I see you already asked Sven and already got your answer.  It's one thing to take a punt and see if someone will do you a favour. It's another thing entirely to have gotten your answer and then go behind their back by way of a asking me on a separate post where Sven won't see.

If you check out my games, you'll see what artwork I've done for myself by putting the time in, that cost me nothing - even the software I use (GIMP etc) is free. (and eventually I paid $30 for Aseprite, which is not much)  

In my game HopSquash, I did pay a guy to improve the characters, and it was well worth it, because they're more amazing than I could ever do and I'm making money off that game.

That is so cool. Thanks guys, I wasn't aware of this technique! The portraits have really good artwork as well as detail.

How are the face portraits so detailed?? I didn't know the C64 could do that resolution...

Ah thanks man :) I saw all the comments without replies so I almost wondered if you were still checking the page!  Am buying the bundle now.

Hi, I bought this on sale and I don't seem to have the background trees or anything, just the tiles. Can I buy just the others?

If I can get a refund for my two recent purchases, then I'll just buy the bundle to make it easier.

You're being facetious - I don't care where you live or what the exchange rate is, you can't tell me this tiny amount isn't comparable. You'd easily spend more on one fast food meal.

It's such a shame, many great survival games are now buried and hard to discover (and buy!) for potential customers.

When I click on the "Survival" tag, I get a tonne of horror games, and less than 1 actual survival game for each screen's worth of games I scroll past. I think this is because of the surge of horror themed short form games (popularised by YouTuber playthroughs such as Markiplier) and the developers would like to use the "survival" tag because you're trying to survive.  (Which is misapplied in most cases because a lot of them are basically walking simulators)

Survival, I imagine to be like, in the wilderness. Finding logs to build a fire. Hunting for food. But this category of game is buried by games that already have a "horror" or "survival-horror" tags to classify them.

I found 2 relevant posts; this and this. I was able to come up with the following URL manually with the advice there; https://itch.io/games/tag-survival?exclude=tg.horror This is a lot better, I'm still not seeing a lot of the kind of game I'm after, but at least they're no longer buried by horror games.

I just think it would help with people finding more games they want if we had a more built in solution to this. Either a more refined "categories" that include "survival" as a category, or a way to exclude tags that doesn't involve hacking the URL like this, which only allows you to exclude one tag.

So you can't pay the cost of one trip on the bus?

I think all your followers got an email notification about this :)

Nice! I found the "wiggle your wand" method was most useful, rapidly tapping the button to try and keep it in the same direction roughly, before it goes off. I got 165 high score in a few mins. Not sure what levelling up does? I got to see the skeletons that throw bones at you.

Thanks for the follow :) This game won't load on Firefox, which is weird, because I know Godot to be pretty good with web games.  It's just stuck on "Loading scripts".

Love it. I like how you used the Mickey Mouse game as inspiration but it still looks like a unique theme.

I'm glad you're introducing this atmosphere to a new generation of gamers :)

I just watched Markiplier's play through and I'm eager to buy the game and play through when it's finished.  I couldn't help but notice the similarities to Thief, being a Thief fan myself. The art style, the re-used sound effects, the ambient music that changes with location, the puzzles, hand written notes that fill the screen when you read them.  I just want to ask; have I suspected correctly? Are you inspired by Thief? :)

Thanks for the video recording :) Oh man the clouds in the haunted house level are moving way too fast on your computer, what did I do wrong... XD They're supposed to move much slower than that.

Thanks, I really appreciate that - I tried to capture some of the atmosphere that I love from my favourite retro pixel art games of the 90's.

It gives me Super Probotector vibes :)

Dude I love these, a few of your characters were a very close fit for what I wanted for my game, so I'm using them in the mockup artwork! And also in the prototype to save me time.  

Was a bit confused for a while until I poked around - maybe add a note that you need to download all 3 files and combine their contents together.  I figured I just needed the latest one - 1.3. Turns out it only has the attack anim. I thought that's all there was for the longest time until I came back here today to double check!

I will need to credit you in my tweets when I start posting GIFS of the prototype.  These are so useful.

I love your style a lot. I'm particularly fond of how they're big enough to see the detail in their face. And it's a nice balance of fluid motion and simple shading. (I understand more detailed work takes longer, and I'm not as big a fan of that because it limits what you can afford to do). All of your sprites show a wide variety of experience with animation of humans, and effects like fire, smoke, etc. and great use of colours, and very distinct looking characters!

Just a question; I find the run animations a bit stiff - there's rarely any upper body movement. Is this a deliberate choice to keep the identity of the character clear and recognisable? That could be a good idea depending on the needs of the project.

Haha, all this time I never knew the ? blocks worked like that... and I searched and looked at 3 walkthroughs just now, and even they don't mention it!  But I'll be using this trick next time I play the original. 

It doesn't seem too difficult to implement, but I might open a can of worms; one technique I read for getting the most out of the ? blocks is to skip the ghost, by punching the ? block and making him appear, then punching 2 star blocks to make 2 bags of money appear, which causes the ghost to disappear, the way money bags do when there's more than 2 on screen at once. People might be expecting to do this as well.  Adding this behaviour would add more code memory and might not be possible without refactoring even more.  I should probably just update the page to add more specifics on the differences!

Sorry for the delay in reply, I just got through a massive house move!

