itch.io

Wow, this is incredible feedback! I think you hit the nail on the head with your first two points; I've felt that grounded and aerial acceleration / deceleration has always been my Achilles' heel when it comes to making a platformer. Splitting the mid-air vectors like you mention sounds so simple in hindsight, but it had never once crossed my mind as a solution.

The lack of snappyness in the attack was definitely a product of both the jam’s time constraint and me not being the most experienced with animation (and more importantly, blending animations together). Certainly something I would have liked to circle back on had time permitted. It’s a similar story with the sprinting. We had noticed the slow startup from zero speed only after many of the level assets had already been modeled, so I was hesitant to mess with the movement much more and risk running out of time if the level design needed to be fixed to account for that sort of change.

I really appreciate these suggestions, I can see myself returning to this comment many times in the future whenever I’m starting similar projects. Thank you!

Thank you! The basic movement being off definitely seems to be the overwhelming consensus, definitely something I'll work to improve in future projects.

Thank you! I was very proud of those animations :)

Gotcha, thanks for the clarification!

Thanks for playing! Out of curiosity, was the lack of control the result of any specific ability, or more so from the basic walking / turning / friction of the character?

I really liked the movement of this game, it felt largely fluid and fun to chain things together to go fast. The scale and open feeling of the world is impressive, and the music fits in with each area quite well.

The major downside here is that I couldn’t actually find my way to the end of the game. I got the mcguffin in the ice area and turned on the wind gusts in the forest, but after that I was at a loss. With the forest area taking away my glider, the wind didn’t seem to be strong enough to get me further in the forest area (despite the seemingly obvious diagonal wind), and anywhere else I went felt either inaccessible or completed (or I’m just blind??).  I couldn’t even backtrack through the part of the forest I was already in because the wind couldn’t get me anywhere.

I probably would have completed this game if there was a bit more guidance. Either way, really liked what I did play, enjoyed the whimsy, but in the end I had to do my taxes.

This was a fun little movement demo, I look forward to seeing where this goes in the future! The wall climbing and running feels pretty good and decently unique, too.

A few notes on the movement:

• Jumping from a wall run feels weird when all your horizontal momentum gets canceled by it. It just doesn’t feel as smooth as the level design would lead you to expect.
• I found that the maximum climb height felt inconsistent initially. After some experimenting, I found the difference wasn’t the climb itself, but rather whether I initiated the climb at the start of my jump or at the apex of it.
• I think a button to simply drop off from a wall without jumping would be nice, especially for times when I didn’t mean to grab onto it and a jump would send me off and away from the platform I was on.
• Attacking could still use some work (but I also acknowledge that it wasn’t exactly the focus here and is still unfinished.)

You all nailed the artstyle on this one, very unique atmosphere with perfectly unsettling music to accompany it.

My only critique is that the movement feels a bit janky, keeping inputs when I want them to stop and eating others that I want to have go through. I also encountered an error where I died without having ever saved and the engine found no existing save file to load me back to.  Otherwise, this was a pretty smooth experience!

I’m not sure whether I finished the game and there’s just no end screen, or if I got stuck due to a lack of direction, but either way I love how fluid the movement in this feels. The animations of the cat-alien-thing are very well done and the little climb that they do when hitting a wall is a fun detail. The dash is also very enjoyable to use (but I would recommend adding an indicator of when it’s on cooldown, since it doesn’t seem to reset on landing).

I would like to have seen some sort of popup saying what a collectable is or how to use a new ability, because it’s difficult sometimes to know what a new ability is without any direction. This is part of the reason I’m not sure if I finished the game, because I couldn’t figure out what the second collectable did and I would get stuck in a nearby large room (unfinished boss room?) just after chasing the green guy, who vanished down there.

Overall, this is a very good start, I could certainly see myself playing a more finished version in the future.

I wasn’t able to finish this game, it felt very slow and death without any form of saved progress is far too punishing. It also felt as though there was a lot of waiting in this game between waiting for health to recharge after missing a difficult jump or waiting on moving platforms.

I only made it as far as finding the wall run over the course of around forty-five minutes, and gave up after not knowing where to go after the wall jump tutorial popup. The nearest respawn checkpoint was quite far away, before a set of moving platforms, which added a deal of wait time that discouraged any experimentation with the movement. I fully gave up after falling one too many times and having my progress entirely wiped.

I do like the aesthetic the game goes for, though. The neon city is cool and, looking around at all the platforms in the sky, I like the application of verticality to the map. Definitely some interesting ideas at play here, but I fear that the game was too punishing for me to get to see many of them.

No, saving does work in browser, it just made for a slight nuisance having to refresh the page after each pickup in order to get back to the main menu and see the keybind. It's more a user experience thing than anything majorly inhibiting :)

This game wasn’t really for me, personally. I completely see what it’s going for with the slower, more precise movement, and I believe it's a very novel idea that could work, but I just found it to be clunky to work with. What didn’t help with this feeling was what felt like too few respawn or save points around the map, which led to runbacks that only exacerbated my grievances with the movement.

