itch.io

cool game. I think only one level is too little (specially when the only level of a rhythm game is a song by cammelia :skull:). More levels would be cool. Also, the windows to react to a pink square are too fast, the only level of this game is pretty hard, is hard to tell how much life I have (is the number below the letter my life?), and the level is kinda empty

Cool game. Imo it should have more levels, as only one is too little. A section for people to make their own levels would be cool too. Also, I found a glitch where if you play the game with lag, the pipes break:

I also got a new (world?) record:

I know it doesn't look much, but I was even suprised when I got a sub 14 seconds, because I thought it was impossible to get less than 14 seconds without finding a bug to break the game lol

this error started happening again

kinda cool game, I just found it weirdly hard, like you pretty much need to get an all perfect in every chart in order to get a decent score. Also, I got an A score in the first song at normal mode and D on hard mode, yet I couldn't unlock the second song.

starting this game makes me get softlocked in a grey screen with an "attempt 2" text

I am chill, but regardless if this game is a game jam game, there are already so many VSRGs out there that if you want your game to stand out you will need more than that. Also game jam games can always grow

Sorry but I don't think anyone will purchase this game (specially as the purchase button isn't appearing). The concept of the game is pretty cool, but all levels other than the tutorial aren't working (they're just black boxes I can't do anything in), the game doesn't look that good (watch some tutorials about making games look good), and the itch.io page of thiss game don't have any decoration

The conecpt of this game, about being the shape I want is pretty interesting (I want to be a mandelbrot set, let me be whatever I feel like!), but sadly the game doesn't work very well. The buttons that switch my shape are almost off the screen even when I play on fullscreen mode, and using mouse to be switching and pressing buttons is kinda odd (specially considering the short time I have to react to something and change my shape).  I think that pressing keyboard keys instead of buttons to change my shape would be better. Also, the dialog system is kinda weird, after me wandering around for a long time a text just randomly came out after I pressed space, while the game doesn't tell me to do so. And the itch.io page of this game having no decoration doesn't help me

So I don't understand what's the peculiarity of this game, is just an average VSRG (again, the world doesn't need more of these). Sometimes, I would press an arrow correctly, yet the game would not give me a point for that for some reason. Also, jumping straight to the singular level of the game isn't a very good idea, it would be better if this game had UI screens. Also, the only level of this game is kinda hard, I don't think a beginner would safely survive these patterns. And the game doesn't do anything if I miss a note, what's weird. More levels, something new and UIs would be cool

Sorry for incovenience, but I think I accidentally gave you a slightly broken version lol. Because when testing the level, I was changing the player's position, and on the version I gave to you, the player was spawning at the middle of the level, skipping it's entire beginning (what's bad as the beginning is also one of the hardest parts). I also nerfed a bit the transition from the beginning to the end

Fixed ver: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1ZEcp7kDEzIcoJ-UYEjdP_JjDmpcJrLct/view?usp=sharing

But wait: the developer of the game took 60 seconds to beat the easiest half of this level in debug mode? damn

The third entry for the trial series:trial comeback -https://drive.google.com/file/d/1Cdn8p6w1ukLC6HAkGPeLfCYRJ7rWmGJz/view?usp=shari...

It is a bit more ambitious than the other two, though I don't know if this one is harder than trial celestial (slow motion helped lol)

It would be cool if more people played this game, and I got known as a top difficulty/impossible level maker lol

I also think that it would be cool if I could customize more the levels, maybe add more colors, change the background, stuff like that

Updates:

- Added 24 levels

- Bug fixing and polishing

I think I took my decision. I'm going to stop updating paradox space for a while, but I'm already planning a new game. This game will focus a lot on automation of repetitive tasks I usually find when making games, will focus on having more overall quality, and some other stuff. PSCE and fanmades/community support will keep running, and I will still do some marketing of my game though

I think I'm falling in the same category as most people, "I can beat my own game but completely mastering it is very hard"

...but as a game designer I also need to point some issues on just saying "my game is too hard" and using that as an excuse for not playtesting your game:

- if you cannot beat your game, you (often but not always) cannot ensure it is possible

- if the developer of the game, even after weeks, months or maybe years of playing, cannot beat it's own game, let's be realistic what are the odds of a player beating it?

