itch.io

Fun demo! It looks and feels great to play. I wrote down a list of bugs (MacOS) I encountered, as well as just some thoughts I had while playing.

Bugs:

• Going back from the options menu by using the B button causes a soft-lock, showing just the main menu backdrop and not the menu itself.
• Loading indicator icon is out of frame on MacBook Pro (16:10 aspect ratio). Although the indicator does display correctly.
• After getting the first key the game froze (seems to be related to the animation unlocking)
• Opening the pause menu and closing it made the controls stop working. Interestingly the button icons still update based on which input I last press.
• Spamming the skip-cutscene button as the game starts resulted in a black screen
• At this point I switched to my Windows PC to continue playing.

General feedback:

• Giving Magnus’ a “voice” would help characterise him and make him more expressive. (Think Banjo Kazooie or Celeste)
• Adding a crouch button would do nothing for gameplay, but it would give the player something to do while waiting for a big block to move, or a screw to screw.
• I often found myself just pressing the first switch I case across without much thought. I imagine this behavior could be exploited to poke some fun at players who do this.
• The audio is currently just ok, it does the job just fine, but it's missing a little something. Music is good though, fits the game well.

Thanks for playing. That delay is indeed strange and we're planning on fixing that, it's just low priority right now as we're trying to get features in.

Very glad you liked the game! There's still a lot more we're planning to add, one thing being a weekly and daily leaderboard.

Ah I see. Yes since the demo was posted we've actually made it just be a game over as soon as all columns are ovefilled.

Thanks for trying the game out! The colour matching mechanic is explained in the description, that allows you to recover from overfilled columns.

Can't see the picture sadly, but I get what you mean.

The trick to clearing overfilled columns is to use the colour matching on neighbouring columns to clear blocks from those overfilled columns.

Thanks. I've heard some feedback from others that it gets pretty stressful after a while, which is sort of the intention, but also we need to balance the game a bit more

It is not.

I mentioned that scores don't get saved yet in the description, but that's coming in a future update.

Yeah I just added an explanation in the description. Forgot to add that. We're planning on adding a tutorial in the future.

Good concept. The art is very nice looking and appealing, however I think the controls can use a lot more polish. The pogo move feels a little stumpy, and in general the controls feels quite stiff. The sound of the deadly laser sticks out a lot, which is clever because it lets the player know that they're about to lose. But you're not capitalising on this enough. There's room for more risk and reward here. If the player were more often presented by a choice of path, like one risky but fast way, and another slow but safe way, they might pick which path based on the proximity of the laser.

As it stands now, there is no choice to be made except that you know that this is your last shot at moving past an obstacle once you hear the laser.

Progression also feels like a chore. The second that barrier touches you, you go all the way back to the beginning. You'll have to make your way through the same part of the level you've already done dozens of times just to get another shot at that difficult bit where you last died. And that bit might take several tries to get right. The frustration from this is also compounded by the stiff controls.

This concept seems like it was inspired by the tower from Shovel Knight: Spectre of Torment. One crucial thing you didn't bring over from that minigame was the random nature of the tower.

Now, I'm not saying that randomly generated levels would be the best solution to this game's problems, but I do think it would greatly ease that frustration of having to replay the same bits of the game over and over again. Instead it would allow the player to hone their skill by facing a larger variation of situations.

I'm focusing on the negative bits here, but that's what stands out to me the most as holding this concept back. I hope that you keep working on this game to make it the best it can be, and I'll be keeping my eye on this.

Thanks for playing.

In what way would you describe the controls as sluggish, and with which character?

And climbing walls are intended with one of the characters.

Thanks for playing :)

 I've disabled air control for Crocodude on purpose, it's enabled for frogboy, it's part of the challenge.

:(

Just a heads-up. You're not allowed to link to a different download of your game during the rating period.

Fun game. I like that there's lot of variation of mechanics! I especially liked the one where the platform goes to the other side once you've stepped on it.

Only problems I had with it was the the controls weren't all that great (high top speed, relatively slow acceleration and instant deceleration made it sometimes difficult to control). And I wish it had gamepad support, but overall, great work!

Nice game! Writing as good, graphics were nice and the audio was well done. I like the idea of a singleplayer prop-hunt game with a story.

Neat game, but it's very short. I would've liked to see the robot mechanic escalate a bit more.

Neat little game. A couple of oddities though.

The name is a bit odd. I get that you have to beat each level before the dark shadow thing gets you, but really it's not about speedrunning, should've probably added a timer and some incentive to master and beat each stage as fast a possible instead of just faster than the shadow can get you.

The music is nice, but since each level is pretty challenging I got pretty familiar with the first 2 seconds of the song. Maybe you should not have made the song restart when you restart the level also, so that I could've heard more of the song.

