Cheers, glad you're enjoying it. There was a plan to do a 'master run' achievement which was to do the stars all in one go on each level but I wanted to keep the game as a relaxing, play at your own pace platformer. In my play testing all but 'Level 15: A Tight Fit' are possible to 3 star in one go. This level needs about 30-60 seconds more because getting all the coins requires end-to-end in the level which isn't really possible with the 2 minutes par time it has currently.
Thank you for the reply, on one hand I welcome that there is no master mode because I think I would be compelled to get it done, on the other, it feels like cheating going for the stars in different runs. I have 2 stars missing only, from the last level, but all in all, it is hard but rewarding and it feels doable.
I played through this game pver the weekend and enjoyed it! I got every star.
I do feel like a master run attempt is exactly what this game is missing to provide the challenge to make it more fun - if the intent is truly to just get each star separately than at the very least I think a few changes are in order, since they are usually very trivial to get when going for them individually:
- The par times are way too high; they seem to be set assuming you are trying to get all the stars in one go. When only getting this star individually it was trivial to do so and I was always way under par; sometimes by full minutes. the times should be a lot lower if the intent is to get that time while also dying and ignoring coins.
- Additionally, its sad that not dying and getting coins have no use at all when affecting par times. Dying at least sets you back to a checkpoint but sometimes this can be abused where dying is FASTER than traveling back unscathed. Perhaps each coin could lower your time by a few seconds, and each death could add ten or something like that? And the par times could be adjusted to reflect this.
- The coin challenges are often trivial as well since you can collect the coins from difficult spots and then die and keep those coins collected. If you die, it should respawn the coins that you collected since the last checkpoint, so that you have to collect them again for it to count. This still lets you use checkpoints to save your progress and allow deaths when going for that star alone, but will actually require you to get each coin the "right way" and travel back to the checkpoint or main path without dying while trying to get them.
- For a game that encourages replaying levels its very annoying that there is not a quick way to restart the level when you mess up (going into the menu every time). Especially since the game never uses the B button for anything. Can't you just make holding B for a few seconds reset the whole level so we dont have to scroll through the menu every time?
- All of the flyong enemies use the same bat sprites even though they have different behavior, which makes ot hard to tell what they will do at a glance. If you dont want to source different graphics fpr the horizontal, vertical, circular, and random moving bats, it would at least be nice to have different graphics for the random ones sonce the rest a move on a set path. Maybe little ghost sprites would work well as a flying enemy alternative for the random ones?
This was a fun little game but with a few tweaks like the changes above I think it would be a lot easier to recommend to other people and would definitely be on more folks' radar.
Finally, any chance you will update this with achievement functionality now that playdate achievements are a thing? I'd love to at least have a trophy for this game sitting in my trophy case after getting every star if nothing else! If you add achievements that could be a fun way to still give an achievement for beating each level, getting all stars separately, or completing the "master run" of all 25 levels, so that players can still feel like they finished the game and got some achievement put of it and aren't forced into doing master runs if they don't feel like going for the extra achievement.