Also, for your game to have a group of people willing to try to beat these challenges, you need a fun game, with a good difficulty progression, and some kind of incentive for the players to grind a top playing field (the latter usually comes when you have a game with good community support). Otherwise players will lowkey not care with the hardest challenges of your game lol

If you're still reading this, you might be thinking about my games. Just look at some examples of my games:

- in my game "paradox space", we have over 70 levels (with almost 30 to come), divided in difficulty tiers from 1-, 1, 1+ to 6+, and a big list that ranks the difficulty of all the levels in the main game, in it's community edition and in it's fanmades. It usually takes me over a day to beat a level around the hardest difficulty tiers with checkpoints, and it also usually takes me days to beat some levels around 1+ difficulty without checkpoints, so it would probably take months or years to beat the hardest levels perfectly (or for players to even get to know how to beat these levels with checkpoints at first place)

- in my game "eternal fall", an endless runner where you just fall and dodge obstacles, my record is ~12000 points, but to unlock a secret world (designed to be borderline impossible and requiring a strong community of people with insane levels of dedication), you need to get 50000 points. And after some point thresholds that cause the game to get harder, the last threshold is at 1000000 points, that causes the game to pretty much spawn an obstacle per frame

- in my game "collapse", you have several levels to beat, and unlike most of my other games, each level is usually just around 10 seconds long, but a set of slightly secret levels, the "expert challenges", require extreme player control, very tight inputs and limited vision. I just managed to beat a few levels of this set of levels, but several of these levels are unverified (with one being just theoretically possible)

So yes, I think I am the king of "brutally hard games"...

(I was playing the webgl version) I recomend you watching videos on how procedural generation works in high-scale games. A good example is that a lot of people joke about minecraft being unoptimized and recreate it in a lighter way, or adding one special feature. This topic is complex so I recommend you to take notes lol.

You can use some chunk system to even save/load worlds, the resource pool would only crash out if you tried generating the infinte world all at once imo, but you don't need to, you can do some optimization techniques like octree to allow more of the world to be seen, you could use some perlin noise to transform the green plane in a terrain...

Or don't scope creep

I found out something interesting, your city isn't endless, if I walk a lot firstly the skyscrapers (big tall grey boxes) will be replaced with houses (smaller larger grey boxes), then if I keep walking there will be a straight line where grey boxes stop spawning at all, and then an infinite green world (your city either isn't endless at all, or endless in just a few directions lol)

Updates:

- Added 20 levels...

- Several bug fixes, patches, and some polishing

- Now the archives are no longer part of the main game, they're a different downloadable

- Changed how the tier system and the webgl works

- Started a promotion campaign (more info in the in-game devlogs)

I don't really know what else to add, the game already have it's own devlog anyway. I think I'm just going to keep updating this devlog until I reach the 100% tag, then this devlog will be just an archive for old content, and I'm going to only update the in-game devlog lol

some people suggested bad features, others suggested terrible feaatures, I'm going to ruin your entire game: make so that the tutorial of the game is also the hardest level/mission of the game. If players somehow pass the ultra-hard tutorial, they start needing to play only easier stuff, and the game gets easier the more the players progress.

