Thanks for asking, I would love to elaborate because I honestly think this game has potential. well, for starters, you would want it to test the player's mastery of the gravity mechanic - the games signature mechanic.
So You want to make something harder but not necessarily longer. For instance maybe you could make a more complicated version of the "navigate-a-box-through-a-maze-while-on-a-moving-platform" section. or maybe you could make the player catch a box from out the air with a well timed beam. or combine the two, something the player can feel good about when they finally get right.
You know, something that makes the game more challenging by using the key mechanic in an interesting way rather than just make the player jump more times over longer distances while carrying a box.
YES! That hectic feeling of trying to get one mini game done and you hear a few more pop up in the background in rapid succession! like: "uh oh"
Early on, pretty much the first day of brainstorming, we decided that one of the design pillars of our game was going to evoke a feeling of eustress in the player. so I'm very glad that that was enjoyable :)
The day we brought everything together and started polishing the game I think I spent way too much time "playtesting" ( in reality I was just procrastinating by playing the game over and over again for fun, trying to get further and further into the "impossible" rounds)
I'm really glad you liked the popping sounds, we took inspiration from Bloons with that one. We liked how satisfying the sounds were in that game and we wanted our enemy death sounds to be satisfying as well.
loved everything about this game, except it was almost trivially easy, is there a way to lose?
I feel like the fact that your horde carried over between levels reduced the difficulty of the second two levels. imagine if you had to take over the army base starting from one zombie, how much more deliberate you'd have to be (at least at the beginning)
This game hasn't shown up in my queue yet, but after the thoughtful and detailed feedback you left on my game, i simply had to come play it!
This game is by far the most polished game I have played so far!
if I had one note I would say that the flame didn't visually go out on the character sprite when the light dimmed, so it wasn't immediately obvious as to why i couldn't light the candle once that happened.
Another thing, maybe some candles could be pre lit to serve as checkpoints? this would allow for some extended darker platforming challenges where you have to dodge enemies while platforming.
This game has potential and I could very easily see this mechanic being added very satisfyingly to a Metroidvania.
I look forward to this game showing up in my queue so I can properly rate it.
The music interruptions might have actually been because at the later rounds we pitch it up much more than usual (so that might mess with the buffer) I'll have to look into that.
The music is actually supposed to jump in pitch, it's just not supposed to cut out lol
It means you reached what I (personally) have playfully dubbed the "annihilation rounds"
Basically it's when the game decides that it's over and tries to kill you by spiking the difficulty a crazy amount each new round, increasing the enemy movement speed by a lot, to the point of being unbeatable. Signified with the audio queue of the music getting faster and higher pitch. but if i could go back, I would probably add a visual queue as well.
Any frame rate lag, was definitely unintentional though, if we had had more time to work on it prior to the deadline we probably would have focused on optimizing so that doesn't happen. A day before the submission ended I discovered a killer memory leak that was turning the game into a slideshow (literally 3 FPS) during the later rounds which thankfully was caught. But the game would no doubt benefit from further optimization!
I wholeheartedly agree, more mini-games are needed! If we end up continuing development with this game after the jam, more mini-games would absolutely be one of the first things to be added in.
As for the difficulty, maybe we should implement different difficulty modes.
Thanks for the feedback! I definitely agree that clear instructions would improve the game, the prompt kind of disallowed that exact thing though. So after voting maybe we'll add it in?
In the meantime we set it up so that the player could do literally nothing for the first two rounds and not take any damage. and hopefully they'll see the towers automatically fighting enemies and immediately realize "this is a tower defense game". And I trust that by round three they'll have thought to press at least one of the few lit buttons on screen, if not just to see what they do.
haha yes! I think that became part of the fun tbh. From the onset one of the key design pillars in this game was to lean heavily into that "Eustress" feeling.
That mini-game in particular is both my favorite and least favorite part of the game, sometimes it's one and done, and then other times it makes me want to hit my computer, which I suppose is thematic xD
Nope, your intuition was spot on haha, the camera is definitely off. That was my personal bad. I asked if we're allowed to fix it, but I don't know if that's against the rules. So it might just have to stay a little janky for the next week. But if I get the go ahead, I might fix it sooner.
very cute game, I liked that all the Beeples had some special way you needed to catch them, the ghost Beeple I think was the easiest.
I noticed your sounds were a bit repetitive, Godot has a built in randomizer in its AudioStreamPlayer2D node, definitely check that out for next time, as repetitive noises aren't something you would immediately think about, but players definitely notice them. The sounds themselves were great though! Just could use a little random pitch shifting.
Honestly, that became one of my favorite parts of the game. The mini-game designer was cooking with that one, they call it "percussive maintenance", which I think is just perfect.
As for the camera, yeah I honestly dropped the ball on that one. I put in a camera solution early on and never ended up going back to fix the jank. If I have one regret with this game, it's the camera.
Honestly, I feel you. As the programmer who worked on that portion of the game, I kind of got a quick camera up and running and never ended up going back to tweak it. I guess I got jank blind. That's honestly my bad.
You know, looking back, I was wrong to only point out the positives with the music. In retrospect the art was cute it's clear that the artist is talented, and is probably just new to the medium of pixel art in particular.
The grilled cheese was adorable, and all the platforms read properly as platforms.
all that being said, I think I'm going to have to improve my rating of the art style.
If I had to give some advice to the artist, it would be to lower the resolution. high res pixel art requires intense amount of precise shading in order to not look bad. You were fighting an uphill battle with that resolution, not gonna lie.
Looking back at my review perhaps I was a bit heavy handed with the phrasing regarding that design element in particular.
I did not succeed, I am aware that it is likely beatable, but since failing at the end brought all the way back to the beginning, after a few tries, I had to make the decision of whether it was worth redoing the beginning of the level over and over again just to practice the end to get good enough to beat it. admittedly, the lack of controller support played a part in me making the decision to just cut my losses. If your goal was to make it frustrating enough to make a player rage quit then, you achieved your goal. I don't completely understand why that was your goal. but props on achieving it lol.
Maybe the game is just a genre that isn't for me. And if that's the case, then forget what I said about it being the worst design element, it seems that you were very aware of what you were doing and succeeded in what you set out to do.
I liked the music, and I gave you 5/5 for being self explanatory. Unfortunately, that's where the positives end for me.
This Game feels like it wasn't play tested. No controller support for a platformer is certainly a decision. The pixel art could use work. particularly in the intro, it reminds me of the early Stardew Valley portraits.
Ending an already frustrating level with precise jumps under a low ceiling while being chased, has got to be the worst design decision I've seen in this Jam so far.
I really liked the lab aesthetic and the controls and puzzles were very intuitive. Your tutorialization of game mechanics was on point.
That being said, the final room is a bit long to backtrack through if you drop the crate and have to go back for it. And, being honest, it wasn't very satisfying to complete. The final challenge doesn't so much test the players mastery of the gravity mechanic as much as it tests their patience.
This game is very easy to know what you have to do, not so easy to actually do it lol I kept dying on the second level because when i was trying to do one spell, it would register as another spell. otherwise, cool concetp and great art style and sound design
And yeah, I see what you’re saying. they are supposed to have varied movement systems and the yellow ones are supposed to stay still. But in practice it seems they keep getting caught on each other. I might see if disabling collision between the enemies maybe fixes that.
I Think that's everyone. :)
