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HugoLCSB1 year ago (4 edits) (+2)

Wow, this game is really cool.

- Artstyle, character design, environments and animations were super cool honestly really well done and creative all around! (even though there's some janky things you need to iron out, clipping sprites and positioning of idle vs walk on the main character).

- Music and overall sounds were very impressive and in the theme.

- Story was nice, lots of dark litterary vibes.

- Level Design was good, quite a bit harder than I initially expected. I felt the whole thing with the story pages always revealing a new gameplay ability was really well done.
One thing I should say is that the spikes were very hard to see, I died way too many times to spikes I had no idea were there, not sure if that was intended or not. Also I got my way around easily enough, never got lost for too long but there were times I asked myself what was the intended path forward, the little collectible fire things were good but I think you could improve a little on suggesting the next path forward.

-Gameplay was a little rough around the edges, it worked fine but I think you could still improve it a little bit, making it less choppy and more fluid and predictable, for me the wall jumps were fiddly and hard to follow through. I liked the torch mechanic and expected it to be more relevant, I think you could still think of other uses for it outside of just colleting the memories (maybe if you flash the enemies they get stunned for a second or something like that).

All in all, I'm very impressed, really good game and quite complete, when I finished it I was left wanting even more!

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Lenyril Tales1 year ago

Hi! Thank you for playing, for the kind words, and for taking the time to give me detailed feedback! I really appreciate it. It was the first game for all of us,  so every suggestion and comment helps  - visibility, spotlight mechanics, redirection and wall jumps will certainly see some work after the Jam closes :)

For the torch mechanic you are "ehm" spot on: originally I was thinking of adding a fear counter and tying the torchlight to it and to threats in more or less the way you suggest -illuminating a threats deactivates it for a few seconds;  the cost would then be that of increased fear, and hitting max fear would lead to a different ending. However, I barely managed to fit in the deadline like this ^^`

As for the gameplay fluidity, did you by chance also experience absurdly high, floaty jumps? On the computer I developed the game it runs pretty smoothly and the jumps are relatively short and fast, so that there really is only one path possible at all times; however, I tried it on my laptop and the jumps were exaggerated and felt like there was very low gravity, making most moves harder but allowing one to jump through sections in the wrong order.  I had similar inconsistencies also while running the game in the editor. If this is what you experienced, would you perhaps also know where could lie the origin of this issue?

Cheers!

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HugoLCSB1 year ago

well I'm not sure how high you intended the jump to be but I would say mine were pretty strong, I can maybe later make a quick clip for you to check if that's what it is, either that or I download the project directly from git and take a look at things.

How did you code the jump? Is it a force being added, a velocity? Are you doing it in the update method or fixedUpdate() ?

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Lenyril Tales1 year ago

Then my guess is that the movements are indeed not running as they should, so I'm afraid that that might have added extra discomfort to the playing experience. I couldn't replicate the issue consistently enough to pinpoint the cause, but there's also a lot that I still have to learn...

I coded all movements (including jumps and wall jumps) as changes in velocities, which take place in the Update() method, and not scaled by Time.deltaTime (which occasionally popped by online as a solution, but is supposedly incorrect when dealing with body.velocity).

In case you did happen to check the code on git, all movements of the player are in the  Controller_V2 class.

In any case, thank you for your time! It's great to find so much support!

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HugoLCSB1 year ago(+1)

Ok, I went to your git repo, but since you don't have the whole project there I can't exactly download and try it out on my own, but my advise to you would be to put a "Debug.log()" inside your Jump() method and then go back to the editor and try to jump a few times and check if that call is not triggering more than once, that would be my first guess. If so, you could make a global bool "canJump" and in place of calling Jump() in the update method you would set that bool to true, and then in the FixedUpdate() you would say if(canJump){ Jump(); }

I'm not sure if that solves it, but you could try it.

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Lenyril Tales1 year ago

thanks for the suggestions! I’m once more out of town, but I’ll try as soon as I get back -would be nice if it worked, and it does sound like a very sensible hypothesis :)

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