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A jam submission

A Reconnaissance of Envi 5View game page

Submitted by Michael Grieshofer (@MiDev_885) — 19 hours, 28 minutes before the deadline
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A Reconnaissance of Envi 5's itch.io page

Results

CriteriaRankScore*Raw Score
Metroidvania#14.3684.368
Overall#63.8033.803
Enjoyment#73.6843.684
Design#113.5793.579
Presentation#163.5793.579

Ranked from 19 ratings. Score is adjusted from raw score by the median number of ratings per game in the jam.

Engine
Godot

Team/Developer
Michael Grieshofer - Just me

External assets
I used one sound and a image from Open Game Art and a few shaders from godot shaders. A more detailed list can be found on the game page.

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Comments

Submitted(+1)

Overall I had a good time with this game. The storytelling was fun and engaging, I was always looking forward to the next story beat. I enjoyed the boss encounters and the exploration for the most part felt very fun (I think exploring the nooks and crannies of the snowy area up top was my favorite bit, it felt cool to kind of "escape" out of the facility''s upper bounds Super Mario Bros. style). The powers were definitely very interesting and diverse.


Generally I feel that my feedback for improvements has been shared by many people below.

The wall jump accidentally clinging to small platforms interrupting the flow through the game is unfortunate. I saw that you said there's probably no real way to fix it, so that's understandable.

The Shift Jet could be finicky at times, but I eventually got the hang of it and almost felt like I could zoom along at a good pace. Transitioning between rooms and having to move my mouse all the way to the other side of the screen to continue zooming along also interrupted the flow a bit, but that's just how the mechanic works.

I unlocked the teleport ability before the ability to move blocks, so I was pretty confused as to what it did and was worried that I had missed something during the text pop-up. I eventually got it sorted when I found the shift ability, but it was confusing for awhile.


Anyway, a very ambitious project and I'd say given its scope and the wide arrange of abilities on display, you knocked it out of the park. Great job!

Developer

I should change it so you can't get the teleport without the shape shifting. It is kind of crazy that you managed to do that. I think to get the abilities in that order you really have to go out of your way to do so. Or I'm just missing something. (oh boy metroidvania world design is hard) 

All the other things you mentioned that could be improved are already being worked on. No worries. 

Thank you very much for the feedback and playing. I'm glad you enjoyed your time with it.

Submitted(+1)

This is an impressive entry and probably one of the best, for reasons others have already mentioned. It's big and ambitious and feels solid. Good work.

I think my criticisms mostly echo others and have already been addressed, but I'll write them anyway for your consideration: 

1. The controls were serviceable for me until the shift jet mechanic. At that point I felt like I was fighting against the game and fantasizing about how it would be like to play with a controller. The platforming challenges became tedious at that point (which is unfortunate because they are well-designed). 

2.  Opinions probably vary on this one, but I was not a fan of how the wall-grip/wall-jump mechanic affects movement through the map. I didn't like how I couldn't just run and jump through the map, because if I ran into a little wall, I had to take care or else I'd propel myself backwards. It made movement less fluid. In general, the wall jump felt more of a chore sometimes than I wanted. This especially was the case in stair-step type rooms. 

3. The environments could be more visually interesting. There were definitely some big, empty, somewhat boring areas (especially in the start), but there are so many challenging plaatform rooms later on that I ended up not minding so much.

Honestly I just want to play this game with a controller and see how it goes. I'll be looking forward to the update. 

Developer(+1)

I thought about implementing controller support before because people complained about it, but I sadly have no idea how I would do that because of some mechanics later in the game. Believe me when I say that this game works really only on keyboard and mouse and you would handicap yourself with a controller if it had the option. 

Also to be honest I have no idea what the problem with the keyboard controls even is. The control scheme is fairly standard for PC games and you don't need to twist your hands in crazy ways like if you were playing monster hunter on the ps2. 

Of course I want to address this concern that so many people seem to have and the best idea I had for it was button remapping. Which is now fully implemented and will be uploaded as soon as possible.

