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Shadow Reliving's itch.io pageResults
| Criteria | Rank | Score* | Raw Score |
| Playability | #258 | 4.000 | 4.000 |
| Artistic Style | #401 | 4.000 | 4.000 |
| Theme | #653 | 3.000 | 3.000 |
| Cleverness | #755 | 3.000 | 3.000 |
Ranked from 1 rating. Score is adjusted from raw score by the median number of ratings per game in the jam.
Judge feedback
Judge feedback is anonymous.
- Love the switching back and forth, the design. I'm not very good at platformers so I ended up hitting a wall I couldn't get past. I always say an easy mode for those who're not good by want to try <3 The graphics are great, keep them up. The beauty of the art even made me try several times.
Did you include your Game Design Document as a Google Drive link?
Yes
Seriously... did you include your Game Design Document?
Yes
Is your game set to Public so we can see it?
Yes
Tell us about your game!
A short demo of a (puzzle) platformer, the main gimmick is being able to turnyour character into a shade, which has unique movement abilities.
Extra Notes
In the future there will be more mechanics revolving around the light form, right now it feels kind of lackluster and being in shade form is just superior, there will probably be other downsides other than the timer, but for now it is as is
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Comments
This is too short! I want more!!
Jokes aside, this is a nice little platformer here, the shade mechanic is quite nice, albeit a bit too strong. It would be nice if the non-shade form get some unique actions or powers, but I guess you've already thought of that. Some effects to indicate shade is about to expire would also benefit greatly.
Anyway, nicely done!
With the obvious exception of this being extremely short this is really cool! What a solid foundation for a game.
Firstly the art is great, I love the character, their animations and the transformation it's all really well done and fluid! The environment tilesets are really solid and well done too. A little more variety would have been nice.
The audio was fine and SFX matched really well.
The character movement is SUPER solid and well done, I like that there are different abilities between soul states. Could be a really cool metroidvania mechanic to have soul state specific abilities or something in the future.
The story being told is quite interesting, I'm looking forward to seeing how it explored in the future if you continue to develop the game.
This was really fun, I hope you do more :)
This is an interesting proof of concept, resource management for collectables to utilise special abilities is an interesting mechanic that I would love to see developed further. The music was nice and calm and the character design is pretty cool.
A few points for improvement:
- The character controller feels rather floaty at the moment, upping the gravity and jump strength would be a good idea here to make that jump curve thinner.
- Carrying on from my previous point, the character having such a high jump results in poor level design, the walls are gigantic compared to the size of the character, and not only that, this introduces a lot of "whitespace" in the background with a huge proportion of the screen just being background which looks bad.
- There's a tiny little collider bug in the beginning where the one of the floor tiles stops you from going left unless you jump
- This is from personal experience, although the character design looks great, the pixel resolution for the character is pretty high compared to the pixel resolution of the tileset for the level. This discrepancy makes the character look out of place. Another reason this is a bad idea (from personal experience) is that the character will take way too long to animate, and harder to animate well. This is particularly a problem in this case because you have two version of the character, each with their own animations, so you're probably quadrupling the amount of time it takes to develop.
In summary, I like the core concept and would like to see it expanded upon in a lengthier demo!
Usually our developer answers everything, because he is more active in communication, but I will answer a little about the art.
I'm really not that good at environment design, I've redrawn the blocks several times to make them fit the style and I'm still thinking about how to improve the design so that it looks really good.
I worked on character animation for much longer and I am very pleased that you, and everyone who wrote comments, appreciated my work.
I tried hard! Thank you!
Loving the music in this. The gameplay is pretty interesting. I like the idea of having to manage your orbs to use abilities. Great job!
The demo seems very promising. Would be cool to see the progress as time goes on following the jam.
Nice demo that you've put together! You've already got enough game mechanics to make tons of interesting levels. I like that the wall jump took a bit of skill to master. Needing to use J and K felt weird. I would have preferred those were Q and E or left mouse and right mouse buttons. Overall, great to see you completed a demo and summitted it for the jam!
Thanks for the feedback! We are already theorycrafting at least one more mechanic to make the light form feel more useful than it is right now, but you're right than we can make a lot with what we have and not get into mechanic hell where we make a lot of mechanics and introduce them all at once and don't know what to do with them.
I see a lot of crutique about the controls, one of the first things I'll be doing after the jam is changing the default controls to something more standardized (zxc like celeste?), as well as adding the ability to rebind controls in the options. My decision for using J and K was that I personally have been using these keys when playing platformers for years now, but it didn't occur to me that it might be uncomfortable to others when uploading.
I liked the concept of being able to transform and with that having different gameplay mechanics, has a lot of potential!
I kind of loved it. Even with the short demo I REALLY liked to ability concept.
The game is missing some keyboards on controller. I could move and jump, but not transform or dash.
Awesome demo, really liked the transition between the player states and the wall jumping felt quite fluid. The bubbly sound design really fit too!
A few things I struggled with:
1. First time I skipped the message that told me about the transformation and then I was lost because I couldn't get it back
2. The font was a little hard to read. A contrasting outline would help imo
3. The j and k keybinds felt unnatural to me as a QWERTY user
An interesting idea, although controls feel too floaty for the precision platformer.
Also, I suggest you tell in description to click fullscrean button, or force the game to load fullscreen, because without it this is all I see:
Ooh, good catch, I didn't notice that it doesn't show the entire play area in windowed, I think it used to do that, but I was fiddling with room transitions and cinemachine (which didn't make it into the demo), which is why it's like that. I believe I am unable to change the description right now as it's locked during the voting period, but I will definitely change it in one way or another to improve the player experience.
You can change anything on your itch page - description, settings, etc. You just can’t upload new files during voting.