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Man, this is a tricky one to review, I want to focus on gameplay so I'll get all the other things things first, visuals: really cool, love the background, the mouth expanding, the character,  I love all the animations for the character, and the little dance they do when standing still, superb! Even the UI for collecting pentajumps and super speed looks nice, you really nailed the vibe! Music is great too, the upset stomach sounding music of world 1 is so cool and the more chilled out music for world 2 is nice as well!


But the gameplay, to start off I think the actual character movement aside from the gravity is very nice! It has a slight slipperiness but it feels very well tuned, reminding me a little of the Ori games. Jumping feels nice too, along with double and penta jumps. But oh boy the gravity... it just feels, off. The first super speed level really just confused me, every single attempt felt so different despite me doing similar things, I get that there is a slight momentum buildup and then jump at the right angle but man it just did not feel intuitive to me at all and nothing ever went how I expected it too, I feel as though you coded it perfectly but it's the sort of thing where you have to fake a lot behind the scenes to make things feel right to the player even if it isn't accurate (that could just be me though). And then one last thing is the gravity changing from planet to planet, now this is is done fine, this is much more of a me thing but it's really hard to wrap my head around which direction my left and right will go if I'm flipping onto the underside of a planet which wouldn't be too much of an issue if I wasn't also under the time pressure of the pentajump and then there's a little eye dude who want to ruin my day. I think a thin transparent ring around the planet that rotates clockwise constantly (you'd need a small part of the ring to be brighter than the rest) or something of the sort could help remind the player which direction to go.

So I think you nailed the genre of game you're making, I suppose it all comes down to me having a skill issue lol. I really hope this doesn't come off as mean or demoralizing cause you've 100% cooked here, these are just changes I'd want to enjoy the game more, really great work!

(2 edits) (+1)

yea, i really agree with the pain points here. so uhh i did NOT code the game perfectly. as you correctly assumed, gravity is kinda screwed up: each planet has a predefined "gravity radius" that flips the player's gravity when they get into the collision box. the problem is that the radius in which you reverse gravity is unfortunately arbitrary so it can feel more or less lenient than expected sometimes. i VERY agree that a light ring around gravfields would have been an excellent visual hint (and I was considering as much, but for some reason didn't get to it). not only that, but a visual indicator as to which was moves you left-right with an arrow (sometimes left is right and right is left: even I never really got it 100%)

preserving the player's velocity vector would have been difficult on gravity flipping: the vector used for preserving speed is different from the ACTUAL vector that gets used for doing movement calculations due to the way I had to kinda work around Godot's pre-existing cartesian calculations. therefore, i did the thing that gave me the least amount of headache and just zeroed each velocity vector on flip.

regarding the super speed level: ceiling bonks are the real reason why its a bit screwed up. you transmit a lot of vertical momentum downwards when you bonk into the ceiling (-0.7x your current vertical velocity, shoulda been more like -0.5x or lower). so, actually NOT holding jump and simply mashing up 2x to jump through those inner pits allows you to not bonk your head as hard (because you have less vertical momentum).

finally: you absolutely do NOT have a skill issue (nor does anyone else whose played it). the game is very much a masocore rage game. i should have been more clear that "yes, this game is very hard and you will die a lot".

i plan to make at least one more update to this game after the jam's done, so your feedback is VERY helpful! thank you so much for checking the game out : D

No problem, I feel as though I made many similar mistakes too such as indicators that would have made gameplay 10x simpler, I never considered how tricky it must of been to code all the gravity so really awesome job on that! In regards to the speed level my hardest jumps were actually the outside ones, the inside one I got second try as other platformers have taught me about ceiling bonks, just no matter what I did during the outside jumps felt consistent and I was always just a 1 cm off (that's probably why it hurt lol), I don't really know how to intuit the angle and momentum needed to jump the big gaps and I don't even know if it's possible to explain something like that, or maybe I'd pick it up better the more I played, idk. Good luck on the update too! (I might try it out again once it's updated)