just throwing this reply here too, pay it no mind if you’ve seen it on Reddit
Super appreciative of this big review! And I wanted to say congrats for beating it! The other devs put a massive amount of effort into the sound and sprites.
You have good points about the gameplay and I wanted to go through them one point at a time, not as a refutation or out of spite/anger but because I talk too much and love open dialogue.
I did want to address that I don’t think this game was designed to truly be beaten in one sitting. My philosophy when creating some of the levels (yeah I was in charge of most of level creation) is that the player can quit and come back whenever and their progress is saved. The game was designed like a hard old flash game someone would come back to play repeatedly to get better at it with more game knowledge and time to think, but I probably should’ve taken more play styles into account. If you ever come back to it though I do recommend taking breaks in between; I made half the levels and I still can’t play it for too long in one sitting.
Honestly though? That’s a pretty fair playtime all things considered. It’s not an easy game, beating it on normal is an accomplishment. Congrats on powering through!
Now onto the boss:
dives do 2 damage because they’re hard to pull off; it’s a reward for going in deep and using all of your tools to your advantage. It’s inherently riskier to pull off due to all the hazards you mentioned, but the boss’ behavior is on a pattern so players can learn it and take advantage of the moments when it is open for a dive. That being said, it’s not required to dive to beat the boss, just an extra bonus for those who go through the trouble.
we had several ideas of attacks to add to the fight to spice up the default pattern, and the tracking orb was both the easiest to program and the simplest to tweak for balancing. I know no one likes homing projectiles, but we tried to make it slow enough to simply prevent turtling.
Level 12:
level 12 is a doozy that I was personally responsible for, sorry you had such a rough time with it (and shout-out to the other devs for making me nerf the escape several times).
I definitely should’ve put it in the dialogue somewhere, but many of the precise jumps in the game are actually far easier when you speed up, and that section in level 12 is probably the biggest example of that. My bad there that one’s on me
That corridor was meant as an optional path for more experienced players that wanted to save time, and it was never intended for a first run due to it’s difficulty. We thought the monitor pointing down at the junction between the two paths was a good indicator of the intended first route, but apparently I accidentally made the monitor destructible. Again that’s on me. The intended path at the bottom is far easier for a first-time experience. We’ll see what we can do to make the intended path more visible.
other notes
Funnily enough that’s one of the intended ways to beat level 9 (prom). Finding the right strategy to handle everything was the big focus of the level since taking everything on headfirst will lead to a harder time dealing with the Doll wall at the end (which requires its own strategy to deal with).
Yeah killing those little toasters is really nice, glad the allure of worker oil translates to gameplay XD
Fun facts from development:
Funnily enough the design of the level about killing dolls (level 8) is actually the test room we used to create and try her out. When we came back around to making an actual level none of us could make a better level, so we just stuck the test room in the game!
And on about hardmode; yeah that’s understandable. Autopawn made a joke a while back and it’s funny how true it ended up becoming.
And thank you for the high and fair review! I’m actually way more appreciative that you listed off your gripes with the gameplay instead of omitting it, as it gave us things to look at that we didn’t consider before. We’re so glad you had fun with it though! Thank you, from the bottom of our hearts, for playing!