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Saw Reto played your game, so I checked it out! It’s really solid so far. Definitely think it’d be more enjoyable if the player hitbox were smaller, right now I think it’s bigger than the sprite? Often getting hit by things that visually aren’t touching, getting sucked into pipes from what feels like far away, stuck wall jumping when I’m not meaning to, etc..

Thanks so much :) Like y’all, this was my first real Godot project and messed some things up. SML.E’s rigidbody wasn’t properly looking for the suit’s collision so it wasn’t properly being affected by the jetpack. Eventually with the gun the reason SML-E has a hitbox makes more sense, but as you correctly figured out the laser gates at the end I think are impossible :( The ui in the top right is also ammo for your gun and will, eventually, power a rechargeable shield for SML.E

Here’s a lil vid of what it could (or should) have looked like, had I fixed those two things… still ends with a bug with the save console, but shows off a little of what gameplay can be like with the gun!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7POlzh8MJCg

Good question 😅 I don’t trust Unity anymore - the last debacle was just the straw that broke the camel’s back - and liked the idea of Godot as something lightweight. Had a lot of issues with it in some ways, and a lot of struggles too. Basic stuff is pretty nice and easy though.

Thanks for checking it out, I really appreciate both the review and the gameplay video! I mention it in my devlog but I really scuffed the difficulty with some poor decisions towards the end, all your complaints are super valid. Really messed up my prioritizing this jam and focused too much on the presentation and ui/ux side of things, didn’t leave much room for the actual gameplay.

Some of the movement mechanics got bugged and I didn’t catch that since I did most of my testing with the gun enabled - for a non-jam experience gating probably the most important/useful movement mechanic (the gun) made sense pacing wise, but I really should’ve given it right away. Of course gating it behind an asteroid field that was spawning too many too randomly and I think a literally impossible timing challenge with the laser gates not cycling as I intended was definitely a huge mistake 😅

Neat, thank you! I definitely didn’t understand that holding space continued to speed you up even while floating with your head up against a ceiling. Was the second level designed to teach you that? It doesn’t appear to be possible without knowing it, and even if you do hold space the whole time there’s barely any time to spare. Because of the insistence on looking at the controls before playing and the palette hop featured in level 1, I just assumed I was missing something with shapeshifting and/or an item interaction.

The drop down apple in level 3 maybe should’ve been something obvious to look for with the whole wall with an arrow on it, but I believe it’s obstructed from view at the start and at that point I had been thoroughly convinced I was missing a mechanic from the previous level. Didn’t even occur to me to look up for an apple to return down with on level 4 at the start since I was then convinced from level 3 I was missing an alternate way to get back down.

Not saying there’s anything objectively wrong here, just explaining my struggle now that I understand what happened :) I do think if the apples were 3d instead of decals and/or had a slightly bigger hitbox that was made visually obvious it would’ve helped me a lot, going back knowing about them and where they were they were still difficult for me to hit reliably.

Appreciate the visual juice in it, though the arrows (or VVVVs?) on gravity swapping were a bit excessive I think.

It was a pretty solid little experience, nicely done!

To me there were a little too many visual artifacts going on with all the effects but I liked the vibe in general. Would’ve loved some better feedback about reaching the end, I kept thinking I died right before reaching it D:

The controls were really pretty confusing, and aiming didn’t ever make sense. Had a really hard time understanding it in general, but it looks like a pretty neat idea overall!

I thought it was an interesting idea, but found it annoying to move around without the sprint (dang browsers). Especially when I wanted to go back through the first door I opened to try to make sure I caught all the details and had to go the long way around instead. Incidentally it’s also a little confusing that crates suddenly give you super big jumps, but it worked I suppose.

I didn’t solve the exit puzzle though I’m really curious what the solution was. It definitely seemed interesting, I did enjoy the periodic table puzzle.

I didn't really feel I needed the time shift to get to the boss with plenty of health (though I still didn't manage to beat him, only got him down to 33% health). The 2 second cooldown on it felt really not great, so I didn't use it. I think it's not very intuitive for it to have a cooldown yet be represented by a bar that doesn't communicate that in any way.

There's some bugs, like the doors blocking bullets even after they go away, and in general hitboxes don't feel super precise. I love this genre though and always have a good time playing it and this was no exception!

