itch.io

My bad, I got confused about which puzzle was the final one. The one I was talking about was the one where its a very vertical room, you come in from the bottom left, you have two powered blocks at the bottom holding down a wide block that rises up, and theres two activators one on the left, and one on the right that has spikes around it.

I wanna start by saying I had fun with the game :). I like the core of going through these puzzles seeing the setting, getting lore, dialogue, etc. My favorite element was the platform/face cube manipulation. It's unique and fun! I also looked through your twitter and love your art style <3 As far as the game, I did have some issues.

Character Movement:

    The momentum, jump height- the physics all feel nice and I was able to get pretty good. Even to the point of pulling off some naughty stuff in some puzzles! (Ill get to that) However I had a couple qualms.

    The mid-air flip. Its a little jarring. Its something I can tell you've put some effort into, but I certainly can't say it *helped* with platforming. It felt kinda ambiguous where my collision box was sometimes. This game is half puzzle, half (relatively) skill-based platforming, so understanding the character's placement has some importance.

    Next is the wall-jumping. Despite the character having full air-control, and it being very easy to reattach to the same wall you jumped from, you can't wall-jump again. I totally get limiting the character movement for the sake of puzzles, but this feels... off. This was most apparent when- Ok I gotta paint this picture through text so bear with me:

    Im on a far-left wall. I wall-jump off over to a pillar in the middle of the room, I make it over the top of it, and reverse to land on the left side of the pillar, aaand of course I still can't wall jump. It feels unintuitive, and a little hard-limiting on a set of movements that are otherwise very free-form.

     I have a suggestion, though. Instead of hard limiting the wall jumps, instead you could give the character less air control after a wall-jump. That would naturally prevent being able climb up a wall indefinitely. You could either give the player a higher base level of "air-friction" after a wall-jump, or maybe prevent movement all together for a set time after wall jump. It would almost behave like a Celeste-style dash in that case. Regardless of what you do, I just hope it feels more natural.

Dialogue:

    The only thing I'll say about the writing is, maybe it's just not for me. I'd be willing to accept that. However, I feel the interface could use a little work.

    I appreciate the effort to prevent dialougue from halting gameplay. However, the dynamic moving box is jarring. It's not practical to engage with dialogue while you're trying to play. I would always just stop moving to read. In fact, once the dialogue is up, I have incentive to stop and read to get the moving box off the screen. Of course, it goes away when you jump, as well as flying to each side of you when changing directions/stopping leaving it in a weird place between trying to be seamless with gameplay, and not making it. It looks neat, and again it looks like you went through some effort to implement, but I'd prefer a simple static placement. It would be a lot easier to read on the fly.

Puzzles:

    Im not a puzzle designer so I can't give you too much great feedback here, but I'll do my best. Maybe take this section with a grain of salt. They puzzles feel a little... Chaotic? Like their designs need a little more time in the oven. For example the puzzle right after the intro to powered blocks: You have to move the normal block above the powered and use the powered to push it upwards where it then.. moves right for some reason? Is there some indication that was gonna happen? I couldn't tell.

    There were a few that I didn't really know if I had found the solution or cheesed it. The ability to move the blocks before they've stopped is rife for cheese, and you may wanna consider removing that feature, or making a special block specifically for that. Now I just wanna say, I had fun cheesing, and it's up to you wether or not you want your game to allow for that, Im just pointing it out. If Im not completely wrong, Im *pretty sure* there's a lot of emphasis on momentum in the puzzles. (that is if I wasn't just accidentally cheesing) This makes sense because this is a puzzle-platformer. But it comes back to my idea of chaotic puzzles. It can feel kind of imprecise flinging yourself around haphazardly, and it has some contrast to the thinking elements. It's just the natural predicament of a game that has puzzles and action.

    On my first playthrough I flung myself through half of the puzzles, abusing the freedom to move blocks however I want, along with the momentum. On my second, I tried to actually do what was intended, and sometimes didn't really know if my "cheese" was the intention or not. Here was my meta: Id ride a cube upwards, then jump off, getting the perfect momentum to make it to the target without hitting spikes at the top. On the last puzzle I was so stumped, I put the spike cube into the left-hand activator, and jumped in and out of the right one avoiding the spikes, easing the block over until the rising platform came out, and I had to jump really early to get the perfect momentum into the hole. Was that intentional?

In general I think this game has done the marriage between puzzle and action in a pretty decent way. You don't see a lot of games trying this for the problems I've already mentioned, so I gotta give you kudos for this game working that on some level.