The thing with the wall jump is that the problem with the stairs is just a natural consequence of having a wall jump to begin with. I can try to adjust the hitboxes a bit but it will probably never go away fully and I think people will just have to learn how to avoid wall jumping at the wrong time. But I will change a few things to make it better. I will add a sound when entering a wall and as mentioned adjust the hitboxes for the wall detection a bit. 

Thank you very much for the feedback and playing though. Very much appreciated.

Submitted(+1)

Making the game controller compatible would probably require changing some gameplay elements so your response makes perfect sense. I think you could still have the shift dash and even click and drag with a controller, if the shift mode was triggered by different buttons (i.e. depending on whether you wanted to dash or move a block). However it would probably require giving up aiming the taser in favor of an Ori-type auto-aim attack, which may be unacceptable. At any rate, I'll try re-mapping the buttons in the next build and see if I can find something better for myself.

Re: the control scheme, I know wasd+mouse is standard for 3d games, but I think the extra platforming demands of 2d games, including in this case, quick, alternating a-d-a-d taps while also controlling shift and space, is a lot for one hand. That said, I acknowledge that for many people this isn't an issue at all. I'm glad it works for them. Different strokes for different folks. 

I should add, the fact that I've been trying to power through it regardless should say something about the quality of the game. 

One other minor qualm: I'm not a big fan of the platforming challenges that require coordination across multiple screens, especially when a mistake might mean tumbling down far and having to backtrack (seems like there are several sections like this after the second boss).

Developer(+1)

Thanks for the reply. 

I'm very glad you are trying to stick with it. It means a lot. Hopefully you can make the controls more comfortable for yourself soon. 

About the sections where you can fall down a long distance; This is something that I'm very much aware of and that I also did on purpose. In past games I often had segments like this because I think it breaks up the level design quite nicely and I just like the design in general, but I can understands why people don't like it. I tried to not have too many of those sections in the game and also to not make them too punishing.

Submitted(+2)

The falling between rooms became more a problem for me with inter-room shift jet puzzles. There were times when I'd get into a new room and, due to how close my character already was to the bottom of the screen, I literally couldn't get my mouse into a place within the game window that would allow me to continue in the direction I needed to go. This led to a few frustrating tumbles.

Submitted

Beat it :) btw I encountered a small bug when falling while trying to get to the optional boss fight in the snowy area. Sometimes when I fell the player would disappear on the board with the horizontal lasers but not die and I'd have to reset the game.

Submitted(+1)

I love ALL of the UI elements and appreciate the different sound pitch for landings. You've picked good way to introduce the story elements on-reports. The use of different colors in each area is great and I like the clean backgrounds.

It looks like the sprite could be bigger so traveling through the huge areas doesn't take too long but if the idea was to show the solitude in a wide space like this some more detailed backgrounds could make it look like an even more conscious decision. 

The location of the first enemy right after getting the zappy skill feels like saying in level design language that it could be used on it - maybe to stun it? The range of the weapon is a bit unclear due to particle effect used for its attack visuals, seemed to ignore the wall when too close to it.

That's it for my nitpicks, overall good job and a really solid entry!

Developer(+1)

I sadly didn't have enough time to make more detailed backgrounds. Some screens are very empty on purpose to convey the isolation of the station. I was going for a almost liminal space like feeling... didn't succeed of course and I will bring some more detail to the backgrounds at a later point in time. 

Also the taser can absolutely be used on the enemies. Was the feedback for hitting them not noticeable maybe ? Because that's an easy fix.

The range of it IS the particle you are mentioning btw. And it's even bigger than that. Everything the line touches plus some phantom range takes damage.

Thank you very much for playing and leaving feedback. Very appreciated.

Submitted
Deleted post
Developer(+1)

Thank you very much for the feedback. 

I personally am extremely opposed to the idea of having the game outright tell you where to go. I find it kills the appeal of a metroidvania for me and I wouldn't want to implement a feature that I think opposes the point of the genre of my game.

The idea of locking past areas in the beginning is however a design idea I can fully get behind. ( as long as it isn't as overdone as in something like metroid dread ) I already have some changes planned to cut off access to the upper beach area after getting into the shopping district. 

