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A jam submission

SummitView game page

Climb a mountain. Avoid despair.
Submitted by ashashza — 1 day, 5 hours before the deadline
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Summit's itch.io page

Names and Email Addresses of Team Members
Ashley Peter - ash.gdc@peter.co.za

Categories Your Team is Eligible for
Art, Tech, Narrative, Overall. Not currently living in SA, happy to forgo prizes.

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Comments

Submitted

I'm really excited about this! Overall, great game feel and play experience.

- Loved the slowmo combined with the great music choice.
- The feeling of traveling further and your view slowly expanding over time really gave me an awesome sense of progression.
- Adding a redemption mode really spoke to the theme and was generally just an awesome addition to the game.

Some issues I faced:
- I feel like you could swipe from anywhere to make this a bit easier to play, as there is only one action at any one time, you don't lose anything by doing that.
- The player would not always go where you pointed, not sure if that was a physics issue but I found myself falling short on a few hand holds because of that.
- That inspiring sort of jealousy. Very cool!

This would be GREAT for mobile. Pleeeassse make it for mobile!

Developer (1 edit) (+1)

Thanks. 

Good point on swiping from anywhere. I think one of my greatest skills in game dev is making things more complicated than they need to be :P. 

On not going where you pointed, I wondered about this for a while. It felt like if you could always go exactly where you dragged... then the challenge evapourates. But if there's not enough predictability... it's super frustrating. I'm keen to learn more about getting this to feel right.

Hehe on the inspiration jealousy... I've certainly felt that seeing your work... so I'm happy to keep the loop going :)

Submitted

I just wana say that I'm really glad that grips don't break when climbing irl! Cool physics and fun jam!

Developer

Amen ;D

Submitted

This was an excellent experience, and overall impressive for a jam game - I had a great time!

The different holds you can go for made for really interesting choices every time you moved, so it was engaging to play and see how far you could get. I also enjoyed the overall level design. It starts out really simple, and then in the middle you have a lot of choices and wide walls, and then towards the end the distance between holds is huge! I didn't finish, but I really enjoyed the progression of difficulty here!

My feedback would be on a few things! The first time I played, I didn't have the physics bug out too much, but my playthrough today had them bug out quite a bit, I'm not sure why! It's quite an understandable problem for sure, so I'm not too critical on that for a jam. 

Additionally, the first time I played it wasn't clear that the black holds were a negative thing - it was only clear once I died. You could maybe add some more negative feeling feedback, like a painful sound effect to convey this sooner? 

You could perhaps also add some wind/motion lines to the hands to emphasize the movement and speed, just for additional feedback/juice to how you move, and also notice how you movement changes over the course of playing. 

Again, overall this was excellent - great job!

Developer

Thanks for the kind words, thrilled you enjoyed it.

Ye, those physics :P I was pretty concerned about it because sometimes it can glitch out enough to result in complete loss of hope (for the developer too).

I agree on the black grips, sound would be a great signal there.

Really nice idea on the hand motion lines. Hadn't considered that at all and I think it would really add something. Thanks.

Submitted

climbing out of despair was great. The lighting as you get back to wall was especially nice. Got some funny joint glitches every now and then when reaching up for a big jump. You could have implemented a left-click-left-hand mechanic and vice versa for right for faster climbing, instead of click on hand and drag mechanic, but just a suggestion. Loved this little gem of a game

Developer

Thanks FanieG!

I really like this left-click left-hand idea... it's something I'd definitely experiment with if I work on this more.

Submitted

"Despair", not "Dispair".  (Also "further" rather than "farther" but "farther" is not actually wrong.)

I was worried that I was going to struggle to play this, like Witchdoctor Duel, but I got a handle on it (ha!) quite quickly. The instructions are a bit misleading because you assume you have to click the hand and drag carefully all the way to a handle but you just need to click somewhere sort of near an arm and drag in the general direction, as long as the arrow is pointing where you want it to go. I think that's where other people may have struggled in that they didn't realise that as I didn't at first.

Once I could control it properly it was really fun. The mix of frustration and accomplishment is just right and - once I was pretty good at playing - the good games became almost meditative experiences as I figured out the angles and swung along (except for the times when the ragdoll had disintegration disco seizures but I know you know about that bug).

At first I was really confused as to why, when I grabbed the black handles, it said "Hope" and that seemed to be negative but after a while I realised it was saying "- Hope" and the others were saying "+ Strength" etc. Those symbols look like dots/bullet points and are really not easy to read, especially because when you're playing at the beginning you're focussed on trying to play so you only read the text with your peripheral vision. I'd recommend making those symbols more defined.

I wasn't bothered by the red handle until I read David's comment, because he's right, and now it does bother me a lot. Maybe make them yellow or orange?

The choice of music was really great and very much enhanced the experience. I liked how when you fall into the pit (which is a clever training area as well) the ragdoll flops down as a breathing sound plays in the audio, which I assume was a happy accident but it's still really perfect for the moment.

=====SPOILER=====

I was expecting more to the ending. I though maybe I was climbing the word "summit" or something - maybe I was and my perspective just wasn't broad enough - and that at the end it would show you the entire wall so you could see what it was and what you'd accomplished so that was slightly disappointing that it didn't happen but not majorly so.

