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The World Begins With You

An atmospheric puzzle-platformer-adventure. · By Beiwerk

Feedback

A topic by arceus444 created Jan 09, 2018 Views: 392 Replies: 2
Viewing posts 1 to 3

I downloaded your game when I first saw it on the homepage a few days ago, and finished it the other night. I did quite enjoy some aspects of it and it shows potential, but I think dealing with some things, mainly technical issues, made it a little more painful than maybe it should have been. I suppose it's possible that the game really does not like my particular system (which is Windows 10 Home, nothing fancy, adequate RAM and hard drive space, laptop), but perhaps it is common to others as well.

The first thing is the resolution. The graphics are stunning and even more beautiful in high definition (the native for my screen), but the game is a little laggy with everything set on highest. I was able to turn it down in the settings, but the game did not like this and kept forcing my settings back. Every time I died, had to restart (I'll explain why in a bit), or reached a new level, the resolution would go back up to 1920 x 1080. Interestingly enough, the graphics quality did stay at medium, where the default was high. It also appears that many resolutions are listed 2 or 3 times in the list - I'm not sure why.

At several points the ambient atmosphere was so dark that it became difficult to see where one was going and got a bit frustrating. Even sitting in the dark with the lights off, it was not easy to discern what was a platform and what was the abyss below. I consider my vision to be pretty good but the contrast did not quite seem adequate. Perhaps the little light emanating from the character's head could illuminate a little more? I understand you want to convey the darkness of a cavern, for example, but it should be doable without feeling like one is completely stumbling in the dark.

There is also the issue of getting stuck in several places. If you stray from the main path a bit or try something not quite right, there are a few situations in which you can find yourself unable to render any movement, or to jump. This makes it impossible to even suicide. Fortunately it does seem you have a 'load' option which restarts you to the beginning of the level, but it might be worth investigating this further or putting in a restart button with a confirm option to do so, just in case people aren't creative enough to try loading. The jump button also seemed to have issues in places, particularly if you're pressed up against a wall. It just wouldn't respond.

I was a little disappointed about the camera movement, particularly that there one was unable to adjust that, say using the mouse. I don't know if it was done to save resources or as a limitation of the game engine (seeing everything from one perspective based solely on location must save resources), but sometimes it made it difficult to navigate or to gauge distances for a jump and so forth. It also seems a bit perplexing that a game based on a free-flowing, slow-paced, exploration-oriented adventure would choose to limit your perspective to a fixed camera angle. Why not let the player rotate, zoom, etc. and explore a little more? I'm genuinely curious. That said, given that the camera was set up in this way, the choice of angles and pitch was I think close to perfect in conveying the scenery and surroundings, from being a small ant in a maze to running off into the distance. But if you went off exploring...your character would practically vanish off into the horizon.

I'm also wondering about the boat ride. That puzzle really got me for a while until I looked through one of the walkthroughs for a solution to the second light. How come the barrels providing adequate shielding, but the stack of boxes do not? It seems one is able to get behind them on the far side and crouch, so I was just wondering. It was a good creative puzzle though, and no fault of yours that I got held up on it.

Anyway thanks for sharing this game for free, hopefully you might be interested in checking out some of the stuff that I mentioned, although I'd assume you might not agree with me on all of it. If so, let me know, as I'd probably look forward to (more positively) reviewing it in the future.

Developer

Hey there, 

thanks for taking the time to write such a detailed feedback post, I really appreciate it!

Some of the points you make are very common feedback I get (such as difficulties in the platforming sections and parts of the game being a bit too dark). The fixed camera angle is both a result of the (time-) constraints of the game jam, but also a choice of mine to frame the view in certain way at certain points. After reading a lot of feedback from players I now see where and why this can cause frustration in gameplay and the will to explore the world next to path the player is supposed to take. Sometimes when you fall off the cliffs and die and the camera follows the player you can see that there isn't really anything down there, as there isn't really anything behind the camera as well. Building all that in the timeframe of a gamejam would probably impossible or would result in an overall more uninteresting world I think, so I went with the current solution and tried to make the best of it. But I share the opinion that this game would have been better with a free camera.

Regarding the boat ride: you mentioned that you downloaded the game when you first saw it on the main page?Chances are that you played the first uploaded version that has since been updated. Specifically the issue with the boxes was adressed, you now can also hide from the second searchlight by crouching behind the boxes, like one would expect. :) I also made the first platforming part significantly easier (at least I think) and removed a few places where people got stuck in an infinite fall animation. 

What I'm really not sure about is the resolution thing. It works for me on my system and I haven't heard back from other people having problems with that. This doesn't mean that this is a specific issue on your system, but I don't really have a good way to test it on many systems, unfortunately. 

Thanks again for the feedback!

I agree that the graphics look nice, but I was not able to appreciate them due to the lag and me needing to turn down to low graphics settings. Also, the camera is worse than Super Mario 64. There seems to be a bit of input lag too. Due to these issues I could not bring myself to play further than running out of that building you start in :/