I really like the art style for this one! You guys did a great job on the aesthetic. Unfortunately once I finished the first puzzle, I couldn't figure out how to outrun the slime to safely reach anywhere else in the level. Also, the slime was spamming sound effects which was a bit grating.
Congrats on finishing the jam!
I actually have a drone I fly as one of my other hobbies, so this was right up my street. You captured the feeling of flying a drone pretty well. I could see this concept being used to flesh out a walking simulator really easily. Well done!
Feedback:
Drones can fly sideways. The tank controls were really frustrating at several points. Consider using Q and E for lateral movement.
The laser section is a massive pain point. I had to retry the entire game twice due to failing right at the end. You need to either install checkpoints, or remove damage mechanics entirely. Replaying the entire game is just a massive pace killer
On a similar note: either allow the drone to regenerate health over time, or remove the health mechanic entirely. Making a small mistake early in the game and then having one less hit for the annoying bit later with no way to fix it apart from restarting felt bad
That's about all I've got. I like this one. Well done!
Personally, I'm leaning towards really hungry, because I certainly don't feel immortal
Nice job on this one! The art looks really good. I do have one or two smaller pieces of feedback:
1. The character accelerates/decelerates just slowly enough to make them feel like they're on wheels. I would shorten the deceleration curve or turn them into a car
2. For the patrolling guards, a lot of them turn so fast on their patrols that I feel like I have absolutely no chance of clearing some areas first try. I would recommend either giving an option to show the guard's path, or slowing down their turning rate
Once again, well done! I like it :)
Fun, chill little puzzle game. However, I keep encountering an issue where the player just can't move in the direction they need to sometimes. I get the sense the game is detecting the cube I'm trying to move to as filled and won't let me move towards it. Weirdest part is if I keep mashing buttons and failing the level eventually it corrects itself, but it's a real show stopper when it happens every very few levels. Had a great time with the bits I could play though, nice work!
Congrats on completing the jam!
Honestly, I wasn't able to get past level 1 in this one. This game is hard of nails, and a bit unfair in a few places. I really love the art you've got going on for your backgrounds! The foregrounds are nice too, but the backgrounds, wow. Those are on a different level. For the foreground, consider using thicker outlines on the art. I suspect it will look better if you pronounce it more
Regarding the game being unfair, I have a few notes:
- The pirate slimes only trigger when you're so close to them that if you aren't already in the process of jumping, you will get hit. This works fine if you're the one who programmed it, but for a player who doesn't know it's coming, they have no time to react
- The flying slimes can spawn 2 inches away from your face if you don't know what's coming. Consider disabling the spawner if the player is too close to it, or spawning the mobs faster
- When the player holds the jump button, make it so they don't jump again when they land. You have a height variable jump, so the player is going to hold the jump button the whole way through for big gaps. Making it so they auto jump again leads to a lot of platforming imprecision
- That level you took a screenshot of where the slime is at the top of the tower? I couldn't get past it. The slime hits you and knocks you back into the pit where you instantly die and have to restart the whole game every time
- The knockback from the pirate gun making the player walk backward for a full second (or close to it) feels super sluggish. Knockback should take almost no time and return control to the player almost immediately so they can try to recover
- Also, the knockback should be relative to the bullet's direction, not the player's. Had a few weird bugs from this where the player got knocked towards the enemy
Alright, that was a lot of feedback. But honestly, this game made me rage. Not much I can do about that :P
I will say though, I was really getting into the platforming segments until that pirate slime ruined it. You did a great job with those!
P.S. I noticed the other levels were selectable from the menu after finishing this, but level 2 immediately had me annoyed with the pirate slimes again, so I'm gonna pass. Apologies
I quite liked this one! At some points I forgot to take notes and was just playing a game, which is always the mark of a good game. I particularly like how the platforming feels, and the use of lighting throughout the scene. Also, 10/10 save system. Had I needed to leave and come back, this game would have had me for sure
Also, great boss fight. Really well done. 10/10
I have a couple notes for future polish if you're interested:
- The sword should do knockback, whether to the player (think duck tales cane) or to the enemy. Right now fights feel weird because the weapon feels weightless, and it feels like you have no way to claim space against the enemies
- Firing the fireball resets the sword's cooldown. Why? I get they are both movement mechanics, but you should either not have the sword be a movement mechanic, or just account for them both being available in the design (I recommend not making that required, or even acknowledging it. Let the player feel like they're cheating)
- Reverting to the previous room every time you die feels a bit jarring because of the camera. I would either respawn the player at the beginning of the current room, or fade to black while moving the camera
- I didn't discover the upgrade menu until I was mid boss and paused to take notes. You should point the player towards it after they pick up 2 gems the first time. Not everyone pauses a game this short
- The sword currently works through walls. I'm sure this isn't intentional and is just a jam thing, but just wanted to note it down
- The boss only being vulnerable when the head is flaming left me confused as to how to hurt it at first. I would either introduce the hurtbox much earlier in the fight, or just make the head hurtable the entire time and increase the bosses health as needed
Alright, now if you'll excuse me, I'm gonna go play around some more with the best item in the game: the crown. I need that jewels upgrade
I loved this game. This art style is wonderful, and you've opted for a style where the puzzles are light, allowing for the focus to be on platforming, which I feel is the right choice.
