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What I liked

  • I dig the space theme. Visually and musically, it all fit
  • Push-back and hover from gun fire was really neat.
  • Despite the lack of a map, the rooms felt like they were thought out and designed.
  • Boss battle felt like a classic metroidvania boss

Improvement suggestions

  • I'm not completely sold on the force of push back from enemy collisions
  • I'm not sure if this was the case with all verticle room transitions, but I did notice that the player's position starting point was static, instead of using some positional offsets. This led to one case where I was running and jumping to the left through a vertical door and ended up on the right side of the next rooms and ran straight back to the below room. So I would maybe fix that if you were to continue. (The door im talking about in my example is the door on the top left of the starting room once the real mission begins.
  • When I got the sword, I didn't notice any kind of message or feedback as to getting acquiring it and how it can be used. It only took about 10 seconds, so it wasn't detrimental to game play.
  • I noticed a lack of SFX that I expected going in. I'm sure this is just due to limited time of the jam and what you chose to focus on. But like the sword mentioned about, as a player, I want to feel like I "leveled up" so a nice sfx would be good to have.


Overall, I liked this game. While being short, it definitely showed the emphasis you put on level design. It was also nice to see progress pics over the jam and finally play it!


Great job!

Thanks for the thorough feedback! I'll share a little bit about my thought process for some of your points.

Things you liked:

2. I liked the push back on the gun too, originally it was applied when you were on the ground as well, but it was kind of frustrating in actual play. I like it while in the air though cause it gives you a sense of weightiness and helps maintain airtime. I'd definitely massage all of these values in a real release, but it served its purpose for this project.

3. I waffled back and forth on releasing a map. Ultimately, with the changes I made in the last hours of the gamejam I wish I'd been able to provide a map cause the rooms honestly do link up pretty thematically with some of the player's actions changing surrounding rooms, I ultimately opted for using musical/regional name/color cues to link the rooms together which I think works on a map that's actually only about 20 or so rooms big, but it's starting to push it.

4. I really enjoyed making the boss battle, I hope you enjoyed it. In the original plans, the player was supposed to get the Shield ability from the boss so it served as sort of a tutorial (the shield can regenerate whereas health can't), but this ultimately had to be scrapped. Either way, I like how frenetic the boss battle can get and that it balances out the sword vs. gun gameplay (if you want to get the best ending and not murder the professor).

Suggestions:

1. I am not sold either. This was my first full foray into adding forces to rigid bodies and I am not pleased with the results. I had code in place to measure what was going on with each interaction but ultimately I didn't have the time to figure out what was going on. I figured that in general the only time this really came heavily into play was the final boss battle, and that the checkpoint was close enough that I could let it slide... for now. 

2. Yeah, originally the drop-through platforms were a much bigger factor in the game and each vertical transition used a drop-through platform to cover the door frame (like a manhole cover). In some playtests, players were having trouble figuring out how to go down through doors, so I removed all of the manholes, but I didn't have time to implement a smooth vertical transition so... it ended up like this. Definitely a thing to improve on in the future.

3. This is super accurate. It was on the to-do list and got dropped in favor of other things. A super frustrating sword anecdote is that I had implemented a super fancy VFX Graph sword slash graphic, but at some point in the last few days it just stopped appearing and I couldn't figure out how to fix it. =/ I did specifically lock the player into that very small play-space so that they'd be forced to figure it out, but ultimately it's not idea.

4. Same as above, this is partially a result of me pushing back finding SFX until the last few days and once finding them not fully understanding how to make them audible (the PlayClipAtPoint feature was spotty at best in my experience, but I didn't spend a lot of time trying to really understand it). This was also a learning I had previously and failed to heed, but I should incorporate SFX into initial gameplay lest it get overlooked.

Thanks for all your feedback, I'm looking forward to playing your game sometime this weekend and giving it the  attention it deserves. We've all earned it, a month is a long time, but for me personally it's the ideal time frame.

Finally, in truth I learned a lot from this whole experience. I feel like I made a lot of progress from MVM 14,but at the same time discovered a lot of areas I want to develop. I am pretty sure I want to try 2D for XVI because I just don't want to bother with this whole lighting situation, and that means I get to spend the next two months really looking into 2D artgeneration.

No problem! Yeah, I learned a lot during this game jam as well. I also learned what not to do next time around lol. I started roughly halfway through so I focused on keeping everything simple, focus on making more complicated UI's than a simple health bar, and making the classic metroidvania style map. I'd say there was a good chance that I wouldn't have submitted if I couldn't get the map to work haha.

Ooo yeah, I want to focus on more UI stuff next time. I was FINALLY starting to get a handle on how all the layout groups work, I don't want to forget.