Oh, a boss sketch at the end to indicate where it was supposed to be. We already had boss sprites, just behavior not implemented, so we could have done that too in our prototype!
EDIT: I found later that it wasn’t the end of demo, and found the last skill of “flying” which is actually infinite jump (I missed a room more above - I suppose getting “lost” this could easily be fixed with a mini-map). It’s unfortunate that it completely superseded double jump, but probably for budget reasons. A floating jump would be a better complementary skill. There was also no tutorial for it at all so it took me a moment to figure how to use it.
The metroidvania progression was functional, the projectiles felt fun to shoot with a (probably too) impactful SFX. I liked the small details on projectile colors being added when unlocking new skills, which are also the colors of the gates you can open. Although that wasn’t really clear at the beginning, that skills are also actual “gate keys” (in general Metroidvania games distinguish both), so it could be good to explain in tutorial. Or ideally make each skill truly unlock new areas by their geometrical properties (for double jump it was easy but for the stomp attack there could be actual ground to break)
Visual-wise I liked the theater-ragdoll-style animation (also a nice trick for budget to justify more simple animations), I suppose we’re actually inside some paper theater book?
The main issues I encountered:
- text displays slowly, as mentioned in other comments. When prototyping, start by just displaying text all at once especially if there is no voice acting. Then if you have time add progressive display but at high speed only. Then if you have time add a slider for text speed in the Settings. At first I thought it was just the intro cutscene but then I saw that it was on every in-game cutscene including the important tutorial text that explains the button to press… It was probably easy to spot when testing but I suppose you were fast-skipping all the text when testing yourself as we did because we know the text by heart. So it’s also good to send build to other people (starting with team members that may not be using the game engine) to spot these things early.
- shoot direction is done with left stick, which makes sense because you shoot with button on right side, but it’s hard to move wherever you want and also shoot freely. Since shooting is THE main attack it would make sense to map it to a shoulder/trigger button instead and leave the right thumb free to aim with right stick
- double jump has an issue where it may be accidentally triggered on first jump. Since the symptom is the same as Sonic Adventure 2 on GameCube PAL running at 50Hz, I suspect this is due to updating jump intention from input on physics frame (Fixed Update) and applying jump on render frame (Update), or reversely, which could cause two jumps to be applied for one input press before intention gets cleared. Or something like that. I’m not sure why my “powerful PC” would get unstable FPS but I was testing on web so anything could happen (and if it happened on GameCube…). Fun fact, it had the same effect as Tails/Eggman’s mech with air thrusters, where you would go higher faster by doing a quick jump + air thrust, probably because double jump is set to add extra upward velocity or not just set velocity Y to a fixed value.
- physics bugs (moving toward a wall horizontally prevents you from falling)
- I didn’t even know I could shoot in all directions at first, so the first breakable ground looked like a special ground that needed a stomp attack to destroy. In fact you could destroy it with a normal shot, and even a forward shot could reach it. So I was stuck of a while there
- Quit game does nothing on web, so remove it from main on web build
Credits:
- it was a bit weird to see all the credits after opening the first gate, I thought it was the end of demo at first! It works well in games where credits appear in the background while you keep moving, but it stopped the player character’s progression so I had to watch it appear slowly…
- don’t say “myself” in the credits. I’m playing fullscreen, I don’t see the itch.io username of the person who created the project page, so I don’t know what that means. Just put your creator’s name like the other team members
- I didn’t see any credits for voice acting in the in-game credits nor on the game page. I assume this is not the same as SFX. It did sound like Stock Japanese battle character Voice Acting assets. It’s not mandatory to put it in credits in the license doesn’t require you to, but in a game jam it’s nice to know whether voice actors actually joined the staff, or you used free assets, or you used premium assets.
Promotion: now that game is done you can add screenshots of the actual game in the list of media.