Nah actually really neat concept. I think with a bit more polish this could be a fun way to waste some time. Unfortunate control scheme though hahaha
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Alright since I never got past the second moving platform, here are my thoughts: Being able to tap the direction you want to go speedy in a for a short window of time after leaving the wall would be a nice quality of life. Since that’s a core mechanic (I assume), adjust the level design to reward moving fast for long distances and make it fun to do so. Especially the beginning of the game should not feel this hard. A tad of Coyote time (of course!). Now the reason I did not play further xD WHY ARE THE PLATFORMS SLIPPERY?? Don’t have slippery platforms, please. That’s almost worse than platforms you have to move along with because the character is not moved along with them. Idk, sorry for not getting further lmao. I really enjoyed the character walk cycle and visual effect for moving fast though!
Neat little game! I would have loved for the gravity to be stronger as that would have made the inversions feel more snappy. Also I would suggest having fewer mechanics in play, since it’s a side-scroller, make the player auto-run. Then stick to the main mechanics which are gravity inversion, slide and breaking barriers. I’d also remove the slowdown from sliding as that came a bit in the way of my enjoyment of the movement. That one mode in geometry-dash but with an attack button and slides—essentially. As for the sound, the music was great! The art communicated the game well. Work a bit to simplify the cracked texture so it has no isolated empty pixels on the inside of the sprite.
Very nice entry! Here are my notes on what I’d spend time on. Sounds like you already have sounds in the works, so that’s great.
- I would tone down the post processing filter a tad by default or at least make it an option
- Since we’re always going up, I’d default the camera as leading up and center the player smoothly when falling.
- Level design funnily enough. For such a movement based game it should be even more tight. I’d make sure the main “intended” path is obvious. The speedrun routes felt distracting at times like they were tacked onto an existing level and were distracting me as a new player. Just as an example I would argue that the wall in level 1 is unnessecary noise in the level design.
- More particle effects, for instance on the bounce pads and level exit flags. Of course also sound effects here that match. I feel like the bounce pads could do well with some rainbow shimmer.
Movement notes, since that’s what we’re here for!
- Coyote time should be added.
- More player movement friction would probably improve the feel a lot. The jumping up walls is already quite chaotic (but fun!) so it kinda takes me out of the fun when I nail that and then hit a random spike because the player slid a bit too much.
- In tandem with this, I’d take a pixel or maaybe two off the side of spikes which are on the ground (fine to still have spikes which are ledge-adjacent kill you so that you are unable to stand on the outermost pixel of the ledge). I died a few times jumping over what should be very easy jumps because I pressed too late and it felt like there was slight input lag (probably not the case but it’s simply gameplay feel).
Enjoyed it a lot though I don’t think I finished it as I never saw a timer (which… there may be judging from other comments?). Got to the seemingly empty level with a platform above you and a bounce pad on either side and figured that’s the end?
BRUH! This is hilarious. It has no right to go this hard. It’s like getting over it … but with checkpoints, and bees! And.. flowers! And the flowers and the bees, you know… so speaking of jokes, hard mode joke and initial narration got me chuckeling xD
So I guess this is to “Getting over it” like “The looker” is to “The witness”
I was about to write: “Though there is the issue of missing collision… which causes… well you can’t get the dash power-up :/ “ Then I checked the main page, lo and behold I could have not wasted my time finding grill-skip speedrun tech because I wanted to try to get that power-up despite the missing collision. It’s possible though to get to grill from down below using only the first two pinks… barely. I have to say I kinda found that even with the broken collision, that section feels a bit too frustrating imo, I wanna hear more narration. Not miss a pink blob five times and ragequit xD
Oh and the music. Remixed classics, love to hear it!
I found the art-style quite charming and the sound decent too! It was a bit frustrating that it was set up as a puzzle which was not too hard but then you die from the magnets and have to redo everything. And the way to defeat enemies was also not really adding the the charm of the game. Somewhere closer to a pure puzzle game is where I think this game would shine. Collect colors in the correct order and move through the correct barriers in order. Manual reset. One-screen puzzles. That way you optimize the thing which was most appealing about your game. I did like the wobbly bubble quite a bit. But I may be biased on that front :b
This is nice! Really annoying and challenging in a good way.
