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(+1)

Neat idea. After getting hard locked for the second time, I'm calling it quits...

First one was on third level and one of  the boxes just went completely bonkers and sped through the terrain lodging itself in a slot where I guess I needed to reach.


The second time the second level teleporter to the third level just straight up refused to work.

So I lied and didn't give up. Now the mechanics seem a bit more clear to be and I guess I missed one of the purple switches on the second run. But did the same thing on the third level jumping to the blue portal which stuck me inside the box which then flew across the screen blocking the entrance to the final purple switch.

Would be a nice addition to more see from the purple switches that they aren't activated yet.

Okay, now after doing the same thing for the third time I'm really giving up. Gotta be kidding me, now the second box refused to drop down to the hole and blocked the way to the final purple switch.


So I wasn't the biggest fan of the controls. Jumping was slow and floaty and there was quite a bit of weird physics boosts. Platforms were tricky to jump through quickly and dropping through them felt finicky as hell too. I usually had to hold the key down and wiggle back and forth for it to activate. And it doesn't seem to make much sense on what you can fall through and what not. Same goes for pushing boxes. Sometimes they felt like weighing a ton but sometimes just slightly touching made them fly across the screen.

The timings were a bit too harshly adjusted in my opinion. There was little room for errors and with the floaty controls those errors were prone to happen all the time. And doing a mistake usually meant that you'd just have to wait around for the next loop to begin. And I don't find just making the player wait ever that fun.

(1 edit)

Okay so, I'm a stubborn person. Went for some dinner but kept having this annoying feeling for giving up. So yeah, came back and managed to beat the dreadful third level and the last one too as that was just piece of cake in comparison to all others.

I think the mechanics could have been introduced a bit more clearly maybe by more incremental level design. Now the game threw pretty much everything at you on the first level and nothing was really clear by itself on what it did if you weren't fully paying attention to the whole level on what changed. I had basically hard locked twice and played 75% of the game before I actually understood everything. Obviously even slight tutorial messages would have helped a ton. Or even having more clear activation animations/effects/sounds drawing the eye to the spot that changed due to button press etc.

(1 edit)

Thanks for all the feedback! I really appreciate it. To be completely honest, I was aware of some of the problems you mentioned, but I really wanted to submit something this year and I was running out of time.  The weird physics and controls are just me being inexperienced. I haven't really made a platformer before so I was figuring things out on the go. The levels themselves were also rushed, as I made all  four on the last day. 

I also underestimated how unreadable and difficult the second and third levels were. They require doing things fast and sometimes in a specific order. They felt perfectly beatable to me, but it was because I knew exactly what to do. It sounds stupid now, but during the jam I failed to consider that other people wouldn't just understand everything imidiately, especially without a tutorial. This only highlights how important it is to involve other people in playtesting. 

As for the boxes, I had some problems with them moving too fast and not falling where they should. As a fix I made some of them heavier than others. It was a very inelegant solution, but a a better hadn't occured to be at the time. The box in the third level blocking the acces to the purple button is something I didn't even realize could happen. They did get glitchy sometimes, but usually just flew ot of the screen (an issue, but not a gamebreaking one, I was in a rush so I let it be).

Overall, this isn't the best submission but I'm glad I participated at all. I'll keep improving and will hopefully make something more polished next year.

(+1)

Absolutely! Of course it's better to finish the game any way you best see fit and submit it even if it might have some issues. And the issues here weren't really even that game breaking (except for that box completely blocking the switch). Hell, my game had a bit of a too deep recursion in late game (something like millions of iterations) and excessive memory usage on it resulting in out of memory issues on web build where memory is kinda limited. The main thing about game jams in my opinion at least is the learning experience. Every time you get better at making design decisions, learn to implement new stuff or even some same stuff as before again but better.