If you look at the source line cited as the problem, the only real explanation is that somehow your window height is being set to (or at least read in as) zero. If you trace the control flow all the way back down, the only way that can happen (as far as I can see) is SDL_GetWindowSize passing back zero. That's weird, it shouldn't be doing that.
Unfortunately, probably not something the developers can fix, likely either a driver issue, or an OS issue, or an issue in one of the dependencies. I can't really think of any thing to fix it on your end either, since all your stuff is pretty much up to date.
killythebid
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I just wanted to say I really enjoyed this, and before I get into any constructive criticism, I just want to say that anyone who loves the overall vibe of this story should definitely check out Severance by Ling Ma. It's got the exact same kind of semi-optimistic existential dread.
Now real quick I only have one note here, but the first time I played through I talked to Blake twice, then clicked on Parker because it seemed like Blake no longer wanted to talk to me, but Parker's dialogue is highly dependent on the previous message, so the whole thing just felt weird. It feels like the game really wants you to spend all your down time with a single person per playthrough, but if that's the case why give a choice? I don't know, it's not a huge deal, but it does affect the play experience.
I wouldn't categorize this as a game, it's more like a relatively simple story told with interesting presentation. When I think about it, that description also describes a poem.
Actually, the more I think about it, the more I think that description fits perfectly considering its focus on words and meanings.
This is interactive poetry.
I liked it. Seems like if you want to expand it though you'll have to add more complexity. I get a very "The Witness" vibe to this game, so maybe fitting with that theme you could add some puzzles that are affected by the environment in some way? You could also add some rune that splits the beam into two, maybe have some runes that have different effects based on which way the beam is traveling so that in the end you can feel like a wizard weaving different runes to control two beams with one set of instructions.
Also I liked that at the end you end up having to write an actual word, and think that would be a pretty cool idea for a puzzle. Like you're stuck trying to do this insanely complex series of tasks and every time you do one thing it breaks another, only to realize that the solution was right in front of you the entire time. Sort of like Gandalf's "Speak friend and enter" moment. Some players would probably derive the solution without ever realizing you spelt out an actual word, so it could be a cool moment regardless.
As an adult with anxiety, I don't think this is a very good idea. Anxiety isn't the same as normal fear. I, for one, am not very affected by jump-scares, but that doesn't mean I'm not anxious. The other issue is that you could very easily stumble upon something that you can't un-see. There's a lot of content online, especially in horror games, that can get lodged in your brain so you can't forget it even when you want to.
Personally the only things that worked for me were medication and meditation. In fact, I might recommend the opposite and that instead of high-stress games you try some games which can teach patience (whether that be difficult games like Celeste or Getting Over It, creative games like Minecraft, methodical puzzle games like Hexcells or Return of the Obra Dinn, there's a lot of options). Since for me, learning to slow down and be patient goes surprisingly hand-in-hand with learning to manage anxiety.
Same, I kinda felt bad that Rae was the one apologizing. Like, I understand how someone (especially a young person) could make that mistake, but I feel like she was definitely in the wrong in that case and if she had any self-reflection she would have realized that (at least after the diagnoses came in).
Honestly that's not what I expected to hear about the story. If it wasn't a focus why did you include so many unnecessary details? I assumed that was a relic of stripping down the story so details that used to be relevant aren't anymore, that you had become invested in the world and that's why you were hesitant to cut details. As is I have absolutely no idea how you ended with this story. If you didn't care too much about the story, it would be better to keep it to a bare minimum, if anything at all. Honestly you could have replaced the story screen with a tutorial screen and significantly improved the opening experience.
The comment about the art hurting my eyes was somewhat of a throwaway comment, but it's not a useless piece of criticism. What kind of art hurts people's eyes? Either intrusive over-the-top colors or high amounts of contrast where it doesn't belong. Well, your colors aren't over the top, if anything they're mostly gray and brown, so what does that say? The message is that the style is too noisy, it has too much contrast all over the screen in places it doesn't need to be.
