Thanks for the kind words! I understand it’s a little slow. With a dungeon crawler, you have pretty clunky/limited movement in general so it’s difficult to balance movement and turn speeds. At least the lack of control makes the encounters scarier. That horror vibe was very important to us.
krameraad
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Here's a video of both the damage boost and some wall climbing you can do with the grapple. The wall climbing is not easy and pretty tedious so it's more a cool trick than anything problematic. You need some horizontal space to climb, so if you fall in the narrow pit next to the upgrade you're softlocked (unless you have the climbing upgrade of course). It's possible to climb up to the ceiling of every level and reach lots of places.
I liked the concept, and the graphics, sound and music were great. It's pretty big as well, with many rooms and some different enemy types. Even worldbuilding and very nice-looking cutscenes. High effort!
While I liked that production value, I admit I found the gameplay itself a bit lacking, mostly because I found the player character kind of awkward to control. Maybe some coyote time or control over jump height would make it feel better.
Good job anyways, I beat the game and the final sequence was pretty tense and fun!
Great job! I had a lot of fun with the game. The characters look cute, and the perspective is pretty wacky. The tongue grapple is especially fun to use but a bit unintuitive.
I was surprised how expansive the game was, actually. Main menu, soundtrack (I recognize the drum samples from beepbox), multiple enemies and hazards, huge levels and even a map/fog of war system. Very impressive.
I took the time to explore it all, even though I found some sequence breaks, which I wonder if you knew about? Basically, you can get the grapple early with a damage boost, and save frogetta with no other abilities. It's nothing too negative, I think sequence breaks are cool if they're difficult to achieve, but it took only a few tries.
Overall I really liked it! Even the little dev bonus at the end is something unique.
Heyy, great video! Really nice to see a playthrough, even if it's not full. I didn't have enough time to properly playtest the game, so difficulty was hard to judge, but from your video it got pretty clear how the challenges ramped up a bit too quickly. Even the room after the first turret seemed too intimidating from your perspective.
I'm still glad the game felt good to play if a bit clumsy at times. I don't want to excuse bad game design of course, but some of the clumsiness is intended. The goal is for the player to start off as a normal guy surviving in a tough situation, and then becoming a skilled freerunner more through knowledge and experience than just through new abilities.
It's kind of an undercooked mechanic, but I wanted facing direction to be an important aspect during certain actions like when ledgegrabbing or wall sliding, so you can't do those things while facing away from a wall. I noticed it was a little hard to control your facing direction sometimes though, so that would be one of the things I'd improve upon. I also wanted to add moves you could *only* do while facing away from a wall.
The palette changes were because I originally intended for there to be more distinct areas, but I ended up not getting to use all the cool palettes for them, so I mixed them into the normal rooms. Maybe a bad call since the changes happen so fast, and because I haven't looked at the alternate palettes nearly as much as the default, but I figured some variation would be nice.
Thanks a lot for the video!
Sorry that the lack of gamepad support turned you off. I wanted the controls to be simple and able to be played one-handed. But you're right, it's subjective whether gamepad or keyboard controls work better (for me, I play Rain World on keyboard, but Celeste on controller) so I could have added gamepad support for those who wanted it.
I'll definitely check out Chick-Magnet!
I'm sorry you couldn't finish the game because of the difficulty. In a full game, I'd probably still have sections similar or even higher in difficulty, but add more intermediate levels to smooth out the difficulty curve while making the hardest challenges optional. I'm glad you could still enjoy the game's design and visual style!
Thanks for the kind words! Nice to hear that the difficulty isn't turning away people as much as I feared. It's funny that you say the rooms play like puzzles, because that's the exact mindset I used to design them. Movement where you have to use your brain and think about different routes and how moves link together.
Hahah, thanks! It does ramp up a little fast, if I made this a full game I'd definitely add a few more rooms between getting the wall jump and reaching that section. In general I'd add a lot more rooms, and design them to be more open and "generally challenging" rather than focused "celeste-like" obstacle courses.
I'm taking a break with the project for now, but when I resume, I'll definitely send you a message about the music. Maybe we can work together sometime, who knows.
The ledge thing also bugged me. I had a solution for it, but that caused other problems, so I put it on hold until I implement an elegant system for it. Controller support is another one of those "more time/larger game" things but I'll keep it in mind!
I appreciate the feedback. I was a little worried that it might become too difficult, and I'm actually surprised you got that far! I've only played the game myself, but if I had more time I would've had my friends playtest the game for me. I actually made getting the final letter much easier than the second-to-last because I felt the player could use a break after that hellish backtrack. If you want to see hints or just the rest of the game, there's a walkthrough on the itch page/my youtube.
A death counter would be great and pretty funny, that's for sure. There are more things I'd add if I had more time/the game was a bit larger, like a save system and music. I was also thinking of something ambient.
I read that you couldn't use the down key as well. There is no real indication that the down input is necessary or does anything at all, and it's never strictly needed, but it does make the game a lot harder in some places if you don't know you can just drop down a ledge. In the future I'll try to communicate more clearly the player's complete arsenal.
Thanks for playing!