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no the rabbits aren't supposed to teleport you. I was adding some extra dialogue with a rabbit that would move around but didn't finish it yet. I'll disable them for the next builds until they are done. 

Yes the red level is complete, as well as the two zones after it.

The arms are the same strength. It's not random of course, the behavior is entirely predictable just sensitive. As an example I will show the break the targets minigame here: https://x.com/ZanthousDev/status/1852729012126159198

If you're curious the specifics, a lot depends on the angle the arm is at relative to the ground when you start moving your arm fast (by inputting a high angle difference input). There is a dot on the arm that indicates when a joint is made with the ground as well, and these joints let you generally speaking jump further than if you are say sitting on the ground and slamming the arm into the ground with out it touching the ground beforehand. It's difficult to explain.

 I've updated the hint for the climb regions to say "Grab - Hold L/R" and slightly increased the size of a platform in that area. Right now this is a bit of a pain point, figuring out how to balance this mechanic. It's apparently a quite steep learning curve to jump between these things. Back when I first implemented it it was a lot harder, and I've made many improvements over time to where it's easy for me but it's still difficult for me to predict how new players will handle it at this time.

I'm curious how much time you've put in at this point if you're willing to share, because I think your progress is decent all things considered. If you're playing on windows there is a replay file saved at %USERPROFILE%\AppData\LocalLow\Zankai\Sklime\Replays\The Depths, if you could upload that at some point I'll take a look at it and see where it might be good to make level adjustments

Also thanks for playing so much, and sorry it's a pretty frustrating game. It's been very difficult to get it to reach my expectations and those of players in some aspects. It's like an idea where you wonder why noone has ever done it until you try and do it yourself and slowly realize over the course of months

yes you need a key to test the full version
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video
I like the character art

Thank you. As you say it's not about how hard you press the stick but where you are aiming it so there is a very steep learning curve that has been hard to acclimate players to. I think the cutscene issue is something to do with localization and it's hopefully fixed in the new builds but otherwise I am working on it.

I'm working on getting an updated build out, there is an error being hit and I am guessing mac/linux may break because of it currently.  I recommend getting the demo on Steam  https://partner.steampowered.com/app/details/2800310/ where it will autoupdate, and allow me to test steam functionality like leaderboards

If you hate yourself and like this game I'm looking for people to test the full game

I'm aiming to get to a point where the first section is completable in about 30 minutes, I've been making some additional changes based on feedback this DD.

The first section is meant to be an easy mode tutorial before the "real game" even starts, since the game is about controlling two arms

it's true I need to decrease the frequency they play the animations

thanks for the bug report (yes it's machine translation for now)

the remake kind of gets the feel of the game quite wrong sadly from physics to sound

also I'm not sure your history of playing these games but you should definitely play super monkey ball 2 if you haven't. I bet if you are going to find an audience for this sort of game you should understand the sort of expectations they will have going into this

I didn't know about the blast attack while playing. I just pressed q/e on my keyboard yes. It would be nice if the second stick let me move the camera if you are hard set on not having an auto camera system. My compaints aren't sound related I was just suggesting a single potential point of improvement for the issue of conveying to the player their current speed

I have some similar feelings to diabolodev. My bias is maybe that I was a big fan of super monkey ball 2 as well. I think smaller levels with strong themes and obvious challenges are just a lot more fun than the longer adventure style gameplay. I don't like the checkpoints with gameovers. I think there are a lot of kind of useless parts to levels when you go for the longer maps and it just feels like filler you have to walk through.  Level 03 feels overly gimmicky and not clean,  bouncing off a ring, or having an enemy push you off a ramp is not a great experience (from what I can tell this is what you have to do, though they all died at one point when I played the level). It felt like different enemies all pushed with different forces too depending on the level, in general it's just a really weird mechanic. I'd much rather there be a static element like a piston that fires periodically than have to fight to get an enemy exactly in the right place to push me. Overall I do feel like the ball is too floaty, but changing that now probably means redoing every level (Designing with Physics: Bend the Physics Engine to Your Will (youtube.com)). If you do have the opportunity to redo levels to be smaller, they should be much easier to test and swap in and out. 

