A question is have is did you have and specific palette that you were sticking to during your design? Or do you just pick whatever colors look best?
Originally I wanted to have the 5 colors in the game (red, blue, green, yellow and gray) be reflected in the fairies, the toads and the level contraptions. I tried to stick to that for a while, but some fairies like merry needing a different color and the brave fairy looking subpar with yellow, so I bend the rule but still kept is as a loose guideline. By the end I just experimented with colors to see which ones meshed well together.
One thing that I did manage to keep constant was using yellow as a highlight for all fairies.
Interesting thought process. You had an idea to lessen the required effort only to talk yourself out of it while implementing it. It happens.
Yeah, change of plans. Thankfully I don't have a strict deadline so I can afford to take the time.
As for the placeholder, it probably didn't help that illusions look like that in DotA and Warcraft 3, but tinted blue instead of green. That probably helped condition people towards that interpretation.
I completely forgot about that! I played a lot of dota so maybe the green tint was a subconscious decision at the time.
Also, I'm still a little confused about the fairies. Is the summoned fairy some sort of construct that only lasts for a level, a merry fairy that was at a different location and got teleported in, or a fraction of the original witch fairy contained within the marble?
Sorry I wasn't clear on the devlog. The fairy is teleported where the witch fairy is. Where the summoned fairy is something I haven't revealed yet.
You are right about the version, the current itch.io one is the same one from steam. I did that to unify both for the new trailer. The test levels are done for testing mostly, they are very rought around the edges and I don't want people to think the final levels will be that unpolished. I do update with test levels every now and then if you want to play them.
Played for a bit on tutorial, arcade and the test rooms. Video:
This does feel like piloting a mecha, very cool. Random thoughts ahead.
The minigun is so much better than the other weapons, the don't come even close.
The sound of the mine throwing weapon is very silly.
Looking directly up or down causes issues with the aim.
I like the destructable things in the level.
For some reason, something kept rotating my view or outright teleporting me. It was very disorienting.
When killing enemies on the middle of the level, more enemies got spawned generating an army.
I didn't notice what the shield could do.
The game was very demanding on my PC, the fans were going crazy.
It is cool to see the game improving, I'm looking forward when you are adding missions to it (I don't know if you are, but it would fit the type of game). Keep up the good work!
The platforming felt right and the character controlled well. I got stuck on the night level thinking there was a golden thing. There wasn't, I cut that part of the video because I was running around like a headless chicken. The game later tell you where they are so I have nobody to blame but myself.
I liked the bounce mechanic, it is a shame it is only used twice and in a bonus level at that. I can imagine it must be difficult to design around it though.
I know it is your first project, but it is competently made. Good job! I also like the music a lot. The movement and air control feel different to mario, so sometimes it is slightly more difficult to control the goblin.
I finished quickly mostly because I watched people play, so I knew what was coming.
I tried to play, but had big FPS issues. Last time I played I did so on my old PC and the game worked perfectly well, this PC is much more powerful but performance tanks as soon as the battle starts.
Being an egg flipper is hard work. It is a small and fun game, just the concept is amusing to me already. Needs more things to fry, I want to make a compelte breakfast.
There is a bug where the egg clips through the pan and gets a huge multiplier. Happened a lot of times during my playthrough.
Interesting concept. It took me a while to get the hang of it, ended up just trying to keep the creatures alive instead of chasing points, which resulted in a good score on my final attempt.
There were a lot of moments where I wasn't sure what was going to happen first. I mean one creature that can eat and be eaten on the same tile.
Very nice sounds and achivements.
Why do trees have counters on them?
I found the storm usefl mostly to destroy trees (is that intended? or is it mostly fo protecting serpents)
The fact that creatures starve made everything very dificult to control, but thats the flavor of the game. I wonder how this would play without that mechanic (maybe building chains is easier?).
Also I was going to mention not getting the piece you needed by bad RNG, but now after closing the game I notice the "Free pick: 3" button on the screen. I'm silly and didn't notice it during playtime. For me the screen on the right was mostly informative so the interactable button got camouflaged.
Knowing what the next piece will be could be helpful to setup chains.
It is an interesting concept for a survivor game. The game has charming graphics and characters and It is more difficult than other survivors games I have played. I like that the jump key helps escape hairy situations. I enjoy survivors games and had a fun time with this one.
