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Key To Success (GMTK Game Jam 2024)'s itch.io pageResults
| Criteria | Rank | Score* | Raw Score |
| Overall | #617 | 3.822 | 3.822 |
| Enjoyment | #667 | 3.700 | 3.700 |
| Style | #819 | 3.967 | 3.967 |
| Creativity | #927 | 3.800 | 3.800 |
Ranked from 30 ratings. Score is adjusted from raw score by the median number of ratings per game in the jam.
How does your game fit the theme?
You can change the key, or scale, the music is in, which affects the levels and gameplay.
Development Time
96 hours
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Comments
Wow, I can’t believe I’m playing such a fantastic game with amazing music at the tail end of the jam! The character is adorable, and the gimmick of changing jump scales is really interesting. It gives off a vibe similar to the tape stages in Celeste, and with some puzzle elements, the level design was also really impressive! Great work! :)
Any comparsion to Celeste is a compliment :)
The art style is really fun! A creative take on the theme, great game!
This was really good and very polished. Clearly a lot of love went into it. The visuals, music, and juice feel amazing. I really liked the idea and I really would like to see it developed further. I beat the game, but I think like in some comments below, I had some trouble timing my jumps in the second and last level.
Good luck and congrats 👏
Glad you liked it! It’s not your fault if you missed some timings on the later levels - there’s a bug where the jump timing starts to desync with the music. It’ll be fixed in the post-jam update!
To add on to this, restarting the game then skipping to the level you were on, as awkward as it is, should fix the bug.
Really enjoyed playing it through! My only wish would be that the beat would be a bit faster, as in, I can tap in every 0.5s or something similar rather than full second. I felt like waiting for the beat was slowing down my gameplay.
Great entry, good job!
Interesting idea! Currently the jump boost is on beats 2 and 4, but we could experiment with making it every beat instead.
Very fun game!
I liked having to change through all of the keys before an obstacle to find the easiest one. The visuals and music were also pretty cool.
I got stuck during level 2 at some point (I didn't know I could jump that high!), but I quickly figured it out.
Really perfect and original fit for the theme. Feels good to jump to the rythm.
This game need coyote jump though, more than any other game. There were these platforms that turn on and off on beat and if you missed the beat just by a frame instead of jumping you felt down. Coyote time in jump would help, because if you jumped on the beat but a little bit later you still make the jump.
But these platforms were on 3rd level, so is't ok it was super hard.
Overall great game.
There is coyote time, actually! Maybe not quite enough, I guess. Might extend it for the post-jam build.
AMAZING GAME!!! I really love rhythm games, and the music and art style of this game was really good. The jumping on the beat mechanic is really well done and fun to use. I can't think of much criticism although my smooth brain couldn't figure out how to pass level 2 lol.
Ah, which part did you get stuck on? I hope I didn't make something too convoluted!
It was the area with the 3 pillars with one moving up and down if that makes sense, I assume something was meant to be done to make it go up instead of down but I couldn't find anything to trigger that.
If you set the key to E you can jump over all the pillars (might need to do it on beat, don't remember).
This game was DELIGHTFUL! I loved how the higher key (scale) changed the mechanics of the jump *and* the enemies! It was really fun needing to modulate to A to get short hops or deal with the shooting E enemies while having the highest jump! That last level was a bit of a doozy, I kinda accidentally fell further down and lost progress ;-; maybe there could have been some check for the "furthest" button pressed for checkpoints?
The checkpoint thing was an oversight for sure. I've patched it in the upcoming post-jam update.
I was wondering when I was going to see a game related to music scales! We brought it up during brainstorming but no ideas came out of it. This is really cute and clever!
I enjoyed the cute character designs and the bouncy animations. Well done to the composer too. Nice touch having the music change scale along with the action. Great work!
Thank you so much! I actually made five different versions of each song in each key so the key changes would sound good, but it was very tedious.
I can imagine! The results were worth it :D
Yeeees! Welcome to juicetown! Great concept, great idea, great little animation sugar coating for jumping and landing and the likes, just beautiful! I am not sure if the beat detection always works, cause I am usually very good at timing and quite often the higher jump wouldn´t trigger. I thoroughly enjoyed this little womp nonetheless.
