itch.io

I mean this is my first time here (and trying Godot properly) so I can't say for sure, but I'm assuming there is no prize since nothing is specified...

Not that I care about prizes anyway lol I just want to get to know the engine and have fun :)

Found this game through your devlogs on Youtube a few months ago, and I immediately loved what I saw. The visuals are amazing, the soundtrack is too (I listened through the entire thing during my last game jam and found so many cool tracks - kinda reminds me of Hyper Light Drifter and Celeste), and being a platformer, it seemed like exactly the kind of game that I would want to play.

And then I played this demo, and as much as it pains me to say it, it feels really unsatisfying to play most of the time.

I spent today going through and finding things to say here and finding a few new bugs on the way, so hopefully these issues can be fixed eventually. Sorry if it sounds very negative, I love this game so much, it's just that I don't want these issues to ruin the game. (This is going to be a very long comment, sorry :( )

My main gripe with this game is the very unforgiving hitboxes.

You probably already know this, but generally in games, you want to give things you want to hit bigger hitboxes than the sprites, and things you don't want to hit smaller hitboxes than the sprites. If the hitboxes are exactly the same size as the sprites or bigger, people will think they are dying for no reason since we're so used to games with smaller hitboxes like this.

Here are what I guess the hitboxes in Diari look like from ramming into spikes slightly too much while testing:

The player hitbox is absolutely fine for the ground, walls and ceilings, but most certainly not for hitting spikes. Occasionally is is possible to die without Aimacra and the spikes' sprites touching for a single frame.

Perhaps a solution that could work is making the player take damage from a smaller hitbox (maybe about half the size of the other one) than the one that deals with ground collisions? Either that or you could make the spike hitboxes absolutely tiny, but you can only go so far with that...

I mean you are kinda nerfing the entire game by doing this, but at least it's a bit more forgiving for the player. Besides, it's hard enough already :') (You could go back and restructure certain parts to rebuff them though...)

The platforming is mostly quite solid. The spin mechanic felt kinda lame at first - there wasn't exactly much to it except for a double jump that you can normal jump after (and a barely-noticeable-at-first speed boost), but when it got to the box section it felt kinda cool, knowing that you couldn't jump while holding the box, but could spin. Essentially what I'm saying is spin-only interactions are pretty cool and maybe there should be some earlier in the game - also those thingies you spin into and get a speed boost I saw in the devlogs look pretty fun!

The platforming does seem to be way more dependent on animations than it should be - cancelling these animations (which it is very easy to accidentally do) makes it very easy to trigger all sorts of bugs. I'll list them here (I have footage for all of them but I'll only attach it if neccessary because this comment already takes too much space):

- By pressing Z, and X in quick succession to use a jump and spin quickly, the spin animation doesn't even get a chance to play, making it awkward to tell what how many jumps you have left, especially if you accidentally hit a button or mashed them in annoyance. It'd be cool if as well as making the spin animation actually happen in this scenario, there were be separate jump / spin particle effects...

- Buffering jump before hitting the ground waits for the land animation to play out in its entirety before Aimacra jumps again. This effectively locks the player to the ground for a short time despite the player wanting to instantly jump as soon as they hit the ground, which can be irritating when you need to react quickly to a saw hurtling towards you.

- Sometimes when you also hit Z and X in quick succession (this might be a frame perfect or something, it was a kinda inconsistent bug but still annoying) you get locked into a crouched sprite which persists when you hit the ground. You cannot spin or roll in this state (as you can see from my keypresses in this gif), and the only ways to cancel it are to jump or grab a wall.

- By pressing X while still holding Z from your first jump, you consume your spin and your jump at the same time, causing you to spin higher than usual (minus the actual spin animation for some reason) but not be able to jump afterwards. I call it the "super spin" and I absolutely love it - it'd be kinda cool if this was made into an intentional bug that you learn of in later playthroughs like Celeste's wavedashing or something. If it is turned into a feature it'd probably need something to visually distinguish it from other things though...

Sorry I'm trying to give constructive criticism but it's probably coming off as way too negative, I actually have a bunch more stuff that I found but I need to go now so I'll come back to editing this comment tomorrow...

Edit: I accidentally left it 6 days to come back to this comment despite me saying "tomorrow" :') I was going to continue to critique the platforming, but I'll get the rest of the bugs out of the way first as that's probably more important...

