Hi Dylan_Bee,

Thanks so much for taking the time to play Portal Labs. 

 'Nice job on making the assets yourself! The pixel art is nice, I like the sound effects and the music fits the setting well. Shooting is fun and I like the screen-shake to emphasize the action. I like the combination of platforming, shooting, and light puzzle solving'.

I really enjoyed making all the assets. The pixel art was limited to 8x8 grid, this allowed me to produce artwork pretty quickly and I'm really happy with the results. Originally the artwork was intended as holding images, but with a little more polish I'd be happy to use the style in a larger game. Bxfr was used to produce the sound effects, using a few layers of sound, rather than one individual sound. I used pico8 to produce the classic game sounds. Music is probably the least of my indie game dev skill set, but again I enjoyed making a sort of industrial like sound loop.

'Something I noticed was that the boss at the end can be easily cheesed by standing at the bottom then jumping and shooting when the boss gets low enough. On a similar note, most of the enemies are pretty harmless in the game. I can take them out pretty easily. If you expand on this, I would suggest tweaking the enemies to be more of a threat'. 

The boss level and the enemies were deliberately made to be easy kills, as I wanted more emphasis on the puzzle and portal side of the game. 

'Weird thing I noticed was that activating some of the blue squares can be finicky. I’m not sure exactly what is going on, but some of the blue squares I could activate on my first try, but others were more difficult. It seems I have to move the player around first before the game actually allows me to trigger the blue objects. For example, in the first level, the blue square near where the hostage is, I activated almost immediately when I pressed the down button. After I found the hostage and tried to activate the blue square that ends the level, I could not seem to trigger it even though I was pressing the down button several times. I thought maybe I was missing something, but I later tried to activate the blue square again and it worked. I’m not sure what the issue could be, but it seems like the blue squares don’t detect the player sometimes for whatever reason'.

Thanks for pointing this out. I didn't get the game tested by anyone else, so I fell into the trap where I knew what to do, and assumed everyone else playing the game would know or figure out.  I've now fixed this bug - although it remains in the jam version for now.

'I think this game has a lot of promise. Tweaking the game to emphasize the shooting and platforming elements with more challenging enemies and hazards would take the game even further if you choose to expand on this. Those suggestions aside, I enjoyed playing this and the original assets are great'. Thanks for submitting!

Thank you I really appreciate your comments. I intend to build on the game, using game jams as a way of evolving the mechanics and game play. I hope you follow the game in its development and see it transform into a fully functioning game.