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A jam submission

PulseWalkerView game page

Find the 3 relic key cards in order to make your way out of this mysterious place
Submitted by curtissmithsound, Nexreon, Avelion114 — 3 days, 20 hours before the deadline
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PulseWalker's itch.io page

Results

CriteriaRankScore*Raw Score
Sensory#53.8754.143
Metroidvania#103.8754.143
Overall#133.3943.629
Execution#153.2073.429
Enjoyment#182.9403.143
Relevance to the theme picked#203.0743.286

Ranked from 7 ratings. Score is adjusted from raw score by the median number of ratings per game in the jam.

Theme chosen
We chose Classic and Time. Classic the music was written with 8bit in mind so all the sounds are using classic emulated vsts combined with newer color bass techniques. Time was inspring for a place in some sort of future, to time our attacks to the music, as well as using quick time events and looking for ancient keycards/artifacts

Team/Developer
Avelion, Curtis, Nexreon

Engine
Godot 4

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Comments

Submitted(+1)

First thing that sticks out is that this game's aesthetic is amazing. The pixel art, the music, hell even the font, it's  all extremely cool. I love the main character's design too. I think the movement feels solid as well. There's a lot of great stuff there. Unfortunately, I also have my fair share of gripes.

I'm not gonna repeat too much of what the other comments already said about the controls, while I agree that both the dash and the walljump could be more intuitive

I think a main thing about this game is that it seems to have a bit of an identity crisis. Due to either a bug or me not paying attention, I completely missed the parts about timing attacks to the beat for a long time, and I honestly don't think it affected my gameplay at all. There was only one enemy type I encountered, and I could trivially beat them by just mashing the attack button. The game, by its level design, seems like it's more interest in little switch puzzles and tight movement challenges than combat.  I don't think that's inherently bad or anything, but I did find myself a little unsure about the relevance of the timing attack, since the game seems more interested in trying to be a Celeste-like precision platformer. During my playthrough, I never felt like combat was a challenge, while the movement challenges were consistently very difficult. And very punishing.

Here's a section I got stuck at for a long time, as an example. To get to where I'm standing, you need to do a pretty tricky wall jump into the double dash powerup, then do a double dash to the top right wall, and do another walljump, avoiding spikes in the process. After you step on a platform, you have to fall off the ledge, dash into the double dash again, use that double dash to cling to the left wall, then wall jump onto the platform. And then, after you've done all that? You jump to the other side to get instant killed by the spikes on the ceiling that are barely visible and you have to do that whoooole very precise sequence all over again. There's no second tries, no checkpoints, no recovering for mistakes, you just immediately die. This results in doing the same jumps over and over again just to get another shot at retrying the jump you're stuck on, which I just don't find engaging. Did those ceiling spikes at the end really need to be there? Do they really add something? Or would this challenge have been less interesting if there was a save point at the pressure plate at the top?

In the end, I got stuck on the segment where you need to race the raising hazard floor after getting the double jump. I'm not sure how much game is after that, but I just couldn't do it, and I was starting to hurt my hands, so I had to call it quits.

Sorry for the long ramble, I hope I don't sound too negative! There's a lot of stuff I really love here, which is why I spent so much time on it, but personally, I found myself a bit confused about what sort of game you want this to be. If you do focus more on the combat, perhaps these kinds of precise punishing movement challenges are better reserved for optional areas.

Developer(+1)

Hi there! Thank you for your feedback! The game was indeed supposed to focus more on the puzzle / platforming elements, but we're also planning to expand on the title and give it a bit of a new take. Well the timing was definitely made to fit the jam's theme, but we're still thinking if we're going to keep it as we develop our project more in the future. There's an idea we've got for the very moment and we might try to focus on giving the world some lore and  exploration / discovery parts in the future - We did in fact try to make this Celeste-like game here, but we're not sure if things will remain as such. Right now we're trying to agree on what do we want to do next and I think we might be getting back to work somewhere around the end of July :)

I could ask you though, if in your opinion using less of those platforming levels could be better for the game? I know that the wall-jump was pretty troubling and we've actually fixed the bug it had quite recently (we cannot post beyond the jam's time though), but I'm wondering if the levels themselves seemed confusing, might ask as well if in your opinion there should be some kind of a boss, so far we skipped this to focus on polishing the art, programming and music. 

