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A jam submission

Princess ShowdownView game page

Fun and Quirky Platformer!
Submitted by miracleJester — 22 hours, 59 minutes before the deadline
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Princess Showdown's itch.io page

Results

CriteriaRankScore*Raw Score
People's Choice Vote#433.6673.667

Ranked from 27 ratings. Score is adjusted from raw score by the median number of ratings per game in the jam.

Team Members
MiracleJester
Vivi (My dear GF)
Samuel Anim-Addo
Many contributors of free assets (individually credited in the credits section of the game)

Engine
Unity

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Comments

Submitted

So I tinkered around with this game for a bit and here's what I think.

It was pretty well summed up in being a fun and quirky platformer.  The story doesn't take itself to seriously, which is nice.  This time, it's a princess who captures a princess.  My biggest issue is with the controls.  I don't know why, but I seemed to struggle with them quite a bit.  I failed to make simple jumps quite often.  I don't know if I'm just bad or if something is wrong, but that takes a few points off on my score.  Also, I had one time where when I was hurt, it interrupted my jump arc and I fell into a pit of spikes.  Not sure what I think of that.  Also, the keys were in a weird spot for all the controls.  This game definitely benefit with custom key mapping, which I learned on the main menu.  The arrow keys were obvious enough to navigate, but when the enter key and space key didn't select the chioce, I had to drag my finger accross my keyboard to find what key selected the highlighted option.  I eventually found out it was Z, which is not intuitive to me at all.  Also, I had some difficulties keeping the abilities straight while playing.  Jump and shield use the same finger, so I couldn't use both at the same time.  I would say I'm not sure where to take the story, but then I thought about Mario and how similar this game was to it, and retracted that statement.  Overall, it's a solid game with some potential, but there's other games that I feel do what this does better.  Maybe with some additional polish, this game can stand out, but I can't anything for sure.

Submitted

This was a little hard, but I managed to finish. I almost transformed myself. XD
Developer

Thank you for the playthrough!

Submitted

Finally found a chance to play this for myself! I had way less issues with the controls than Indrah did and found myself having a great time. I do agree that, control wise, a way to duck would be nice, but I didn't find the range of the ice attack to be a problem. I also agree with her assessment on the camera pan not always being friendly to the player. (found myself saying 'come on, camera! move!' a couple of times.

I enjoy the dynamic between the two characters. I also enjoyed a lot of the platforming sections that involved bouncing. Once wind form was introduced, the potential for even more tricky 'puzzles' opened up.

But after unlocking wind form I hit a road block. So, sometime before wind form, I realized I had stopped taking damage from anything. Walk into enemies, stand in front of their projectiles, walk on spikes - I could do it all. I wish I knew better when this started (maybe it was when I got hit by an enemy projectile during the 2nd cutscene where you unlock the shield? What I know that did for fact is make the MC princess jump every time I pressed 'z' to advance the dialogue. But I didn't notice if I was invincible after that or not.)

When passing through this area I didn't quite zoom right, hit the spikes and dashed into the wall:

Fine and dandy, I'll press 'P' and suicide to freedom------ wait she's not dying. P P P P P P!!!!!!!!!!

Wait, she's invincible. Wait-

I tried everything to get out of that wall and couldn't u.u Which is a shame because I was having a good time lol

All in all, I'm happy I gave this a play through on my own! It's fun, the characters are charming, the art is cute (though Princess' legs on her sprite are a bit jarring style wise compared to the rest of her), the little voiced sound effects are funny and never get too annoying, and the platforming puzzles are not too difficult but still rewarding. Wonderful work!

Side note - my friend who watched me play suggests not using a full screen flash between transforming as it can be very hard on people with eyes sensitive to lights flickering.

Congrats on submitting your game! Best of luck.

Developer

Thank you for the playthrough and comments! It is so unfortunate that the invincibility glitch happened. Multiple people have had it happen to them even though it never happened to me in all my testing. The disadvantage of not having someone else to playtest with XD

I hope I am able to fix those and expand the game further.

Submitted

If you haven't yet, I would certainly try - jumping over the enemy just outside of the room with the bubble shield cutscene, letting it launch a projectile, advancing into the cutscene so the projectile hits you during the cutscene. It's the only thing that happened to me that felt outside of a normal, expected sort of play run. (though I know that projectile in particular did hurt me. So idk xD) Nothing else felt unnatural though.

Submitted

This game was adorable all the way! \(^▽^)/

It was fun, I liked it. A little rough around the edges, but then again,
most games made in a month would be.

There's one glitch that could break the game, but it appears early on
and I haven't encountered it beyond the first few minutes of playing.
Basically, I somehow became invincible during my first few attempts.
That alone would've been nifty, but it broke the game in other ways of course.
Though what really happened is that I'm actually too good at videogames;
I can't die even when there's a button designed specifically to kill me!

