itch.io

Bug Report: Class B

Some various Z issues for certain tiles being rendered above the main character where I wouldexpect them to be rendered below:

is one example, towards the upper left of the map

Really strong a e s t h e t i c in your tileset, and a very interesting premise for your choice of historical time period and overall narrative. I would have liked to see some example gameplay mechanics provided, even if it was just a 'treasure hunt' type "Find 5 coins hidden around the city" or similar to give some gameplay context to exploring the world you have created.

Bug Report: Class B

Although graphically you recognise the player taking damage, nothing happens in terms of game mechanics; I would expect some gameplay feedback that you are being damaged, for example a life bar decreases, with an end result of taking too much damage, for example restarting the level or a game over screen.

Bug Report: Class C

When you play the 'hit effect' for taking damage, it overrides your animation cycle, so you are 'sliding' when moving. I would expect either a new version of all of your animations in a 'hit' and 'unhit' version so that animations still play after you take damage, or using a different method to show the hit effect - for example, using the Construct 'Flash' behaviour rather than hard coding the animations. 

Good job on making all of your own graphics and animating them as well - I know you lost some work, and managed to recover from that. I particularly liked the attention to detail on your  hit effect, making it clear when you had taken damage. I think your enemy sprite is slightly 'off' from the aesthetic used in the rest of the levels assets however; either making it a more 'low fidelity' enemy in line with the rest of your aesthetic, or increasing the fidelity of your other sprites and animations would help blend the overall aesthetic together.

Bug report: Class C

Sometimes it is tricky to tell whether a vertical jump can be made, as the height of the platform you are jumping to is very close to the maximum height of the players jump; I would suggest making these distances slightly more lenient, and making it much more visually obvious if a player can / can't make the jump by lowering the vertical element to be clearly below the maximum jump height of the player for 'regular' jumping - for harder 'precision' jumping this gap does not need to be /as/ obvious, but there should still be enough of a difference that it is obvious you can make the jump just by 'eyeballing' it.

Bug Report: Class C

The player plays a walk animation while jumping - I would expect a dedicated 'jump' animation for the two different 'stages' of a jump; the initial 'upwards' movement (on jump) and the follow up 'fall' movement (on falling) to help sell momentum

This is a really solid gameplay idea, and implemented very successfully with a very coherent aesthetic; the tonal shift between the past and the present in your use of colour palettes is particularly pleasing, and I would like to commend you on your music - it is just long and varied enough that it loops pleasantly without getting annoying.

It errs a little bit on the side of 'too difficult' in terms of memorising the differences between timezone; this could be  because as the level designer you know where everything is and were worried it would be 'too easy', but with fresh eyes it becomes a memorisation effort - you might want to consider some subtle guidance here, for example having background elements that suggest where things might be in the alternate zone, rather than as /purely/ graphical elements, or maybe some 'lead' on your camera, so that it is not centred on where the player currently is, but on where they are going to go, to make it easier to 'plan' where you are headed before committing to it and then trial and erroring through the changes.

Overall this is an incredibly strong vertical slice, and if it had been a real GameJam entry would end up scoring very highly! As an aside, I would personally downgrade the 'you can get stuck in buildings by timejumping' bug reports from an A to a B class, as you can 'fix' it by timejumping; if you had been stuck permanently and had to reload it would be an A.

Bug Report: Class C

The 'building' at the very start of the level 'above' you has some wall tiles that are slightly further from each other as other wall tiles, on the bottom and right wall sections, which means the shadow cast sometimes has a weird gap in it. 

Possible solution: redraw these walls with 'snapping' on, so that they are definitely all aligned the same way

I particularly liked the blood splatter when you defeat enemies - it's a nice subtle touch, but adds a little feeling of 'permanence' to the game. Although I enjoyed the music to begin with, it did end up getting a bit annoying - I think you could have a 'turn music off' button, or maybe add some new music so it doesn't just loop the one piece forever.

Overall this was an enjoyable top down shooter game, except without the shooting, and the controls felt very responsive.

Bug Report: Class C

You have the cursor keys and space bar for controls, but you have 'R' to reload, which is quite far away from the rest of the buttons, and not near anywhere my hand is naturally resting. Maybe a button next to the space bar for reload would feel better, so that I can reload without moving my hand?

Bug Report: Class B

I noticed that you can continue firing after you are dead, and even though no bullets appear, you hear the sound effect, and you are missing bullets as though you have fired them on your next life.

Possible fix: when you respawn the player, set the bullets to maximum, and do a check on the firing event that the player is not dead before playing the sound effect and decreasing the ammo count.

I particularly liked your use of foreground and background elements, so that I had a nice parallax effect of the hills in the background, but I could also 'hide' behind the trees - it gave a nice sensation of 'space' to the game. I also liked the 'spread' on bullets - a nice subtle touch. 

One thing I think I would have liked to have seen would be your scenery being drawn in as much detail as your main characters; they are at a very high resolution and really 'pop' on screen, but then your trees look quite blocky by comparison.

Overall this is a fun little shooting game, and I hope you continue to work on it with new levels!