You're welcome

Could you make a webgl build of your game? otherwise there is the chance of people not wanting to play your game, as downloading a downloadable takes longer, is more boring, and there's always the chance of the game being a malware in disguise lol

friendly reminder that's my vision of a perfect game, go easy on me lol (and mostly as a player)

Recently I was thinking with myself "if I made a game using only my personal preferences, what would the game feel like? what if I tried to make a perfect game?", and I got some topics I want to discuss with other game devs (alright yeah my definition of a perfect game is probably different from yours but game design principles still apply):

1 - The perfect game needs to have strong community support

I have a couple points for this one. Firstly, if your game has a strong community, then newcomers will have a reason to play your game - to engage in the community too. Also, if you have a community who also makes content (e.g., fan-made levels, videos, etc), then you won't need to feel like "if I stop this game, the game is dead". Of course a few updates and stuff like that will keep the community, but they will also be making content by their own. 

Btw, fanmades and stuff are good for other reasons too. If your game have a good fanmades support, people will start making fan made stuff, like their own levels, their own content, etc. This will give players another reason to play your game - so that other people consume their content too (like to play their levels or fanmade games). And in order for more people to get to know their content, they may start making videos of their levels, which means more content and promotion for your game

2 - The perfect game needs to have some pro playing field

This will get much easier if you have a community - but not every person in the world is a casual player. Some people (like me) might prefer to do some intense stuff in your game. Maybe they beat a new hardest level, maybe they did a crazy achievement, maybe they did something that deep down inside, you know that even you as the developer of the game would struggle to do so too. Also, if you have a not so small player base, then a pro player might start to make more serious content, as the community will watch them plying and go "oh, dude's good". More serious content can mean live streams, not so small channels, more engagement even for people who don't play your game still...

Also, if your game has a good pro plying field, then becoming a good player will take longer, meaning more playtime. Then you just need to make the learning curve less steep, maybe you can make a "hardest levels list", maybe an introduction on how top playing works in your game, etc. And if becoming a pro player in your game doesn't feel impossible, then some players will have another reason to play your game - they will want to be top players too, to glaze their skill in the community, and to make their content too

3 - The perfect game may be a rhythm game

This is the moment where my personal preferences might start biasing the perfect game, but I still have points. Firstly, music will help making the levels of your game to feel more alive, and more satisfying to watch and play. Also, people will be able to use your game to promote small artists, or even to self promote. But it will be shared promotion: you get more people in your game and more content, the level creator also gets engagement, and the artist will have it's song being shown to more people. Including people who may actually like the song and the artist... (I found the song Crim3s - Lost with a popular red level in a game, never cared that much with the level but the song was one of my favorites for some time)

Just please, don't make another vsrg (vertical scrolling rhythm game). You know those games where you have notes falling on a line, and you need to be a pianist and be getting perfects... the world doesn't need more games like these, these games are too technically hard to make, and you need to be lucky to make your game stand out. Also, games of this kind usually requires lots of music anyways, and I don't assume first-time rhythm game makers have that many songs valiable to use

4 - The perfect game may have a lot of levels

You don't need to scope creep your game (planning more features than what you can add), but you should focus on an easy, fast and good level design system. The more levels = the more content. And having a good amount of levels will help people having more stuff to do in your game. For instance, level grinders (people who strive to beat the most levels, maybe to get the most stats, or to have more videos in their channel) will need to play your game for more time. And level showcasers (people who get very good levels, usually fanmades, and record these levels to other people to watch and find new levels) will have more content to choose from

If you know you cannot make too many levels without scope creep, then that's another reason to support fanmades. You cannot make too many levels, but your community can.

5 - The perfect game... doesn't really exist (yet)

There are some games that got pretty close to this definition of a perfect game. Two games that really impacted the way I see games as a whole were rolling sky and geometry dash, the first was pretty much my introduction to games with strong communities, and the other impacted a lot the game design of my games. But they're not perfect. Rolling sky kinda forces you to have a discord, install weird apps and to have a really good mobile, what's not my case. And geometry dash is *too* hard, taking pretty much hours (if not days) to beat levels that I know that are still far from the top playing field (and demons). 

