First impressions:
- Beautiful and charming hand-made drawings in the main menu
- Nice soundtrack, fits the theme
- Nice abilities, allowing for a huge amount of skill expression (i.e. parkouring on bouncing hats is hard but satisfying to pull off)
- Interesting lore (the little I was able to parse from the very quick text!)
Analysis:
You got yourself a very cool looking platformer with a super nice set of character skills, and huge potential for a fun game. However, repetitive looking areas quickly become confusing to navigate and boring to adventure in. Enemies strike fast and with not much indication, leading to pretty much one way to succeed in combat: strike fast and as far away as possible and then run away. There's not much interplay with the enemies, because allowing them to do anything at all results in punishment to the player, and the enemies seem to have just 1 move. Enemy design seems a bit incoherent. Why am I killing birds? What are the slime blobs?
Platforming mechanics (bouncy hat, dash, ground pound, wall-jump) are pretty solid and incredibly fun. The wide breadth of possibilities is awesome, and lets you navigate the platforming challenges in however you see fit.
Issues/Bugs:
- Controller D-pad doesn't work in menus (need to use stick to navigate, which is unusual)
- I have two sticks - feels weird to have the left one for both walking & aiming, and the right one unused
- Correction: Feels even weirder to aim the hat with one stick and aim reflect projectiles with another! If you want my opinion here, I'd suggest to keep all aiming on the right stick, and all movement on the left. I kept stumbling over the controls because I kept forgetting which stick served to aim what. And kept foolishly trying to use the right stick for aiming the hat, several minutes into the gameplay... Muscle memory is powerful, remember your players bring baggage from other games; trying to keep things as standard as possible will make your game much more intuitive.
- Text too fast
- "I forgot my hat" message is confusing, it looks like I already have a hat on!
- Typo: "Come find me ... if you are gnome enogh" (should be enough)
- Enemy animations are hard to read. They should have some sort of charge-up, to telegraph the attack, and then a wind-down after the attack misses
- Unlocked dash but it remains locked in the abilities menu
- Pressing the "start" button on my controller while in the pause menu unpauses the game but the pause menu remains visible on the screen
- Game doesn't pause when showing what was unlocked by the rock, leading to deaths that are impossible to avoid (because you can't see what's attacking you)
Verdict:
You have a solid prototype and good foundations to make a great game. You nailed the design of the protagonist and their abilities. If you put some work into adding more visual variety and polish, and more carefully think about the enemy interactions and solving some of the "jank", you will have yourself a great platformer IMO. For now, the clunkyness is getting in the way of my enjoyment, and every attempt to have fun with the mechanics leads to some frustration with the jank getting in the way. But don't be discouraged! Everything can be solved with patience and iterations; some of these things are hard to nail the first, second, or third time.
Good luck with the project! Don't hesitate to contact me again if you want me to give it another try in the future, once you've addressed some of these issues.
Best,
FLCB