I do have some small feedback if you want to keep fleshing this out:
This game is crying, SCREAMING even, for an undo button. The game is very inexact about placing your corpses by its very nature, and restarting the entire level every time you jump too high and place a platform you can't quite jump on is super frustrating. You can also replace the "you lose, restart the level" to "out of legacies, press undo" etc
One more thing: if K is the main "interact" button in the game, it should be able to go through the cutscenes as well. Took me too long to figure out I needed to press enter. The main menu and cutscenes should be processable if you press K, Space, or Enter
I would love to see this fleshed out further. If you don't choose to do that, I will look forward to whatever you make next instead. Great job!
I had planned to take an hour to play all the games in the jam, but I ended up spending an hour on your game instead! Before anything else, congrats on finishing your first jam! It's awesome that you managed to ship a completed product. I really can't wait to see what else you're going to make in the future. Also, I love the art style you guys have going on here! The end screen in particular looked pretty cool
As it is with most first time games, this one is a little bit rough, but that's ok! I have a small mountain of feedback to give you for this one, but I just want to take one more second to again note that it's awesome you finished this! I hope you take these notes as things to keep in mind for next time rather than finding them discouraging. We all have a first jam game somewhere, and the most powerful thing we get out of it is what we learned. Alright, without further ado:
Gameplay:
So, the web version didn't have the text block on the left fully expanded. Not your fault, but because of that I spent the first several minutes just running around the overworld very confused. Having said that, there's one thing I noticed about your overworld that's a common mistake for first time devs in the top down space: Do you notice how you made it so the entire sprite has collision both for the ghost, and for the other people, meaning you collide with their head/hair etc? When you're dealing with a top down camera, make it so their collision is only the space around their feet. This allows you to create the illusion that you can walk behind the NPCs. Similarly, if you make it so the ghost only has collision at the bottom, it means you can get right up in an NPC's face instead of bonking the top of your head against their shoes.
Now, you may be thinking this will cause sprites to look weird as they clip in and out of each other. That's where the Z-Index comes in. You can layer which sprites appear in front/behind others using code in your game engine. In the case of a top down game, if you make it so their z-layer is equal to -y coordinate, you'll make it so the higher up on the screen a sprite is, the further back it is. This allows you to make it so the sprites can go behind sprites and in front of them and the sprites will clip properly
Alright, now I'll talk about the minigames. First, I'm gonna level with you, this music was giving me a bit of a headache by the end. It's kind of grating after listening for a bit, and because some of these minigames took me a while to solve due to issues I'm about to talk about, I ended up overdosing on it heavily. That said, I adored the scrolling skull background. It gave me megaman battle network vibes, which is awesome. Alright, here's my notes on each individual minigame:
--Puzzle minigame: I personally think this game would be significantly better if you removed the money thoughts mechanic, and made it so every piece can snap to every tile piece. Solving a grid puzzle when you don't know the original picture can be fun, but when you constantly have to divert your attention it stops being fun and starts feeling annoying. Now, it may be that you want your player to feel annoyed like how the ghost feels towards their brother, but it's best to remember that video games are meant to be entertaining at the end of the day. If the player runs into a wall of frustration, they're just gonna go do something else. In the end, for this one I ended up just dragging the pieces around until they caught on the only tile they could snap to and moved on.