The 45 degree slopes should not prevent you from jumping imo. They should simply not be possible to go up forever, and then correct the level design accordingly. That way the movement would feel more dynamic because I actually quite enjoyed how the character felt to move after getting used to it.
Another minor thing is that it would make the first area a bit more enjoyable to be in if you added like a .1 or so delay between hitting an electric switch to the platform beginning to move. That way you could hit the switch in driveby and still get on the platform:P
Delightful rope physics!
For me the playable space was somewhat too narrow and it would have made it more fun if you could see a bit more while at the same time the patterns you have to avoid are more complex. This would also allow for more visual interest as it currently is a lot of looking at an empty screen and quickly reacting when something does show up.
I suppose you do have some great music to listen to in the meantime though:D
This feels like a love-child between the cell stage of Spore and that one insect resource gathering evolution war-game I played in my young internet days lol. That kind of power progression is always satisfying. I see that kind of potential in this game too since the promise is kind of the same, you just need to deliver in that promise. The promise being: Eat food, get stronger, avoid those stronger than you until you can defeat them. It’s like “there is always a bigger fish”, but I am also becoming a bigger and bigger fish if that made any sense at all.
I agree with the others. Tightening up the gameplay loop and fixing the loading issues would help. The shop is a bit unintuitive and you do not feel a progression. You are somewhere in between a puzzle game and a progression based game. Because you do not decide on the resources (things to put in the tower)–which would work in a puzzler where you have to figure out the optimal location for a specific wave (it needs to be more challenging to be fun then), and you do not manage your resources gained which is what would make a progression based game fun. Also just a minot thing, the click sounds needs the top end cut off with a low-pass filter, it’s just kinda jarring when you spam click to hear that repeatedly.
All that said, I did enjoy the game for a bit and I hope you can use some of the feedback:D
Yo, the winning/losing?? music is an absolute bop! Imma lose the game on purpose now to hear it again lmao.
Anyway I feel like an in-game tutorial would have been beneficial because I did not understand the purpose initially although I had read the description. No matter. Artwork could use a bit of work imo to make it look more… less noisy perhaps? Probably the background which would look better as a darker less contrast-heavy texture so that you focus on the layout of the rocks and water. Perhaps an animated texture for the water would be nice to make it shiny and “ooo i wanna go there”.
Also then I got blocked by the game with no way through the rock across the whole map. So that’s a thing where the generation algorithm should be tweaked to ensure that there is always a possible path?
Edit: RIGHT THE AUDIO! Not sure it matches the exact mood of the game, probably my best critique? Good job having feedback on all the actions taken in the game:)
Also maybe tweaking the water-metre so it perhaps pauses for just a while (need to dial this in for balance) after picking up water, that way if you go fast enough you can go as far as you can, if you can keep up the pace. You could even add in a combo system if you pick up more water while paused!
A small particle effect flowing from the water to the water bar could probably futher improve feedback as it links the action of picking up water directly to your water metre. As well as giving more focus on the water metre as a player.
I appreciate that the ding sound does not clip if it is playing already when you lose, good detail! Again I think some feedback on what the hitboxes are and feedback for when you hit an enemy would vastly improve this game. I stopped when I got frustrated on the floor with the two chimney sweeper guys lol
Quite enjoyable! Didn’t click for me that collecting multiple of the same blob would yield more points but that might be a double edged sword because now that I think about it, it is not about planning the most efficient route to deliver as many blobs as possible but only about going to the floors that get that specific color blob, which is probably less interesting?
Another game with a paper aesthetic, love it! Unfortunate that reading everything did not really mesh with the movement mechanics, which required you to not fall out of the screen (you can’t go a bit too high and land on a letter to read it).