- Projectiles continue to spawn when in the first death cutscene (I didn't notice this in any other cutscene). During this cutscene the amount of memory taken up by Diari slowly but surely increased - since it only seems to happen after this one cutscene I can't say it's a huge issue but if somebody afked for a while with this cutscene unfinished it'd be kinda awkward...

- Speaking of cutscenes, you can jump over the trigger for the Sirestias' note cutscene. This is honestly kinda cool for speedrunners and second playthroughs (there's no way to quick-skip cutscenes / dialog so this bug really helps) - it's just not that obvious. Doing this also disables the asking the player how they are doing cutscene, the first death cutscene (although if you've only died once it happens directly after you trigger the note cutscene), death messages and probably some later on I didn't bother testing for.

- It's probably just my potato laptop (as soon as I encountered the Aimarca running animation in The Other Side the level ran at like 2fps or something lol), but the game's speed drastically drops whenever I enter any area with greenery, as you may be able to see in some of the gifs. The lack of a frame skip option (an option that would make the game run at less frames instead of every action being slowed down - tbh I'm not sure how you'd implement something like this) is kinda annoying, especially when opening the diary menu takes an agonizing 10 seconds... Seems a bit weird that it only happens in the green areas, when the areas with other colours run at full speed at 60 fps despite them not looking that different visually.

- You can easily animation cancel in the menu (it was probably easier for me given how slowed down everything was) to get the menu looking pretty cursed. Here's an example: (also I had no idea this drawing was meant to be of rolling at first - I thought she was just on the floor to look at the laser at eye level lol)

- You can pretty easily die with the diary menu open to gain control of your character and the menu at the same time.

- Uh I don't really know how this one happened, it kinda just happened when I was trying (and failing) to guess the saw hitboxes like my drawing of the spike ones earlier

- When you hug the right wall when going down into this room, you seem to get stuck in the wall. Not a huge issue, but it might be one later in the game? (Also it's kinda satisfying to just sit here and hold X :) )

Um need to go now but I'll come back later because I haven't addressed how buggy the voi boxes are :/

Edit 2: Ok I might as well finish this stupidly long comment - it's not as if anyone's going to read it anyway...

I genuinely have no idea what these next three bugs relating to the voi boxes are - I'll just let these gifs speak for themselves: (Uh that is what the boxes are called right? Also is putting "voi" before random things' names a naming convention in this game? I think I saw it in the first area's title card (which I didn't even see in my first playthrough due to it being covered with a dialog box at the time (I should stop with these brackets)))

- Box randomly decides to bounce (and stayed there until I left the room iirc)

- Did I crush the box or something? (Also does the lighter colour of box mean it will break after the next use? Can it only be thrown twice before breaking? Or at least that's what it seemed like but it wasn't made too clear...) (Also mysteriously entered the death messages dialog without being in menu)

- I thought beforehand that the cause of the boxes sliding after respawn was velocity they had before player death, but maybe not? (Pay close attention to the bottom right hand corner of the screen)

I think that's all the bugs. Phew. I am done editing this comment for today. Why am I doing this...

Edit 3: Wow, I apparently posted this comment 150 days ago, and I still haven't finished it lmao

Honestly, I pointed out way too many issues in this comment. I suppose this is why I never finished my own attempt at a metroidvania; I focused too much on these small yet still crucial issues and felt awful after fixing them, since I hadn't actually made any more of the game, only slightly patched up what could barely even be considered a game. I then saw your game's devlog, adored it, went to play it and hyperfixated on it for about a month, and I was afraid that the game would be released with the same jank that it had at the time. I suppose I thought that if I couldn't make a perfect game, maybe I could help somebody else with theirs, and maybe they could actually finish. Except I only pointed out the small issues that stopped me from actually finishing my game by doing so, so sorry about that :c (I mean I'm presuming you haven't seen this comment, so it's not like this comment did anything anyway, which is probably for the better.)

Anyway, I hope that you manage to finish this game :3

If you want to, of course.

...although please remove the fixed hitboxes lol

If anyone's interested I gave the game a small post-jam update so it has more than 10 seconds of content

Yeah I plan to add more content today or tomorrow...

Yeah, I intended to make wall spikes knock you in a directional-wall-jumpish direction (if you know what I mean) and ceiling spikes knock you downwards, but I realized I'd need a separate tilemap for each one, so I scrapped it. (Might add it later today with some more content, or maybe tomorrow...)