Again, assuming you weren't using the tools available was kind of the generous interpretation. If you were using the tools available to you I have no idea how you were spending your time since it clearly wasn't on the story, the art, the sound, the gameplay, or the programming. I'd like to tell you what I think you should have done differently, but that doesn't work when I have no idea what you did. Maybe this was a casual project done in a few hours, but as a 48 hour project done by 2 people? I don't know how old you are or how much experience you have, but I made a 2D platformer from scratch in java in about that much time just after my freshman year of college, it was garbage, but the vast majority of the time was spent getting basic physics and collisions working, and most of the rest of the time was getting stuff to draw correctly.
I'm trying to be polite but that's very difficult here. This game is the worst one I've seen out of any of the gmtk submissions I played, aside from a few that were just completely nonfunctional. You ended up with a game that would be forgettable if it came out in 2008 as a flash game, working with tools that are so far beyond what anyone had back then. I know a lot of times these comment sections get filled up with hollow praise, and who knows maybe that's good for motivation, but honestly I think you could do much better. I mean, the "health as mana" thing isn't a bad idea, it's just not remotely original. Maybe it would have been more creative if you could use it a different way, how about "health is tied to screen position"? Every step you take rightward you need to offset with additional health potions. How about instead of "spells cost health" you had several bars, a health bar a magic bar an energy bar, and if any of them ran out you'd die, so it became more of a game about juggling multiple bars.
I apologize if my criticisms aren't constructive, but honestly I think they are. I tried to pair every criticism I gave with a suggestion on what could have been done differently. Now, maybe that suggestion is garbage, I don't know, and you can disagree with my assessment, but I am truly trying to help. Normally I would try and include as much as possible that I thought you did right, but honestly I can't think of anything that I could say. I know that sounds cruel but I can't think of any other way to say it. I saw another comment say this game was very "ambitious", but I don't even think is accurate considering it's really just trying to be a side-scrolling platformer. All I saw in the comments before I posted was unhelpful faint nonspecific praise, so while I apologize for being harsh, I think it's necessary. I may have done poorly though, since it seems like you've gotten fixated on a few specific criticisms that were worded particularly harshly and didn't see the suggestions that were meant to be more important.
A fun and unique concept, but here's a couple notes.
1) It's possible to skip the trigger in the fourth level that makes the purple things follow you. If you shoot the ball just under the first blue orb on top of its little ledge, you can hit the orb behind it and teleport to it, making the purple things not follow you through the entire level. I mean, I appreciated it because it was stressful enough as is, but I doubt that was intentional. I did it by accident my first time, but then preceded to do it every run thereafter. (Maybe instead of an "on touch" trigger, have a "on stop touch", or just have it be "if(player.x > some_value)")
2) Please let me retract the orb sooner. If I know a shot is going to miss it can be painful to have to wait for it to bounce a few times before retracting. Also, consider binding retract to a different button.
3) You might want to vary the purple things' speed based on where the player is. Imagine it speeding up if it's too far behind and slowing down as it gets closer to camera view. That might make it so the threat is ever-present rather than having the option to speed past it (although, again, the game's pretty stressful as is so idk).
It may have been better to hard-code the camera's y position, just following the camera on the x (sort of like the first super mario bros), but great presentation. You have no idea how much a cute aesthetic and some nice royalty free music adds to the experience.
Oh, and you probably know this, but the collision mechanics are a little sticky when you run into a wall. That's a hard thing to fix though, so I wouldn't hold it against you.
Sorry, I was trying to be charitable by assuming that this was a first project, I didn't want to be condescending but I assumed that if I was correct about this being a first project I wanted to explain at as low a level as possible.
I did assume a lot of things as a result of that, and as you mention it seems a lot of those assumptions weren't true. However, if this isn't a first project made by young creatives... well sorry but that kinda makes it worse.