Also I find it weird that you say that there are multiple ways you can pick despite the game being kinda linear. (there are some optional abilities and sequence breaks sure, but it is very straight forward otherwise)

But you got a point with the personnel key "ability" . It was mainly meant to act as a bit of setup before getting into the real game, but I probably could have cut it out. 

Thank you very much for playing though.

Submitted(+1)

I did not expect this game to take so long. I've kinda been playing it on and off for 10 hours, all without closing my browser. The game has such a ridiculous amount of content for a jam, and the map is well designed, although I did find myself getting lost a lot, madly backtracking for around an hour. On my playthrough, I didn't collect enough abilities in the residential area, and ended up somehow ending up in the green area with only one shift jet and no shift extend, leading to me spending half an hour trying to do stupid skips I didn't even know were skips. (This was entirely my fault though.)

The platforming of this game is extremely satisfying. It's kinda rare to see proper jump buffering, coyote time and jump height control in a jam game, but it's executed really well here. Also, despite the character being two shapes, it's really satisfying to bonk your head on the ground using the character's air rotation and hear that noise as you land. The one annoyance is lack of air control, but I understand that adds to the feel of the character. Maybe a little more air control would be nice, but not too much.

Also, the main shift mechanic feels absolutely useless once you get it, although it's pretty cool, as it's only really used for opening certain doors. Thankfully it's upgraded quickly to become much more interesting and diverse, but I feel like from the get-go you could have increased the time before the player slows to a halt, so it can be used to increase jump height a little more than it already does if you time it right. However, this slowing time should be drastically decreased when falling, as it's incredibly demoralizing trying to slow your fall with it only to see the cool trail effect go further down - it's meant to be a hover... (I do appreciate the interesting  take on the theme though - shifting shapes around instead of shapeshifting.)

On a random side note, HOW do you do that insane jump right from that screen in the fourth screenshot??!! I know you're meant to have three shift jet unlocks at this point, but I just never seem to make it on the attempts my shift jet doesn't get screwed over by the screen transition (y'know, when the direction of shift jet changes because your mouse is in a different place relative to the player). I never made it up there in the end. Also, why does the shift jet have to be in the opposite of mouse direction? I know it's meant to feel like a sort of launch, but it would just feel so much better if it launched TOWARDS the mouse cursor, like Ori's bash.

Also, the game feels a little empty. I understand you spent most of the time on content, but even small deco like those seashells and parasols at the beach would have gone a long way if you used them a lot more. More frequent enemies would also have help. Also, try making different variations of tiles to add more visual interest. In my game, I sorta spammed them around places of interest to (hopefully) attract the player's attention, and places that looked empty. The bottom part of this tutorial is sort of what I'm talking about.

Apart from what I covered in that little rant, it's a solid game that I quite enjoyed.

Developer

First of all, thank you so much for all the amazing feedback. You have some really good points that I think I can and will tackle to improve in the update I'm currently working on. 

I also wanna say a few things to your complaints.

The air control. I know the air control is a little tight and that is very deliberate. I wouldn't wanna change it too much since I already did all the level design with this amount of it in mind, but I will try my best to make it a little more freeing if I can. 

With the main shift mechanic I think you got an amazing point there. I will see how I would implement that though. But I'm sure I can figure it out. 

About the idea of having the player go IN the direction instead of the opposite I'm not so sure. This is absolutely an personal preference thing and I think if I change it I would probably alienate some other people, having a setting for this may be a solution.

And lastly: the art problem. YES ... I KNOW. It is very empty. I was scrambling at the last minute to get at least 'some' art done. And I only managed to do the crappy little skyline backgrounds. I'm sorry. I will do better next time. 

And the jump you mentioned is just a bit tight. To make it easier you can let go of shift when you initiate a shift jet. This gives you a little speed boost and makes the jump a lot less tricky. 


Thanks again for all the feedback and playing the game. And also sorry for my bad grammar ? It's very late for me and I'm tired so if I messed something up ... oops.

Submitted (1 edit) (+1)

The movement on this feels so good, probably the best I've experienced in this jam so far! I'll admit, the artstyle is not necessarily to my taste but it doesn't even matter because of how good it feels to play. The puzzles and platforming challenges hit that sweet spot of not being challenging but not frustrating, and the map layout is intuitive. Really well done!