Ok here's the link - https://robonaut121.itch.io/spike-spin

Sure, working on the game page rn

Oh well lol

I might """finish""" the game tomorrow and put it up here if anybody's interested but I don't think anyone is

(Also I think this might be my first time properly missing a dealing in a jam like this hence the overreaction)

I'm not sure they specifically said lol. I checked the rules and they said "participants should submit their games to the designated platform or community specified by the jam organizers" - yet they haven't specified at all. Usually you're required to submit for Windows, but if you submit an apk... well, they didn't tell you not to ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Like, I think so? I think they said just focus on unique mechanics, so that's what I'm going with now (unless they're like slightly late to releasing the theme idk)

The jam's just started, and I can't seem to find a theme either... so I guess there isn't one? The host(s) said in another community post that "the objective is just to make creative mechanics" so I'm presuming that means we just come up with the best mechanics we can...

Sorry I'm late replying to this comment, but most of those things you pointed out were plain laziness on my part.

The sprites are all mostly just circles downscaled in realtime by Unity's pixel perfect camera, and I wasn't bothered making actual UI sprites so I just played around with a few more circles. I would have actually sprited them if I had time to have a pixels per unit consistent with the rest of game, but sadly Unity's pixel perfect camera doesn't work for UI, so if I was to perfectly adjust each pixelized UI element to be consistent with the rest of the game it could just be screwed over by playing at a different aspect ratio than 16:9.

I've pointed out in other comments that the small window was just a dumb mistake on my part - I spent most of the jam playing the game in a tiny window and only realized later how incredibly stupid it felt in fullscreen.

As for enemy variety - this game ironically has the most enemy variety I've ever put in any of my games - fast blue enemies appear from round 6 onwards and slow projectile-shooting enemies from round 11 onwards. But naturally my difficulty-obsessed self makes it borderline impossible to reach those rounds (I haven't got to round 11 myself yet :-$) Sorry you had a bad time with my game!

The lag when shooting enemies is freeze frames, and is intentionally added to make hits feel more impactful. As for the infinite respawning, how did you manage that? Any steps I can take to try and replicate that glitch?

Thanks for the positive feedback! Yeah, I see where you're coming from with the camera proximity,I didn't actually play the game in fullscreen until later in development, which was a mistake :-( I was actually intending on adding comboes if i had more time,, in particular one that encourage the use of killing enemies through mirrors, but I ran short on time.

Sorry, how exactly are you having trouble with the game? I can't exactly tell from this comment. (If it's that you're having trouble getting past round 2, try slowly baiting enemies to where the rest of the enemies are, then shoot them all.)

I meant to create a combo system that would boost your points immensely for killing enemies through mirrors, but since the laser's hitbox was made of box colliders the enemies could hit multiple at once, so I eventually scrapped the idea. Also the enemies were meant to not see you through walls, I copied code from one of my old jams for that, but it didn't work and I just never bothered fixing it :-/

Thanks for the feedback! I'm not the best at composing music, and while it is one of my better tracks I too found the melody drilling into my head after a while ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ The UI was kind of rushed, and I would have pixelated it with more time (Unity's pixel perfect camera irritatingly can't pixelate UI, so I'd have to do it manually :-( )

Same, horror games are too scary for me too :-(

It just kind of felt that way with the simple graphics and slightly unsettling music (sorry if that wasn't intentional), as if there was going to be some imminent danger or drama just around the corner...

While dying over and over again seems to be a common idea, I really like the way you disguised it as a seemingly innocent RPG! The idea of pressing "new game" in the main menu as a game mechanic is pretty cool, and the game slowly advancing in time and colour is interesting. It makes the player think of what will happen when the protagonist's parents come home and find them dying over and over... I feel like this would have potential as a short horror game, despite not really being into horror games myself. I would love to see what you could do with this project with a little more time!

Very visually appealing game! You used Unity's 2D lighting very well, and the pixel art is good. I would usually advise to keep the pixels per unit consistent across sprites, but it honestly doesn't look too bad here as there isn't that much of a difference between the most and least detailed sprites. My only critique of the art is that the spikes don't exactly look like spikes, they sort of look like awkward 45° slopes... try making them pointier!

The game mechanics and platforming are kind of annoying though. There's no way to do high or low jumps except with the flight mechanic, which isn't exactly well executed. It takes forever for the flight power to recharge, and the flight power should regenerate while you die, not be wiped (although it occasionally does regenerate?!). If you want to jump high you have to perform insanely fast double-clicks of spacebar since it simply reduces the player's gravity - maybe perhaps try capping the player's fall speed to a glide while spacebar is held? It would also be nice if it didn't require a second press of spacebar, and you could simply hold to do a long glide-jump. Also, please add checkpoints of some description next time (not sure how it would have fit in with the whole random lever thing in this game though...). I acknowledge that this seems to be your first platformer (at least on itch.io) though, so these are just some tips for the future!

