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Aztec's itch.io pageResults
| Criteria | Rank | Score* | Raw Score |
| Graphics | #5 | 4.641 | 4.641 |
| Overall | #11 | 4.353 | 4.353 |
| Audio | #15 | 4.185 | 4.185 |
| Authenticity (use of resolution) | #35 | 4.728 | 4.728 |
| Gameplay | #43 | 3.859 | 3.859 |
Ranked from 92 ratings. Score is adjusted from raw score by the median number of ratings per game in the jam.
Did you work in a team?
2 Members, @SlainteES handing gfx code and some SFX and @vavmusicmagic who worked in the music tracks and SFX as well. It was fun, but stressful... this was a very ambitiuous project.
Was the resolution a challenge?
Animating fluently in a "realistic" way a sprite of 10x13 proved a big challenge, but the extra time and effort put into it paid off... Guatemoc is a pleasure to control and watch while he traverses the temple
What did you learn?
From the coding perspective the learnings are Platformers are incredibly harder than expected (and the big refactor required by this code is proof of it), from the music/sfx perspective... first time for @vavmusicmagic on pico8 sound so it was a brand new experience.
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Comments
Real great game! The level design is pretty cool and the art-style is fantastic :D Have to reactivate the checkpoint after every death is a bit frustrating, I forgot it twice (one of this times almost in the end hahahaha) but the gameplay is so fluid that replay it isn't a problem at all :D
Thank you for playing and the comments. The checkpoint reactivation was a late decision, but I wanted things to be a bit more challenging… Like the mirror power beinig drained recalling your soul from death leaving it useless for a bit.
With very fluid animations, the game reminded me of the older prince of persia but smoother. The art is stunning and the music is great. I like the way the puzzles are laid out, and how everything was very intuitive despite tutorials being present.
One thing I'd change about the checkpoint system is that it could automatically refresh after dying. I thought that was the case until I died twice to a lava pit and got back to the main menu, then I figured out that I had to wait a little bit before reactivating the checkpoint to ensure I wouldn't game over.
I like how the map isn't a straight line, makes it really fun to explore. Overall extremely solid entry, super polished. Great job!
Thank you for playing and glad you liked the exploratory approach to the game. Seeing a few comments on how frustrating the reactivation time of checkpoints is… will need to think about it. The idea behind them was of limited power needing to refill, particularly for the healing part… but maybe respawn can be considered differently.
An excellent PICO-8 game that really pushes the console’s limits.
Thank you for playing! not that it goes as far as poom or other big titles there (yet…) but I think it breaks a mould on what a pico8 game expectation sets out.
Absolutely wonderful - the art is superb, with a fantastic tileset and phenomenal animation for the player character. Just a joy to watch!
Music and sfx are perfect, and really fit the tone.
The world feels huge, and is great fun to explore. Having a degree of choice in where to look next felt great :)
Gameplay is challenging, mastering control of momentum proved essential and led to a very satisfying feeling when I was able to pull of a tricky section. The gaps between checkpoints work really well, forcing you to play well consistently for an extended section. That said, I'd love an alternate game mode with unlimited restarts from the last checkpoint - it's definitely a little tricky for me!
Fantastic game all around, I love how far you've been able to push the limits of PICO-8 :)
Thank you for playing! Glad you enjoyed the experience… Checkpoint system will need a rebalance considering all I am reading about it. Post-jam to-do list is growing ;) Anyway you are right on somethng: mastering movement is key.
The character animation might be the star of the show but the enviornments have a very appealing look to them too! I will say having a jump with no air-control can be used with intentionality to create interesting challenges (and often is here), although expecting the player to do it onto a single tile, from a single tile, into a section with only one checkpoint (in a game where dying twice before activating a different checkpoint results in going back to the start of the game) can be a bit mean. Aside from that the gameplay feels spot on to the vibe and type of game you're trying to capture.
Thnx for playing and the feedback. Note taken… I need to balance a bit better jumping ;) for checkpoints… After respawn those take a few seconds to recharge before reactivation is enabled… So maybe some patience could pay off ;)
Given the system you wrote this in, color me very impressed. This is fun and fluid to play. Any minor nitpicks I might toss have already been addressed below. As you say, I really think you pulled off the animation! Excellent all around.