Didn't mind opening it back up just to double check. And then I forgot to take a screenshot lol

so the red line is the path I took from start - push the lower block left, jump up through the middle, push the upper block right until both it and I fall off, then jump back up.  From there solving the puzzle is simple.

I think it's the falling on the block after pushing it off that triggers it.

Decently snappy controls but overall gravity felt frustratingly strong, as did acceleration upwards while floating. I suppose that's somewhat the point? I appreciated the fact that it actually saves progress, and the color picker thing is cool. I did feel like each room should be a checkpoint, or that should be an optional "easy" mode. Respawning also was a little slow, though pacing was otherwise good.

Really solid entry overall though!

I enjoyed the puzzles and wish there were more, the third one took a long time to solve and I felt great when I did.

Art I think is a little too reminiscent of Baba Is You, but, it is a nice style. Really curious what more could be done with this if you were to continue developing it :)

It crashed on me in the desert (?)/second section, I never figured out how to make the gravity anomaly thing actually help me but assumed I should carry it all the way so I did. Appreciated the snappy respawn and the movement, while a little floaty, was decently paced. I think the player character is super cute!

I thought the story was really cute and also liked how well tutorialized it was. Gameplay felt a little slow and bugged out on me towards the end -  generally I feel like in a puzzle platformer, assuming it's not supposed to be mechanically challenging, you should probably be able to make the solution happen within seconds if you've figured it out.  That complaint aside, I thought this was well done and a really solid entry!

I have mixed feelings about soliciting feedback for released games in jams, but you're clearly putting forth a really good faith effort to give other people feedback too. I have thoughts on how to improve the animation of the cube and stuff but from your devlog it sounds like do too :P Actually I don't think it's nearly as bad as your devlog makes it sound like. It's clean and aesthetically pleasing, by and large. A lot of the transitions, especially going from one level to the next, or dying and respawning, easily take like 2-300% more time than they should imo. Some bugs I noticed, too, like it aggressively trying to convince me to restart when I was seconds from completing level 10 (i accidentally lost the screenshot as itch didn't like me posting it for some reason, can recreate it reliably if you want help bug squashing)

I got stumped on level 18, would be cool to see a full playthrough at some point. I think I might've been taking the wrong approach to a lot of the puzzles! Congratulations on finishing a game, though, that is a huge achievement 🥳

awesome, I'd love to see it!

Some really great ideas here! 20 seconds is a long time for cooldown in a game like this, and the movement is very slow. The idea of a random ability is interesting but since they can do such drastically different things it's hard to know when you'd actually want to use it? I definitely had to read your discussion with StuckArcader to figure out how to get past the start of the first level, though. Wall jump controls are really tricky to get right!

Really cool start to something. It definitely needed an explanation of each character's abilities. After a few tries I was able to do the tutorial. The endless mode sometimes spawns two traps that need the same character at the same time, and the forcefield door thing that the grey guy can pass through can blend into that area too easily. Four dimensions is definitely stretching my ability to pay attention to things, which was a fun challenge. Great concept!

I couldn't get past the second level with the cannons, I couldn't figure out how to reliably get on a cannonball, much less do it twice in a row. Was there a lot after that I ended up missing?

The character controller felt a little too heavy/full of momentum I think, like takes too long to accelerate, decelerate, and turn once running. Would've really liked some more precision to see what other ideas were here, cause it was off to a really promising start!

Feels like after maybe 0.2 or 0.3 seconds of being affected by your jump, your ground movement starts taking over if you have a or d pressed, significantly slowing you down (potentially). I wasn't able to get past the weird torch like thing as controls stopped responding there, and the third platform seemed bugged and like it didn't work at all?

I liked the gun sound a lot, and am curious if I missed a bunch of stuff higher up, but this was a really fun jam entry!

Would love to have seen some more to it but it was a fun idea! 

Curious if I ended up beating it the intended way, or if there was a mechanic or something I missed... avoiding spoilers, was pressing e on the roundy thing blocked by the yellowy thing and then backing up until it clipped through then just carrying it to the end the intended solution?

It's really neat, if a bit confusing. You can use the gravity mechanic with left click without picking up the gun, and it seems like you can easily lose the ball floating off into space. Cool jam entry!

I was able to beat the first level! I tried every combination of growing bigger/smaller (which never seemed to help in any meaningful way?), picking things up, trying to bunny hop, trying to jump off of things I was holding, and could not for the life of me figure out any other level.  The timer, especially in level 1, adds so much pressure when you don't know what you're doing. I really did appreciate just having all the levels available from level select, though, as I was able to at least get a glimpse of what was going on everywhere. Is level 6 anything beyond just walking forward and then falling? Fun atmosphere there (and throughout!)

