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A jam submission

Star PeakView game page

A physics-based 2d platformer in which you get to fly around using a grappling hook.
Submitted by Stoff (@artstoff), KepFox (@Kepsert) — 1 day, 48 minutes before the deadline
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Star Peak's itch.io page

Jam Origin
this one

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Comments

Submitted(+1)

You've got a really good concept here. The graphics are great, the music is great. The level design builds on itself well and has a good curve to it. The puzzle elements work well, though I didn't manage to finish it.

Here's a link to the footage I took. This is from my second playthough, so I blitz through the first few screens.

I'll link to some timestamps below too.

I played this for about 4 hours, 3 of which were solidly stuck on Screen 3 (I think it's screen three. It's the one where the sign talks to you)

And it wasn't because I couldn't figure out where to go - the levels are fairly well laid out up to this point and I was never confused for long. Instead it felt like I was fighting the controls more than the game, and it just made this stage frustrating, rather than fun.

It's important that a precision platform has precision controls, and throughout my time with it, this game just doesn't have it yet. And it's really really simple to begin fixing it should you decide to keep working on the game post-jam.

The most important one to address, for me, would be the grappling button. 9/10 my failures weren't because I was too late on a grapple, but too early. I'd see the yellow target come up for a couple of frames but because there's no buffering, there was no way to make it without continual trial and error, hoping that the next time I'd get it.
Adding a short buffer to the grapple button would sort this out and allow players to pre-empt their grapples, and make those tight hooks. It also encourages people to go faster, knowing that they can more consistently get the grapples they want

Secondly seemed to be her oddly inconsistent jump height 1 2, and the unreasonable number of times she refused to jump on a jump input. And I don't even mean in the heat of the moment. There were times that just standing still and spamming the spacebar would have her jump once every second.
There also seems to be a bug where, either her jump is too low, or she jumps too high (one or the other), making some platforming sections really inconsistent, like this bit. There are other parts of the footage you can see me doing this right away, but at this point I think I spend 5 minutes trying to make this simple jump and failing (from this I guess that the bug is that she occasionally jumps too high rather than not always reaching her full height, and you're not supposed to be able to make this jump at all).

I get the impression you're using Unity's platformer template (or, at least the capsule collider) just by the feel of how she slides off of, and gets stuck on, the corners of geometry. I can't say what you can do to fix it, outside of redoing the platform engine entirely (in all my time doing Unity dev, one of the first things I realised was that I got much better results rolling my own player controller and not using rigidbody physics if I could help it)

Lastly, this 1 2 feels like I should be able to make the ledge quite easily, but it's frustrating when you can't.

I get this might change the gameplay a bit, but letting the player reel themselves in - even slightly - would prevent situations like this from happening all the time. (or, make her hitbox a bit smaller when swinging, or let us use the jump key to do a short hop off the grapple. There's plenty of Quality-of-life changes that could work around this)You've got a really cool game here and I do hope you continue working on it post-jam. And tightening the controls would be a good place to start.
Everything else about it is great - I wouldn't have spent an afternoon playing it, or spent so much time writing this up if it wasn't.

Developer

Hi!

First of all, thank you for playing! Second, thank you for the elaborate feedback including video footage!

The grapple buffer was something we'd talked about, but I couldn't quite find a proper-working solution for this in the timespan of the jam. However, your comment did just gave me an idea of a potential way to implement this, will be giving it a try for a post-jam build later this week!

As for the jump, you're absolutely correct about the jump sometimes being higher than intended- had me double check everything haha. Turns out a late "fix" I pushed in an attempt to fix another problem, caused this one: basically, the grounded radius has become a bit too big, which only sometimes causes the "isGrounded" check to return true more often than it should, causes you to get the first frame of a jump twice as you go off the ground, giving you just a tad bit more height than intended.

Once again, thank you so much for the elaborate feedback, it sure is very helpful and I'll make sure to get to it as soon as I can!

~Kepsert