Good call on that, by the way.
When I was in the game proper, I did have to use it a few times! ^^;

For the orbs, I'd differentiate their path from the main ones.
Either that or design the maps to allow the player to go backward!

There was also a little trickiness to the controls, but I was playing on the keyboard.
To be honest I haven't figured out a better solution to this yet.
I know what it's like to make a platformer with surplus bindings,
so you did a good job with a complicated idea!
I think my main difficulty came when my brain had to switch between
close buttons on the fly.

Overall, I'd recommend this for sure. d(^^)

TOTAL PLAYTIME: 1 HOUR (and 10 shiny orbs!)

FINAL VERDICT: Why Kirby, why?!

Developer(+1)

Thank you for the comments and playthrough! People keep discovering new bugs like the invincibility one you describe. It seems like the contest rush got to me!

And yeah. This game was designed to be played with a gamepad primarily, but I should certainly find a way to make keyboard controls work, perhaps with customizable controls

Submitted

The art style is very cute and it can be recognized from other games. The switching powers mechanic works very well since in other games you need a power up in order to do so. The "suicide" button (sorry for the name) is a good idea for testing purpuses. Some parts may need some level desing work but others are okay since they felt more like a hard challenge. The music and voices also fit very well.

Developer

Thanks for the comments! Yeah, I need some level design rework for the next version

Submitted

I'm just going to give my thoughts as I play, sorry if this post is a bit disorganised!  This game is very charming and I think the art is really cute.  I also really liked the music.  It wasn't a huge deal but I couldn't pick my resolution (1080p) out from the list, more options for that would be great if possible.  I think you should have the bullet wave be telegraphed a bit better, whilst it does use predictable timing, having a visual and/or audio telegraph would help.  

The controls feel a bit floaty but they do the job nicely anyway.  It can get a bit annoying hearing "jump" everytime I jump, I'd rather just have a standard jumping sound than a voice line.  It's a very mild inconvenience but there's some kind of camera problem going on where it keeps stuttering behind when sudden movements are made like a direction change or jump.  

The shield jumping is really cool, I like it a lot.  There's a part where the camera zooms out for a big shield jump section that I have two problems with: first of all it zooms out way too much and is very jarring, the second problem is that the player can go off screen to the left or right, making it hard to see where you are.

I love the idea of different forms, one little suggestion I'd have would be to have some particle effects matching the element the princess is using, just to differentiate them better.  I think the difficulty ramps up a bit too quickly for a first level here, you're expected to combine both forms before you really get the chance to get used to the wind form, also the gaps you're meant to dash between the spikes with are too small imo.

I feel like the level design is a bit too open, it's cool to have a lot of optional things to collect but I was never really sure which way I should go as there a big differences in difficulty between each path, some visual signposting would help a lot, though I also think having the levels be a bit more linear would streamline the design and make it more cohesive.

The boss fight has the fire hit me before I can see it, I would recommend having better telegraphs here too.  Unfortunately I had to stop the game here because the boss fight wouldn't start on my 2nd attempt and I was continually taking damage and dying when there was nothing on screen.  I wonder if the fire hitboxes are still there from my first attempt but are invisible? 

Overall it was pretty good.  The theme was nice, the dialogue was funny, the art was very cute, the music was good and the unique game mechanics were good.  It just needs bug fixes, quality of life improvements and I really think it would benefit from smaller scale level designs.  3 out of 5.

Developer

Thanks a lot for the feedback!

I have never experienced that boss retry bug. That is weird. I got to test it out. I will take the rest of your comments for improvement

Submitted

No problem, I hope I wasn't too critical and that the feedback will be helpful for you!  I'm not sure how the boss retry bug happened at all, I wasn't actively trying to break the game like I would in a full testing session, it was just a normal initial playthrough.

Submitted

Great game. As others already stated, the art is cute (I like that magical girl vibe) and the level design is neat, I personally love the different ways you can use the transformation powers. I enjoyed it a lot! Already shipping Rose x Serena.

I am playing with a QWERTY keyboard, the controls are good overall, but I would rather set the Up arrow for jumping instead of Z, that way the Z key could be used for one of the available powers. It is just a suggestion though. About the bugs, the only one I found that could be important is that after getting the Wind transformation spikes don't hurt.

Nice one. Looking forward to the future versions!

Developer(+1)

Thank you for the playthrough and the comments! I have never seen that bug you describe. Weird. I will have to test it out. In terms of the controls, I do think that some people don't like up arrow as the jump. This makes me think I should add customizable controls so everyone can play the way they are the most comfortable

Submitted

Mmm yes, maybe it is an issue of personal likes. Anyways the customizable controls are a good idea

(+1)

Adorable and cute design, clever level design, and very good controls. I really enjoyed this one.

very good

Submitted(+1)

Nice design character and transformation, the story is funny and nice, with a little bug here and there, nothing that can't be fixed to get this game better though.

Submitted

Nice voice acting btw.

very good