While I did end up collecting all three abilities, there were two specific points where I was about to give up. The first was after about 20 minutes of wandering without finding anything – I had missed a pathway that led to the attack ability, and only found it after deciding to start a new game and go a different way. The second was with the string of moving platforms near where the water immunity ability was, where some platforms were so small that I kept sliding off of them after jumping. 

That being said, this game absolutely oozes style. The colors and character models all look great, and despite being built from mostly flat-textured primitive shapes, the water-ruined cityscape’s view is beautiful. North’s animations have so much weight to them, it perfectly complements the core idea of the movement (even if I didn’t personally jive with it). And the sound adds so much to the ambience, movement, and even the menus. I just really wish I had enjoyed the actual gameplay more, because I cannot overstate how incredible the presentation actually is.

The thing that stood out the most to me immediately was the music – it set the atmosphere perfectly. At first I wasn’t a huge fan of the floaty controls, but they definitely grew on me over time, and the level design was definitely made with those in mind.

One thing I never grew to like, however, were the instakill pits / spikes / things-that-eat-you. Very few other things actually deal damage, and instantly dying from missing a single jump kinda (in my opinion) invalidates the point of health upgrades.

It was also a bit unclear as to exactly what some pickups did. I never figured out how many hearts led to an extra health, nor did I ever find out what the other green orb items did. There was some slight confusion on what the difference between the area-specific sigils and the five major ones for the end room was, but that did get cleared up eventually. 

The artwork was great, the bridge scene with the logo moon in the background was absolutely stunning, as was much of the other environmental spritework. Fun game, great vibes!

This game is really good! The combat is incredibly unique and fits perfectly with the tight controls. The art here is also very pretty, there was never a point where anything felt out of place. 

If I had to give a point of criticism, I would say that some room transitions with enemies immediately present felt a bit unfair or unreactable, especially when paired with the glass cannon effect of cursed sword, but save points were common enough that backtracking was never a major pain point.

The gameplay was pretty enjoyable and the running gag of re-entering your name was pretty silly. I still have no idea what’s going on in the story though (oh well). I quite liked the animations of the player character’s limbs, I found that very charming.

The map itself felt a little bit linear for a metroidvania, with very few places to go and explore that aren’t on the main path. I also ran into a softlock where I fell in a pit in the lower cave, respawned past the large enemy, hit the checkpoint just outside the castle by the robot NPC, and found I was unable to break rocks to progress, causing me to have to restart the game.

The game felt fairly fun to control overall, I liked the vine climbing especially. It was a pretty charming little game!

I really like the idea of placing platforms, and the level design is pretty well thought out in how everything seemed to circle back in on itself.  The only major issue in this respect is with the purple key; I found it was very easy to miss, as the nearby green wall naturally draws you in the opposite direction, and with the entrance to the purple key being so high up, it’s easy to just not see it entirely (looking for this area alone probably doubled my playtime, but I may also just be blind).  Otherwise, I very much enjoyed the exploration aspect.

My biggest gripe is more so with the base movement and combat. The jump feels too floaty and the air control too low for the platforming to necessarily feel great, and aiming the attack forwards and back (on controller, at least) felt too sensitive.  On top of that, having to stand still for so long to aim makes bosses frustrating with how much they spam projectiles, and basic enemies obnoxious since by the time the projectile hits the ground, they’ve already moved elsewhere.

Visually, the game is great, I quite like the character and enemy designs. The environments are also distinct with each zone having interesting landmarks to look at; I never felt lost in the sense of not recognizing an area I’ve already been to. Exploration was certainly a strength with this game.

Overall, well done on the visuals and world design, but the controls could have used a bit more time in the oven, I feel.

Pretty fun game here, I really liked how the second boss requires you to juggle the locations of both yourself and the tank, which works especially well with its relatively simple attack pattern. I also appreciate the control popups when picking up the gun, tank, and double jump.

I only have a few suggestions / criticisms, but these are more nitpicks than anything and really didn’t detract from the experience:

• I wish there was a sound or more clear visual indicator on when the tank’s attack was fully charged. Judging when to let go is a bit difficult based purely on the line’s opacity.
• Also with the tank, I found that if it was within range to pick up while I was still controlling it, I was unable to press S to stand up until first moving the tank out of range.  This got me a couple times during the second boss.
• I’m not quite sure what the little potion-vial looking pickups did (if I were to guess, I think they upped my gun damage, but I’m not fully sure on that). A small indicator would be nice there.

I liked the idea of capturing creatures to create a new ability, and having a shrink ray fits the theme in a very clever way. I do wish the keybinds were shown somewhere besides the keybinds menu, especially when I have to fully restart the game to get to the main menu and, by proxy, the keybind menu. 

Exploration could have benefited from not blocking off areas with invisible walls, this led to a bit of confusion where I wasn’t sure where to go for a bit, not knowing that an invisible wall I had run into earlier had quietly disappeared at some point.

(And a bonus nitpick: the menu button sound is a bit ear-piercing; I would recommend turning it down or using a different sound in the future.)