The ending section confused me a bit since I just dropped down from the mom letter and then… it was over? Not sure I got the story of the game
Ohh I love the art direction you took on this! Sure the other aspects weren’t there to make it a full “game” experience, but I actually enjoyed simply looking at the art quite a bit. A simple improvement would be to swap out the bullets with hand-drawn ones to make it a very coherent art-style, these felt like they didn’t belong.
Cheers:)
This feels like it could have been a real flash game. Very well done!
The progression of mechanics feels natural and is introduced gradually. One thing about the tutorialization is that the two click jump sign room introduces something which is not nessecary for the rest of the game (I think). It did however allow me to do some trick jumps which I don’t think are intended to skip frustrating parts of the game lol.
The music was nice and reminded me of the coconut song and under the sea. Fun song! xD
In general I think the length was very appropritate because I don’t think I would have wanted to play more 1) because I felt like anything more with these mechanics would become unfun levels of frustrating/difficult and 2) Because then I would have become sick of the song I enjoyed listening to for this experience hahaha.
You game page looks very clean too! In general the art direction is on point.
Solid foundation across the board! I would encourage you to further refine your level design to make full use of your mechanics, not because there was anything in particular wrong with this one, just that I feel like there was still room for improvement to making a more memorable level (which is probably one of the hallmarks of great level design). The mechanic could of course also use a bit of fine-tuning as it was slightly janky at times but I appreciated you going the route of infinite health/no resetting except getting knowcked down as that made it feel less punishing.
I’m delighted to hear you had fun! Makes the last day grind worth losing those few hours sleep ^^
Actually my first time voice acting so it’s not quite as I would like it. HOWEVER I found out I don’t hate hearing my own voice recorded, which comes as somewhat of a surprise!
Glad you enjoyed the shaders, love me my tech-art ahhaha!
E.L. Corp. EV-ATE jam comments · Replied to Polaris Mountain Ventures in E.L. Corp. EV-ATE jam comments
Appreciate the feedback! I would have loved to flesh out the gameplay a bit more such that the mechanics are conveyed more clearly as well as adding some endings, but I think I managed to work in the essentials for the experience!
Yeah, I was actually surprised by how engaging the story ended up, but of course who doesn’t love a bit of shady business ethics in video games. The dialogue and worldbuilding kinda wrote themselves. No wonder the Portal franchise story worked so well, I bet they had a lot of fun writing that!
Very neat! Yes, the music did get blasted, of course:D
Having had some experience with this kind of game myself using object pooling should fix the issue you’re facing with the swarmlings.
Simply have an array of swarmling nodes:
# Pop elements from this array
var swarmling_buffer: Array[Swarmling] = []
# Into this array when you need a new swarmling, then set properties
var swarmling_instances: Array[Swarmling] = []
var swarmling_scene = preload("res://path_to_swarmling_scene.tscn")
func _ready():
for i in range(1000):
var swarmling = swarmling_scene.instantiate()
# Or Swarmling.new() if using script-based instances
add_child(swarmling)
swarmling.hide()
swarmling.set_physics_process(false) # Pausing physics
swarmling_buffer.append(swarmling)
This approach makes it so the swarmlings don’t have to enter and exit the game tree a lot, which causes lag. It’s better just to pause processing and hide them when not in use. Then when you need a new one you unpause, set properties to be correct (position, internal parameters etc.) and unhide it.
Cheers!
PS: The background is probably also nodes, which probably cause more lag than the swarmlings? I’d make sure to disable as many unnecessary features on those as possible to reduce lag. Perhaps even using a dedicated shadermaterial to draw the sprite could be good. For instance you could relatively simply stack the texture on top of itself and squish it into a trapezoid shape. (might be easier than lining up polar transformations, though you could find code online for that!)
Some more tutorial (even on the game page works fine!) would be nice, as the controls were unintuitive. And the key rebind is broken, I would suggest instead of rebinding all controls for movement at once, each one should have its own rebind button as I just messed up the control scheme messing around in the settings and had to reboot the game to fix it.
Yeeted myself out of the world not knowing how the cannons worked, tbh pretty funny moment but not the most frictionless tutorial having to reset the game again there.