Thnx for playing and the feedback. It doesn’t look your avg pico game ;) let’s see if I can push the limits further post-jam
It really doesn't - excellent work. I'll totally check back post jam!
the art is great, i coudnt really connect with the movment of the character, the timing and collison feels off, i like the level desgin but the movement just really affected my exprience
Thnx for playing and the feedback… Any hints on what didn’t click in with the movement for you? It’s good to hear feedback and look for improvement opportunities
mmm is hard to say because i havent play prince of persia and i feel that where the style of plataforming is coming from , i would say that i hit things that i feel like i should be getting over like if there was a invisible wall that made the object bigger and the jump never lands where i think is going to land, but it could be just me that im not use to this type of jump
Collision wise maybe the BBox for the character is a bit wide (a rect) considering he’s a “stick man”, so probably I will try to fine tune it as it might feel a bit odd stopping at an arms length… in the other hand this makes platforming easier as you can really extend a bit out of a platform before dropping. I’ll need to balance things out…
Jump is lacking air control and is a based on button-press time, can be tricky to master and feels so unnatural against your usual platforming where you can fully adjust trajectory mid-flight that I totally understand this might not be the cup of tea for every player, maybe I can consider optional settings you can configure for several aspects of the gameplay…
Thnx for the feedback
Congrats! I know how much you worked on this and it turned out really well! Love the theme and how it goes through the entire game. A gif difficult here and there, but that can be easily ironed out. Good job!
Thank you Johan… it was a story of parallel games XD we even ended pairing up the same musician! I pushed a lot of hours into the gfx particularly so ended up not having that much time to get the polishing I would have liked for it, but I don’t think there’s anything too bad ;)
Great visuals and sounds.
Landing after a jump where no damage was taken felt really long relative to the speed the character moves (felt like a split between Prince of Persia and a faster paced platformer).
I was hoping to get to more interesting game mechanics sooner over a slow boil (given that it’s a jam setting).
Thank you for playing it… Seems that the landing is ruffling some feathers around, and probably needs some fine tunning (like keeping part of the speed, or a roll landing to keep moving). Sadly I had not the time or the space in the cart to expand mechanics, but I will be working on a post-jam version see if I can fit a few more things and improve the engine overall.
Definitely one of my favorite entries. Sprites, music, all really well done, the characters animations are *chefs kiss*
The movement was awesome, felt like prince of persia or flashback or something, really deliberate and requiring you to really consider how you want to move and not just sprint around jumping.
The game is HARD, specifically the precision jumping on the pillars over the spikes.
Thank you for the nice comments. I put a lot of time into those sprites :) Really glad you liked the game and felt the restrictive movement mechanics to be fitting, I think I hit the right spot there when you copare the feeling to PoP which was one of the references I had in mind when working this out. The pillars, yes, those are the trickiest thing there … on the spikes and articularly on the lava pits :P
I died because of fireballs. 😥🤭
The most difficult for me was to jump accordingly those obstacles:
But I could get it after a few tries. I thought the move limitation was annoying at first, but once I got I thought it fits very well in fact.
Lovely entry. Amazing art & audio. Loved everything from it! <3
Thank you! The intention of the restrictive move mechanics was to escame a “mario style” platforming experince… I wanted it to feel like a deadly run through unexplored ruins, with danger lurking around and human-like abilities (even though jump is far over a normal-human campacity :P) Glad you liked it… once you get used to the jump sensibiilty it’s not that hard, but still harder than with full air-control during the jump.
Glad you enjoyed playing it!
I do understand why you wanted to escame that "mario style" and honestly I think you did well!
Your game got me nostalgic and makes me remember how much fun I had playing Prince of Persia on DOS for some reasons.. Probably because of overall mechanics and these good restrictive moves.
I'm repeating myself but again, really good job here! 😅
I really enjoyed the mechanics that pushed this more towards a slower, more deliberate platforming experience. I found some of these mechanics a bit clunky at first compared to modern platformers which give you a bit more freedom of movement, but these limitations really make the game feel deadly and unique. Music and art were really well done and fit the game well.
Thank you for playing and the comments. The goal was not a platformer speedrunner, but a dangerous exploratory and puzzle experience… too bad 2 weeks are not enough time to get that to the level I’d wished for, but I think this is a good enough result for the time invested.
Well i think you nailed it, it's got great atmosphere and mechanics!
A stunning work. Everything is done simply great.
Thank you, glad you liked it!