I also have to admit the sound of the pickup gun was really grating and hard to bear, and while I liked it in general the post processing was a little extreme, creating quite a fisheye lens effect that triggered motion sickness I usually don't get. This all maybe sounds harsh - I really like what I think the idea of the game is, I'm just not sure I ever got to feel like I understood it after quite a bit of time with it. Happy to revisit it if I just missed something obvious about how to play, it seems cool in theory!

Thanks, I'm glad you liked it! Very fair complaints though, incidentally the robot isn't supposed to be totally unaffected by your movement. Definitely leaning into the "broken physics" theme a little with accepting imperfect physics interactions, but I plan to fix those bugs. It definitely ended up crossing the line from fun/silly difficult to control into pure frustration territory . Thanks for playing :)

Thanks so much, I'm glad you enjoyed!

I swear I had a dialogue line about needing to go to the left, but apparently I hallucinated it 😅 i had intended to have a little off screen arrow/compass to help direct people but ran out of time to implement it. Thanks for playing though :)

Thanks so much! Definitely agreed about the dialogue - I tried to lampshade it a little with the line "Thanks for dumping all that info on me" but it is excessive for sure. Very much a jam decision - I had also intended to have portraits with the dialogue but ran out of time.

Definitely plan to polish it up and fix the physics bugs (to the best of my ability)

Appreciate the good and honest feedback, thanks for playing!

Drawing the lines surprsied me with how smooth and snappy they felt, and it was a fun idea. Made me think about the double slits photon experiments. I seemed to die randomly which wasn't great, but it was a really cool start to something for sure! 

what did the robots do to this poor guy? :( i think pressing down to attack felt kinda not the best, would've preferred another key for it. I know it was partly due to gravity changing but I felt like the jump was always too floaty at first and too heavy after the peak, so I really struggled to feel in control of my character. Seemed like the best thing to do was always just hop down in the hole and kill the brown robots.

I thought you said this wasn't a rhythm game? :P Really good use of sounds. I got 2667 but my run ended partially cause I kept clicking out of the window. Really neat entry though!

It was a bit difficult, but I liked the idea! It was a lot easier when I realized keyboard controls were there too though. Great use of the theme  I think :)

Super fun! I guess we were sharing the same inspiration pool with games based on propelling yourself with a jetpack and your own projectiles 😅 naturally I think it's a genius interpretation of the theme! I did give up at the precision jumping part in level 3 after failing twice at it... the controls are a little too floaty to feel like I can consistently make 1 tile wide platforms. I also never figured out what the icons above the boost were supposed to represent?

Great jam entry overall! 

Super cool! Love the art, the shader for the enemies is sick. The sound effect on the dash is really satisfying! I really wish there was some indication of what abilities did as you picked them up. I also think having to hold up for the super jump is really un-ergonomic, would rather spacebar jump just had the potential to be held longer once you get it.

I ended up falling off the edge of the world for forever to the left of the castle. I reached the top of the castle (to my knowledge), didn't see anything, and jumped off... did I miss an ending?

Really great entry overall though! Would be curious to see it fleshed out more, I really love the lil wizard 

I thought this was a really cute idea! I eventually had to just convince my brain I was playing a platformer with a reversed control debuff or something to be able to remember what I was doing. I liked the experimenting with different heights you did towards the end, would be cool to see how else you could expand on the idea. I did think it was not super intuitive that in a game about controlling the earth the birds moved right along with it instead of flying in a straight path. 

I had to study the screenshots to have any idea what was going on gameplay wise. Once I understood it, I did like the challenge of trying to keep track of multiple moving parts and get the timing down, would be cool to see it expanded on! The cutscenes were cute but maybe could use a way to speed them up without skipping them entirely :)

This is really cute! I like the sounds a lot, they're very fun. The art is nice and super clean - it's held back a bit by a lot of visual artifacts that I assume are engine related? They're not that much of a distraction though! I loved dumping all the enemies in the pits in level 8 :)

I want to clarify, I made some of the art (the main characters, the gun, the meteors, the UI [with some help from kenney]) but the tileset i used isn't mine (though I altered it visually). Also some of the sound effects are my creation (like the voice "acting" at the start lol)