itch.io

A nice short game with a good message to go along with it. The game despite mechanically how simple it is manages to effectively hold your attention and to feel for your little bean character, good job on that. The end especially drove that home and made me worried for the little bean that something bad would happen. While this definitely was a story / emotion driven game I still think that overall the design could have been improved some. At one part I tried to explore parts of the level which were just ways to get back up from a fall. I believe should be clearly marked in some way for a game which appears to have "find the goal" type gameplay on first inspection. I also tried to interact with the newly coloured background assets the first time with a bit of keyboard mash only to find out that they were symbolic rather than gameplay driven. Perhaps you could create a sort of "blast of colour" from the characters as you meet them or add other background assets  which get coloured in to the first character's screen to more clearly indicate that it is just adding colour to the world. These issues are quite minor, but they did affect my experience. All that being said I did enjoy the game a lot and thought the level (and all the art assets for that matter) looked very nice. The art combined with the music created an atmosphere that felt well defined and made the game more emotional. The world becoming more colourful as you progressed gave a good sense of achievement and made you feel like you were really improving the world of the beans, a nice feeling to have. Good work with the game!

Thanks for the feedback. A lot of the audio was placed in absolute last minute and was low priority compared to the other features in the game. I agree with you we should definitely have some audio at the start scene, If we remake the game it'll likely be a bit of ambient noise like leaves and birds to compliment the sort of easy going introduction of the game.

Also, I completely agree with you that the audio loop gets annoying. I always mute the game after about 5 minutes. Unfortunately our usual audio guy wasn't around when we did the game jam and so we had to get someone else who wasn't very involved in the jam to make a loop. We knew it was repetitive but we didn't want the game to have no music. A volume slider would've been a good idea.

Thanks for the video link, I'll definitely be implementing the ideas in the video in later games!

Starting off I felt like the game would be impossible given how wonky the controls felt but to my surprise I quickly took a hold of it and realized the character controls way better than I first thought. The biggest complaint I have about the game is that it doesn't really build on the theme very well. I get that the idea is "one wheel" but it doesn't feel very original for the theme, so much so that it took me until beating the game twice to realize how it related to the theme. The levels for the most part were pretty fun to play, especially some of the later ones but I felt the difficulty didn't scale well and some levels were much harder than others. Namely levels 5 and 7 I found to be too hard the first time around while levels 6 and 8 were very easy. I don't like how the start of level 10 has that semi RNG part with the TNT that rolls down the hill, the character doesn't move fast enough to dodge the sporadic TNT and being hit is sometimes feels inevitable. Level 4 has a super easy skip where you can just drop to the goal after going a bit forwards, not sure if that was intentional. Additionally, the levels in general seem a bit too hastily put together with lots of clipping or misaligned surfaces which were a bit distracting. Stairs in levels seemed to be more of a nuisance than a challenge as it was super unlikely you'd die on them but it takes far too much effort and time to climb. Jumping felt very inconsistent and I found myself feeling frustrated when I had to restart a level several times because the character didn't jump. Sometimes I could be at a 80 degree angle and jump just fine other times I would be at 40 degrees and it would just decide not to jump (this most notably happened on level 5 right after the stairs). Despite all of this, I really did enjoy all 10 levels of the game. There was a good amount of challenge and it felt good to beat each level. The levels seemed fresh and original always introducing new concepts or things to play with like level 9 where you go super fast. The character although flailing around a bunch did control and feel well. Finally, the music was a nice touch and didn't get boring to listen to even after 40 or 50 times hearing the start of it.  Great work on the game!
also your start over button doesn't work, just saying.

I really like your twist on the theme. Having only one dimension of play might seem like it would be impossible to make a game with but you managed to make one anyway. I do have to agree with the other commenter that it isn't really truly 1D, but since it was made for pew pew I guess you had no other choice 🙃. I appreciate the way you integrated the drop with attacking the enemy on the first level which made me feel like I was a timing legend.  Although I did find the game to be pretty interesting, the responsiveness of the game really made the experience worse. It seemed like there was at least 200ms of delay from when you pressed the button and when the action was performed, this lead to a lot of split second attacks from me failing. On the topic of attacks, although there seemed to be a pattern with the attacks of the enemies, often times I would think they were done attacking only to instantly die when I moved to attack them. I think your attacks need to have a shorter, more defined transition time between attacking and not attacking (Assuming that the flickering attacks are the transition period). These things caused me to take a bit to complete the game, but when I finished it was cool to see that there was an end scene. Although I was not exactly sure what was happening it's nice to see it's not just a black screen with nothing. Overall, cool take on the theme but the lag made it a bit frustrating to play.