Developer

I think you mean it IS challenging but not frustrating, because otherwise that would be a failure on my part :)

Thank you very much for playing and leaving the comment. Very much appreciated.

Submitted

Ah yes I do mean it IS challenging

Submitted(+1)

I love the storytelling of this one, and not just that. The design of the map, the powerups, the puzzles, the music, everything is so good here. I kept playing until I finished it, and thought to myself: "Yes, this is a metroidvania!". The way the tunnels at the end of the game connect each section to one another, the different biomes, the bosses, hours of content, lots of powerups, phew!

If I could have one critique, and it's a very small one, is that after some time all the wall jumping left my hands pretty tired, but that's all. Of course the art can be improved on, but the game has a LOT of style as it is.

I'm really impressed that this game was made by just one person. In a way, it's endearingly inspiring, because I've been flying solo for some time and I feel like I've been improving a lot, and seeing other people create amazing things like this gets me excited to continue my journey. Great job here, this is a winner in my eyes.

Developer

Thank you so much. 

I'm already working on an update that will change some things, and one of the changes that I have planned is button remapping. So that everyone can tune the controls so its most comfortable for them. 

I very much enjoyed your entry as well and I think it definitely stands out for me in this jam. 

Art is one thing that I think could always be further developed. So I like to focus on design and game feel a lot more usually.  But I think I might update the visuals a bit later down the line if I feel like it. 

Thank you for playing and the nice comment. Glad to see you here.

★ Enjoyment: 4/5

Solid game, I had fun. But I feel like the game could have more clarity on where I should go. 

★ Design: 4/5

Solid gameplay, but 'boring' level design. Also, could have more powers that actually mean something. There wasn't much significance from the power-ups I got.

★ Presentation: 4.5/5

The visual is good! I can see where I'm on the map. Good contrast and all that. I'm a bit icky about the dialogue parts, but other than that, all good!

★ Metroidvania: 5/5

Definitely a Metroidvania

Submitted(+1)

This is solid stuff. The movement feels really good (probably best out of any game in the jam) and I love the way you can quickly pull up the map as you discover more rooms + extra points since Godot is awesome. I think the art has a lot of room for improvement, especially the player in the level part of the game. 

Developer

I actually made a more complex player at some point, but then realized that the player is too small. You wouldn't see any more detail, so I had to scrap the art I had made for it. 

Thanks for playing.

Submitted(+1)

really nice, can I ask for a spoiler is their much after the first boss? I was playing on laptop and defeating them with a trackpad was not easy ;)... If there is lots more I will dig out my mouse and have another go!


Lovely game! Really great entry

Developer(+1)

Yes there is a lot more. From playtesting I figured that the game is around 2 hours long if you only do the main quest stuff.

Submitted(+1)

Awesome will grab my mouse and continue the quest later... :) once again really great job on this one! I look forward to seeing what else the world offers!

Submitted(+1)

This is another chill take on a metroidvania! Not as chill as that rhizome game, but still pretty laid back! It’s good to see that a game doesn’t have to have oodles of enemies and combat to make it engrossing or fun! I’ll need to remember that when I make games. I also like the story that’s interwoven into the game play and makes me want to add one to our game.

I think the biggest issue of the game is the choice of camera motion. Having the camera quickly switch from one level grid to another while jumping platforms is disorientating and frustrating. You can’t see what the character is falling into to stick the landing or (if they’re there) miss enemies. I would switch to having the camera simply center on the player, and maybe use some camera limits at the very edge of the levels.

I appreciate that this was a one person effort and that art may not be your strong suite and is time consuming. But perhaps teaming up with an artist would have been a good call. An artist will look at things way different than a developer and come up with things that you never would. At least that’s how it is with me! (Sorry for projecting if it’s totally off base!)

Because of the camera issues I didn’t get that far into the game - I think. And I want to get to as many games as possible. But I’ll get back to this one again when I have more time. I do want to see how it ends.

So, great job! Especially for working solo!