Nice small text-based game! Reminds me of when I used to make terrible pure-RNG text-based games in Python. It felt a little short, I would have liked to see a little more content, but I appreciate that these games require a ridiculous amount of if statements that take a long time to make. Deaths felt kind of cheap - you weren't given any warning about a certain option being risky, and having to start the game 5 times over was a little annoying - perhaps giving the player a screen where they can choose to play again with the same introductory options or not could be useful. Also, for my first few playthroughs I selected a mace, but then that option was completely ignored for the rest of the game - the narrative mentioning a sword - overall the narrative needs to be more non-linear...

The content you have so far in this game is great, good job!

Nice visual novel! I came across this game when listening to the Ace of Rope soundtrack on YouTube when this game's soundtrack came up, and I thought I'd check it out. I was initially going to try and get through the French version with my terrible French and Google Translate, but the English translation was available when I got around to playing (which seems to read perfectly most of the time, although I was kind of confused what you meant by "males and princesses" ("mâles et princesses") in the introduction). 

This game has a great way of making every decision feel like it has a consequence, or an eventual consequence at least - I was getting rather wary of foraging for food from the humans, but thankfully the winter ended soon after. I managed to not engage in any wars and survive the winter peacefully.

I did encounter two bugs. I'm sorry I can't point you in the right direction, as I haven't used Twine before, but I'll attach screenshots here:

The artworks looked quite nice mostly, apart from looking (in my opinion) unnecessarily grainy in parts dithering wasn't really required, but I can't say much as I am infinitely worse at high-res pixel art. There could have been more artworks, though, they really helped illustrate the world of Fourmidable more!

I'm not sure whether Twine allows you to add backgrounds of any sort, but they would certainly be a nice addition if it's possible to do such a thing. Maybe something diagetic, like the dirt of the anthill, or tall blades of grass reaching to the sky - it just feels a little bland with a completely white background.

Overall, I quite enjoyed this game, and I can't wait to see more of it!

Yeah, I noticed the UI covering some of the gameplay while gathering footage for gifs post-jam, I should have probably made it fade out when you near it or something...

Visually stunning entry! My only complaints are with the gameplay:

- Both the player and the zombies are too fast. There were often times I lost track of where the player was because they scurried almost out of the camera frame, plus it was hard to stop exactly on top of the corpses to pick them up. The zombies should be a good bit slower than the player too.

- Maybe it's just because any Unreal game runs at like 5 frames a second on my computer, but I could barely ever land a shot unless I stood still. This lead to the game becoming a constant unenjoyable cycle of running away from the zombies while failing to shoot them, failing to pick up the corpses, wasting ammo, only spending money on ammo, wasting that again, never getting above 5 gold the entire game, and dying.

Other than me being bad at the game and not enjoying it, great game!

Nice work! It took me a second to realize that it actually was an RTS, and when I did, I kind of just spammed healers and two-handed swordsmen until I won - I only upgraded them once near the end. If troops had a certain cost to deploy (like sun in PvZ for example) it would have made the game feel more tactical and rewarding. Perhaps if the arena was wider, and you could reposition the printers to areas of the map in need it would make the game more about strategising than spamming. Good game, just it's a bit too simple for something of this genre right now.

I checked out your game, it's quite good, but please don't spam people's comment sections for rates...

Sorry, I meant the Lactose Particle Accelerator mechanic you added in the last two rooms - I just wrote "LPA" because that was what was on their sprites...

But yeah, they could be sped up a little as they felt a little sluggish, and it would be handy if when you rammed into a wall with them you instantly entered the wall cling state.

Amazing visuals! I mean, it ran at like 5 frames a second, but so does any Unreal game on my laptop :') I unlocked terminal 1, but couldn't manage to find terminals 2 or 3 anywhere, let alone the hints to open them. I ended up looking at the safety instructions on the wall, but gave up as it didn't sound remotely related to a spaceship. Maybe some direction of where to go after terminal 1 would be nice, but otherwise, great job!

This game was really fun! I got really lucky on my first run, barely got any events and kept it fairly contained, but on my second run I only seemed able to save the measly amount of tiles on the other side of the river. I love how quickly this game can spiral out of control! I think the game kind of fell down on audio, with a boring background track, and only a few sound effects, but I'm bad at audio too so I can't say much...