So I started searching games on itch.io, it would be cool to find a really good game on itch made by some indie, and helping the developer of the game to grow - and to pretty much start a community in a game (which in turn, the community of the game would know me lol). The closest I got was with my own game Paradox Space (no, I'm not self promoting no time to play), and I also found a cool platformer called RED CLAW by Cookie-Crumb. Other than that, I really didn't found that many games that satisfied me, even though there are millions of games in itch

This is my point of view in the "perfect game". I know such definition doesn't exist, and you probably disagree with a lot of stuff I said, so let me know your thoughts on your visions of perfect games!

weird game. Firstly, it took longer than the expected to even understand if I should grab the yellow boxes or to dodge them (they don't look coins lol). Also, this game isn't crediting who made crystallize, overdrive, etc. Did you made the songs? also, since I start the level, specially on the daily run, I already start the level losing several boxes, and giving me a lot of damage, causing one input to basically kill my entire run. 

weird game. Firstly, the ball movement is weirdly floaty and feels strange. Also, the game takes too long to stop being boring slow, and even longer to start being more challenging.

My record:

Kinda weird game. Firstly I get prompted to watch an *cough* AI generated *cough* movie of several cubes, then after a lot of time I accidentally press tune and get to a weird UI, where I'm prompted to go to beatsaver.com, a site I never went before (I'm not a beat saber player), and copy a link from there, and after finding a song I just don't know what else to do. I'm a beginner bro, don't feel bad on holding my hand for a while, maybe even give me a song to play without the map extraction thing. This game is too confusing and I don't relly understand what to do

Cool game actually, the level select UI and the levels look and play pretty good. The page of this game on itch.io though, kinda doesn't, everything is eye-burning saturated, what can reduce the amount of people playing your game. 

I also read the "how to play" section, but at fisrt it wasn't obvious enough that I should hover my mouse on the ? button. Also, even after reading the how to play, I still didn't understood how to do the red/cyan swipe walls.

I also think that the game should have a pause button, as I may want to leave a level before finishing it, and after I beat the level, I need to refresh the page because there is no "go back" button, so I get softlocked in the stats screen

Also your game only have one song, if you need some other songs, I have a music channel (N30-Arctrux - YouTube), lust let me know if you found  cool song that you want to use

oh, I didn't managed to beat this level other than 3 runs... you're kinda good in (your own) game...

I made another level: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1Ha2RQe2sVtgOPhjVGwXfc68K_q-l1JsI/view?usp=shari...

well, unlike trial 000, I didn't managed to beat this level, but I got it in 3 "runs". Idk if this is harder than trial 000 or not, but is definitively better.This level also made me miss a copy/paste feature, as manually placing every block got annoying after some time

as an actual former pro player in actual GD,  weird game. 

Firstly, did you playtested your game? those jumps are so broken they feel AI generated. You cannot get in all holes of this structure, so you need to jump the first spike, land and jump the other two spikes at once. That's way harder than the rest of the level... wdym there's another one at the end of the level-

Also, the buffering mechanic is really weird, if I click while mid-air, even if by accident, and really far from the ground, I'm going to buffer no matter what. That's strange

Your game could also have more levels. Only one level? Also, the fact that your game looks good but the page of it is just plan itch.io, I have a suspiction your game might be AI generated...

anyway

I mean, focus on whatever is feeling more fun in your prototypes, that's why you use them. In level design, if your levels are fun, then that's ok, sometimes cool levels are also the ones that feel the most unexpected anyways.