We used Godot as well in our game and made heavy use of the MultiMeshInstance2D to create our mining zone level. We would love for you to check it out and leave a comment letting us know what you liked and didn’t! Thanks!

Developer (1 edit) (+1)

Thank you  for the comment and the great feedback.

I am aware of the camera issue. It's something that was baked in from the start because I wanted to try a new way of loading rooms. In general when I started developing this it was just to try out some ideas I had for tech. (Mostly for one of the later abilities that you probably haven't gotten to yet) But as I went further with level design and story the room loading system got in my way a lot and I had to start designing around it. I did a lot of playtesting for it to make all the transitions as fair as I could but there are still some annoyances with it you are absolutely right. 

Just believe me when I say that using a camera that's centered on the player causes more troubles than it's worth. I have tried it multiple times and never found a solution that I found satisfying.

One thing I can do, that I should have done earlier, is to get rid of the transition. It feels a lot nicer when the camera instantly jumps to the next room. I will probably include this in the upcoming update.


About the art thing you are of course right. The art is nothing special, but that's mostly because of a lack of time. I wanted to pack this game full of content and that didn't allow me to focus on art as well. Basically all of the art assets were done in less than two hours and I used ploygon2Ds everywhere I could to save time. But I paid attention to colors, and I think that's what mostly carries the visuals.

I could have teamed up with an artist but I just wanted to do this one solo. Maybe next time.


Also I have seen a lot of games made with godot in this jam. Nice to see the engine of my choice become so popular amongst indie devs.

Submitted(+1)

I did notice the nice use of colors! Like you used distinct palettes for each area.

Well, hopefully you can get the camera thing cracked. One thing that came to mind just now - and might not work either - is how Hollow Knight automatically lands you on ground when you are jumping up into a new zone. This is probably too difficult and has other issues that I’m not thinking of. But just in case it inspires a solution . . .

Developer(+1)

believe it or not, but I too thought of that. I think the best way to do it now is to make the transition instant and polish the level design a bit more to make it less frustrating. I will try my best to fix this. I'm already working on it btw.

Submitted (1 edit) (+1)

Awesome game!  My only complaint is the controls requiring jumping with the same hand as WSAD and using the mouse at the same time. (Not the game's fault, I struggle with pain in my hands.) I wouldn't have had to quit if I could remap jump to the mouse. I simply wasn't able pass any puzzle that requires wall jumping and using the mouse at the same time.

Developer(+1)

Yeah I get it. It's quite intense. The button remapping is coming.

Thank you for playing though. And I'm sorry for your hand -_-

Submitted (1 edit) (+1)

Dude holy shit just you? Music and everything? Fucks sake you deserve the win for this awesome game. Legit the continuous development of your little ship was so awesome. I had the "okay yeah midair dash thats cool YOU CAN DRAG THE SHAPES?! YOU CAN TELEPORT TO THE DRAGGED SHAPES HOLY CRAP" feelings for this. I got everything I believe in terms of levelling up the character (some sneaky pickups there) and got to the ending. Man, where did those 2 hours go?! I had a blast with this one, you should be absolutely proud of this work.

A few complaints, and I mean a few is:

1) The player taking damage sound is too loud. I'm glad you can change the volume of stuff, but only from the main menu. I think havbing the sound options in-game would be great. Saving > main menu > volumes > back to game isn't terrible, but a QOL change for sure.

2) Remapping keys would be great. I'm not a native PC player and definitely found some trouble with the shift combos, but it wasn't too bad for me. I can imagine this would be a struggle point for people. Especially Shift+T while hugging a wall, that took some "Okay I gotta stop and think" time when executing those moves.

3) A little sound letting you know you're on a wall would be great. Similar to the landing sound, it'd be a great player-response to let you know you've sucessfully latched onto the wall. I've accidentially jumped off of short stairs, and also fell quite far while spamming space and I wasn't on the wall. This one is super minor though, don't take this to heart. I assume with more time this wouldn't even be a thing. 