This game is amazing! It's clear how much effort went into this - the art looks great and the music compliments it really well. The platforming does takes some time to get used to but its still pretty enjoyable to traverse the environment although I do find that the landing lag on the player frequently breaks up the flow of the gameplay
Thank you for playing and the feedback… I might need to fine tune a bit the tolerance for “requiring a landing” and not… depends on height achieved mostly. Normal jumps should not require a landing, long/extreme jumps should. The goal was having a somewhat realistic jump physics, against the traditional full control and resilience to impact yuo find in your usual platformers… I might have gone too extreme :P. Glad you liked the game
Your art looks amazing.
Visuals, animations, audio & music all works harmoniously and perfect.
Thank you for playing. Glad you liked the game.
Some of the best art I've seen in the jam so far! Really great vibe and atmosphere!
Thnx! Took a big lump of the available time to come up with the tileset and particularly animating Guatemoc, but I think it’s paid off… I was not expecting it looked so good globally, considering it’s only 16 colors, and mostly 12 or so are heavily used (some are just used for the pick-ups) Thnx for playing!
I did it \o/ that was hard! tbh I didnt realise the orbs were the extra life -_- once I figured that out I could go make sure I had a life before trying those jumps, had to restart all those times cos im dum. Id be super proud if id made this game well done! :)
Maybe the voices of wisdom can be a bit cryptic when hinting things out… :P “𝘮𝘪𝘳𝘳𝘰𝘳𝘴 𝘩𝘦𝘢𝘭 𝘢𝘯𝘥 𝘳𝘦𝘮𝘦𝘮𝘣𝘦𝘳 𝘣𝘳𝘪𝘦𝘧𝘭𝘺…” Thnx for playing!
The game looks amazing, it looks like a lot of effort has been put in. It's a little buggy at times, there is a game breaking bug when you get the green gem at the top. Jumping could be improved, it's a bit of an issue when you need to jump precisely on platforms. Couldn't get past one stage where you had to jump across three evenly spaced platforms. Overall great game, rough around the edges but great potential. I hope yall keep working on this.
Hey, thnx for playing… hmmm I did several runs completing the game without it breaking… you mean the gem on top of the temple shrine right? Will try to find the issue and fix it (post-jam I’m afraid…)
Yeah I think so, I did two runs just to make sure it wasn't a random one off occurance. Is it needed to beat the game?
I just played a couple runs and got it correctly every time :? Not sure what might be failing, any particular hint you can give me? That gem is needed for one door in the route to one of the skulls… so quite critical
Yeah seems to work fine now for me too, not sure, might be a sequence of buttons I'm pressing. I'll see if I can replicate the bug later on.
Could be you died at the same time due to a fireball from the snake head on the right… and that generates a combination of states that is not correctly covered… it’s the best explanation I can think of for an edge case behaviour. There’s just somany states to control in a platformer :P
I got this not from the gem but from jumping after climbing the stairs.
thnx, that will come handy debugging… it’s an “instance” landing that has no landing handler… cannot be the player, will figure out but this helps a lot!
found it… using the wrong reference in the player when checking top_of_a_ladder state… should check self not not E… this is a check when getting to the top of a ladder with an offset… should be not that common to hit it, but yeah, needs fixing
Should be fixed… there was some commenting breaking bugs could be fixed… so it’s there, thnx for the report!
Lovely art and animation here, I adore the use of PICO-8's colour palette too, very atmospheric. I like how much I was able to understand without being explicitly told what to do. Nice entry!
Thank you! I must probably say this game is using almost no colors for the original pico palette, and abusing the alt palette :P Visually does not scream PICO-8 to your face. I tried the game mechanics to be rational, and seems I kind of managed that… if you need a long manual or a lot of text in a game you’re not doing your job right (and text in 64x64 is a big no-no). Thnx for playing!
Liking the game. The movement could use a bit of improvement though. There's no mid-air control of the character, making it harder to make jumps (especially awkward when jumping straight up). Also, the landing animation when falling down from larger distance is a split second too long.
The visuals, animations and sound design works well and fits together well.
Thanks for playing… the lack of air-control is intentional but maybe it can be refined. The goal was to have somewhat realistic physics and I’ve not met anyone yet who can fully switch directions mid-air ;) The landing probably needs a bit of fine-tunning depending on the height, taking less to recover for not so high jumps… low height jumps don’t force you into a landing crouch though.