Hey, really cute entry :D I really like your concept, and I adore the animations you did for your froggy main character and all the robots. The tongue lick animation for attack is very cute, and I thought the way the flying enemies moved looked great. Great opening cutscene to set the stage, and the music you chose worked really well with the environment (tropical sounds + palm trees = noice).
Honestly (unfortunately) I had a really hard time getting my fingers to do the right things (I think I generally have a hard time with any games that use Z as a keybind) so I died repeatedly and ultimately ended up giving up. The farthest I got was the little springy jumpy robots. But here are my notes for the portion of the game I did experience:
- The music was super loud for me, so a volume slider would have been great.
- There were some contrast issues colour-wise:
- The grey text on the title screen against the various backgrounds seemed too close in value. One helpful trick is to test your scene in black and white. Viewing your colours in greyscale can help you identify where you do not have enough contrast.
- The frog's shading colour appears to be the same as many of the background hills, which has the unfortunate effect of appearing to change the shape of your carefully done froggy sprites when they overlap. I like the vibe your bright palette has, so one option could be to give your froggy an outline or to darken/lighten him.
- Some colour modifications could also help make it more clear what is in the foreground, what is on the collision layer with the player, and what is in the background:
- The grey tubey structures (pipes?) looked like they should have colliders to me, and
- Where there are some pillars that all look the same, but some are in front of the player and some are behind, colour variation could help to make this a bit clearer and seem more intended.
- One thing you can do to help this is make foreground objects more saturated/darker/higher contrast than the midground / collision layer objects, and make background objects less saturated/lighter/lower contrast. This is how we are used to seeing things in the world because of atmosphere, so it is pretty intuitive when we do it with colour in games. Thinking about it that way helped me a lot with similar issues in my games!
- It wasn't clear to me what the coins I was collecting were for, but I suspect if I'd managed to survive a bit longer I might have figured it out?
Overall, I think this was a lot of fun, and a few colour shifts could do a lot to take it to that next level. However despite that, I think it looks great and you've done some amazing work with sprite design and animations! I also didn't experience anything that felt particularly buggy or broken, so it was a smooth experience. I only wish I could have survived longer!