This is the best kind of comment, from a true Alex Kidd fan. Thank you for pointing out the differences, those are things I missed. I like to think if this is the list of differences, then I must have come pretty close!  Sorry about the missing 1-ups, my only logic was that the ? blocks had a ring in them, unless you already had the ring, in which case it's a ghost. That's the only behaviour I noticed in the original, so that's how they all behave.  Not sure why the merman has mercy invincibility, maybe it uses the same code as Alex Kidd - it was a while ago and I had to cut a lot of corners to get all the code to fit in Pico 8's memory limitations!  Also same with the Ox boss, he re-uses some enemy behaviours because there is literally zero bytes of code left!  It can be done though, I have playthrough I recorded in a single take up on YouTube.

But as for the Janken games, there is a trick - it's time based. If you watch closely to the changes they make, you have like half a second to react and change your option to beat theirs before the time is actually up.  I figured this was more of a challenge than them all having the same pattern every time, though maybe I should be more up front about this change in the instructions. It does get a mention though.

I'm glad you're willing to keep trying :)

Looking forward to these! I really like your style for them, where you can actually make out the face.

I got the feeling these were player magic attacks, like in Golden Axe, which is why they're all quick and instant.

What's your licence for these purchased assets? Can I use them in my commercial game?

Dammit, I did the same as the other guy. I bought the Forest pack twice. It's that "Other asset packs" section with it's Buy Now button, it's misleading. Can I have a copy of "treasure cave" somehow? I saw the other guy offered an email. Mine's [edited out]

That's awesome. My next door neighbour / school friend had it, and we took turns playing it a lot. He got so good at it, he could get to the last level, but then die on those damn spikes...

Thanks for releasing this game! I love the cartoony character pixel art style, it's very slick and consistent, and the design of the main character is cool - that hairstyle, man.

The way you get a jump boost off the "coins" is cute, never seen that before and I quite like it.  Once they're gone, they're gone, so you are encouraged to make the most use of them and think ahead.  Please keep this.

Main things I would want to address first are the level design and the camera. First thing that stuck out is the camera following you up & down exactly  whenever you jump, it's jarring and makes it hard to avoid enemies. Usually you don't scroll vertically until the player lands at a new height from where they jumped. See how other games handle this.

Following on from that, the vertical design of the levels makes for constant leaps of faith - once you get high up, you have no idea what you're going to land on when you fall.  Maybe once in a while this is ok, for super secret areas up above, but I think that happens so often in this game because of the jump boost pickups. Try to make it so you can always see a lower platform below you from the one you're standing on.

Also am I supposed to be picking up as many gold pickups as possible? The sheer number of them make this feel like a chore and I ended up forgoing them and just aiming for progression, only using the pickups to boost my jump.

The screenshots seem to suggest a lot of gameplay is up ahead! But the instant death and returning to the start of the level, coupled with the leaps of faith and super fast jumpy scrolly movement, meant that I felt like this was going to boil down to a lot of level layout memorisation which was going to get tedious! So I never made it past the first level.

Hope the feedback helps, with some level tweaking and camera tweaking, it would be interesting to see how it plays next.

Man this game doesn't F around!  As soon as you have the grapple ability, the levels are instantly hard XD

Some feedback: I got quite a long way without learning you could jump just after grappling. I kind of cheaped my way out of the pit after getting the grapple. It didn't feel right but I didn't know what else to do.

The way I actually found out was when I got sick of using the keyboard and re-loaded the browser so it would detect my gamepad, and then accidentally triggered it; at first I thought he/she was climbing up off the corner of a ledge.  After a few times I worked out what was going on.

Maybe it needs a screen right at the start where there's no walls or anything to jump off, just a platform that's too far to make in a jump, but you need to grapple off the side of it, then jump.

I love what you're doing here :) I wish I had more time to make music with this, I love Adlib FM music!

Man that could have been answered by actually reading the page and seeing that it's for a completely different sound chip... A better question would have been how does it compare to Deflemask...

I said "Woah" out aloud, when I first saw Santa swing a candy cane like a sledge hammer and smash things. Was not expecting that.

This parallax thing is going to be super useful to sync up set pieces in the background, like a castle in the background, scrolling into view slowly and being in the right place at a particular point in the level. Thank you!!

I like that the musical scale is randomly generated :)

Ahhh. I get you. That's thinking outside the box :D

Yep, plays just like Rick Dangerous :) Dying, over and over...

Is it possible to get the 2nd disk where the only path down to it appears to be blocked by the 3 swords trap?

I have a question - why on Linux does this game have trouble maximising to full screen on multi-monitor setup (it spanned 2 monitors in a really wierd unusable way) but White Hearts, which I assume was released earlier, but instantly maximises to my primary monitor with no issue?  Was a different version of Godot used?

I love this, I've only got the first crystal so far, but boy does it seem like there's a lot of content in this metroidvania. I think it's frigging hilarious how it's stylised as a quaint little jaunt through the English woods, while little Red Riding Hood learns her bullet-time dash attack and grows wolf powers so she can cling to walls XD

Finished the game, this game is so fricken slick, I love it! And I think it's hilarious how you can still fire your gun out of frustration after you die XD

Ah thank you, I will!!

Hey man, great to see someone else that wants to keep Jump 'n Bump alive!  Thanks for the link back to my version!  Heheh, I see you put the flies in, which I left out ;)

Making a local multiplayer game is tough huh! Having to support different combinations of keyboard, gamepads... one hurdle I haven't overcome in Unity is supporting more than 4 Xbox gamepads... for some reason Unity doesn't want to do it! I keep getting complaints about this for my Steam game HopSquash... :(