Thanks so much for giving it a go!
The trick is that dashing is additive to your initial velocity: so give yourself a little run up, move forwards, dash and then jump shortly afterwards. This will propel you forwards.
If you get stuck there are many glitches to help you progress and funnily enough you can use the glitches as a form of puzzle-like problem solving (this wasn't intentional at all) which is kind of a fun broken way to play the game.
The most powerful glitch is to simply open the in game menu by pressing [esc] tap on the leave game button and this will load the next level but it will be frozen. then open and close the in game menu again and you can play as normal. this was a bug I found after submission and haven't fixed yet.
I also have a post-submission version I am waiting to upload which fixes many of the bugs.
Viewing post in Absolutely Garbage jam comments
Hey! I gave it another go. After a few attempts I finally managed to get across the gap. I would definitely recommend making it more forgiving at least for the tutorial in the future, especially since tight spacing like that didn’t seem to be necessary for the actual game levels, so it was just a frustrating block while you are first learning to use the move.
Anyway, now that I was finally able to try more of the game, I have more feedback! I like your art style and the big open levels are definitely ambitious for a jam game!
A couple of issues I encountered:
- The shift time counting down during the tutorial dialog was a bit stressful, and made me feel like I had to rush through it instead of read it thoroughly.
- I would recommend using a sin function or something for your function movement rather than just reversing direction. The first time I tried to jump onto the platform I missed because I wasn’t expecting it to change direction so suddenly.
- I imagine this is just a game jam issue and will be fixed post-submission, but the full game restarting if you die was very frustrating. Especially because I died on level three by glitching through the floor on the hill on my way to clock out, and it took me all the way back to the tutorial (so I gave up there).
In terms of the main mechanic, I think there’s something interesting there. I’ve never seen a game where you need to buy uses of things like jumping and dashing. It has the potential to make for interesting decisions that the player has to make, but also the potential for frustration. My main concern would be that the player can probably soft-lock themselves pretty easily if they run out of jumps/dashes that they need for progression.
In any case, good work on making such an ambitious 3D game for the jam!