotcha" isn't quite cool. though i didn't get screwed over by it myself, i can easily see how that could be the case and i found myself jumping straight up to probe what's in the next part. since it seems like the moving objects still work off-screen, i think trying out a smoother camera setup in place of flipscreen might be beneficial for the game.

another thing is that i'm not sure how useful the rocket is, aside from being a vehicle for communication. it has a proper reload, letting player shoot in mid-air, and simple flight physics, but as the character drops like a rock on most falls and easily outruns the rocket, i don't think that has any use, as precise aiming to try and rebound seems pretty much impossible. unless there are some puzzles later in the game that use it, then i can see the purpose, but if there aren't, it could be probably simplified.

the game looks competently executed. i've encountered no bugs and the aesthetic of the game is easy on the eyes, kind of feels like the character and the aimer were taken from another game with how abstract they are, but it's not a drastic clash, it kind of works as a highlight.

this is an intriguing game and seems very accomplished in what it's trying to do. it's not pretty, but extremely consistent in its usage of textures plastered all over the place, mixed with eclectic music (that sometimes fails to loop for what feels like a whole minute, adding some flavor) and occasional fancy creature made of multiple parts. mechanics feel janky, but at the same time finetuned for what they are trying to do. there's clever gameplay hidden behind the chaos of jittery movement. i wish there was some more consistency and natural flow to potato's actions, though. a lot of them seem to rely on naturally occurring overlaps between the terrain and the tongue, often resulting in timing windows too tight to keep the actions consistent, as walls like to kill all of your momentum in a blink. i think even something as basic as speeding up the tongue animation would be a good start.

what is really dragging the experience down, in my opinion, is the level design. it's all over the place and generally directionless. perhaps it feels right at home when you've seen the stage layouts in their entirety, but in the field of view the player is given it takes some trial and error to get around and with how visually monotonous some levels are, it's hard to keep playing. i think putting some dumb clue arrows around and cutting back on the parts where a fall sends you back several screens would help the game as a game and not an experimental piece of art by a lot.

another thing that irked me was the dialog system. too many times did i walk away from the transmission of pomao's brother in the tutorial level because i tried to find the button to speed up the text and ended up resetting it all over. a skip button would go a long way.

thanks! i don't think the spheres will be going anywhere, but i'll be varying up the bestiary for sure.

thanks for playing and detailed feedback and suggestions. you got some good ranks considering how harsh the difficulty curve is in this demo. stars are definitely gonna get adjusted and i'll look into reducing the gotchas related to the corners. it's possible to play around them if you act more careful with your movement and camera, but looking into that anyway will probably benefit the game as a whole, so i'll toy around with that.

got the download version, gave it a go, had fun. the enemies with the lasers between them are a clever mechanic and the game makes nice use of it with some of these dudes trying to wrap you around them and push you off to the border.

i didn't like the control scheme, aiming is kind of imprecise and sluggish. as enemies come up your face, it feels like the controls are yet another obstacle you have to battle instead of being a tool to use against the foes. i think the game would feel much better to play if it was possible to lock on a shooting direction at least. doesn't help that the game didn't pick my xinput controller up aside from vibrations, but i have some weird drivers on that one, so maybe it's something on my side.

upgrading feels good, some of these pare pretty much game changers while others barely useful in comparison. i pretty much never used dash until i got the laser phasing and enemy destroying upgrades, since it didn't seem worth the risk of having to readjust the shooting direction, then it became central to my playstyle, even more so after nabbing the double dash perk. at this point the difficulty curve didn't quite catch up, so i ended up killing myself at phase 25, as i've seen most stuff the game has to offer anyway. either way, the phase formula with the game feeding you upgrades to keep you going is a classic, there's a nice rhythm to the game even if latter phases sometimes drag on.

the graphics are effective, game looks nice, everything pops and is shiny. it's nice to watch, it's polished, the camera tilts are a great touch. great showpiece for that operagx stuff yoyogames is peddling nowadays.

so yeah, you've done a good job with this little arcade spiel, would recommend giving it a try.

Thanks. Item icons have been already changed.

Thanks for feedback. Zoom is dependent on stage/section and 1st stage isn't supposed to have too much going on with it. Weapons are a constant subject of balance, some graphics/effects are due a touch-up too.

I'm talking about some unpolished details, it's nothing gamebreaking though. Some notable ones I remembered:

• It's possible to pick the Hard option in the difficulty menu without making it highlight if you do it fast enough (https://my.mixtape.moe/ejrkvk.webm)
• Player appears to be able to shoot for one frame after a death  after they're warped to their respawn (https://my.mixtape.moe/untqzu.webm)
• The fuel bar visibly goes past the limit for a frame when you pick up the item (https://my.mixtape.moe/jdetya.webm)

Regarding the boost button, I suggested making it just boost you in whatever direction you're facing if you're not holding left/right.

And thanks!

Really enjoyable demo. I was surprised by how well the jumping physics are suited for dealing with the barrage of projectiles enemies shoot at you. There's some lack of polish and visuals might be somewhat underwhelming, but they create a cohesive whole and shooting stuff just feels good - explosions are on point and enemy fire is easy to see.

As others said, an autofire button would make a great addition - the frequency of mashing gets pretty hard on you after a while. I felt the charged fire of blue/red weapons isn't very useful - it has quite limited range and most of the time it seems to be just faster to kill things with ordinary fire. I think I saw it had some bullet-blocking properties, but it appears to be very situational, maybe I just didn't get used to it well enough. I'd also probably find myself using boost more often if it was possible to initiate it without right/left input.

It's nice that there is an option for basic key rebinds, but I wish gamepad support was a little more robust - it seems like only pad 1 can be used.

I'm looking forward to more news about this game.

Regarding the movement itself, I feel like that little bounce that happens after a high jump is a little unnatural. Because it has the same sound and graphics as an ordinary jump but is lower, it looks like some kind of input buffering bug. Giving it different audio and visuals would do, but personally I'd say with such high gravity it just would be better to ditch it overall and put in some kind of landing animation instead that wouldn't affect player's behavior.

From bugs, textboxes don't seem to pause the walking animation properly and timed textboxes don't react to mashing buttons properly - they just loop around until their staying period is up.

Looks good overall, I really liked the death animation

It's a bit rough around the edges with some flaws like wonky full-screen scaling and extremely limited view along with no invincibility frames after entering new floors, but a pretty fun prototype overall. Gesture detection is neat, cute sprites too. Want to see this further worked on.

- Knockback cancelling mechanic is brilliant.

- Death screen is a nice touch.

- In the (I think) second section of the first (Cave) stage it's not possible to go down the stairs of what seems to be a passable segment - the character just shakes back and forth.

- Mechanics are still very solid overall, but stairs feel too sticky and take too much priority - especially in the tower section of the Hell stage I often found myself trying to duck or use the alt weapon, but instead unintentionally interacting with the stairs and taking damage. Perhaps their sensitivity should be tweaked.

- I feel the section after the Tower in hell stage is a bit of an unfun romp with the same short moving platform passage - enemy pattern repeated a bit too many times.

- Second boss was awesome.

Gameplay-wise it's looking rock-solid, though the boss seems to be on a bit unpredictable side later on. Good work so far.

Good game. Could use some more polish, but very playable as is.

Thanks. It's being developed further.

Thanks. I haven't played that game, these backgrounds do look like something worth investigating though.

When it comes to picking software, it depends on what you're aiming for. For the characters I used GMS' image editor, a program that doesn't surpass MS Paint that much, but the sprites' outlines are softened in the game.