The one that says "thanks for playing", no.
The "wall duck" level or whatever it was called, yes. Try changing the direction of your wall jump after sliding off.
Man, just when I thought I had a chance at this game jam... you gotta snatch it away from me just like that?? 😄
Yeah so I had basically zero complaints. Maybe except that this is suspiciously similar to Patrick's Parabox, although I haven't played that one yet so I can't tell how much is inspiration and how much is copying. The only place I didn't give you 5 stars was audio... you know... could've had a couple more varied/polished sound effects, could've had some adaptive music... but really. You wowed me.
Man, this is... almost amazing. I'd say a bit too many random jumpscares, "hell/eternity/judgment" tropes, and a bit too bad visual design, on the UI especially, but also non-seamless textures, weirdly lit doors, etc. And the dialog sound clipped a bit for some reason. I think the concept and especially the questions were actually top-notch writing, much philosophical, I must give you that. But everything surrounding this experience unfortunately brought it down a bit. Especially the poorly designed jumpscares. Sure, you scared me, but it wasn't a properly rewarding jumpscare, with buildup and... stuff. Idk I never really designed jumpscares, but you can do better than that.
Sorry, maybe this is semantics... but how can I give 5 stars in theme if you... never actually break the loop? xD
This is a fantastic foundation, loved the art and visual design of the menus especially! Now just add some more gameplay mechanics, like idk, balloons that you have to dodge or asteroids that can manipulate your gravitorial trajectory, or maybe even "war zones" where if you land a package you instantly lose, and this could be a cool small paid indie game.
If you're gonna update this, please make an "Ico sphere" with blender instead of the UV sphere for the Earth, it looks much better, especially at low poly. And I'd like a bit further zoom out range for the later levels. Also, I recommend making the reviews not randomly selected upon level completion, but to have the list shuffled at runtime, so that you can't get 2 identical reviews in a row, that can really decrease the immersion.
Oh man, you really touched me with that ending. Especially that song. I forgot for a moment that even game jam entries can have some soul in them. And I love the "princess kisses hero after being saved" trope, lol.
From a gameplay standpoint, I felt that the triple-shot gun was markedly worse than the default gun. Maybe it deal more damage, but it's not communicated with the game feel. It was annoying sometimes that I'd have the goated yellow laser gun and then out of nowhere get the triple-shot gun against my will.
I felt that enemies either spawned too close or moved a bit too fast for me to react while moving away from the final boss. It make me take some cheap hits, but at least there was a big enough supply of health powerups that I didn't get at all close to dying.
And apart from that, the usual "would be nice to have more enemy types and gun types" etc yada yada.
Obviously for a jam entry it would be impractical to have the player actually play through all 255 levels first... but I'm kept wondering how awesome this game would feel to beat if it was an actual full release like that. With even more fourth-wall breaks at the final boss fight and ending. This concept certainly has potential.
But please clarify... how do you see a "loop" in this game's backstory? So all other players just tried to get to level 256 and beat it and simply lost? Game-overed? Can you really call that a loop? Or was there some kind of glitch that didn't allow them to reach level 256? If so, how did we overcome it? Your interpretation seems to make sense, but under scrutiny, I don't know.
Either way I really liked this so don't let my criticism get too in your head lol
There's not much to say here really, cute theming, a bit on-the-nose dialog, cool bossfight, though you'll probably want to work on the platformer physics:
GMTK and Jonas Tyroller have some good videos on making platformers feel right.
This is cool and well made, especially given it was made in Scratch, well done! However, I must unfortunately criticize the gameplay. In such "destruction chaos" type games, it's generally good to give the player as much freedom as possible, have things fly around the screen, one thing breaking another, fire spreading from object to object, things like that.
I didn't like how restrictive the object placement was (one pixel of overlap and you get nuh-uh'd) – I think you could at least made the object glow red when you can't place it in a spot, and don't make it disappear when I click on an invalid position, but just allow me to place it again immediately. As others have pointed out, the torch is a bit counterintuitive – it only makes fires bigger instead of creating new ones, which may be a tad pointless? I mean, fires usually get bigger on their own, don't they?