Add a few more musically relevant skills to this and it will be grand!
Yeah, the "jump on the beat" mechanic seems to desync sometimes. Not sure what's up with that - I'll try to fix it in the post-ratings patch. In any case, the flashes are tied to that mechanic, so worst case using them as a guide will work.
LOVED this game!! It was so much fun. Having the button switch between the various major scales was a fun musical touch that I adored but I'm not really sure most people will know about it switching if you don't have the player aware of that fact, I only figured it out on accident. Give an NPC to tell the player about it during like a first level/tutorial. A few things though, making the jump be the z button rather than the up arrow, space bar, or W keys was a little...weird and it took a minute to figure out because it was not the norm; same with starting the first level, didn't know I had to hit z to start.
For the gameplay, the movement is pretty good for a game jam but I'm not a pro platformer player so I don't know how to give better feedback on the movement other than, it felt pretty good.
It seems like the enemies don't need to be paid attention to at all though because killing them vs just avoiding them give the player the same result; progression. Maybe adding in a time limit or a score system would make having the enemies useful instead of just, existing. I also think making the enemies/helpful NPC's more clearly visible. I wasn't sure that the C enemy was an enemy until he bit me and same with the first NPC that told me about the higher jumping, I thought he was an enemy so I tried jumping on his head at first to kill him.
Sorry about the keybinds - Z is a quite common jump button on keyboard for the games I play and I hadn't thought it was going to be an issue. I find it much more comfortable than any of the other options. The title screen does say to press Z, though maybe that wasn't enough?
I tried my hardest to make the movement satisfying, so glad to hear it felt alright.
The enemies were difficult to get working as-is, so we didn't go the extra mile to make them more interesting. Maybe a score counter could work.
As for the key change mechanic not being clear... yeah, we probably should've added an NPC to explain that. I guess we just hoped it would make sense to people once they hit the button, the music raised in pitch, and platforms floated up to form a bridge.
Yeah, I noticed the background change and the jump height I have change then I noticed the gravity lines. I forgot to add that I couldn't have the volume on very high (I'm playing in class lol) but I was still able to jump to the beat because of the visual cues which was a super smart idea to add in. Again, great game, I enjoyed it a lot!!
Ah, that makes sense - I'm super happy with our musician's work though, so if you have time to give it a listen I'm sure he'd appreciate it!
Absolutely love the key change concept! I also made a music-based game and wanted to use key changes as a mechanic, but didn't have time to design or implement that layer. You have done it beautifully! Well done!
I feel like it's not super complicated but it's very polished and it makes the game very enjoyable so good job !
Reminds me a lot of the ninji stage in Super Mario Wonder, and you took that idea further. The enemy shape corresponding to the key of the music adds so much charm to this. The mechanic, visuals, and the audio really point towards one theme you went for, awesome job on this :)
That was one of my inspirations actually! I love Mario Wonder.
This game is super creative and polished! had a lot of fun timing my jumps with the beat, and cycling through scales to find the right ones for a challenge was really interesting!
The volume was a bit loud starting off, but the music is pretty good. Having checkpoints was definately helpful since I am apparently not too good at rythem platformers. Getting the gameplay to line up with the beat is awesome, that isn’t always easy to do well.
Thanks for letting me know about the volume!
Loved to see a music game in here. Was waiting for someone to take scale in terms of sound and key. Game feels polished and well-executed. Not the best at precise platformers, had some bits of frustration with some of parts of the levels. Eitherway, still a fun game that would be cool to see expanded upon.
Good stuff~!
Glad you liked it! We tried our best with the levels for the time we had, but some of them could be a bit unbalanced :)
The creativity level this game produces is just amazing.
Be sure to check mine :)
Really polished game, lots of fun!
Love the concept and music! This could be made into a full game with a sick soundtrack.
Movement and music syncing feels polished too for the time you had. Well done!
Glad you liked it! Polish was one of the main goals we had for this, so I'm happy it paid off :)