The enemies have a combo of abilities that make them very annoying to deal with. First they block your path, so if you are surrounded you take a large chunk of damage until you get free or just outright die. They also predict where you are going to move, making them hard to manouver around, forcing the player to be overcautious. Otherwise you can bump on the same enemy twice in a fraction of a second. They push you back when taking damage, resulting in unpredicatable situation to react to resulting in getting hit multiple times. And since most of the skills are almost melee, these situations will happen during gameplay a lot.
The upgrades need text. Sometimes it is clear what they do, but other times not (I'm not sure if the blade was a regular attack upgrade or if it was cooldown updgrade). Upgrades to the same skill feel like they do very little, with the only exception being the the shield upgrade.
I got damaged while having the shield. I'm not sure how, this is what caused me to lose my run.
If the player starts a jump with no horizontal momentum, the jump will have no horizontal momentum, jumping in place. Some air control would be welcome.
Health regen felt like it did nothing.
I'm not sure what the chest contained.
Like the others said, my cpu was melting while playing.
It is a fun game, I hope you will be able to develope it further.
Finished the game and also played some mine mode. Video:
It is a nice puzzle platformer. The mechanics were easy to understand and the graphics are appealing. For the puzzles, it felt strange that some of them had unwinnable states. Most puzzle platformers I have played have a design that lets the player continue the level without restarting if they mess up (with the exception when they die).
Towards the end of the game the focus was more on action and precision than puzzles. Those are difficult to mix, which kind of gameplay are you looking for in the endgame?
Talking about precision, it is difficult to jump between two blocks. You can watch in the video how I struggled with that on the first screen.
The mining minigame is fun. It is much better to break crates than hit rocks, so without crates (or when crates are hidden behind rocks) there is little one can do. Also my computer got fried while playing (on browser).
You already know your game is full of GMI energy. I have only one objective complaint, the key bindings are not localised. It will not always be "keys on bottom left of keyboard" – on non-english layouts the keys start being all over the place. I think all input libraries have some abstraction to fix this easily, e.g. in SDL it’s KeyCode vs. ScanCode.
This is something that the engine I'm using has and I have been thinking about implementing. It would require adding a lot of assets for the tutorial UI, which I'm on the fence about. I will study a bit what other games do.
Subjectively I am not excited for the mix of puzzling+execution, I mean the execution is really not hard, but it sucks having to redo a level from beginning, when I had the right plan, just because I didn’t line up the tongue handling correctly. There were a few situations where fairy hitboxes behaved unexpectedly. But maybe all this is more fun with the proper key layout.
The game has an action axis to it, so will require some timing execution, though I have been chipping away at the action difficulty part for a while now. Normally the way that the game set ups tongue shots make it easier to aim them, though there is a learning curve. There is an "aim assist" checkbox that I recently added to the options menu to help with that.
About the video, sadly something went wrong with the transmision and twitch shows a frozen screen. I can hear you playing on the background, so it must be something visual about it. I still apreciate you taking your time to stream the game.
I had another tester mentioning something similar about the blue toad, not wanting to stay nearby. All toads used to have a bite attack that made them more dangerous up close, but now with the long attack preparation times the player should be safe-ish at melee range. I need to communicate the safety better.
It is understandable, specially if you plan to have multiplayer down the road (I don't know if you do). You might have done it already, but I think experimenting with changing the symmetry a bit could be nice for this mechanic in particular.
Played for a bit, had a crash and tried again with a different build. Video:
I played from the spot I left it last time. I noticed that finn's protection spell now has the armor as part of the base skill, which sounds good.
Dialog cannot be advanced anymore by clicking outside the "next" button, but if you want to speed up the text reveal the click has to be outside the button. Pressing the button skips to the next dialog, which is not ideal. I think the button should behave like the enter key (press once to change dialog, press again to speed up text reveal).
I got a crash on the game again, same place as last time.
The guy who revives and does massive amounts of damage kicked my butt.
There was a point where the battle felt hopeless and I wanted to restart, but found no way to open a pause menu to do so. Am I missing something?
After the crash, I tried a run osur suggested to me, which was mass slow with mosca. This does absurd damage compared to anything else in the game + a slow that stacks and acts a defensive move. So yeah, attack and defense. Might be too good.
The game bugged out by the end in a real weird way, you should check out the video.
