Pretty nice game! The movement is cool and the pixel art is really nice, especially the boss. I think that's probably one of the best pixel arts in the game. The music was also pretty nice.
Here are some points of improvement I had:
- I think a tutorial would be really nice, because I didn't know you could attack with J until I actually read the start menu😅. But just teaching the player simply by saying press "J" during the game would be a great addition.
- I think camera offset in some sections would be great, because there are times where I'm jumping and I just can't see what's below me but when I move a little more down I see ground. If there's a slight down offset that'll help convey that below me isn't nothing :D.
- It would really benefit the player if you could have it be more apparent when the player gets hit by the boss. Because I didn't know whether I was hitting or not😅. So maybe some extra camera shake or some particle effects could really help.
But other than that the game jam entry was really nice so good job :D
Hi, JustSomePikachu! First of all, thank you so much for the feedback and for pointing these things out. They are very valuable, and in this case, it is completely fair that these issues affect the evaluation.
This was the first game I started and actually managed to “finish,” and it was also the first time I went through many new steps, including making a build. It was a huge learning experience, bigger than anything any course or tutorial had given me so far. I honestly did not expect so many things to behave differently after the build.
Unfortunately, the Start screen, Victory screen, Game Over screen, and Ranking screen had their Canvas displaced, which made it much harder to see the small tutorial on the start menu and to navigate through the menus. The gameplay HUD also disappeared because of this screen size and Canvas displacement issue. It was supposed to show the 5 lives as little ties, the ancestral fire counter, something like 4/30, and the phase timer set to 3 minutes and 33 seconds, reinforcing the loop idea behind the name “FOLLOW suit Eternal.”
Your point about camera offset was excellent, thank you very much. Initially, I wanted the path to be not too intuitive, so the player would take risks, learn the level, and try to optimize each run. Some ancestral fires were hidden in secret paths or behind trees that the character could pass behind, unlike other trees where he walks in front of them, precisely to draw attention to that possibility.
About the final fight, one important detail: it is not exactly the Forest Protector who dies, but the Ancestral Forest. As the Suitman collects the flames of the Ancestral Force, he gains power and becomes stronger. The game does not have an easy, medium, or hard difficulty selection. The difficulty is built through the run itself: the more ancestral fires the player collects, and the less life they lose before reaching the Ancestral Tree, the stronger, faster, and slightly smarter the Suitman becomes during the boss fight. If the player has a more casual run, collects fewer fires, and loses more life, the final fight against him becomes easier.
The timer was added to prevent the player from exploring everything too comfortably. The idea was that, with each new attempt, the player would learn new paths and fire locations, allowing them to collect them faster. There is also a ranking system with up to 10 stars, calculated proportionally based on how much life the player lost during the first part of the level, how many ancestral fires were collected, how long it took to defeat the Suitman, and how much life the Ancestral Forest lost before victory. This system creates a first, second, and third place ranking, which resets when the game is closed and opened again.
About particles and damage feedback, I really did not have enough time to polish them as much as I wanted. Also, some effects that helped make the fight feel more impactful did not work correctly after the build. There was fall damage with camera shake proportional to the height of the fall, a shake when the Suitman destroyed the tree after the third hit, a softer shake when the Forest Protector hit the Suitman, and also a dramatic shake when entering the boss room, together with the music change and the Forest Protector standing still for a moment to create the feeling of a grand encounter.
I explained all of this because I am happy to share what I managed to build in such a short time and with limited experience. Since this is my first finished game, I feel very proud of it. I also learned that I need to reserve time to test the build after exporting the game, because several mechanics were working perfectly inside Unity, but did not behave the same way in the published version.
I joined the competition mainly for the adventure. At first, I clicked almost just to see how it worked, and suddenly I was already registered. From there, I started preparing for the jam, and it became a huge experience. I am really excited to join more in the future.
I will attach some images of the gameplay HUD and the boss scenario, where there were also pillars that would shake along with the camera to reinforce the feeling of impact and drama. After the evaluation period, I intend to fix these issues as soon as possible and finish some ideas, including a brief way to tell a bit of the lore at the beginning of the level.
Congrats on finishing your first game! That's a great milestone, you do learn a lot of stuff when you finish a first game :D. You definitely put a lot of thought into the design so that's amazing. And yes testing is super important because you never know how it plays with people who have no idea how it was made. Well Goodluck on fixing these issues and your next jam!