That is it. I had a blast, and if you're not top 10 then this whole thing is rigged. Put the soundtrack on bandcamp and I'll download it immediately. if you have the time, definitely play our submission! I think the vibes are similar and you'd enjoy the tunes at least :D

Developer(+1)

Thanks a lot for the kind words. All the points / ideas you had had are really great and I'm going to implement all of them as soon as I find the time for it. (Oh god I have to do button remapping again - whoooohoo) Also might add controller support while I'm at it. (Just "might" because I have no idea how I would do that currently.)

About the bandcamp thing I'm not so sure because I don't use it. Maybe I will look into it eventually but at the moment you can download the soundtrack here on itch in the downloads. I also put a CC license on it so anyone can use it in their projects, commercially or not. 

Oh and I already did play your game and left a long-ish comment over there. I really liked it.

I very much appreciate the feedback you gave and the time you spent on the game. Makes me feel great about my work - thanks for that.

Submitted(+1)

The amount of content in this game is crazy. The puzzles are frustratingly perfect. I can't find a single thing to offer a critique on. This may be a winning game. Congrats!

Developer

Thank you so much for the praise and playing my game. It means a lot.

Submitted(+1)

No problem. I'm really interested how you designed your world, as a fellow Godot user. It seems like it's one big scene, with you using camera limits and lerping them to the next room.  My thought's would be that being one scene and having as many entities as you did would slow the game down, but its all smooth running. Also interested in the map overlay, because it seems like it would be much  better than my solution.

My system is obviously not great.  I start with a Node2D scene and make a tilemap for each room as I block out the whole map. After that I add an additional tilemap that I use to trace the entire collection of tilemaps. In the script on the root node, I get the used tiles from the "stitched/traceover" tile map, iterate through the cells and create a 1x1 rect  in the _draw function. I also add in screenshot functionality, and take a screenshot of the rendering map. After that, I save each tilemap as its one scene to be instantiated in the actual room scene.

Then I create the actual map scenes which has a TextureRect root node with the screenshot as the texture, and for each room (Node2D), I add Polygon2D's that cover their respective rooms and doors.  The highlighting and revealing of new rooms are just signals connected to it from the player.

It's a tedious solution, and came up with it my first time entering the this jam. I wanted to change this during this jam, but my focus was learning better character movement by learning and implementing state machines. I did figure it out and am able to implement them now, but it took half the month and the design of my game ended up suffering.

Developer

Sure I can give you a bit of insight.

Every room I have is it's own instance, that inherits from a base room class that defines its coordinates, map icon, and other information. I then have a big map scene where I put down all the rooms and then use a tool script to generate an array that contains the position in coordinates (generated from its global position) and the filename. This array I then use in my main game scene to create the world during runtime. How this works is that there is always a starting coordinate. that gets added first. then I create an array called "needed_rooms" which determines all the rooms that are connecting to the current room. Then I check if any of those are already loaded and if not I add them. 

The camera also gets a signal when the room is updated  (the signal contains the coordinates of the room ) and moves accordingly. 

The map works almost the exact same way, except I'm not loading rooms but map icons instead. (The conversion into 0:1, 1:1 coords is what allows me to have square rooms in the overlay map instead of 16:9 ones btw)

In retrospect it would have probably been better to use a custom resource that contains map data to save multiple iterations of the map at the same time.

Submitted (1 edit) (+2)

The is a beautiful game. The simple aesthetic is well-executed, pleasing, and easy to read. I love that the character tips over when it jumps—cracks me up. The abilities are interesting and create good platforming puzzles, with a good mix of classic mechanics and new ones (that I hadn't seen at least). The pacing of the power ups was nice, too.

Unfortunately for me, though, the Shift Jet was the end of the game for me. I can't manage wall jumps with one hand and the mouse with the other and then press shift on top of that. I was just squeaking by with the taser blocks, but sadly that last one did me in.

Regardless, I think this is amazing work. Very well done!

Developer

Yes the game can be pretty intense on your hands. Some other people have already requested button remapping to make it more comfortable for them and that feature is definitely coming. 

Thank you for playing and leaving a comment.

Submitted(+1)

Very cool narrative idea.You have a very good level design.

Submitted(+1)

A truly fantastic game, despite its simple appearance. Nice work! Unique concept!