Always nice to see AG in demo day, keep up the good work!
The game is a lot more juicy now in animations effects and sound. I also like that the skills are automatic makes it a bit easier to understand, though sometimes the cards were highlighted but it didn't mean anything in particular (they were off cd but the board didn't allow an activation).
The core of the game is solitaire which is easy to understand and play, but everything else feels a bit too complex. There are like 3 different resource bars to pay attention to and the skills have a lot of lines of text making them difficult to parse.
The merchant perk felt incredibly powerful after having a run where I didn't have it.
Not drawing the card you need and then watching the opponent randomly draw it feels very bad. Taking damage after the opponent manages to chain 3 cards in a turn feels even worse. I know the game is a solitaire battle, but there is so much rng involved here, I don't even know how to hedge my chances to avoid this happening.
I don't know what to think about the limit mechanic. Is its function to avoid one shotting the opponent? Big chains are exciting, why punish them?
The game is interesting and the concept is fun, but the controls need work on them. I had issues while manipulating pieces, either placing them or rotating them. I think you need a better way to handle these.
Having the whole track setup but being one piee short and needing to start all over doesn't feel great.
Sometimes I wanted to see where my pieces where but it was impossible to tell where without having to lift them up.
Last level I played I felt completely lost. From a glance the last level looks like it takes an hour. I think that starting with some pieces already on the board, stuck in place, would help to guide the player.
I didn't knew about the iyashikei term, I know someone who agrees with that. My intention is to have both protagonists and antagonists be likable in their own way.
If you plan to finish the demo later, I updated it to v23b which has a couple fixes.
Thanks for playing again and the detailed feedback!
Looking back, the most obvious utility for them should be holding down buttons but the most intuitive mechanic for me personally was the fact that you can use frogs to block other frogs
Yeah the testing had me realize thats the case. Strange thing because tongue blocking is something I added less than a month ago, the toad was designed for pressing buttons. I will embrace the intuitiveness of tongue blocking, seems like the better option.
The least intuitive mechanic comes into play in level 4: Big Enough, where I admit I was attempting to murder a frog in cold blood by dropping it into the stratosphere. Instead, I learned that toggleable platforms can't be toggled off if a frog is standing on them.
Toads have the thickest plot armor. Nothing can hurt them. I prefer it this way, though it make things like the platform behave in unexpected ways. I don't see any other solution, so it will be a quirk of the system.
level 7: Fugitive
Congrats! You found an unintended solution! I thought of the possibility of solving the puzzle like that, but I believed it was impossible. Thanks for proving me wrong. I updated the level (v023b) to make it more straightforward.
frog is around 2 tiles wide and the strong fairy is around 1 tile wide
The toads are 3 tiles long, the fairies are less than 1. I realized through testing that the size of toads is not very intuitive, which means I will have to make levels to better teach the concept.
I can only speak for myself but level 8: Rude could be earlier because, as I hinted at before, feels unusually easy, but that's only my opinion.
I will do it, looks better than what I was going for.
Made a quick update to version 0.23b. Changes are:
- Small adjustment to test level "Big enough" - Major changes to test level "Fugitive" - Removed timed solution from the "Innitiative" level - Made aim assist keep the target when it is on
I have plans for something with that, I look forward to making a game without having to worry about drawing a lot.
I could really use a checkpoint/savestate/rewind/undo system of some sort rather than fully restarting every single time.
Sadly it is too late for this. The best I can do is keep levels short to avoid constant restarting.
There's definitely an issue with how slow the game feels in general, despite that being helpful for the animation shenanigans.
It is tricky. For players just starting, the slow speed helps them not get overwhelmed by attacks, but as the player progresses it can become sluggish, I know hearding toads can contribute to that a lot. It is tricky and I'm not really sure if there is an easy answer, but Im always experimenting to alleviate it.
I don't find the aim assist helps much with anything, though it doesn't hurt either. Maybe get it to highlight whichever fairy is going to be eaten?
I can make it show the regular crosshair too. Thanks for trying it out.
this is cheating
Toads are above cheap tricks like that.
The way these blue frogs occupy space in general is not very well represented. Another instance is when you're supposed to solve a puzzle by using them to block a leaping fairy, which they don't look large enough to be able to, standing at the same height as fairies that don't.
Toad occupy a lot of space. Also they have infinite height. I will look for ways to make it clearer.
