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Phoenix Fall's itch.io pageResults
Criteria | Rank | Score* | Raw Score |
INNOVATION | #70 | 3.815 | 3.815 |
MUSIC | #89 | 3.741 | 3.741 |
SOUNDS | #109 | 3.519 | 3.519 |
OVERALL | #152 | 3.704 | 3.704 |
DESIGN | #188 | 3.481 | 3.481 |
VISUALS | #198 | 3.815 | 3.815 |
THEME | #300 | 3.259 | 3.259 |
Ranked from 27 ratings. Score is adjusted from raw score by the median number of ratings per game in the jam.
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Comments
This has become one of my favorites from the jam...
Theme:
You need to try to land on less platforms to get a better score and more flight time. But you need to land on platforms to refuel flight time. So there is a definite balancing act here! Nice work!
Visuals:
This game style reminds me of a kids sketchbook using color pencils or water paints. I love it. It works so well with the entire design of the game!
Innovation:
This was incredibly unique and the use of the theme was used in an original manner. The controls were a little awkward at first to get use too, being such a new concept, but after a few failed attempts, the controls clicked and I was flying and diving like a bird!
Sounds/Music:
The game was very minimal in the sound department. This makes sense due to everything else being so polished. The music was very nice and fitting, but since I played it for so long, the tune got repetitive which could be easily remedied with some new tracks added!
Overall:
This was a blast of an experience. The visuals were beautiful, the gameplay loop was fun and addicting. The theme was used as a core mechanic to the game. Music was good overall with decent enough sound effects. The only real major gripe I had was there was no indicator to point to the end platform. So this made some levels just guess work. A minimap or point to show where to go would have really made this game a complete package! I highly recommend checking this game out!
I streamed it here, starts at minute 14:
Thank you so much for all of that feedback! Thanks for the kind words and for playing it on stream! Looking back adding an arrow would have been a super useful feature for navigation, thanks for the suggestion! Thanks again, it really means a lot!
No problem! Keep up the great work, and I hope to see more fantastic work from you!
That was a really fun game i loved it :D I can imagine myself playing this in mobile with gyro controls you should consider porting it. My only issue was that it was hard trying to find the last platform maybe adding a arrow that points to the finish can help it :d Other than that it is impressive that the levels are randomly generated you must have worked hard. Overall i had too much fun with this one great game well done :D
Note : I would be happy if you could check my game as well :d
Thanks for the feedback! Yeah, looking back I should've definitely added in a better way to find where the exit is, thanks for the suggestion! Thanks for playing!
Nice submission and well done for creating the assets by yourself, that's a big ask for the timeframe provided! I really liked the feel of the game and the way the music/sounds coupled with the controls to give that feeling of flight. I would have maybe liked something like a minimap to show the surrounding area as sometimes I jumped off after looking down and then the way I went didn't have anything I could land on as the finish was in the other direction.
Only a minor recommendation though as on the whole I felt everything came together well and it was a joy to play! Nice work :)
Thank you so much for the feedback! Yeah, a minimap or an arrow pointing towards the exit would have helped a lot! Thanks for playing!
Great mechanics and nice visuals :)
Thanks for playing and thanks for the kind words!
Hey,
Really liked the unique visuals of this game, it also matches the sound. The game loop is also quick to grasp. This looks like one polished game to me.
Cheers!!!
Thank you so much! I’m glad you liked it!
Great game!
The art style is amazing, the gameplay is fun and the theme fits great!
The music was too loud for me, but overall it is an excellent game!
Thanks for the kind words! I meant to add in an option to adjust volumes.... but ran out of time lol. Thanks for playing!
This was a really fun game to play! At first glance I didn't know what to expect but this game was a lot of fun! really good job!
Thanks for the kind words and thanks for playing!
The hand style drawn visuals were great. The Pheonix was a little difficult to control but I think that was the intention. The music and sound were good. I think making a game with procedurally generated levels must have taken a lot of time. It also means that the game has a lot of replayability. It was fun jumping and diving and praying to god there was some platform below. Hahahha. :D I really had a lot of fun playing this game. Thanks a lot!