About the combat, there is an animation for a second enemy type, but the time ran out quicker than we thought and we had to put it aside temporarily. But we'd definitely like to give some more attention to this part, we're generally thinking about refactoring the code and re-thinking some mechanics of the game to encourage exploration rather than precise jumping.

Submitted(+1)

I completely forgot to mention it in my original post, but I think your overall level and world design was very solid. I never felt lost for particularly long, and some of the platforming challenges took a bit of thinking for my approach, but I think that's actually a good thing, it was fun to plan out where to jump, where to dash, etc. I definitely don't think level design is at fault for some of my frustrations, those came primarily from the high dexterity requirements. Perhaps with some fixes on the controls, the execution barrier wouldn't have felt as high.

I don't feel qualified to say what would be "better" for the game. After all, Celeste is an excellent game, but I don't think it needs a combat system and boss fights (it does kind of have boss fights, but they're really obstacle courses). If that's the kind of game you want to make, I think it could be very cool! I think this game could work with more of a focus on rhythm-based combat and exploration, or with a focus on precision platforming, depending on what you want to make. Perhaps it is possible to combine both, but I do think that'd alienate a larger portion of players, since those two are pretty different appeals. Don't let that discourage you from making that game if you really want to, though, perhaps there's potential! If you do want to keep developing this game, I'd recommend doing some prototyping of different approaches, and really honing on where the fun is, in your opinion.

Developer(+1)

Hey! Just wanted to chime in as the programmer and level designer and say thanks for your very detailed feedback! 
That specific spot you mentioned seemed to give a lot of players trouble and it's safe to say I got a bit carried away with the difficulty as Celeste is one of my favorite games. Moving forward we'd like to shy away from that very difficult and technical platforming style. Others have mentioned your frustration as well with there not being much room for error and having to start at the very beginning of the level sequence. 
I'm glad you were able to complete it despite your frustrations. As previously stated we have fine tuned the controls to a great degree since uploading for the jam so hopefully you'll give it another shot in a little while when the jam ends! 
Regarding combat a theme we really wanted to incorporate was "energy" of the music, so landing hits on beat increases the level of instruments and brings more life to the track, however it is agreed that this could be executed better or achieved in a different way without timed attacks.
You give some very good insight into "what type of game is this supposed to be" and is the exact question we are asking ourselves moving forward.
So thank you so much for the feedback! It is extremely helpful
Cheers

Submitted

I love the concept behind this game and the aesthetic is super appealing, especially  the main character and background designs. Unfortunately, I didn't get very far - the wall jump did me in, especially when I struggled with a very long vertical climb only to drop off the other side and discover I didn't have the key I needed. I would love to see what this game can become if you stick to the vision though.

Some other thoughts:

- The attack animation takes a long time to come out. If you're going to pair it with attackong on the beat, then it needs to be almost instantaneous or the feedback isn't very clear.

- The beat also needs to be pretty clear and high tempo (or enemies need to be balanced around slower music). The music itself was appealing, but it didn't have a strong bassline to drive the action, and a lot of times I'd wait to sync my attack up with the beat just to be punched by an approaching enemy.

- Others have said it, but the wall jump is really hard to get good at. It requires you to stop holding the direction input when jumping and then entering the direction input while in mid-air, but if your timing is even a little bit off and you accidentally hit the direction input before the jump input you'll send yourself downwards. This made doing long, vertical climbing sections very frustrating as the key inputs never felt entirely intuitive or smooth (and eventually my wrist started to hurt...).

But yeah, a rhythm based action game with the kind of graphics and overall presentation shown off here sounds super cool, and I hope you keep up with it if that's what you're interested in.

Developer

Great point on the music. I struggled with what to write. I maybe should have started us out with a stronger track. Later on in the game Track 2/3 has deeper rhythmic content. I think I'll probably revisit the entire music system and try and get something deeper and more intuitive going.

Thanks for the feedback and giving the game a play!

