Cool concept and pretty fun to play too. Maybe you could keep kaiju position after death and let it be manually reset instead? I died a couple of times getting the hang of platforming and having to position the kaiju again felt pretty bad.
I will say the levels felt like they were ordered backwards. The first level was hardest because the horizontal distance was the longest, so I had to actually walk the kaiju, which was tricky given the controls.
I absolutely love this idea, and once I got the hang of it, the gameplay was very fun too. I write this much because I greatly enjoyed the game.
I will say that the climbing phase was very confusing at first, and I think this comes down to two factors, one major and one minor. The former is that there are two parts to most actions - choose tool, then choose target, but the game doesn't clearly show which phase you're in. One way to solve this could be to disable buttons that can't be used (so everything that isn't GO! when selecting tools and vice versa), or highlighting buttons that can be used.
The latter is that the cooldowns round down, meaning that they show 0 before they are actually ready to be used. This is a problem because in general you want to be using the items as soon as they are available, and you can't tell whether it's cooldown 0 (available) or 0 (a second from being available). This especially applies to screwdriver, which always shows 0.
Now I don't know if this game would actually be better with better balance, but I do want to note some imbalances in case you guys are interested. Among multiplicative items, big scary button is the best by a long shot, since it's both cheaper and faster and its negative is easily mitigated. Battery and overclock are both too expensive for what they do. I think the cooldown is sufficient without making them expensive as well.
Final note - on the one hand it is funny to see a long train of zeros stretching off the side of the screen. On the other hand, it would be nice to know what my score actually was. Maybe get the best of both worlds by showing both a regular number and a number in scientific notation. It's also possible to get inf/-inf/nan meters, so if you were to work on this further you'd probably want to add bignum support as well.
Wish I could take credit for the rain shadows, but it's from Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri, which has a very elaborate terraforming system that I simplified and adjusted to make fit this game.
I agree that I should have made the ships' role explicit. I'm sure better UI design could convey more information with less text than the walls of instructions on the tutorial levels, but I didn't have time to implement many quality-of-life features (such as undo, action preview, resource icons on tiles, or a resources harvested indicator)
Absolutely amazing game, probably the best I've played yet. You guys crammed so much into it that I can't quite believe it was made in just 4 days.
*Spoilers below*
Now I might just be a little dumb, but putting Unknown Assailant as the default option really did not make it seem like that was a pickable option. Even when I got to the third case and it was obvious that I had gotten the first two wrong, I think it would have still taken me a while to figure out how to move on without accusing one of the people on scene if I hadn't used the cheat sheet.
On the plus side that did mean that I ended seeing two endings, though.
I managed to get the game stuck by collecting the exit too soon after beating the boss. I think probably the "Foe Obliterated" text interacted badly with the end screen, so that's something to keep in mind for the future.
Based on your description on this page, something changes when you do multiple runs? If so, then I think you should explain that in the game.
In general I think you should go bigger with effects since I didn't really notice them. If you haven't watched, in Mark Brown's Day 2 stream he talks about this (at 27 minutes playing Drivey Trucks)
It's a neat platformer, but I wish the ideas had been developed more. There was rarely any reason to make my platforms any size other than max size, and I didn't see any reason to take snapshots of anything other than a floor. So the whole snapshot-taking process felt somewhat superfluous since I was taking the same picture every time.
The concept is great, but the controls simply aren't good enough to support the pace of the game. I died multiple times near the fire extinguisher, spamming 'E' and adjusting my position, completely unable to pick it up. The couple of times I did manage to pick it up, I was still unable to put out the fire, whether the room was big or small. I don't know where the hitboxes were exactly, but I do know that they weren't where I expected them to be.
This game looks and plays absolutely amazing. It's incredibly well-made for being made in only 4 days. My only complaint is that the inside gameplay didn't feel like it contributed very much to the experience.
Conceptually it's a very neat way of organizing the upgrades unlocks, but gameplay-wise it's mostly just kind of a hassle.
Neat idea, but to be honest the chords just sounded kind of bad when you got them (partially due to conflict with BGM), especially when you got multiple at once.
I don't know how difficult it would be to make them sound good, but since it is the central hook of your game, I think it's worth the effort.
To be honest, I didn't really feel much advantage or disadvantage either way to scaling up the enemies. Mostly the optimal strategy is just to keep circle-strafing them, which got boring pretty fast.
Beautiful idea, brilliantly executed. I am biased towards platformers, but I think this is the best game I've played so far. I think it's actually wall jump height that makes them difficult. They are not so hard to do, but when each one only gains you the tiniest amount of height, you have to do them with very tight timing to move upwards.
A cool concept and a fun game. I couldn't get past the wave with the two bosses, although I can't tell if that's simply a skill issue. I unlocked both pulsar and magnetar, neither of which seemed to do anything, and always ended up with a huge pile of unused medium elements.
The main idea is great, you've made some interesting puzzles, and I can imagine many more with this mechanic. But the game really is incredibly finicky. I think making jump height scale less aggressively with size would help a great deal with this; as it is, you often have only one shot at a particular jump.
More checkpoints would also be appreciated (do I really have to do room 2 every time I want to take a shot at room 3?)
Thanks for your kind and insightful comments. About the nature of the game, Mark Brown came up with the distinction between puzzle games and problem-solving games in one of the really old GMTK videos, if you haven't seen it and are interested in watching an analysis.
The little secret about this type of game is that the levels are much easier to design. Instead of having to come up with a puzzle that is built around a particular path, I can just plop down some terrain and an objective and say "This level is left as an exercise to the player" (obviously I checked each level to see that it worked and wasn't too annoying, but I didn't have to do any rigorous testing to rule out unintended solutions). I actually didn't get the game working until around 80 hours into the jam, but after that I banged out the full set of levels in just 4 hours.
Very impressed with how smooth the platforming and the resolution mechanic was. The bonus collectibles were a nice touch. I think there's something wrong with the I node in level select; I noticed when I tried to get the first collectible which I missed and it brought me to II instead.
I think it's very cool that you took what could be a flaw in another game - sprites overlapping making it hard to select the one you want - and turned it into a feature of the game. I could shrink the body to lower its health, but then it might shrink behind the shield, forcing me to destroy that first.
It's unfortunate that there are only 4 traits when each soul has 3 of them. That means every soul has dog lover or criminal traits. Through 2 rounds beginning with the one where criminals were rejected, I correctly rejected 71 out of 71 souls. Not a single soul met the entrance criteria. This imbalance makes it very easy to decide for souls and makes the process uninteresting.
I do enjoy puzzle-in-puzzle type games, and the puzzles in this game seem solid. I would play more if my brain weren't fried from coding. One issue is that it's difficult to reason about the puzzles without being able to easily see the insides of the boxes, which is rough because you have to set up the boxes just to be able to enter them.
Although I've seen people crack many jokes about "Shoot to Move", I still found this implementation quite creative! The controls were tricky, but in a good, challenging way, not in a overly janky way in my opinion
Pretty fun but the feedback loop is insane because of the ability unlocks. The first time I shrank quickly and never got enough abilities to avoid getting overwhelmed. The second time I unlocked offensive abilities and quickly reached the point where I was steamrolling all the enemies without even trying.