Please play and rate my game as well. I would really appreciate it.
Thank you so much for the feedback! Im glad you enjoyed playing! I’ll try your game later today :)
Great game! I love games that use this hand drawn style. The mechanics of the bird took a while to grasp but after the learning curve they felt great. Also impressive that you added generated levels. Good game :)
Thanks for the feedback and thanks for the kind words about the level generation!
Really nice, cohesive artwork! I have to admit, I was really bad at the game, lol! The challenge was just right, though, and I can definitely see this game being one where people can raise their skill to play it and do speed runs! Good job!
Thanks for the feedback (I’d love to see someone do a speed run sometime :D) and thanks for playing!
Very cool game! I really enjoyed being a bird and flying around. It has a fantastic sense of momentum and I really enjoyed the challenge of flying around. Your use of physics to govern the bird's flight-path adds a lot to the game and there's a lot of mastery involved in flying.
The controls were a little confusing to me. I needed to do the tutorial and afterwards I found it hard to grasp the the idea of holding one direction while tapping the other, I wonder if this could be simplified? Maybe you could always flap by tapping buttons, even without holding the other key? Still, those controls are a minor problem overall. It's a fun game with a chill vibe and a fantastic sense of movement and velocity. Well worth expanding on!
Thank you for the kind words! Maybe having an option to left click or something to flap might be more intuitive, thanks for suggestion and thanks for playing/leaving feedback!
I really liked it! Games that are simple and focus on momentum and movement are often some of my favorite Jam games!
Very cool game! I really enjoyed being a bird and flying around. It has a fantastic sense of momentum and I really enjoyed the challenge of flying around. Your use of physics to govern the bird's flight-path adds a lot to the game and there's a lot of mastery involved in flying.
The controls were a little confusing to me. I needed to do the tutorial and afterwards I found it hard to grasp the the idea of holding one direction while tapping the other, I wonder if this could be simplified? Maybe you could always flap by tapping buttons, even without holding the other key? Still, those controls are a minor problem overall. It's a fun game with a chill vibe and a fantastic sense of movement and velocity. Well worth expanding on!
A really calming experience even when you're trying to narrowly dodge or hectically flap to avoid obstacles, one of the better feeling flying/gliding games.
- My favorite part is moments like when you just manage to dodge an obstacle with a momentary flap and are able to direct yourself to glide into the fire even after running out of flight-appreciate how losing flight isn't an instant loss for you if you get the right angle.
A nice selection of obstacles/interactive elements that give you a bit of extra flavor on your flight path.
The flight in general feels pretty nice and works well for navigating to your destination.
Music and art complement the experience well.
- The smoke of the fire target isn't bad, but it would really help give you more direction if it had an extra more vertical stream of lighter smoke particles, to let you prepare yourself a bit earlier, especially so you can judge if you need to stop again or can risk trying to reach it without doing so.
Regrettably as great as the general feel of the game is, the gaining flight seconds at the end of a level felt really underwhelming, especially as you have no tangible way to know what '+X seconds' means. And with getting to the bottom in 14 giving +1 second, but 1 giving +2.5 seconds, a difference of only 1.5 seconds, it feels even more unnecessary. It means if you're doing better, you get better, but if you're doing worse, you get less leeway on future levels. It felt counter to the otherwise relaxing time you were having and made the end of the level feel a bit awkward. Generally you should always be able to complete a level I imagine, so I can't see that being a barrier to how many levels you complete-that aren't shown to you anyway.
Depends on your goal but I might suggest instead, to have a 'bird ranking', that grows as you complete levels with less landings. So you can finish at the end of the content that's added to the generation, or you can keep playing to see if you can grow to an A rank bird.
Also I think what could be nice, is the camera moving out a bit the longer you're in flight, to give a bit more inherent value to flying longer, and also give more immediate impact when you land beyond an abstract feeling flight time/score.