I don't really agree that books are the best way to learn game development. Reading game development books is kinda the same thing as watching a playlist, except it is more boring. You will still get confused, you will still struggle to do stuff other than what the book is asking, you might need to pay another book... (and I don't recommend you to pay to learn to make games). You do need tutorials to even get to know what the hell you're doing but in game development (and pretty much everything related to art in some way), the best way to learn is by doing. Make small games and focus on finishing them, try different things, do whatever passes in your mind and if it is fun, keep it. And most importantly: focus a lot on marketing, otherwise no one will play your games lol

Updates: 

- Added more levels (and a suprisingly good amount of top difficulty levels lol)

- Added the archives, a secret place to store old levels (hint to get there: look at the keybindings of the description of the game)

- Now the PSL is also downloaded with the game, for you to see the top difficulty levels

- Started recording levels and beating them without checkpoints (this might be harder than the expected lowkey lol)

- Reworked the planet selection UI

I don't really know how to manage two devlogs at once, most of the info of this update is on the devlog of the game itself, and I don't want to copy/paste devlogs lol. However, I think that for now it might be a good idea to start promoting this game as much as I can, to get some players for it

weird game. Firstly, arrows don't work, what kills me because my letter "w" is broken (I need to copy/paste it or use virtual keyboards lol), and I know stuff like this is unexpected, but keybinds are always good. Also, why there is a sailfiah on a city, like context? (and why isn't the fish dead lmao). The game also has nothing to do I think, the visuals are strange, the UIs are pretty bad, they feel too big and have a lot of aliasing (if you know what that is), the cases where the fish would just say something to me were weird too. The video you added in the game don't really resemble the game, like the game only has grey cubes but the video shows actual buildings, and don't use paint to record parts of your video lmao

"keep going"... now context? are you making a game engine or a game without a game engine? what is kool, OpenDE, fabmax, depression edge and lwjgl? why the logo of your thing is "penie"? (by the way, that is sus) how did you lost your entire code? are you making backups now? (they're really important, trust me lol). Even if you're not here for promotion, I don't think you won't want promotion forever lol

7: No webgl build done, players are gone

Hello dude who uses chatgpt to write texts, I'm currently not looking for developers to help me with paradox space by itself, but if you really want to help me, then consider installing the "make your PS" package to make your own fanmades of the game! I'm also needing content creation for my game, such as recording levels (and preferably with some funny videos) and promoting it on social media, I'm going to make content by myself later but more promotion will never be a bad thing, so if you want to help me with marketing, I'm in :D

So based on y'all feedback, I made some changes:

- Added a couple easy levels (the "easy levels" update). Those levels will both work as introduction levels for beginners, and to help people to get used to the "player to object" physics. Now "link" is far from being the easiest level lol

- To help beginners to have a smooth difficulty curve, I decided that the webgl build would now have two planets instead of one

- Bug fixes and polishing (stuff like making link less glowy, fixing checkpoint respawning issues, etc)

- Added more shortcuts and contrast to the buttons, to help players navigating the UIs

Updates: I finished the "easy levels" update. As the name implies... easy levels. The feedback I got in the section "get feedback" was mostly complaining about weird physics behaviour (lots of unfixable and even intended stuff though), too much glow/darkness, and mostly about difficulty.

- Added 10 levels, all around the easiest difficulty (those levels might be usefull for beginners to just have easier content to start with, and for the players to get used to some physics behaviour of the game)

- Changed the paradox space list (which I'm going to start calling PSL for short from now on). Changes to a list that only exist for me are boring, but I'm going to make a site so that you can see the levels difficulty

- Bug fixes and polishing

- Replaced the level "on & on" for a better and hopefully more fun level. I will be replacing the bad levels of my game one by one, and I will make an archive for people to play the replaced levels

So... when I started making devlogs for this game, I was still developing the game. This devlog started before the game got released, and such I couldn't make a devlog in the project page (there was no project and no page still). Now that the game is released, I started a devlog in the project page but... now I kinda have two devlogs to manage at once. Managing devlogs is easy, even more considering that this devlog will lead people to my project page, where they will get the "main devlog". Also, more devlogs = more visibility. But idk at which point more visibility won't be seen as spamming lol. Hey no time to play, if I did something wrong, sorry :D

why I wouldn't like it lol. Trial 000 by Developer3244 is good :D

thx for adding my level! (which you can call "trial 000") I will make more levels later (I'm currently busy with my newest game...)