Great concept, well designed puzzles, nice art and polish. Very impressive in the time we had!
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What Goes Up's itch.io pageResults
| Criteria | Rank | Score* | Raw Score |
| Design | #12 | 4.639 | 4.639 |
Ranked from 321 ratings. Score is adjusted from raw score by the median number of ratings per game in the jam.
Comments
I gotta say, my favorite part about this entry is that, by having the grapple push cubes towards you as well as push you towards them, it ends up neatly fitting into both GMTK Game Jam themes so far (something you yourself seem to have noticed if one of the level names is of any indication).
Also, HOLY COW THIS WAS MADE IN TWO DAYS!? With this level of polish from both a gameplay and aesthetic level, if you told me this wasn't a game jam entry, I would 100% believed you.
Also also, that ending was terrific.
The idea is very simple, but the way you implemented it was splendid. I had such a good time figuring out the levels and feeling how clever the design of them was. Amazing job! I love that when I keep floating in the air, there was periodically a jump sound. Those tiny details make the game feel very very polished!
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LostSoulReally great idea! Art is great, animation is really good and the level design is awesome ! Big thumbs up ;)
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Mined If I BreakAmazing! Challenging and addictive. Beautiful art, fantastic animation, and great puzzle design.
Laughed hard on the final screen. I hate you guys. Take your 5 stars. :D
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Because Potatoes - GMTKJam 2018The representation of the theme you guys made is terrific. One of the best platformers I've played, like ever. I loved the art and sound effects, and what I like the most is that this feels like a puzzle-platformer. Amazing.
＿φ( °-°)/ We'll appreciate if you rate or game: Slow Ride.
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Slow RideAmazing game, best I've played in a while and that is not limited to jam games. And so many well designed levels. I was not expecting to find a game of such high quality. Well done.
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Without a TowerThis is hands down my favorite game that I've played so far. Everything about it is so well done. All the levels feel so clever and well thought out. I have no idea how you had time to make so many of them. The animations are fluid and just plain great. As a fellow mouth noiser, I commend you on you excellent exhalations. I literally laughed out loud at the end.
If I had to find one fault with it, it would be that the difficulty curve is all over the place. There are levels that I had to spend several minutes puzzling over that are immediately followed up by levels that I just blitzed through. On the one hand, it kinda gives you a break after racking your brain, but on the other, it makes the follow-up levels feel too easy.
Submitted
Metal MouthI realized as I was typing it out that the easier levels do serve as sort of a break, but it's a balancing act. I think the difficulty in this game was still a little too spikey for me.
Ideally you probably want to have an ever-rising trendline of difficulty that sort of averages out from level to level when you have something really challenging followed by something that feels more forgiving. You don't want to have the hardest bit in the middle of the game flanked by the easiest bits, but providing a little variance definitely keeps it more compelling.
hey, i'll shine some light on the matter!
i'll admit the level order of the levels isn't perfect; designing levels was the heaviest task of this jam - about half of the development time went into creating all the different rooms - but the time we had for determining the order of the levels was much shorter (less than an hour).
we definitely wanted the levels to have some fluctuations in the difficulty curve, exactly for the reason you've stated - as a means to keep player engagement high - 'rewarding' the player with some easy levels after a very hard one makes them feel less tense and gives a more powerful sense of progression (which are both important for jam games).
i completely agree about the hard levels though, the spike is too big. the way i'd solve this is to tone down these harder levels, make them a bit easier to solve, with hints like visual cues or a more refined room layout (level 16, which a lot of people get stuck on, would've greatly benefitted from such changes).
all in all i'm happy people are taking notice of this problem, and we'll make sure to give it more thought next time :)
Thx for replying. Great stuff. Level design is the part I find hardest and ironically was planning to focus on so choose myself an 'way to implement' game. Sadly I only got 1/3 time I expected so didn't get to exactly that part!
Can I ask how you/your team go about designing levels? Always fascinated to learn and yours were just superb.
Great game, one of the best ones I've played! Cool mechanic that is used very well for a good amount of puzzles, very enjoyable! Also liked that you could just retry or skip a level if you were stuck but it still was always fair. There was no music which is a little bummer but the sound design is just great! So you get the full 5/5 anyways! :D
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