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Scaler

3d platformer with unique mechanic that allows you to fully control your size (i.e., to shrink and to grow). · By half8toNaN

Played about 30 minutes & got stuck.

A topic by skpacman created Aug 10, 2024 Views: 68 Replies: 3
Viewing posts 1 to 3
(1 edit) (+1)

I played about 30 minutes of the game, got through one of the spheres (the green one on top of the lamp on the table) but couldn't get inside of any of the other spheres due to the platforming difficulty. Some smoother sizing controls, or better direction on a path to get into the spheres would be nice. I couldn't interact with anything in the Blue sphere in the plant on the desk for some reason. Will be looking forward to future updates! Video will be posted to my youtube channel soon!

Here's my video: 

Developer (1 edit)

Thanks for the feedback!

In cemetery sphere (the blue one) you're supposed to knock over headstones (by just walking into them). Apparently, this isn't very obvious (and I guess trial and error method didn't work in a reasonable time frame), I'll think how to improve visibility of the required actions.

About platforming difficulty: it's interesting because I was afraid it would be too easy.  Overall, I guess, it's a good thing cause there is some learning curve with the control mechanics and by knowing right tricks you could access any sphere in seconds.

Finding a path to the spheres is part of a gameplay. As for scaling controls, yes — It's not particularly polished, I am still working on that, but again — thanks for pointing it out.

Thanks for the hint with the cemetery sphere!

It's definitely a difficult control scheme to get used to. The movement acceleration and tendency to bounce off of vertical surfaces makes several of the jumps extremely difficult. The red sphere on the shelf (desert/canyon) took me 20+ tries to get inside of the cave to complete it. Learning the right time to scale yourself down during a jump for maximum control is extremely difficult for me for some reason.

I do have a few bugs to report, though.

  • If you go inside of any other sphere, whether you complete it or not, then go in the desert/canyon sphere, the game will lag severely going from a smooth 60fps down to just 4-5fps. The longer the game runs, the worse it gets, especially if you're trying to record your gameplay. If you go to the desert/canyon sphere first, the lag doesn't happen.
  • Changing your resolution, fullscreen, or quality options have a chance of causing textures to be badly mapped.
Developer

Fixed the issue with texture mapping when changing graphics settings (and updated the build here). Also, partly fixed the issue with Vsync: for some reason it increases render latency at the game start, but unchecking it and then checking back in makes render latency normal.

At the moment, canyon sphere is incomplete from gameplay stem point (unlike other 8 spheres), it is just empty location, so the path into the cave definitely not final. As for canyon sphere related lags, unfortunately I wasn't able to replicate it yet. I'll look into this further. Am I understanding it correctly, that lags didn't appear if you didn't go inside canyon sphere at all? As this sphere empty at the moment, I will probably just exclude it from build for some time.

As for controls (especially scale changing mechanic) — it hugely depends on FPS and even more on render latency. If you don't have screen tearing, it is better to turn off Vsync as it drastically increases render latency, and bigger latency even with the same FPS could make controls less responsive and noticeably harder. So this could be the reason for troubles with scaling timing during jump. Ideally, controls should work well in any case with any settings, and I will certainly strive for this.