A smaller piece of feedback is in levels with dynamic objects, you should try and have them move during the countdown time as well or it looks too static (the floating rocks in this case) 

I think this type of game is by far better played on controllers unfortunately, maybe if you have a wooting with partial key presses it could be better. The camera rotation is another big pain point, that I think arises from this. Since you can only start moving in about 8 directions, there won't be an amazing auto rotation system you can make

I had a lag spike before the results screen showed the first time, and I didn't realize how to continue. 

In the first level a couple things weren't overlapped amazingly so I bumped up a bit on what looked like a flat section too

Putting more into helping the player feel exactly what speed they are going at would help too. The sound that plays while you roll takes quite a bit of speed before it plays (I was trying on controller) and some intermediate sounds could help. I think the strengths of the game currently are the sounds themselves are good and the style is mostly cohesive.

Lastly the menu transitions are cool but could be sped up a tiny bit imo

gameplay without sound:

Like the other commentor, I agree that a little bit of improvement of the dungeons could go a long way. There need to be more features even if they are just part of some modular pack, and of course you could work in a few traps and such if you found ways to make them interesting. I do think basing combat around heals has a lot of potential and some of the spells were interesting in that sort of way. A few user experience improvements could be made, like if I cast a channeled spell I think my character should stop and start casting it. I come from a moba background so I do wonder if the game could benefit from that sort of overhead perspective where you can more easily ground target or select and manage specific enemies/allies, but that might not be the style you are aiming for. In the video I pointed out a couple smaller issues here and there such as some spelling mistakes, or things I didn't understand immediately

also you can rotate the shapes which makes it a lot better

you can set the faces to numbers in the graphics settings

you should add the suika-game tag to your game Top games tagged Suika Game - itch.io

the steam version is better

by the way, if you don't mind answering, were there any parts you thought were particularly bad or too hard too fast? And have you played similar games before (getting over it, jump king, pogostuck, bred and fred)?

congrats on the first demo clear I've seen and thanks for playing through it all

I keep accidentally reloading when im trying to  do this part. I got -1 hp in the next level. The character seems to face the wrong direction after standing up a lot. I think the caterpillar got stuck facing a wall in the bonus stage and I couldn't feed him anymore so I retried. There's some interesting stuff here and there with momentum based platforming, and the level recap is neat. The controls in general were a bit confusing and not very intuitive to me, I generally like the wasd based control schemes more. 

well you got pretty far then, the cookie can be used with the builder npc to build a shortcut (which isn't super polished yet) for each zone if you are bad

there seems to be a lot of jitter with how the camera tracks the player. In unity this would be a problem like not having the camera update in lateupdate, but I don't know the godot equivalent. Make sure the camera is updated after everything is moved. Right now there is a huge info dump when you first get into the game, it would be nice if you could spread that out a bit more. On to the second level and still the same problem, 3 switch types all introduced immediately together through text. 

I think for the companion commands it could be nice to have them bound to 3 different keys with a UI display for this showing the hotkey and which state it is in. Or you could think of simplifying to stop/follow bound to 1 key and not have move away. I haven't played through everything yet to see how some of it is used

yep it's a "rage game" type of game but I'm still working on the difficulty curve

I personally don't like circles as much as others, things like tear shape (not in demo) have circular properties and are interesting in different ways, triangles are cool too in their own way. Most shapes have a couple unique properties or techniques. The combination modes like rect+circles and plus+pentagons are a bit awkward admittedly. Circles are less "puzzley" feeling than the others since they fall in annoying ways constantly compared to more stable shapes, and rotating doesn't do anything with them so they are missing one of the strategy elements. Capsules are another semi round shape to try, they're somewhere between rectangles and circles for how they play.  

I didn't "fix" what you are saying, it's just what I decided to go with for this game, new shapes (spawned from merging or recently dropped) don't instant end the game but old shapes do if their center point is above the front box line. I've seen other games do different but the balance would be thrown off a bit too much if you could just spam shapes for too long at the top in my opinion. All the shapes were balanced rather carefully so you can "clear" the mode when you merge two suika/watermelon.

