At first it would be a golden flag (kinda like Baba is You), but I wanted to be able to pull the “flag” with the tongue, so a flag wouldn’t make sense (yes, I know a frog that can’t swim also doesn’t make sense). Then I thought in a berry, on a fly, worms… but IDK, watermelon seemed cool and easy to draw.

It’s very strange that all my friends (without my commentary) found out pretty quickly that the frog wasn’t locked on a grid, but a lot of people here said about not knowing the frog could jump diagonally. I don’t know if I should make it more clear for the player or keep as it is right now and hope for the “eureka” moment to happen.

Thanks! BTW, Where is Mustard?

It felt pretty great to zoom around whenever I could as well.

It was a difficult balance between leap control, leap max-distance and leap speed.

Also, even with the game being linear, I try to give the player more than one way to traverse the same level (with a few exceptions). Plataformers these days tend to forget this and instead make a inflexible path to follow (i.e. Uncharted: Great game, but lacks freedom in some areas). Human Fall Flat exaggerates with the freedom, making the game too easy to beat with the same strategy.

Thanks a lot for playing and for your honest review.

3 Block jumps are super finnicky, and sometimes I’d touch water and die, sometimes I wouldn’t.

I made the frog’s hurtbox really small to reduce this feeling, but I think it should be a tiny bit smaller than it is right now. About the 3 block jumps: I personally find that the most engaging part in platformers is the “almost impossible jumps”, when you prepare to leap and think “will I make this jump?”.

EDIT: About the pixel art: Many games stick with only using “stretch and squash” for more “fluid” animations, but I think it steals the soul of the animation. For Tooongue I tried using 3 key frames to convey the sense of motion, like games did in the past. I’ve considered scaling the frog up a bit during his jump, but I thought it could break consistency with the rest of the game’s aesthetic.

I still think the frog looks like a green headcrab tho.

Thank you Zyckro for playing my game. Baked Orange said the same thing about the 3 block jumps (I know you said it first), so check my reply to them.

introducing mechanics slowly with tutorials throughout

In the development process the game had only 3 levels, each one exploring 1 or 2 new mechanics. They were similar to the levels 2, 4, and 7 of the final game. I noticed in time that the difficulty spikes were too high and happening too fast, so I duplicated every level and made the transition a bit more smooth for the player.

I tried to do not fall in the trap of “too easy and long tutorials” new games now do. I think is a waste of the player’s time to first go to a “empty hallway” followed by a “empty maze-like hallway” an then a “empty hallway that requires a jump”, etc… You get the idea.