-- Pipes minigame - I got super stuck on this one because there is a second, much shorter, valid solution that doesn't count as correct. Puzzles like these only work if you allow dynamic solving. It's pretty obvious you programmed a very specific game state to be the "correct" solution, rather than building in detection for a correct solution. I can get why, given it's a jam and you had time constraints, but puzzle games are at their best when they allow for multiple solutions, especially when the alternative solution is 100% correct by the rules of the game. Always build solution detection rather than hard code the "correct" solution
-- Twins game -- this one wasn't super remarkable in any regard. Kinda felt like an old school flash game, so props for that. Only thing is, just like with the puzzles I gave earlier, you should allow every letter to slot into every letter slot. Using the periods as a cheat to indicate the end of the word, and only allowing the letters to slot into the exact correct space kind of takes away from any puzzle solving there was to do there. Find a letter, drag it till it snaps, next
-- Ghost game -- this one I got so stuck on I nearly gave up and quit. Turns out, the only way to beat it is to click the button, then move the mouse way to the left and click the space bar to trigger the button again, because the ghost is offset way to the right relative to the ghost. Additionally, you don't have to start at the beginning of the maze. Move your mouse to the left of the exit and hit space to instantly clear the maze. I don't really have much to say on this one other than the bugs need to be fixed
-- Crushing Pills Minigame -- honestly, I don't have a lot to say on this one. Was just a straightforward "click the buttons before time runs out" affair. Lots of web game vibes here
One change I would have considered making if you had time would be to change the dialogue of the character after completing their minigame. That gives a better sense that the player is having an impact on the world around them. I'm guessing this was a time related issue though, which is completely fair. Food for thought
Alright, that's all the gameplay done, but remember how I mentioned that I spent the first several minutes wandering the overworld? Well, during that time I also took a moment to take a few notes on the writing as well. I'm gonna level with you, these people don't feel like people. They don't even feel like caricatures in a lot of cases. I don't say that to be unkind, but I recommend you continue practice writing dialogue after this. Maybe write some short stories etc and have people read them. Here's a few specific notes:
- The conversation between Mama/Papa (aka Gerald/Margaret) ends up feeling super stilted. I can tell you want them to be super detached/stilted which is fair and makes sense, but some of these things don't read like how anyone, even stuck up people, talk. Specifically, Mama refers to Gerald by name twice in two different sentences. It would be like me, every time I talk to you going, "Appel, congrats on finishing your first game" "Thanks Mist!" "You're welcome, Appel". See how weird that feels? The person opening the conversation might use the opposing person's name once, but the person responding will almost never use the opposing person's name unless it's the very beginning of a social interaction "Hi Appel!" "Hi Mist!" (we will not be using each other's names for the rest of the day except to maybe get the other's attention).
- Here's an exact note I took while playing the game "Erin and Ellen give me boomer facebook meme vibes". I don't feel any reason to hate these people like the author clearly wants, because I can't find them believable enough to hate. They're just "40 year old mad at the youths caricatures numbers 256 and 257". I don't think using this stereotype here was a good idea. If I'm exacting revenge on people, I should be able to feel at least some level of dislike for them when I'm reading their dialogue, but here I just roll my eyes and move on
- Cousin Ian on the other hand is a much better written young person relative to Erin and Ellen. I still don't feel a reason to hate him, but the writing here doesn't make me cringe. He feels like a character. However, I do have one note: You know that joke on the internet where people note how you can tell if the writer was an only child by how they fail at writing sibling interactions? "Hey bro" "what's up, sis?" etc? I get the same vibes here. People don't refer to their cousins as "Cousin Harold". He's just "Harold". If you want to indicate they were cousins, call him "Cousin Ian" in the name card and nothing else
Ok. I feel like I've been a bit more negative than I intended, but honestly all of this feedback is what I really thought about the game. That said, please don't feel discouraged by this. The only reason I took 2 hours to play/write this is because I want to see you keep making games, and for those games to get better and better. Congrats again on finishing your first jam. I can't wait to play what you make next!
An unfrogettable experience. Thanks for sharing!
If you are interested in continuing to work on 2d platformers, I have a few resources/topics you might be interested in researching:
Learn how to make 2d platformer movement feel good:https://gmtk.itch.io/platformer-toolkit
Learn about coyote time: Coyote Time Blog
Learn to place limits on the camera bounds: here
It's awesome to see you upload a project here. I hope these resources can help you grow. Keep making cool stuff!
Thanks for the tip! I replayed it with that setting on and had a great time! This was a ton of fun. That last segment in level 10 was particularly cool
It was a bit frustrating having to swap from keyboard to mouse to hit the next level button. It would be a lot better if I could just control that with the keyboard as well.
Other than that though I loved it! Thanks for the game!
Hey! This game really has some great stuff going on here, and it's super obvious you put a ton of work into it.
I'm having to quit just a few levels in unfortunately, because the camera is giving me a bit of a headache. The camera snaps super aggressively forward and back to the player depending on if you're moving forward or have come to a stop (and when you respawn as well). This is super useful as a way of showing the player the level ahead of course, but the movement is so fast in this game it kinda feels like I'm getting whiplash. Hopefully this is only a problem for me since I tend to be more sensitive to motion sickness problems in games, but hopefully you find this helpful on some level
Seriously though, this looks like an awesome game, and the controls seem super well polished. Congrats on the release!
Congrats on finishing your first game jam! It's awesome to see what you've made here. Don't worry about your game being a bit rough. The fact you were able to compile and upload it means you've already done better than my first jam! Also, did you create this art yourself? It looks good enough I can't tell if it's from a premade pack or not; if you did, that's awesome! Super well done.