Minor Gripes

 - Not a fan of the post-processing effects

 - Menu is full of slow animations

 - Quit button doesn't have a confirmation

Glitches:

 - Occasionally the momentum wouldn't be carried over to my jump on a moving cube

 - If you're wall-hanging on a cube, and you start to move it up, if you make it to the top of it and are holding jump, you don't die (there are also a few other instances where spike cubes didn't kill me but I couldn't see a pattern why)

I think you've got some good ingredients here! In practice they feel a little scattered. Dialogue is mostly fluff, puzzles are a little chaotic. But I can see the potential in here, and the care you've put into it. Congrats on making it this far, Ill be watching how the game progresses :)

Oh yea and the "straight-up vertical jump" is kind of a death trap. Not entirely sure if it is *possible* to make it over an enemy that way, but I would say it's not really pheasible.

The dedication to the arcade aesthetic is commendable! The whole vibe is right at home with Mappy, Mario Bros, Burger Time, etc etc. I'm impressed with the detail and character you we're able to achieve with such low resolution! The gameplay itself is simple, but has that addicting quality, just like the classics.

Criticism:

I was disappointed to see that the level plays out the exact same every time. I think there's some simple things you could do to mix it up. It would also be cool to see things progress in difficulty the more levels you complete. Moreover, having a different scene to look at would be great. I don't have much incentive to play to the high score point as it is.

The Spray has no indicator for it wearing off, this definitely got me killed a couple times. Now, this is certainly true of another classic, "Donkey Kong", but that doesn't make it a good thing. I would take a queue from SMB1 here, and just give the player a second or two longer after the music has stopped.

The screen real-estate. The art is adorable, but It can get a little squinty trying to look at the game. We're already dealing with a vertically oriented game, and I can't even use the whole vertical space of my monitor.

Nit-picks/Small things

- You can't go down the stairs once you've started going up

- The keyboard doesn't work at all while a controller's plugged in

Overall, all the ingredients are here for a great simple game! I hope you take some time to tune things up :) Have a good one!

Ok, im not sure whats up, but I downloaded the latest version, and the game just starts me in a grey room falling forever

I actually managed to escape with brute force on the left somehow! I made a proper save in the menu, fell in again and tried to load and got this crash. I can send you the save if that would help, but Im not sure where to find it.

Just posting this alone because it was a pretty bad bug, Fell straight through the floor in the room above this one and had to full restart because I was completely stuck.

I'm glad you're receptive :). Also don't need apologize to me, you're the one whos gonna feel that polish when you inevitably have to refactor things ;) (Its an inevitability with game dev). Again, good luck!

I think calling this a demo gives off the wrong impression. The game is currently lacking all 4 of its listed "FEATURES" from the main page. This puts criticism in a bad way, because it makes me  wanna respond to it as a demo, instead of what it really is, which is an alpha. A proof-of-concept. That's where the game is right now.

It feels wrong pointing out anything in particular, because I'm judging something that's not really there. The game isn't fun yet. But the *game* doesn't really *exist* yet! The things that will make the game fun, aren't here.

Imagine Vampire Survivors, but its just the first level, with no drops, no upgrades, 1 type of enemy, and 1 player attack. The whip.

Despite this, I'll try to point out the most pertinent things for right now.

- Game starts too abruptly. Make a menu and tell the player the controls.

- Game has polished elements, despite lacking content.

- Bandage feels odd. Let me explain. Touching the bandage causes a counter to go up. But you don't really "collect" it? Plus when you hit it, it just goes in a random direction at a random speed, so it doesn't really feel like its responding to the player. It also didn't occur to me naturally that this was meant to represent "health". I can't say for sure I'd know if it was even a bandage without being told.

-Health. You run around batting this bandage 10 times, just for that effort to be taken away in one hit. Now, I know we've just treaded into the area of unfinished game with this concept, where there will be more traps later, but I still think it's worth pointing out right now.

You might wanna consider changing the entire identity of the object that gets kicked around in the circle. That alone is a fun idea, if a little unsatisfying that it doesn't go in the direction the player hit's it in. But tying that to the player's health feels a little strange.

I'd love to come back once the game has its core features. Good luck with development.

Does the gx.games version (linked in another reply) work? Also does it give any errors, and what OS are you running?

Thank you so much!! TWT <3 Glad you enjoyed! Sorry the end didn't work for you! Theres supposed to be a *little* more after that point. If you could tell me your OS I could look into fixing it!

For now, Im not quite sure if gx.games is OS Independent but heres this. https://gx.games/games/nbl9z0/cave-man/ 

This is very cute and cool, I want a game where you play as the little guy :)