itch.io

try the orienteer mode, it's much closer to a "game in a wide term", and I found it to be very fun to learn how to navigate, I would also recommend you change the settings from "3m" to "1m" in "stride distance" (which determines how far you go with a single "forward step", there was a lot of text to read before I understood any of what I was seeing on the screen which is a very big barrier of entry, but ultimatly there is fun to be found in it.

I think that if you like the feeling of getting lost in metroidvanias, or even more specifically, orienting yourself on hollow knight without the compass charm, you can have fun playing the orienteer mode. I also didn't have much fun playing in the "explorer" mode, it was just too open ended for my tastes, but the orientieer mode, as it states in one of the PDFs provided, it aims to simulates the experience you have in real life on, IIRC, competitions of how to orient yourself.

I actually have a lot of criticisms to provide:

• the more you get hit, the bigger you get, this means it's easier for you to get hit again, you have to think that if the player is taking damange, getting bigger means it's easier to take more damage, so the worse you play, the harder it gets, which is not a good system to have in the game as it disincentivizes the player on getting better
• I can shoot as fast as I can click my mouse, which is not good, if you are not gonna limit the rate of the gun, you might as well make it be a machine gun and make the gun keep firing if we keep the button pressed, otherwise, the only think I will gain from playing the game is tendinitis from rapid-repetitive clicks
• I don't link that it's quite unclear how much bigger the enemy will get when I shoot it, think about it: when a enemy gets close, I have no choice but to shoot it, but shooting it will make it bigger which will lead to me taking damage which is not good. A better system would be: if the player is not shooting the gun, you run faster than when you are shooting, so when an enemy gets too close I can make a decision on whether I should shoot or run to prevent the damage I would take
• I also don't like how the game has no end to it, you have a gameplay loop, but the score is only limited by how much time I wanna keep playing, if you add a time limit to the game, or instead of getting -30 points you just die, I think it would lead to a game that is more fun to play/compete.
• also, I don't like that the enemies spawn without time for me to react to their spawns, they appear on the edge of the screen, but they run so fast that I don't have much time to react to them, I think it would be better if they were, either slower, as it would leave me time to react to ther spawn, or if the screen would warn me a second before they actually spawn so that the player can have the sensation that there are more skill on the play instead of blaming bad RNG of receiving a hit when you are just running from a red eye.
• also, instead of letting the eyes get bigger on hit, you could make they grow based on time of their existance, that way we can teach the player that if they let the eye exist for too long, it will just get bigger and bigger which would make it both easier to hit to amend the problem the player has created for themselves, but also it incentivises the player to try to get rid of the enemy as soon as possible to control their threat

despite the several criticisms I had, I had fun playing it, got a score of 236 before realising the game would have no ending and my hand was already several clicks away from being tired, so I just stopped  

good call, thanks for the feedback

personally I really liked the maze, the level of difficult of the maze, and SPECIALLY the "compass" system (the little lights tha keep showing the direction you need to go), this is something that I really miss in so many maze games where you are just lost as to where you should head to. I think no minimaps are needed, but I think you knows best what you wanna include or not in the game :)

I felt that the traversal is very slow, something we have to thing as designers is like, the engagin part of the puzzle, is thinking of how to solve the puzzle, then we have to consider the time the player takes from "ideia" to "input", and a maze is kind of a problem in this sense.

I felt that I had an idea, like "oh, I need to get there, so I just need to follow this walls, and I will probably get to the place I wanna go", but the walk was so slow, it kept me disengaged with the gameplay, if you need to walk this slow, we need to make the traversal more fun in and of itself.

For me the moments I had most fun was when I was falling a pit, and needed to grab the edge of the wall before taking fall damage, but those moments are few and far between.

Also I got kind of discouraged to explore some plcaces due to the sole reason of the effort it would need to come back to where I was.

Those are my impressions, good game tho, I love the way the inteface feels like those old games from master system and the likes, it was a throw back.

I got really confused at the start, like, I don't know what is an obstacle, what is a enemy, and what is a point, it's missing a more clear tutorial, just try not to do a tutorial in written form, the interactive ones should be better :)

the controls are very frustrating for me, all the actions I want to take are spread all over the keyboard which doesn't offer me a satisfying experience and I can't seem to rebind the keys. Other than that, great game, my mind was kinda blown by everythin in it, keep up the great work

did you try orienteer mode? I thought it was the most fun one

hey, thanks for playing, what was the highscore?

doesn't run on browser or linux, can't play it :(

very cool, much like, suck design

the very low resolution :sweat_smile:

• I really like the soundtrack for the mazes,
• doing all for of them was kinda boring tho.
• I think that the first one and the third maze were the same
• the boss in the end made me very excited
• I didn't like that the step sound was too loud,
  • and the tempo for the steps never aligned nice with the BGM, which I think was a missed opportunity
• thanks for the linux version :heart:

very funny

cool game, I found the jump to be very annoying tho

doesn't run on linux :( (as in: I can't play it, not that it is really a problem)

The game is way better now, I actually had fun playing it, thanks for updating, highscore was low, tho only 83... (EDIT: 167)

If you let me indulge in some more suggestions: I think that it would be very cool if you could manage to make the horizontal platforms take the player along like the vertical ones do.

Other than that, I think it would be more fun to retry the game if I had the ability to press (idonno) `R` or maybe the jump button, and have it reset the game when I'm in the game over screen, as aiming the mouse to two different buttons (the "reset" and then the "start" is a bit tedious when you just want to repeat your run).

I also think it could be nice to have some kind of way to determine the direction of the battery(?), specially when the screen is fully zoomed in, as it is quite difficult to have to think where to go when you are just trying to stay alive. A kind of compass around the player, like those in FPS when you receive damage would come a long way to help this.

I'm extremely happy that you took the time, man, thanks sz