You are the second person that's mentioned Dungeon 10! I was kind of wondering what I'd done with it, but it seems like I needed to make the parameter modification tiles a little clearer visually (drop the 6 block ontop of the darker coloured block in the bottom-left of the map and it'll massively increase your running speed, which should let you clear the thorns)
digikerot
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Thanks for the detailed feedback!
The base feel was bit of a sticky one with this - it's likely partially that most of my references points for platformer feel are pretty old, but it's also partially a constraint of the base game design. I basically had to settle on something pretty early using a test stage that still gave me room to shift weight and movement speed in either direction and then stick with it, as any subsequent modification would have required redoing all the stages. Something to chew on if I find the time to go back to this in a significant way for sure.
Yeah, Danger Course basically came out of me want to try to throw together something quick as I was getting frustrated with how long it was taking me to finish a different project. It didn't end up panning out that way (it ended up taking about four times as long as I was expecting), but I basically did the initial game design working around assets I already had - so the running sprites from this (though the new June sprite aside, Alys is actually 1 pixel shorter in DC, not that you'd notice on the PD), the mines are from Sight Blight, the fire is from... well, something I've not actually released yet, but it was something I already had lying around.
Thanks!
The whole save slot thing was a bit of a freebie that came along with me reusing some menu code to be honest, but I feel like for a device like the Playdate where I can't imagine many people (well, outside of people developing stuff who might want to check RevA/RevB performance) having access to multiple devices, then it's worth doing for this kind of level-based game with progress tracking.
Really incredible feeling controls, and I love the little intro with the circle expanding when spin the crank - extremely fun touch.
If I could ask for one thing... maybe a little health gauge for the moon appearing in the corner of the screen if the moon scrolls off the screen - there's a couple of times I got a little too zealous about chasing an asteroid and flew off into the boonies and had to make a decision as to whether or not it was worth trying to save a run or not.
I had fun with this - good movement and the collisions work really well for something with such an oddly shaped environment put together in a weekend.
I did have similar issues to sub-rosa when it came to running the game, though. The crank being docked/undocked at boot didn't seem to make much difference - the odd thing is that the same did seem to be running, but the display was not getting updated. I say this because if I hit the home key to quit out then the game would suddenly refresh the display (so I could fire an explosion, wait a couple of seconds, hit the Home button, and the player character had moved).
Not sure if that is useful information or not. Honestly not sure what would cause it to randomly get into that state or otherwise just run perfectly normally - I'd go off and play a couple of the other Jam games, come back to it, and suddenly it was behaving itself normally.
Appreciate the feedback!
Absolutely agree that the post-level menu probably needs a rethink at this point - I've been using versions of the same menu since Queen of (Mine)Carts, where it made a bit more sense since the game had separate clear and full-clear states that made replaying a stage something you'd actually do. Not really so relevant here though (well, aside from when a poor developer is repeatedly replaying a stage to check for issues...) - I'll have a think about it and adjust before putting out any final version.
The hitting your head thing... was actually entirely deliberate (as in, I had to write in an explicit exception in the code to force that to happen) - it's pretty standard behaviour in the particular genre of ZX Spectrum platformer I'm mimicking here, as entirely an acquired taste as that is. That said, I'm open to revisiting that later assuming I don't end up designing any stages that rely on that specifically being part of the control behaviour - it caused me plenty of headaches as well to be honest, as I had to keep readjusting stage layouts to accommodate needing the extra headroom.
I honestly agree with most of these point. I kind of figured the processing order of the maths would end up particularly being a headache for anyone with any degree of programming experience. Those laser grid levels are gone as soon as I can upload an update as well (replaced them with something considerably less annoying!).
Mostly I'm modifying a few of the level layouts (either shortening things which went on a little too far past being interesting, or just some minor visual tweaks to aid readability), and I'm replacing what will probably be around 8 levels entirely that were either too similar to other stages or more frustrating than I feel good about subjecting others to with ones featuring mechanics I ran out of time during the Jam to implement.
Thanks for the detailed feedback - really appreciate it!
I think I'd probably be the first to admit that I'm probably a terrible judge of what is fun versus tedious in this kind of game - I'm coming to the realisation that maybe level design is not my strongsuit and that I should probably be more aggressively getting friends to playtest some of this stuff before release.











