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Ryan Wires

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A member registered Feb 03, 2018 · View creator page →

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Hey, there's a Turn Speed slider now! Great addition.

One more note for others reading: "Coyote Time" isn't just to be nicer to the player, it also acts as compensation for input delay. There's always some delay between the player pressing buttons and the result showing up on their screen - if their TV or monitor is poorly set up or if the game is poorly programmed, it can be north of 100 milliseconds. As a result, it's very possible for a player to say "That's BS, I totally pressed the jump button before running off the cliff," and be right because their image was delayed from the game's logic. Coyote time helps compensate for that.

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N++ is a really great counterexample to the usual "floaty = bad" way of thinking, for sure. Building characters with real momentum is often difficult (see how much of a mixed bag the Sonic games are for proof of this), but if you get it right, IMO it feels far better than Hollow-Knight-style immediate corner-turning.

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Great addition. I understand why there weren't multiple implementations in this demo, but the specifics of how you handle non-full-height jumps in particular often inform the rest of your jump physics. Meat Boy, I remember reading somewhere, actually goes one further than what you described and will invert your y-velocity when you release the jump button to prevent the top of your arc from feeling floaty (as opposed to increasing downward acceleration).

As to why directly physics-engine based platformers don't feel quite right, agree that it's pretty hard to pin down. My guess is that objects and the player receive the same gravity in a physics engine to keep things consistent, but a natural-looking gravity for objects is too floaty for players and good player gravity makes the objects feel like they're on Jupiter. I'd need to experiment more though.

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Nice demonstration. One thing I think was missing was the difference between "coasting" to a stop by just releasing your movement direction, and "skidding" to a stop by actively pressing the opposite direction. You can have a more naturalistic default deceleration if the player can choose to pivot on a dime if they need to, plus that animation is a great time to go hard with particle effects.

Also, when I've implemented lookahead, I've included a constant based on the direction the character is facing as well as incorporating their velocity as appears to be done here. Purely velocity-based lookahead ends up interacting with camera smoothing in a way that more-or-less cancels everything out IMO.

I watched a roommate get through Persona 5 off and on, so while I'm not suuuuuper familiar, I love the idea of Ryuji getting super defensive about pineapple on his pizza while Yusuke insists he has no taste.

I quite like the idea of swapping between a more nimble, pacifist character and a slow brawler - it's a good combination. I also had trouble at the boss though - it's not exceptionally clear if/when the boss is vulnerable.

Once i got it running, I thought I had to grab all three objects instead of just one, and it was kind of frustrating seeing the other items disappear. I think some sort of indication that it's okay to turn around would have helped a lot. I also think the affected style of writing doesn't end up doing you any favors. I could see a bit of this being useful (say, in the item descriptions), but I think it was a bit overdone, which left me feeling a bit annoyed by it.

Beat it! This was super fun, - sort of an RTS-meets-cookie-clicker kind of vibe. I think it successfully distills the core of RTS macro strategy (deciding when to attack and when to build up your economy) without having a lot of unit-based micro. Especially long and in-depth for a jam game too! I think the first couple levels where the enemy can attack serve as a giant spike in difficulty - because there's not many buildings, the AI can make optimal moves and overwhelm the player easily. I would suggest maybe given the player an extra building in those levels to help ease them into fighting against a capable opponent.

I quite liked it! Reminded me of the old time management, diner-dash-ish games. Would be great on a touchscreen, for sure.

Surreal indeed! While typos are a small thing to complain about, it feels like there's a lot here - probably because the Twine editor doesn't both giving you red or green "misspelled" underlines - and it pulls the reader out of the bizarre, mysterious, interesting, world you're building.

It would have been cool if the text/background color shifted with the color of each character you speak to as well. Certainly not necessary, but could help reinforce the mood you're going for.

#relatablecontent :P Anyway, to be serious, some people's games feel more like prototypes for bigger ideas, but not yours. It may be small, but it feels fully realized, which I quite liked.

Simple and small, but well executed - the point of any game jam game, really. It's a pretty fertile foundation to add things like branches with collision and powerups onto (assuming you wanted to expand it).

There's a lot to like here - great, cohesive visual style, and a fun core mechanic. I especially liked tying explosive enemies together and creating a chain reaction. I would experiment with pulling giving more momentum to enemies than it does to you so you can pull them into pits - right now, it's pretty easy to pull yourself in as well.

So charming! Love the little metroid reference, and the music fits the tone of the game perfectly. The end boss(?) also fits well into the tone.The game accomplishes a lot with it's simple, outline style - a style I might have to try out in the future. 

It's been said before, but I am curious why you decided to bind movement to the mouse. I'm guessing so that the player didn't need to move their hand when they checked their phone?

Thanks for playing! The visuals are a downfall of working solo I guess. I'm a programmer first and foremost lol. And agreed on both counts. Some randomization would help, as would a death counter per run.

Thank you so much! I love the idea of focusing on boss battles - it would add a sense of progress (like Mr. Hippo was talking about on the store page) and even more epic scale. Balancing the difficulty of attacks to hit that sweet spot could be difficult, but it would be soooo satisfying to pull off!

Glad you liked it! I bet some kind of progress bar along the side could work well for that. Seeing it freeze and rewind during the hit animation would be super neat.

That's fair. When you're in the thick of it, it's very easy to forget that just because *you* can make a jump regularly doesn't mean *your players* can. Thanks for the feedback!

Tried again. In most games I'm not a fan of auto-regenerating health, but here, where the time it takes your health to regenerate is just as important as the health itself, it works well. The game still feels very foreboding, which I enjoyed as well.

Very zen. I wish I could see a bit further in front of me so I could watch the forest fade from decayed to grown more easily.

Simple concept, executed well, and the contrasts between slides can be hilarious. I don't know if this is feasible or not, but it could be fun to have slides that have randomized text options in addition to their images, for extra replay value.

Unless I'm missing something, combat with enemies takes around half your health and there's no way to heal, making it challenging to explore very far. Love the palette and style of your art though!

An accurate simulation of present buying anxiety, and adorable to the end. At first, the happy vlog-style music was grating, but it kinda grew on me.

Great puzzle design, and I really like the set-your-own-difficulty mechanic of delivering coal. I would have liked to see an extra puzzle or two require pushing the kids - as it stands, they were often impossible to move - but I'm guessing that would have led to a bunch of alternate solutions you didn't want. Nice work!

Liked it! Solid way to use your mechanics as a metaphor for the support given by those who've passed. The puzzle where white has to keep falling down the pit to let black climb was both an interesting puzzle and says a lot about the two's relationship.