Thank you so much for that feedback! I'm glad you liked the gliding! I agree about the reward system, I spent a lot of time wondering whether or not a positive feedback loop is better than a negative, so I agree 100% about having another way to get more flight time (or rewards/progression in general) like the bird rank. Maybe there could be another reward like flap-force which increases, because getting to the end of a level and just seeing "You've got 1 second!" is definitely underwhelming looking back. Thanks for taking the time to play and giving such a detailed review, its really appreciated! Your feedback is extremely helpful! Thanks again!
No worries :) ! Yeah the gliding felt real smooth ^^.
Only concern with flap-force, is though that might initially feel good, having your flap-force change each level could end up negatively impacting you as you're used to the original, and that might cause you to crash instead of have that narrow dodge. Especially with no time to practice it until you're in the air trying to reach your objective.
I think the main question to answer is, do you want the player to be challenged more as they progress, or do you want them to engage in the experience in a more comfortable way as the maps become larger/more challenging.
If you wanted to give a reward, you could increase zoom out the camera more, as if the bird reaching its goal quicker elevated its environmental awareness.
It's not a significant reward, as a player that's not reaching the goal in few stop may be intimidated by that larger range of view anyway. But for players getting to the end well, that could give them an increased capacity to plan their way towards the goal, and increase their potential ability in a natural way-that still requires them to be good at the game inherently.
Happy to hear the feedback was appreciated and valuable, no worries at all :D !
Yeah, that’s tricky choosing how to reward the player... maybe the better a player is doing you challenge them with a wider variety of tools and having to learn them (like zooming out and learning a more route planning based strategy) so that way they get more comfortable with the initial mechanics, while also learning more varied approaches of attacking the level. Thanks for sharing your game design knowledge, it’s very much appreciated! Reward systems are a very interesting field of game design, might have to watch some more GDC talks about them :D
Yep it's a whole genre of design itself haha. Happy to hear this all helps you :) .
The wealth of GDC talks is definitely a great resource to have access to when trying to fine tune design and reference what others have discovered/helped them :D . Good luck with it.
Really like this! The artwork is especially very fitting. Controls took some getting used to, but worked well once I had. Good job!
Thanks for playing and thanks for the kind words about the graphics!
Very good game. the mechanics of flying are well polished and after some time it feels intuitive. Also congrats on random generation, when I try it it destroys the gameplay, but in your game each random level is challanging but completable. So good job.
Thanks for the kind words and thanks for playing!
This game really captures the feeling of flying, it's simply beautiful. Is the most pleasant game I found so far, it's a really nice experience.
Music and art are both really good and also go well together. The sound effect of the wind when diving is great, it really makes you feel the it.
The flapping mechanic is a bit counter-intuitive to use, but overall the gameplay feels good.
Good job!
Thanks! That really does mean a lot!
Very nice drawing skills from you if you drew it and I also liked the music until the crazy piano part lol.
The tutorial is very handy for this game otherwise I wouldn't figure out how to fly.
Solid good work bud!
Thanks, I’m glad you liked the tutorial! Thanks for playing! PS Yeah I made the art :D so thanks, it means a lot!
This is really cool! The movement in this game is weird, but once you get the hang of it, you can really do much more than what I thought you could do. It was sometimes hard to know the direction of the fire, so sometimes you would just fly through empty spaces and suddenly find the exit. Seeing a bit more ahead might be just what this game needs.
Thanks for playing and the kind words about the movement system! Someone mentioned zooming out a bit more too, something I’ll focus more on next jam (relating the goal of the game to the zoom of the camera.) Thanks for playing!
pretty cool! though the procedural could use some work, as i saw a platform in a rock, otherwise cool game!
Thanks for playing, yeah I’ve noticed that one or two times- probably need to add a few more checks to the system! Thanks for the feedback!
No problem! happy to help
Visuals are a 5/5 no doubt i loved them! music too
only complain would be that it was annoying to figure out where the fire was, an arrow pointing to it would be nice! still very well made in the amount of time
Thanks for the feedback, means a lot! Yeah I think some better indication of where the fire is would have helped a lot! Thanks for playing!