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crazyhoundgamedesign321 days ago(+1)

Initially I thought this would be simple platformer, but the mechanic of leaving a trail of poison that becomes lethal means you can't just bounce around aimlessly, you have to think about your path through each level to ensure that you can complete it without bumping into the lethal poison.

Beyond the need for sound, I think that the way the poison trail (or the controls) works needs to be looked at.  If you start moving and then stay still for too long, you end up being killed as the poison is still spawning where you're standing, and with the controls as they're set up now, it is very easy for a jump to fail or for you to fall off a ledge and into the poison trail.  On one level I also got a stutter towards the end of the level which I assume is because of the number of poison spots that were spawned in and because I played through the browser.  It might be possible to have a maximum number of these sprites that can spawn, and when that limit is reached you remove the oldest sprite.  This would still leave a trail that could stop you from doubling back on yourself, but would help performance by limiting the number of poison sprites spawned at any given time.

Thanks for the game.

Any chance you could have a look at mine as well?

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Nopel321 days ago(+1)

Thanks for the suggestions. I think I did add a system to not spawn trails when the player isn't moving, but maybe it doesn't work correctly all the time. I also realized that I should improve controls, but it was too late and I also had school (as you can see i submitted 1min30secs before the deadline). For limiting the number of trails, I don't know if it would be the best solution to destroy the oldest one as you could then try to find a workaround, I just need to make trails not spawn when moving.

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crazyhoundgamedesign321 days ago(+1)

Don't worry about not fitting it into the jam.  The suggestions are just if you want to carry on with the game, and are only suggestions, you could take it in a completely different direction.

The reason why I mentioned about removing trails is because as the number of objects to be processed and rendered increases, performance will start to drop off.  This performance drop will then start to impact the way the game plays.  I'm only assuming the next bit, but I take it that the poison spots have a script or timer attached to them and some kind of detection area for physics?  Each instance will take it's own chunk of system resources, if this doesn't get cleaned up or recycled, this is when it starts to hit performance.  If you don't want to remove the objects, there might be another way of streamlining the objects to reduce the performance overhead.

Thanks again for the game.

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Nopel321 days ago(+1)

Ok, thanks I will try to find a way. Also i checked out your game and I'm really impressed that you did such an ambitious game with only a week of time. Did you have time off that week or is making games the main thing you do right now?

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crazyhoundgamedesign321 days ago

I was lucky to have the week off of work, even still I spent more than 80 hours on this jam.

It was the biggest scope game I've tried to do for a jam, and I still had things I didn't have time to get into the game or tidy up the way I would have liked.

It's also my third jam, so I've gotten a bit better in planning out my time on the jam and the breakdown of the work.  I tend to split it up into art, coding, sound and finishing up.  But for this one I spent 27 hours just on the art.  I know it's pixel art and simple, but you have a pixel in the wrong spot or wrong shade and it can make a good sprite look bad.  I then spent about 40 hours on the coding (I reckon about 1,500 lines of code), and the rest for everything else, due to the time constraints I wasn't able to make brand new music specifically for the game, so I reorganised a couple of songs I made a month or so ago when I was playing about with the DAW (instruments, length, and trying to make them loops).

I would like to do it full time, but at the moment I haven't earned a penny, not spent one either.

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