A very replayable jam game that deserves way more ratings than it has!

Good game! Also, really neat voice acting for a jam game! I could tell there was some really deep lore / backstory but I didn't really get it and it could have been explained a little more. I know this has already been said, but it's really hard to see what's going on in the artworks. I couldn't tell whether it was meant to be pixel art, or traditional art uploaded at a low resolution - but either way, it had too much anti-alias for me. At the end, the prompt to "poop" honestly scared me more than jumpscare lol - I wanted to go and handle those 100-or-so party guests that were waiting, not go to the toilet...

Anyway, great game!

Very interesting concept! I love the idea of beating up fellow customers to purchase more items! I just think less emphasis should have been placed on the collecting side of the game and more on the fighting side. The keybinds are kind of unintuitive (I wouldn't have found them were it not for the game page). Also, it would have been nice to have more than one attack (although, having spent the vast majority of the time on my game adding too many attack types, I can appreciate that it would be a pain to implement). And without the enemy fighting back at all, the game was a pushover.

Still though, great game!

Nice platformer! Vesuvius kind of looks like Core from Celeste, and Deiry kind of looks like Ori, and I like it! I appreciate that you took the time to make a tight-to-control character too - a lot of jam games don't put enough time into it. Just a few things...

- Very small gripe, but Pompeii's citizens don't have the same pixels per unit as everything else (Everything else is fine though)

- The background felt incredibly bland during the tutorial compared to the rest of the game...

- Cheese string felt incredibly unresponsive compared to everything else - the string itself should probably extend faster, and you should probably be able to cancel it with a jump as soon as it reaches the wall.

- It was kind of annoying having to cheese string after every LPA. (By the way, you should have used them more - they would be so cool if they were a little faster)

- Before I realized you could reset the scene with R, I got softlocked out of the tutorial for double-jumping too much :-/

- THOSE CYCLES ARE SOOOO TIGHT! Especially this room below, which took me forever. (I've made a stupidly hard platforming game for a jam too, I understand the feeling of wanting to make things just a little tighter... but you could have nerfed that second lava rise in that room by half a second or so...)

Overall, a really enjoyable entry that I had a lot of fun with!

Yeah, about the sounds... I kind of just copied them from my other games (Drillshift and Assasin of the Night) because I was running out of time ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Also would have loved to test my garbage composing skills but time constraints happened...

Sorry, because some of that unresponsiveness was slightly intentional :-/

Both the pogo and final horizontal slash had a commit time of an eighth of a second, which I hoped would make the attacks feel weightier and souls-like, but it definitely didn't work for the pogo.

I was also so disappointed that I only got one enemy type done, I actually had plans for 5, but I had to cut it down to one boring cannon fodder enemy due to time constraints. Thanks though!

Thanks for the positive feedback! Yeah, I do agree that there wasn't enough encouragement for flipping gravity, I almost had to force myself to do it when gathering footage for the gifs :') 

Yeah actually, good idea with the kill counter / score! (I mean, in its current state there's a set amount of enemies each time so you'd always end up with the same score, unless each attack gave different score or something...)

By the way, I really didn't make it clear as I kind of just rushed it in in the last half an hour, but you end the game by attacking the "corruption source" (big blobby thing) on the right that becomes accessible after killing all enemies. Thanks!

Nice game! Interesting combat system, although it's essentially pure RNG. However, the flickering dice sprites give the illusion that maybe it might be possible to rig the rolls, like in the King Dice bossfight in Cuphead. I did try my best to do this, and often failed, but when I actually tried, I did feel like I was getting higher rolls more consistently at least. Maybe if you slowed the flickering down slightly, so it's more obvious there's a small element of skill to it? (If there is one, I could have been all wrong lol)

The vector art is absolutely amazing. The alien designs are so unique and the game uses such a clever and vibrant colour palette which is so attention-grabbing. This is a really cool game, which deserves a lot more attention!

This is a very cool idea! At first I couldn't figure out how to shoot - in fact I didn't know you could at all, but once I did (space to shoot if anyone reading this is unsure), it became a delightful grid-based bullet-hell, which in itself is a very interesting concept, but the different firetypes for different face values made gameplay very interesting. I felt I didn't have a terrible amount of control over the firing pattern. Perhaps showing what face value would come up if you rolled in each direction would help? Like a sort of half opacity clone in front of each of the player's cardinal directions which showed the value?

While the game isn't terribly polished (except for the dice rolling animation which was way more satisfying than it should have been), this is a really fun game!