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I'm not a fan of this kind of games but I gave it a good try.
Some paths were tricky to folow but the difficulty kept increasing until I reached a point where I got stuck.
I hoped there was a checkpoint after the very narrow section that requires bouncing quite a lot in a zig zag pattern while at the same time avoiding jailbirds, but no, there was just an open space and more falling to do... at a different pace than the immediately previous section. I whiffed my bounce into thin air (which of course didn't slow me down) and slammed into the next platform. It was disheartening getting to that point after countless attempts to clear the narrow section and find no checkpoint. :(
I stopped playing at that point. My goal at this point was to get past that stretch of the map and I did it. Checkpoint or not.
I liked the visuals and the relaxing music you used.
Volume controls would be nice.
Good game!
Thank you for the feedback! We will surely take this into consideration when updating the game. I'm glad you enjoyed the visuals and the music :)
Thoughts on the game: in the end, having a delay on the pogo is just not a fun mechanic. If you want to make it similar to jump king make it so that you can hold space and you swing on release, and if you hold space longer you pogo further or something, and design levels around that instead of making purely timing based. The current design of the mechanic just doesn't really make sense since it's clearly arbitrary and only there to make the game artificially hard instead of introducing any interesting decision making (you need to do the exact same thing as you would with no delay, just slightly earlier). Imagine if jump king, in order to make it harder, made it so that instead of jumping when you released space, it would continue charging for a short period of time for no reason. That's how it feels right now, and it just isn't good.
Thank you for trying our game and giving us such thorough feedback. We will surely take your comments into consideration in the future!
I really wanted to like this game but it was one of those things where I really lost enjoyment after so many tries. The hitbox is just a little too unforgiving. I get that its by design but the game crossed into 'wasting my time' kind of gaming. Also the music is way too loud with no way to adjust. With that said, the game concept as a whole is really good and cute graphics to boot.
thanks for playing, yeah the audio settings was something that needs to be adjusted
for the hitbox it's something that's hard to give justification to adjusting because in 1/4 people could actually finish this in 10 minutes.
making a new difficulty option is what I'm considering or maybe just more toggleable settings with score multipliers. Heck the checkpoint system was something that was decided after seeing someone trying the game for 30 minutes and not being able to finish the game.
kind of hard to balance the difficulty when I was mostly the one testing it and I've been clearing it with no checkpoints.
anyways I'll be sure to take some notes and maybe work on the game again later on
OMG I actually beat it! I didn't expect to be able to.
The vibes are immaculate. With the cool chill music in the background and the cool dark cave with glowly lights and birds flying around. The art is also really well done.
I think the game as a concept is actually a great concept, with the legendary, simple but engaging gameplay mechanics that people strive for. It's really quite hard to find a simple but engaging concept and I think this game handles it quite well, with the sword slash mechanic being a simple one but one with a lot of depth. The name is also quite clever.
I do think there are a few things that did make me quite frustrated. It's a bit hard with these kinda games since Jump king in it of itself is very frustrating by design. But I think 3 things I found frustrating are:
1) You can die from hitting the ground, perform a slash and then die after the slash is over. This kind of "fake out" where I think I successfully slashed the ground, and then died, was somewhat frustrating
2) I feel like ERB's hurtbox might be a bit too large. I think sometimes I would clip a bit of ERB's hair or something similar and die. I think shrinking the hurtbox a little bit to favor the player can help ease frustrations.
3) There are some comments about making it so you only die from hitting the ground instead of hitting the ceiling. That could be interesting and ease frustrations, but I feel like the game as is, is designed around dying from hitting ceilings. So for this I think it's fine, as you would need to change how the game is designed to accomodate that. I think maybe part of why it is frustrating is that it doesn't look like you should die from ceilings. Maybe changing some blocks to be spiky/lava/dangerous could make it more clear?
I really like the idea of a reverse Jump King with Downwell elements. I think the thing that makes this feel bad when you make a mistake is the delay before you die and the delay before your attack actually connects. Because of this, you're essentially playing through the death animation, but you can still attack and move, so it looks like you made it, then you die. The attack should register immediately to help with this. I do feel like hitting a wall sideways shouldn't kill you, only hitting your head or landing on a block. With adjustments to the hitbox and the attack delay, I think it would be a really fun game to play. Good job!
hiya thanks for playing!
Yeah, the attack delay is something I wanted to have, it was 5 frames before I cut it down to 4. The thing is this was mostly inspired by jumpking instead of downwell. In jumpking you learn how long to press space to adjust your jump, here you learn when to press space if you're already at a certain point of acceleration.
I'll adjust the death trigger so it'll be instant, the death animation was something we added last minute.
the hitbox is something that we'll need to test a lot more of, the game was mostly testing levels and how long it'll take to clear it. I guess we need a lot more casual gamers to test it to make an easy mode hitbox(?). Since this was tested for hours just to the point that people can clear it.
Challenging but fun! Playing this had me relive the days I played a ton of Downwell a long time ago :') Good times. The visuals are pretty, the ambience is chill, and the game is hard, but that's the fun of it in my opinion. I enjoyed playing!