In all this is a really great game and perfect for the theme. There's not much to improve - but I would like to have more to play if you want to work on a bigger version of the game (more levels or something like that).

Developer(+1)

Thanks, this is excellent feedback!

Oh my gosh, "despair" spelling error is super embarassing. I've never been a great speller, but this is a new low. Thanks for pointing it out.

Good point on the controls and clicking anywhere. It seems I've got a habit of over-complicating them :/

So glad you felt like you got into the meditative state! That's totally what I was going for. 

I agree with you on how the black & red grip don't read well. I considered having "Loss of Hope" instead of "-" but that felt less elegant. 

Congrats on reaching the summit! I'm with you on the ending too. I'd run out of time at that point and would have liked to do something a bit more climactic. 

Again, thanks for taking the time to write that up, helps a ton.

Host

Hi! Just a reminder of this rule: " To be eligible to win any of the prizes, your team has to play and give feedback to five other entries by Monday, 5th October 2020". 

So if you haven't done it yet, you still have the rest of this weekend and Monday to give your feedback!

Submitted

wow. this game is beautiful. i like how taxing it was having to move each hand because i felt like it was reminiscent of life. well done :)

Developer

Thanks!

Submitted

Really cool experience. I do wish though that I didn't need to literally click a hand and move it and instead the left/right hands were bound to left/right mouse and then balanced accordingly. You could probably climb really quick but it might feel really cool that way, I wonder..

Loved the powerup themes but think there should've been more negative blocks, and like ol' Dave said below, red should really be used for negatives, I actually avoided them all game.

"Dispair" semi-death was really cool!

Developer

Thanks ReadyGo.

Interesting idea on the control scheme there. Are you imaginging that you left and right click (not drag) on a point to move the climbers hand in that direction?

Nice feedback on powerups, noted on red. On the negative blocks, currently once you've used a block theres a 45% chance that it respawns as a bad / - hope block. Moving that to 50%+ changed the difficulty a ton, like I'd never be able to return after dropping down a bit. Would have been cool to playtest with more folks and find better numbers here :)

Thanks again.

Submitted

Well, I think the dragging part of it is important actually, I just didn't enjoy the finickiness of trying to click the small hands, if I could just drag from the body with mouse1 for left arm and mouse2 for right, I feel it would be a little more satisfying... also that could mean its possible to accidentally detach yourself too which would be a laugh and a challenge. Not sure if it would be better but might be worth testing :]

Submitted

This was an awesome entry! Great mix between fun and challenge. :) 

Also good use of music for the climb and rag-doll physics adds to the fun.

I'd only suggest changing the red grab points to a different color cause red usually means negative.

But I always felt like I was on the brink/edge so good job all round! :)

Developer(+1)

Thanks David!

Good input on the red grab points. Steven mentioned this on Discord too. Wondering about it afterwards... it's interesting how red is often associated with danger / bad and yet games often use red for health! 

Submitted

Haha I think it depends on where it's used. XD Usually if it's in the scene and doesn't look like a pick up. I usually think it'll hurt me.

This was really fun to play, I do think the rocks should not spawn while jumping as I had from time to time grabbed the depressing rocks as they appeared while I was aiming to hit other rocks behind them while they did not exist. but I really enjoyed playing this. I don't know if you fixed the powerups but when I played it there was a clear difference when I tried to collect all of the powerups that I could and when I didn't bother. They really help.

Developer

Thanks! 

Great point on the rocks respawning. Initially they we're hiding & appearing at all but things felt a bit too easy then (and I was getting caught on previous rocks often). I still feel like having them respawn is the better option but ideally balancing the timing so they don't spawn in while you're mid-move would.

Nice observation on the powerups. It should be impossible to summit without getting a bunch of them. I also liked how some of them become unweildy without others. E.g. if you have tons of Strength but not much Perspective, you can fling yourself wildly into risky situations. That feels like a metaphor for life :)

Was good fun playing it. The different "powerups" (patience, strength, perspective etc.) seemed a little arbitrary as it didn't seem like they were really doing anything? Also experienced the player falling apart into a million pieces hah, which could be a very cool mechanic for when you drop and splatter all over the floor. Managed to get pretty far up after getting the hang of it (see what I did there)


Cool game, would actually dig to see this developed further.

Developer

Thanks 00B! Glad you enjoyed it.

The powerups definitely do something, it's not possible to summit without getting a bunch of them. It's really good feedback to know you didn't notice as they kicked in, thanks. With more time I'd have liked to add more feedback around getting powerups.

<3 puns.

Submitted

Loved playing this one, managed to get quite high (just short of the third? area I believe) really a lot  of fun once you get a hold of the climbing, one thing I did notice was if you fall far but manage to catch yourself the model starts jerking around and it's difficult to find your hand before dropping.
I also really like the despair mechanic of climbing out of the hole to continue climbing. 

Developer

Thanks! 

Good job getting so high, the third area is the last one! 

I'm sorry you had to witness that poor model disintergrating. I spent hours wrestling with the physics system but it still goes nuts sometimes. Hiking accidents are the worst :P

Submitted

The soundtrack is super awesome, the colours are really minimalist, and it looks intuitive to play. Excited to try it out!

Developer

Hey, thanks for the kind words! I stared at this for so many hours, I couldn't tell if it was good or not anymore :)

Keen to hear your thoughts after playing.