If you're interested on things you could polish with this game you've made, I've got a recommendations for you:
1. People typically don't have as much momentum as your player character does here. You should consider shortening the time between the player pushing down the walk button and them reaching max speed, and how long it takes the player to come to a complete stop after releasing the movement key. The shorter those 2 times are, the less floaty your movement will feel
2. Speaking of floatiness, here's some resources if you're interested on how to design jumps that feel good. Mark Brown made an awesome interactive tutorial that can help you improve your platformer movement. I highly recommend it: https://gmtk.itch.io/platformer-toolkit
3. I actually kind of like how slow the sword is to swing. It makes the weapon feel heavier, and requires more planning before swinging at the coconut. I just wanted to point out here if you want the combat to feel snappy instead of heavy, you would just need to reduce the time between pressing the button and the weapon's attack hitbox coming out. That's all just a matter of taste though, not something you necessarily should change
4. I would recommend only using mouse inputs if you specifically need the pointer for something. Having all the buttons be on the keyboard makes it easier to play your game on a laptop, or once you're feeling up to it, a controller. As a follow up if you do change that, always make sure your UI only uses the inputs your game uses. So if you swap to a keyboard only setup, make sure the player isn't swapping to their mouse to hit UI prompts (or at least, make it optional)
I can't stress enough how awesome it is that you've managed to create something here. Good luck on your next game! I hope I get to see it
I was smiling the entire time I played this. Your sense of humor is really good. Keep at it!
If you want some constructive feedback, there are 2 things I would recommend:
1. In the 7up level, you have several areas where the player has to jump to a bottle that they can't see on screen. We call these "leaps of faith" in platformers, and typically you don't want to have them. If you must have a platform off screen, use pickups (like how mario uses coins) to draw a line towards where the platform is, so the player knows what to aim for
2. If you're interested in learning more about creating robust 2d platformer character movement, I recommend checking out this project: https://gmtk.itch.io/platformer-toolkit It will teach you a bunch of stuff about what makes a platformer character feel good to play
I really loved this; I hope you keep making stuff. Good luck!
I really like it! It's a fun take on pong!
My only suggestion would be I find every time I jump I get momentarily confused about which button goes in which direction, since left and right are effectively inverted when starting from the top of the circle. I would either make it so the button to head in a given direction changes based on where in the circle you started moving from, or just add button prompts on both sides of the paddle to be more easily readable.
Thanks for sharing!
That sound effect when the mannequins spot you genuinely made me throw my mouse, meaning this in fact a successful horror game. Well done (Not sure how it fits with the theme tbh, but still)
I'm not really well versed in horror game design, so I can't really give much by way of design feedback. Only thing I will say is after wandering around a bit I didn't really find my way to any sort of end goal. I just kinda wandered aimlessly while avoiding the mannequins. I would recommend using visual cues to guide the player where they need to go.
Perfection. No notes.
Ok... fine. A few notes. I adore this art style. Fantastic. Unfortunately I live alone and can't play this to it's fullest potential, but the little experiments I can do by myself seem positive. The only thing I will note is this isn't a particularly interesting use of the theme. It's generally more interesting to build your core around the theme than to just add a one use powerup and call it a day. At any rate though, excellent job. Can't wait to see your future work!
I couldn't play this one for super long because it unfortunately triggered my motion sickness issues with first person games. That said, for the time I did play, here's my thoughts:
I don't really like the map design on this one. Normally games with dark maps use lights to gently guide the player where to go, but in this case I don't have any idea where I'm supposed to head and just end up wandering aimlessly. Also, the blinking flashlight is what really ended up causing motion sickness. As a general rule of thumb, don't constantly flash between light and dark, or it's gonna negatively impact the player. All that said, congrats on completing your game! I'm not a huge fan of the design, but I can still recognize that a lot of work went into it, and for that you should be proud! I'll be looking forward to trying whatever you choose to make next!
The physics on this one feel a bit like the car is made of styrofoam. The car doesn't seem to have much weight to it. That said, I loved the environment design. The art style is simple, but it works super well. I don't think this really maximizes the theme though. This feels like a normal racing game/walking sim combo that you just added a story to in order to fit the theme. It's generally more interesting when you directly reflect the theme in the core of the game. All things considered, well done! One final note: even for a game jam, you need to make preventing the camera from flipping uncontrollably your top priority. That's how you cause motion sickness
Once I figured out the tutorial typo, I love this game concept. Running around as a speedster feels super good. I only have 2 notes:
The others being on ice when you push them makes them feel hard to control
Honestly, I feel like the greatest limitation of this game is the "only once" aspect. The game gives you the most strategic control when you're in the slow mode, so only being able to use that once, particularly in longer levels, puts you in a position where you either feel inclined to never use it in case you need it later, or frustrated when you did use it and then you can't save them. I think there are better solutions than the "only once" aspect. This has the potential to be something really special. I hope you flesh it out a bit more