I was commenting that the art was drawn in MS-paint, partially to communicate that if it was drawn in MS-paint to maybe consider using another program. The artstyle actually reminds me of 3kliksphilip's old flash games, I should mention that I didn't like that artstyle but the games were reasonably popular so maybe I'm in the minority.
I don't think that implementing the story changes would take much more work. Compose some images in powerpoint or photoshop, save them out as pngs (or bmps if that's easier to draw), and given that you already have a way to implement drawing images over the whole screen until the user clicks (as seen in the story screen) you could just flip through them.
I'm not trying to hold you to a high standard, I'm comparing your games to the other projects in this jam. I know that can be problematic in of itself, I don't know what additional constraints you were working within, and maybe you had to change direction midway through, and on top of all of that life happens and sometimes things just don't work out the way we want them to, but whatever the reason this game was simply not produced to the standard many other games were, even games that were made by a single person. I know that isn't nice to hear, and I know that's not especially constructive, but I want you to understand where I'm coming from and, if this really was close to your intended vision and you're really happy with the way the game turned out, you can ignore all of this. I'm assuming you're in the position of "my game is flawed, now what could I do differently next time?" If instead, you think "this game is exactly what I'd hoped it would be" and I just don't get it, then take my criticisms with a grain of salt. We don't all have to like the same things, and if I'm the outlier then conforming to my suggestions might take enjoyment away from the people who do like it. Again, I'm just trying to provide what I would like to see in the game.
For the record, I am a hobbyist game dev, but I'm primarily a programmer and I know I suck at art. This is why I said I can't really help you too much on that front and why my principal recommendation comes down to "do the thing that everyone else does". Speaking of which, that's why I assumed that the movement wasn't physics based. It seemed like the movement was really stilted and that's the most common explanation for why it feels like that. If that isn't the problem than the problem is principally one of game feel, which is much harder to meaningfully critique in words (especially for me since that's another weak spot for me, I don't know how to achieve it I just know when it's missing).
Look, I do feel for you, I know it hurts to have someone tear you work apart and I could have been more sensitive in how I worded some of my comments. Ultimately though I hope you understand that I really am trying to be helpful. I do also appreciate your constructive criticism on the constructiveness of my criticism, since I know I still have room to grow in that field.
It was interesting seeing little vignettes into her life. I love the foundations here, the story felt like real glimpses into somebody's life and the main character design was really compelling.
If you do make this into a full game though, you might want to add some music. I found myself sometimes forgetting which button was forward in time and which one was backwards, and I feel like if you put a different audio filter for each it would be easier to remember what you're doing.
Let me just put this out there: it seems like this is a first project created by middle/high schoolers. If that's the case, congratulations on getting something finished, that's more than most people manage, but you've run into a lot of classic problems that come with inexperience.
I'm not going to lie to you and tell you this is a masterpiece, but I am going to try and be constructive so that you can use this to better your skills going forward.
Art:
The art style gives me very strong MS-Paint vibes. In all honesty, it kind of hurts my eyes to look at. I'm terrible at drawing so I can't really give you a lot of tips in that regard, but one thing I would recommend would be to use a pixel-art style if you're struggling with adding detail. I know it's kind of cliche at this point, but it's cliche for a reason. Another recommendation could be to draw in a program that supports anti-aliasing, so that your lines don't look so odd and sharp.
Story:
The story breaks pretty much the two most fundamental rules of storytelling in the first five seconds. Show don't tell, and don't bombard your audience with proper names without giving them time to adjust. I read the pre-game text screen but my guess is 90% of people won't even do that. If you want your audience to read, you should keep it short and interesting. You don't need to present all of the background world-building to your audience upfront. The fact that your character's full name is "Lalaisa" but she goes by "Laisa" is not something we need to know as the first piece of information we're given. If you were telling a more in-depth story you could present that detail naturally by having one of her friends call her "Laisa". Why do we need to know all of the details of who is part angel and what relationship they have with each other? More specifically, why do we need to know these details upfront? You should limit the story that's directly told to the player through the voice of the author to information that's absolutely critical to understand. Having the character be part angel is cool and all, but do we really need to know that? What if we rewrote the opening scene like this:
[Opening text screen]
There are very few celestial beings who reside in the mortal world, and those who do tend to stick together. Lalaisa and Yngar exemplify this, both being half-angels and lifelong friends. As a mage and a monster hunter, they've been known to lend a hand to one another in their hour of need.