Finally, there's some kind of balancing issue. While it's definitely possible to beat all difficulties with the items you're given, it's never really the "complete chaos" kind of fun. It's more of a "strategically place the few limited resources you're given" kind of fun. Which can certainly be fun, I mean look at PvZ no sunflower challenges for example, but I think that's not what you were going for. Make sure your game design is in line with your vision for the game.
Okay, so the art and story is great, humor much appreciated. But damn that guy with the white eyes scared me.
If you're gonna do a spot-the-difference kind of game, I think it's a really good idea if you tell the player what they missed if they say "normal" but there's an anomaly. I gave up trying after 4 runs failed, and each run failed I had no idea what I had missed. Things like the shadow man, cheese, or the hands on the window are easy to spot, but apparently there was some really well hidden object that I just could not find.
Apart from that I think you could improve the door opening/walking animation to make it less obvious that you're just teleporting back, and the kitchen countertop had some annoying Z-fighting.
Oh boy, I have a lot to say here. When you make a system this complex, expect many things to need fine-tuning!
All that being said, the core design is great and with a couple more puzzle elements (and maybe more balancing of difficulty/usefulness of items) this could be a great Mosa Lina-like. I'm just going for the feedback award. (:
Well, there's not much wrong that can go with a clicker. I did appreciate that the gains were balanced in a way that did not overly drag out the game, and the humor definitely netted you bonus points. I still feel you could've done more with the theme though, particularly from a gameplay standpoint... sorry, but I can't give this more than 3 stars in innovation. And apart from that, I can't really give other feedback than to add more juice! Screenshake, sounds, particles, etc. to make popping the loops really satisfying. And maybe to change the type of loop you're popping based on the highest upgrade you have.
Great, I love such video game genre mashups, I love how you merged the mechanics of both games in a thoughtful way. That being said I'd still do a bit of balancing in terms of the gameplay. Shots feel way too weak for pool, you can never get the same satisfaction as with that first pool shot breaking the triangle and sending balls flying everywhere... and one more thing bothered me, that the indicator of your shot didn't show collision with other pieces if it was very close a piece but not directly intersecting; this ruined some of my shots.
So yeah, it was excellent but for my taste not chaotic enough, too controlled.
Hm, for some reason youtube embed don't seem to work, this is the link: www.youtube.com/watch?v=sDAPKn0VZo0
I must admit, cool concept that was hampered simply by a lack of time. I know the pain. But I'll try to offer some more useful feedback:
You'll probably want to have more hard-to-understand minigames to fit the theme better. Simon Says and the sine wave minigame are pretty easy to grasp in just a few seconds. Something like the fuse minigame is better – first you have to figure out how to unscrew the top, and then what to actually do with the fuses. I'll admit I never figured out what to do with them. And here's the second tip: more feedback for when a player is going in the right direction, a "hot-and-cold" spectrum rather than just the binary "finished/unfinished".
With how you're approaching the theme, you probably want to have the player learn through trial and error. But for that to be effective, you need to have some kind of spectrum of how close the player is to figuring out the solution, because otherwise it's just random stumbling around until I find the solution.
And apart from that, there's a couple gameplay issues that I'm sure you're aware of: clicking buttons on other panels accidentally while trying to switch to that panel (I recommend just disabling interactivity on panels when you're not "focused" on them); no backspace on the numpad, so if you mess up, you just have to restart the game.
I also thought that in the sine wave minigame, you could make the change in frequency not cause the wave to fly all over the screen and just scale horizontally from the midpoint, that would make it much easier to adjust the frequency.
Thank you for playing! How would you suggest changing the game speed to be more intuitive? (I basically just stole the idea from Celeste, and they probably did it well since Celeste is a good game)
Thank you for reassuring me that the game is very hard, that is my intent :D and that the "click to toggle" mechanic is actually helpful. The point you're at is around 20%ish of the first level, so it's good to know there's enough gameplay in here.
Huh, I didn't think that part would be *that* confusing, since there's no other possible explanation. Do you think a sign showing the crosshair moving up would help?

Also, what do you think about the sign in this room? Should I add a second sign at the first part:

Or maybe change them to mouse button signs?
