TL:DR This is a unfun Mobile game quickly ported to PC/consoles. Its full of bugs, jank, and boring obtuse mechanics with a really bad way of progressing through the content.
full of MOBILE UI, boring controls that feel bad to use, Asset store mobile game art and textures, bugs that feel like it was rushed and really bad. Boring SLOW level design (your only real gameplay input moves is movement itself and that movement itself is janky). I encountered a couple bugs and design flaws that made playing with a controller feel awful.
There is DLC for cosmetics like it was free to play on mobile instead of making those cosmetics unlockable through game progression.
Progression feels awful by forcing you to do the side missions when you just want to play through the levels and not do the unfun side missions (The collection of balls and low amount of movement spaces taken being the side missions), and the camera feels awful because it wasn’t designed for mouse movement (or keyboard) or right stick gamepads it was made for a touch screen, the UI looks bad and feels bad because again it was made for a IPAD or phone, the dev didn’t even care to retool the game for a PC/console release.
The music and audio is stock slop that I KNOW iv heard in the background of a youtube blog video that you can just mute the game it has no soul.
If I had to say anything positive its the composition of the asset art that are there when you look at the game statically looks appealing. The level designs if you look at them on the outset and not play them look appealing. The 6ish zones of content seem attractive to play through but after finishing the first 2 and realizing I’m locked from the last 4 because of being forced to do the most unfun gameplay of counting my movement across the tiles side mission I’d rather drop the game now.
Not gonna refund however because despite whatever pressure I’m sure the publisher might have given this dev, they have a chance to make a better game with their upcoming 3D platformer that moves away from this slower janky mobile stuff and looks more fun.
Its not a good game and I can’t recommend it without more work to finish these issues but the dev seems to already moved onto the new 3D platformer game so this is just mobile slop that probably wont ever be updated.
the moving color banding on big flat surfaces is distracting. I like the banding. but maybe you should bake some objects with vertex colors instead of using distance. possibly mitigated by messing with the geo of the castle and floor, or basing the distance off the player’s position instead of the cameras, but unsure. looks good on pretty much everything else.
Escape instant closing the game is FUCKED UP. do your fucking homework (pause screen options etc)
nitpicking
A lot of these only up clones have clambering which makes platforming a lot more forgiving. is this a good thing? idk
I don’t like how your body turns when you jump into a wall it’s a bit distracting
ideas guying
give me a runelite XP drop whenever i land a jump. let me level up at increasingly stupid XP thresholds. you dont need to make it do anything.
give me random events where i get teleported to a side area and need to solve a captcha to escape
might be brave-related.
the game autosaves when you quit to main menu or when the “game closes”. im not sure what that means for each browser though.
also it saves to your uhhh /idbfs/ which might not work for brave.
Honestly if possible it would be better to just download the game
unfortunately, without an account the steam workshop is READ ONLY! you can’t upload your custom maps to steam workshop if you haven’t purchased the game on steam. but you CAN download them using steamCMD (see https://steamworkshopdownloader.io/)
just make sure to put downloaded maps into %localappdata%low\HEDGEWIZARDS\pogo\custom\maps folder just like you do when making your own maps
and I’ve done a little bit. it feels hard to find streamers who will be interested haha
Anyone who played jumpking when it first came out would probably be interested but i wasnt there writing down names for that so I feel a bit S.O.L.
theres only 1 community pack… maybe they are named wrong.
the others are just regular challenge packs and are named after each chapter.
in total theres 4 packs in the demo. Swamp, Sewers, Park, and Community Pack 1
try reloading that area. i done like a bunch of refactors to try and stop level loading from bricking but sometimes it still does
if you send me your %localappdata%low\HEDGEWIZARDS\pogo\Player.log after experiencing this, it would help me out a lot
the number on the vending machine tells you how many coins you have but its not super well explained
if it says $3.25 you have 13 coins (each coin is $.25)
XD thanks im reproducing that on my machine right now. I’ll reply again when it’s fixed.
the downloaded builds seem to be working fine but that obviously wont have your save file
I was thinking of adding some sections to the sewer level to tamp down the difficulty level. the current sections would stay in, and in the same order, they would just be side routes that are a little longer and easier.
Do you think people would care :P
audio and visuals felt really awesome. gameplay-wise felt pretty uninspired. the circular roomshape gimmick could be cool on paper but it feels a little underexplored. Maybe your sub weapon could be designed with some synergy towards the room shape?
usually shmups have a risk reward vs being far forward vs far back, can you recreate that gameplay somehow with more enemy variety?
dying for some placeholder sound effects here
some of the animations are a little over the top, or maybe wonky because it’s procedurally animated. hard to tell
could do with a tutorial
wish i could hold 2 directions at once. even if I can’t move diagonally, move in the last pressed direction
map is way too big or character moves way too slow. your first area is extremely important to get right and you spend 5 minutes of teaching how to mantle and that you can walk in shallow water. gave up before getting to experience too much gameplay
fell out of the map climbing underneath a bridge
Sick. I think for a game like this what’s most important is having satisfying visuals. obviously it would be better if your mspaint drawings were higher quality but I think those are technically fine. I would do some research about hierarchy of visuals (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YISKcRDcDJg) as well as general UI design best practices and shit. you should differentiate your common and rare pulls and ESPECIALLY symbols vs powers visually with their popups
There’s a lot of mental processing I need to do even to fight your chump enemies. the game should do some of that heavy lifting for me. for example sound effects to convey enemy state instead of just color (see crypt of the necrodancer for examples of how to do that). a change in music when we go between “explore” to “battle” to “hidden”. since enemies have a set amount of hp and always die in the same amount of hits just show me how much hp they have left.
sorely missing the “pick shit up off the ground” gameplay that is common in roguelites
I think your maps are way too big… so much walking around when I should be punching enemies. making a more condensed map with fatter encounters may lead to an increased difficulty which you’ll have to account for in enemy attack frequency and health of course.
finally I think your gameplay is too punishing. either make damage not stick so hard or make you take less. personally i like full resets outside of combat but i know I’m alone in that. High difficulty in games is totally fine when the variety in gameplay is high enough to support cruising through the early game a bunch of different times like DCSS. but it’s just 3 or 4 enemies and almost no gear. i dont want to have to engage my brain at the level I need to until im at least far enough into the game that I have a build going and something to lose