Last and probably least important is that I couldn't use the D-pad to move, only analog stick, which a lot of people don't like for 2D platformers with digital movement.

Other than that it's a cute little game that I enjoyed, the graphics were perfectly nice. Would've liked to see a bit more variation in the gameplay as well, but I guess you were probably strapped for time like the rest of us :)

Thanks for giving it a shot! The keyboard controls might be odd because I prefer to play on gamepad so that's how I've been playing it.

Thanks for playing! Yeah I'm a lousy artist so the art is basically plagarism, I'm giving credit though and Tiny Link is open source so I hope it's alright.
All the code is by me though.

Interesting little game, the crafting mechanic was neat, especially since you have to think about that while in combat, so it's a bit of a juggling act. Overall pretty fun game, although it was initially a little confusing.

Thank you!

Great little game! I had a fun time playing it. It was very satisfying getting full house.

Creative take on the genre! It's chaotic but fun.

Thanks, we tried to add as much juice and satisfying animation as time would allow.

Hey thanks for playing. The game kinda ended up becoming a good practice tool for adding up numbers between 1 and 6 quickly eh?

Thanks for playing!

Graphics are cute and pleasing. Desprite a few oddities like there being swords and chests you cannot open, it was decently fun, good job!

The graphics are really good! But gameplay suffers from the lack of camera control.

Fun and creative concept, but it does get pretty hard once you throw in that second die. The graphics are very nice!

Nice game! Impressive that you got an online leaderboard in there.

Nope, the monster's behaviour is just badly thought through. I'm planning a total rework of that.

Thanks for taking the time to play and give feedback on this project, I am planning on changing the enemies in the future.

Oh, it wasn't clear that it was supposed to be a conversation, it just seemed like some random error.

Oh well the d-pad didn't seem to work for me in the menus then.

Sadly I know all to well about Unity's situation with inputs. I recommend you switch to Rewired on the asset store, it's a great plugin that comes with a button remapping system, although I haven't tried it out yet, I'm pretty impressed by the rest of the plugin. Word of caution though, the documentation is a bit lacking on how you set it up, but once you do get it going it's great.

Yes I do recommend a square instead, but if you watch Sebastian's videos on it you'll see that he uses a different approach entirely, but it ends up behaving just like a square collider.

Another thing I forgot to mention in my initial review is that the in-game menu for inventory and stats is pretty janky to use, so I would suggest you re-think your approach to that.

Thanks for responding so kindly :)

Cool little game. Here's some feedback based on some notes I took while playing:

Could use controller support, and ideally button remapping but there's not a lot of different actions in this game. But considering this game is built for speedrunning, letting players play in the way that they find comfortable should be a high priority.

The music restarting whenever you retry a level would get grating, again since there's this clear emphasis on speedrunning that seems like an oversight.

It's not so great that you always can't see the platform you're trying to land on so sometimes I had to blindly jump in a direction and hope there was a platform there.

The controls were good and I liked it despite having to play on a keyboard, I feel like there were tricks that could improve my time that I have not yet discovered and if this game got another pass of polish or some extra levels I could see myself coming back to this.

Edit: I just read that this was made in a week as a self imposed challenge, so I'd like to mention that I did not take this into account when writing the above critiques.

Nice game with lots of potential. I don't know how much more you're planning to add, but at some point it will definitely need a polish pass or two, lots of small problems here and there that could be improved, but overall it's pretty good.

I took some notes while playing the first 20 or so minutes.

Lots of mixels, I'm not personally a fan but it might be something you like.

D-pad is completely unused, as someone who prefers using the d-pad in both menus and in-game this was a sore point.

No button remapping.

The shape of the character collider makes platforming somewhat awkward, consider using some other shape.

Consider finding some character controller 2D online since I know Unity doesn't have one built in for 2D and using rigidbody is not ideal in most situations. Using a custom character controller lets you have way more control over the feel of moving around. I'd recommend looking at Sebastian Lague's old tutorials or Prime31's character controller on github.

Demo seems broken, hit new game and I got to a white screen with a few coloured dots floating gently around and I could click to generate a puff of smoke, but that was it.

Additionally the options seems to be broken as well, selected FULL as the screen size and after restarting the game it started in the smallest screen size even though the option was set to full. And changing the screen size option again just changed from full screen to 4x but none of the other options. And the full option was 4x and 4x option was full. Pretty weird.

Yes there is supposed to be an encounter.

Hey thanks for playing my game! The monster is supposed to be stopping you from entering the cave until you have all the torches in the forest but it seems like he bugged out. At least you did see him once though, some people went through the entire thing without seeing him once.