I'm not sure if there's a better way to tutorialize freezing enemies to use as platforms given that there are alternate ways to get height (Matt's double jump, the rocket powerup, the hikkori powerup, Drake's uppercut) so there's no way to FORCE a player to do it to proceed.
Hey, I think one of us isn't fully understanding the other. I wasn't saying you should design the section to FORCE the player to use ice; I was saying that an obvious series of floating enemies that can't be jumped on would be a better way of subtly conveying your intentions, as opposed to a single enemy that CAN be jumped on and a platform that just barely can't be reached from bouncing on said enemy. In the second chandelier level, the second time the game requires ice for non-Matts without traversal powerups to reach a painting, you use one of those electrified black sphere enemies, and that's a much better clue than the ghost cat since, as I said, they can't be jumped on safely without freezing them, but the platform visibly can't be reached otherwise. All I'm asking is for a similar clue to be implemented in Hellfire Mountain.
Anyway, I've beaten the game and gotten all the keys, and to reiterate: I think the game is good overall; decent graphics, good humor, fun gameplay, solid level design, and the hints for missed keys are also just as helpful as I was hoping they'd be, even if said hints are a bit out of the way. I just have a few final points of feedback:
1) There's no cat claw powerup in Unstable Footing Underside, so the only way to get the key is to bring the power in from elsewhere. Once again, I feel the need to point out that all other worlds' keys can be gotten using the powers within each of their respective levels (and that this would be a non-issue if Inventory items could be used within levels--even if only at checkpoints). Also, I think you should add one more coin to the bottom of that coin trail that leads to the Underside's key.
2) I know now that the long whip was taken by the Rich Reaper, so I'm not sure what a good whip replacement would be for the Snow Queen or Dan Maku. However, I do think some of their patterns could use some clearer tells: when Mr. 44 is about to stomp, have it move upward for a split second, and likewise, right before the Rich Reaper dashes to the other side of the arena, have him move backwards for a split second. Also, instead of the Rich Reaper's melee attack appearing all at once, have each purple arc appear one after the other.
3) When a zombie is coming out of the ground, there should be some indication of this happening on the solid tile the zombie is coming out of, because the zombie itself appears behind the player and can result in a cheap hit in the dark levels.
4) The notes in the final world are well written, but I'd appreciate if they appeared in (or at least quickly moved to) a less-obtrusive part of the screen, such as the top or bottom--or better yet, have them appear as standard text boxes that pause the game until the player pushes a button.
5) You did a great job at introducing the shadow ghosts by having the player fall into that gap and having the shadow ghost float by above right afterward. Unfortunately, the first static level (with the gibberish name) does not do a good job of introducing the shadow hands because the ledge looks safe to fall off...right until you do so and crash face-first into the enemy you didn't see. My recommendation is to have the player fall down a one-tile-wide vertical shaft (so there's no room to move left or right), then have it drop the player into a left/right split path except the shadow claws are right there beside the player.
6) A couple more typos: in the ending, Matt says "a ethereal" instead of an ethereal, and one of Jason's lines mentions "asbesthos" (there's not supposed to be an h in asbestos).
7) Personally, I was disappointed that the keys only unlocked more playable characters instead of postgame levels, but I guess different players value different things.
8) The final boss's large downward laser should have a bit more warning since it covers almost the whole arena. Maybe, instead of just having her float there, have the laser instantly show up but expand slowly for the same amount of time she spends waiting in the game's current build. EDIT: For another clue, you could have the laser's slow expansion rate also slowly speed up.
9) Speaking of the final boss, I found the spinning sword weapon to be rather unreliable at destroying the boss's bullets, and I also found that the bomb weapon made it much more clear when the boss suddenly becomes invulnerable while still pretending to react to damage. Would you consider tweaking the boss's pattern so that the bullet spiral has more frequent but smaller gaps that can be slipped through without destroying any bullets, then swap the given weapon for the bomb and move the spinning sword to the world 6 or 7 boss?
10) Is there an alternate ending? If so, are there any in-game hints on how to get said alternate ending? I already got all the paintings and notes.
EDIT: Couple more awkward phrases in the bestiary: Court Mage has "they did the correct choice" when the more natural way to phrase that is "they made the correct choice," and Water Balloon Girl has "water balloons is" instead of are. Oh, and Soul of Art says "it once were" instead of either "it once was" or, depending on what you were going for, "they once were."
3 days ago(+1)
There's no alternate ending. When making the game I felt like adding a happy ending would ruin the weight of the story.
I don't want to replace the final boss' powerup, the boomerang sword is the strongest powerup in the game and logically that should be used for the highest point of escalation in the game (the final boss).
Noted down everything else. (A lot of the grammar mistakes are because I was legit a lot worse at english 6 years ago, I still mix up is/are occasionally because of my native language being plurality-agnostic so even thinking about verbs having alternate forms depending on target is an alien concept)
Ah okay, so that means there's no postgame and the "true final boss" theme is unused, then? I was just curious.
Also, if the boomerang sword is supposed to be the strongest, you should look into rebalancing it because it dealt less damage per hit than the bomb. It could maybe have dealt more damage if a single sword-toss could hit the final boss more than once, but that doesn't happen. At best, I was only able to hit the final boss twice-at-once with the boomerang sword if I was suicidally-close enough, with the initial swing counting as a separate hit from the thrown-sword, but no matter how or where I threw it, the sword-projectile itself would never damage the final boss a second time until it returned and I threw another one. At the time, I assumed this was an intentional way to avoid cheesing the fight, and maybe it was, but you should know that it has the side effect of making the bomb the strongest powerup in the game.
And to top it off, the bomb also has a faster rate of attack since you can throw another one right when the previous bomb is done exploding.
Oh, and speaking of the boomerang sword, it'd be nice if pushing the attack button locked in the direction the player is facing until after the sword is thrown. That way, we can push the button and immediately run away from an enemy while still throwing the sword at said enemy.
EDIT: I thought of a way you could make the Teleporer Maze a bit less painful: make the process of teleportation itself faster. Right now, the player just kinda floats there for around half a second before being sent to the OUT machine; I'm sure you could speed that up by 2x or so.
Just saw you published the update already, so I guess I was too late with my last comment. Oh well; thanks for hearing me out and addressing all of the other points I brought up.
Unfortunately, the old save files crash the new build, so I guess I'll wait a bit before double-checking what changed. I was curious how enemies' patterns changed on hard mode anyway, so it's not a huge issue for me personally.
I will say, I only just now realized that all of the characters have slightly different intros when starting a new game, which is a neat detail. However, they do have a typo we both missed: Sugar and Matt say "mr." when the m should be capitalized and a space should go after the period (and maybe also capitalize the b in "boss" since that's the name Sugar gave Lloyd). EDIT: Oh, and in the latest version, the dialogue font size seems to be different depending on who is chosen.
That's worrying, neither of those things are happening for me. Are you on the Linux or Windows version?
I have a theory the savefile issue could be because reading savefiles is using a RNG-dependent obfuscation algorithm and the underlying RNG library has been silently changed since the previous version of GM so old seeds don't work anymore (so it erroneously reads extremely long array lengths and the infinite loop being parsed as a crash). The font issue, I have no idea (all dialogue should use the same font, and it's only scaled up or down depending on window size).