That being said, the upcoming update will have a lot more content for all shape modes including circles, because I am adding new stages very soon (crunching on it currently and almost done) and online co-op at the same time. The stages have a couple mechanics to encourage strategizing together. Circles of course is the most popular since everyone sees it as the standard mode, nearing scores from 1000 players. Random with all the shapes has consistently been popular too, since it offers a lot of gameplay variety

yeah my bad on missing the tutorial on the menu, I'll give it another go. This is the browser version

I seem to have disabled the ui on accident somehow and can't select my units (I don't know what they do anyway) anymore. I'll give it another try if you can give me some direction

(I see there actually is a tutorial now, I missed it when starting the game)

unfortunate, I don't really know how mac works. Some security thing? If so the steam version should bypass it (hopefully)  https://store.steampowered.com/app/2686690/Suika_Shapes/

Slippery mode will probably be pretty crazy and more of a joke mode. I'm not super sure on the specifics of how much the rotation change matters. I just am pretty sure it is the best change going forward how I have it on the steam version now, since it gives players the most control. It's unfortunate I messed up the update for the itch version

Yes I was saying I that instead of a smaller mode I'd like to have an "evolution" mode or similar so you'd maybe play the game at 12% reduced size to start and every loop it would increase, -8%, -4%, 0% , 4% bigger etc for every double watermelon clear, or similar. I haven't decided what numbers yet but it would hopefully not feel like a secondary mode to normal, like a "smaller" mode would. Just smaller shapes feels like playing on easy mode and I am guessing players wouldn't like it as much, but the size would gradually increase it would just be a mode made for long play that anyone could enjoy without feeling any guilt. 

To give an example for triangles mode, its current size would be starting on the -8% size, so the new mode would start you with shapes a bit smaller than that (-12%), you'd complete a loop and get to the current itch size (-8%), and then another double watermelon clear would be a bit larger but still within reason to clear (-4%), then it would be hard (0% or the standard size), and after that it would be close to impossible or impossible (4%). Realistically a person would clear up to 4 times in a session, and 5 max depending on if it is possible on the mode.

Btw I checked the friction values at least and they haven't changed

I'll double check later but it should be the same. There is a chance the friction was increased a bit. In general I want to aim for the modes to be barely possible to beat, so that the very best players won't be able to go infinitely on them. In the original game there are players that have gotten a double watermelon clear twice in one run for example, but none in my version even though the sizes should be (just about) exactly the same. Assuming this is a legit score ( I didn't watch so carefully just skipped through), it caps out at 9999. My main point is if even better players came along they could probably just loop forever if I am not careful. There's also maybe a social media effect if all the modes are hard to clear and players take time and struggle to clear them (but it's eventually possible

I want to still provide a different gamemode that allows for multiple clears more easily so the evolution type gamemode was what I was thinking of currently. I know you said you liked multiple clears in a run so if you have any ideas here I'm open to suggestions

Firstly suika classic has its own physics so it's a bit different but in general the only drop difference was that now shapes drop at their max velocity from the start, this has been in the game for a while though, and is why I added the toggle. When the game first was made, all shapes would spawn in the default orientation, in the live version it takes randomly (whichever shape's collision gets processed first) an orientation from either shape. I fixed it days ago at this point but I haven't been putting out updates to itch for a few days because of the steam crunch. Today I'm working on steam integrations, I got local scores listing out for any possible gamemode you choose

https://imgur.com/a/jKPeBMP

This is what the mode select panel will be like, I haven't added any fancy visuals for it though. Right now normal mode has made triangles and squares bigger (~7-8%) and small mode is their old size. I was thinking of making a mode called evolution or something instead of small where each double watermelon clear you get, the size slightly increases for all shapes by 4% or so, and it would display the current size on the screen. Rising floor and all the modifiers you see there can all be played with any shape or shape combination but leaderboards are limited to non custom shape combinations, and there are no leaderboards for bouncy/slippery/low gravity. 

I was considering making swap a default option but ultimately decided against it, since it seemed a bit too straightforward to do well with it so instead people can choose it if they would like to use it. I did end up making it so the next 2 shapes show though on the current version

I don't plan to sell it on other platforms currently, but I will think about whether I can sell a full version on itch. The new version I am setting up with steam leaderboards, achievements, cloud save, potentially multiplayer with steam features, etc. I also programatically generated about 200 leaderboards to allow people to pick different modes/mods to play with and still have leaderboards if they want to challenge their friends on specific settings for steam, I also hope to allow people to see scores among their steam friends. 

Yes that will be in the steam version (and eventually itch), hopefully scores among your friends too. I just got started on the steam leaderboards today but only got through uploading scores. Itch version might be not updated for a while since I'm kind of crunching for the steam release, though there are a good amount of bugs in the current version I'd like to patch. (examples: moving shapes all the way to the edge doesn't work for some shapes, merging shapes don't take the rotation/shape of the faster shape even though I thought I made this change). 