Submitted

I really like the potential in this game, the aesthetics are really cool, and the main character is really charismatic. That said, the difficulty curve is too steep in my opinion (maybe I am awful). Even though the platforming spaces are fascinating, they become too hard too quickly for me to get used to, and I have to try too many times. In fact, I rage-quitted, I will admit.

The wall jump is hard to get right, and there are not many parts where you can practice it in an easy situation. It feels really strange that moving towards the wall and jumping takes you off the wall. But that you can get used to.

The dash has some weird controls. It is mapped to the mouse, but the mouse position is not what determines the direction. If the mouse is not going to influence the dash, in my opinion it should be mapped to a key, since this way it feels really weird.

For the combat, I love the idea of having to time your attacks with the music, but I really did not get the feeling well, it was a bit clunky, maybe it lacked some feedback? My feeling is that I did not get your idea right, which is a shame, since, as I said, it is a really cool mechanic. In the end, I just hoped for combat to end.

To end with all the things that were done well, apart from the aesthetics already mentioned, the level design is great, I did not feel lost at any point, and it taught me well the mechanics (as I said, I would probably need some easier platforming spaces before the difficult ones). There are many save points, which I feel is a great decision for the style aimed for. And the game is fun, which is the most important part. In fact, all the things I said can be neglected, but fixing them in some way might make the game an awesome experience.

(As a game developer, I know not everything I said can be applied as some things might go against your view, but knowing how I feel can help you get your view more accurately)

Developer

Hi there! That's a good insight! To be fair the part where you fall off the wall while jumping onto the wall wasn't really intended and we're pretty much fixing that issue right now.

I could ask though since in our previous game the players had some mixed feedback about the dash controls - it seems that some prefer to use SHIFT for that mechanic while other players tend to go for the Mouse. I might ask if at least in your opinion rebinding the dash key to the shift would improve the dashing? 

About the combat, we're planning to rethink this part in the future - do you think that the timing mechanic made the fighting parts more difficult / frustrating? Basically what I wanted to know is that if  you'd enjoy the combat more if you wouldn't need to sync with the beat of the music, do you think that the enemies are missing a knockback? (Note that you can turn the Metronome on in the game's options) 

Thanks for your feedback! :)

Submitted (1 edit) (+1)

Just jumping in to say that you can always bind Dash to both. I personally prefer shift, but Attack on LMB and Dash on RMB as a secondary option wouldn't feel that bad (as long as there're no other actions that require me to take my hand off the mouse).

Wow the aesthetic of this game is beautiful as whole... I love the concepts.... I got stuck often and died more often I had hoped.... Other than that I may come back and see if I am missing something here in this one.... I really think there is probably more and I am just not quite playing it the way it was designed! 

(+1)

yea if you don't kill enemies you can get stuck falling some places.... and once you get the wall jump it doesn't really work as expected...at least on a controller from what I can tell.... needs some work as a whole! Would love to see a more polished version of this game

Submitted

I like the art style and the character design is really interesting. I love the way its head points while your run and looks around! The art style and tile mapping and music all work well together too. will def come back and try and beat this at some point. too difficult for one sitting.

 the music was nice, there was one spot I somehow managed to get 2 songs overlapping, went back up into a puzzle area after maybe caused it?

One thing I noticed is control wise its difficult to move to the right and attack at the same time. Might consinder some remapping options or switching attack to left mouse. Controlling the direction of the dash was a bit difficult I may have gotten it down a bit better with practice. The wall sliding slowly when holding is a nice touch however I did find myself falling quite a bit when trying to wall jump quickly and not hitting the opposite direction fast enough. 

Developer (1 edit)

Hi there! Thank you for your feedback! We're working on improving the walljump mechanic. Feel welcome to replay our game again when we'll have an update, your progress should be saved to the latest checkpoint that you've reached :) 

Do you perhaps remember at which part did the music overlap? Was it by any means the part with a very huge moving obstacle? Or did it happen around the level introducing spikes or nearby one of the three modules that you can obtain?

Submitted

it was early on after the first puzzle maybe, after the switch u need to press after a door go back through to get up to the left hitting a switch and needing to wall jump. It was a small path lead back go the area before that. I had jumped back up through there and the music started overlapping