Holy crap, I took over an hour to finish this. The last segment was killer. The art is great but I wish the collision was a bit more lenient because players have to swing much earlier than anticipated.
OK! So far, this was the most challenging Jam Game so far! But it was worth it reaching the end! (Despite after playing, I saw everything going down. Guess I'm too weak to playing games like this!) I liked the graphics, I liked the mechanics! I love Liz! Great job!
Took me awhile to complete
Fun little game - I like taking the Jump King formula and turning it on its head, literally, and the slash mechanic to bounce back up
Also thank you for the checkpoints, couldn't imagine trying to run through without them - its a small thing but still makes a difference
The pixel art was high quality, and the art for the start/end screen was also very good!
Not much new to contribute as far as improvements go that hasn't already been mentioned, so overall very solid submission, great work!
thanks for trying the game!
yeah we just flipped it upside down and we wanted the same gameplay where you only press left right and space.
Using sword slash as the bounce and as a fall velocity reset is really clever. It forces player to make the choice of taking the risky way of slashing in time vs "I'll just speed my way through and suffer after".
Art style is simple and cute, really dig the calming cave music you've used.
Gameplay wise, I personally feel it'll be much more intuitive if you could only die from falling on top of a block.
Great job! Thanks for making this!
yeah maybe if we made a full game we would make it more like spikes and set it up so that not every angle is a hitbox
Another good game for pass the time.
The BGM are great!!! I really like it , Also i kinda like the mechanic of using sword as a jump boost.
even if the hitboxes are a little weird but over all this is a good game especially for rosarians... hehe.
PS: I didn't know before that jailbirds can fly like a frigging jet fighter O_O
Thanks!
well uhm... the jailbirds were just there as a joke at first and then we kept it like that by we I meant me.... as it looked like a funny experience
As others I also struggled with hitboxes.
Maybe I'm just getting to old for gaming...
But the music is great and soothing. Really enjoyed my time with this game
never too old for gaming.
hard platformers are just meant to train your reaction and accuracy. There's always a learning curve with games like this!
Jump king: hold space = longer jumps = misses
This game: faster fall = less frames to slash jump = misses
we basically did the jump king formula but as jump king punishes hard without checkpoints, we decided to make the hitboxes something that also messes you up when you attack.
Dude! I just love the atmosphere of the game!
Aside from the jank hitboxes.
I think what you have for right now really fits "The Ordeal" in a Hero's Journey. And THE MUSIC! really sells it!!!
I feel like breakable blocks! abilities! and make it feel like you're diving head first into danger. Start building that adrenaline~~
Thank you so much!!
The side fall damage is crazy lol. Great work on a unique game idea!
Thank you so much!! Congrats on clearing the game o7
Nice game! Can't say if I struggled a bit due to being bad at these games, or the hitbox being rather punishing, but I like the idea and presentation overall.
Thank you! I also struggled on clearing the game myself lol
Very fun! A little more polish on the hitbox would be nice, more sound effects and some juice to the animations and I think this could be the downwell of holo!
Thanks for playing!
Not planning on making it a downwell, while downwell looks like a platformer it's more of a action game. We wanted this to be more of a classic spin of "hard" platformers.
Man that last section was brutal xD The game was fun! But the hitbox does have some jank. Like sometimes it bounces when killing enemies, sometimes it doesnt, sometimes it bounces without even killing them which happened to me once xD same with getting hit. sometimes it feels like i should have been able to survive with the bounce but it counted as a death while in others it seems like the sprite went through blocks but the death screen didnt care. Well other than the hitbox i think its a really fun game xD
yeah, made the hitboxes change with the attack animation. so if you attacked the hitbox goes left to right
Not much of a deadline but a fun twist on jumpking
Thank you! We did not manage to make the time mechanic due to technical issues and deadline constraints sadly :(
Thanks, but yeah made a timer and then when we were playing we had no time to make an easy mode so we decided to scrap it. We wanted the game to be finishable by everyone and putting a timer where you get restarted from the beginning when 1 out of 4 people can take 30+ minutes to clear the last section felt a little off-putting for us.
A lot more time was spent on testing the game, making sure the third section was hard enough. That way most people won't get it on their first try but looked clearable and also hard enough that it gets you to learn deeper about your movement if you took the right route. Or the falling acceleration and attack frame if you took the left route.
The level designer and I wanted more freedom to the player to learn and play or
just close the game haha...by the end of it all maybe the theme was just how much time/patience are you willing to give to actually try and finish this game? when you've already tried for 20 minutes and still stuck at the final checkpoint while thinking I got this next time.
Pretty cool game! The hitboxes are definitely punishing, and I think a feature that would improve the quality of life would be a small period of time where the player can swing their weapon after hitting the ground to save themselves. This would sort of be like "Coyote Time" in platforming games.
And I think checking side hits on the player might be a bit too punishing, but that's just my opinion lol.
Overall, nice work!
Thank you very much for the feedback!! Yeah its kinda punishing lol.