I'm glad you enjoy the game and thank you for playing

The features added until now will stay free on the itch version. Additional features either will not come to the itch version as fast or will be steam only, such as additional modes, certain shapes, custom combinations, modifiers, multiplayer (if added) etc. Quality of life update(s) will be released (options menu)

Pay what you want has gotten me a total of 2 sales over about 20k plays totaling 4$, then $2.80 because of fees, and then that is taxed an additional amount.

 In order to justify spending a significant amount of additional time developing the game I need to make some sort of return at this point. 

An options panel has been added but is not live on itch because I have made many changes to how the game works and it will take some time before I can ensure both the steam and itch versions will work properly

To disable the drop preview, you can use middle mouse button. In the future it will be part of the options menu

I've been working on an options menu along with a lot of other things, I can't say when it will be out since there's a lot more left to do but it will be in the next update. 

random question, would you be opposed to having the next two shapes show instead of just the next shape?

I was thinking the big/small mode separation would be the difference between being able to clear 1+ times vs being able to clear only if you play near perfectly. Small mode you would go through the game and be able to clear it, but maybe with some sort of thing that makes it just a tiny amount harder each time so it isn't infinite, like you have to place an unmatchable shape for example. I bet some other people also do like being able to clear through it so that is the idea for that mode. I haven't thought through it too much though so it could just be that the shapes are a bit smaller without extra changes, squares and triangles could be about the same.

I'm also surprised the other modes aren't played as much, but a lot of people just come here and want to compete with scores from the original game directly after watching streamers (it's a big streamer game right now) so until streamers play the other modes it will stay like this. I think more dedicated players definitely give them a try. I personally like random a lot, it feels somehow like a rogue type experience, different every time but there is a lot of complexity to think through.

As for adding shapes through the workshop, it likely won't be possible. There are a few failed shapes I tried adding, ovals, stars, corner pieces. I tried a wide range of physics settings and workarounds and still couldn't make these work yet. Ovals were not bad, but get stuck inside each other, corners and stars were cool, but in order to resolve physics under stress the entire box of shapes would spazz out, everything rotating with insane forces to try and depenetrate all the objects. I used various baumgarte scale values, bounciness, tried 2d and 3d with constraints, different collider setups etc. I have a scene I run where it just spawns a ton of objects in an enclosed space to stress test shapes.  A lot of shapes you would think should work somehow just haven't so far but I'll continue to try and make more.  One type of shape I think I could add and tested a bit is a capsule shape, which is close to rectangle but has round ends. This might be next

(Theoretically there might be a way to have someone provide a path of polygon points and set everything up from that but I don't know if I'll jump at the idea immediately, since few of these collider types end up stable)

Neah don't worry about it just buy on release, purchase numbers/player numbers/reviews and the sort matter a lot more at this price point. A lot of users won't buy games not on sale so you have to plan around this sort of thing so I was just being transparent about it.  That's not to say I don't think I can make it feel worth 4$ or something, I'll be continuing to improve it. The biggest change will be that you select shapes, and then any modifiers/rule changes you'd like. Here's what I'm thinking at the moment:

There will be leaderboards at least for the normal mode on every shape, and for every shape with a bigger/smaller modifier (like 0.9x size and 1.1x size or so, hopefully to preserve the ability to go through multiple clears, thinking about it now the bigger modifier might be unnecessary).  Also achievements will be specific to the base shapes without modifiers, probably 3k points and then double watermelon for that specific shape. Rising floor/speed mode is another example of a modifier, and slippery and bouncy are some more I have planned at the moment.

I'll be adjusting the sizes of all the shapes hopefully so it's barely possible to make a double watermelon. The itch version will probably just keep the current sizes and leaderboards so there might be a bit of a split in features. I'll have to see just how much I can get in by release. Right now I'm updating visuals, adding a couple extra faces (and replacing ones that are too similar to the original) and will have a simple face animation when merging etc

My focus will be on making it a good single player game, but if it sees a good amount of success I'll consider multiplayer. I think just competing over scores is already pretty fun and people prefer to take the game slow overall. Suika classic is by far the most popular still. These are the scores  submitted over the last half hour for example:

• classic 56
• squares 6
• triangles 5
• circles 2
• pluses 1
• rectangles 1
• hexes 1

thanks