Recently though, tragedy struck. Yngar's fiance sadly passed away.
Three weeks later, Yngar rides out to find the nest of the beasts that have been attacking the local village...
[show scene of them talking]
Lalaisa: Promise me you'll be careful on your hunt.
Yngar: Sure, Laisa, whatever. I gotta get going.
Lalaisa: Are you sure you don't want me to come with you? With my magic and your skills we do make a pretty good team!
Yngar: No! Look, every time a half angel does magic it drains their life force. I don't want you throwing away your life because of me. And... I really don't think I could take losing someone else.
Lalaisa: Yngar...
Yngar: Besides, I could use some alone-time to clear my head. I'll see you when I get back.
Lalaisa: Come home safely...
[Yngar rides off]
["A few weeks later" appears on screen]
Lalaisa: Where is he? He should be back by now! [one of the monsters walks on screen] Huh? This is the same kind of monster Yngar was hunting! Maybe I can follow this beast back to its nest!
Just as an example, I think at least that this would be much more compelling. It would take more work to create, but not much more since you could basically just implement it like a slideshow and have it display a series of images.
Gameplay:
Most of the gameplay problems come down to technical issues and game feel. I don't feel I can accurately provide any insightful feedback since most of that is either stuff that comes with experience or problems that you probably knew about but didn't have time to fix. One piece of advice I can give is this: if you're going to use a game engine like Unity you should take advantage of the tools that it gives you. It feels like you're setting the characters' velocities/positions manually when it has a prebuilt physics engine that you could use. It just takes a little bit of reading up on the tools you're using to understand how to apply that to your own projects.
I'm amazed at how much technical knowledge of PICO-8 this must have required. Seriously, great job.
If I had to provide one piece of constructive criticism it would be that if the middle of an enemy sprite is visible, then the whole sprite is drawn even if it's in front of a corner that should obscure part of it, but I'm not sure how possible that would be to fix, it depends how you're utilizing the sprite system. But if you can't fix it don't even sweat it, it's phenomenal already.
Digital Logic Sim (old version) comments · Replied to maple-shaft in Digital Logic Sim (old version) comments
He's posting it on itch.io for donations, I assume that means he eventually intends to make money on it. I'm not gonna do his work for him and contribute to a project for someone else to make money on. I contribute to Open Source projects that aren't monetized. Besides, it's in alpha, I'm giving my feedback, so apparently all feedback is entitlement now? Plus, how is it entitlement to want a feature as basic as deletion? Look you can get off your high-horse and stop being a dick to people requesting features in a product that is in alpha specifically to get feedback.
Digital Logic Sim (old version) comments · Replied to LOB-kun in Digital Logic Sim (old version) comments
How is it complicated? It's no more complicated than making OR from AND and NOT gates. Look, the way I see it is there's two potential goals here, start simple for beginners (in which case it makes sense to also include OR, the other basic gate) or build your way up from nothing (in which case building everything from NAND or NOR would be better).
Okay, so a few problems. Solid GUI, but come on man why can't you delete anything? Like, you can delete individual instances of a certain gate, but if you put a typo in the name or something there's nothing you can do except restart the whole project or learn to live with it. Speaking of, if you did make a mistake in a project and have to start over, you can't delete the old project. Plus, maybe instead of starting with AND and NOT you could just start with NAND or NOR, since you can make every logic gate out of either of those as a starting point.