itch.io

Cool game! Thanks for sharing. Very impressive boss fights and artwork. Some controls were a little sluggish to respond a couple times, not sure if it waits for the previous animation to finish or something. Probably something you are aware of though and will get ironed out on iteration.

Game has a distinct personality too.

I'll start playing it now!

Last call in case anybody wants their game played. Going to end the stream soon!

Played this game on stream. Beat all the levels. Very solid gameplay. If I had finished before reviews were closed would've given:
Gameplay: 5 Seems perfect for what it's going for, good pacing of new mechanics, grabbing and dragging was responsive and worked how it should.
Enjoyment: 4 Fun for what it was
Innovation: 4 A low 4, but while no individual idea is super unique putting them all together in this world is pretty innovative.
Audio: 3 A high 3, kinda barebones but it achieved the important goal for puzzle games where it helped build a good puzzle solving mood without distracting at all. Maybe could've used some one or two soft bits of ambience to build out the mood.
Visuals: 3 Well drawn art, like the audio I think it just needed some slight non-static effect to give it life/dimension. Again, high 3, almost 4, much better than had it been too busy/flashy in a way that made the puzzle harder to visually parse.
Theme: 4 A textbook solid example of the theme.

Playing it now!

Played your game on stream. Beat level 1. Pretty alright style, liked the ambience. I think for a game like this though, you need high precision controls and consistent level behavior. Think of something like Super Meat Boy or Celeste. Everything is very responsive and dying always resets the cycle so there is no luck element to the timing.

For your game the main mechanic of gravity flipping felt very slow, this combined with the world state not resetting when you die made it so the start of level 2 was mostly up to luck rather than timing or player skill.

Also some of the floor and other colliders were bumpy/off. Normally this is nbd, but if you aim to make an extremely precise and challenging platformer, you need floors to be perfectly smooth, and the controls to feel super tight. And these did not.

In case you are curious, had I finished during rating time, my rating would have been:
Gameplay: 2/5
Audio: 4/5
Visuals: 3/5
Enjoyment: 2/5
Innovation: 1/5 (idk if other mechanics are added later)
Theme: 2/5

I started playing earlier, but am playing again, live now.

Wasn't able to play/review this game in time, but I played it after live on stream. It had good vibes. Well done ambience, really liked the visual filter you put on everything. Seems like an interesting engine/foundation that could be built into something more. 

We are so back!

I'm going to try to play through the 4 in the queue and any requested by people who join the stream. People watching live will get priority.

Welp, got to several games, but time rant out. Still no reason not to hang out and play some more games!

I'm going to take a short break then I'm going to be back and play the following games on stream:

1. https://barionlp.itch.io/standing-still 
2. https://sydev-games.itch.io/upfall
3. https://pasus.itch.io/dimeslide
4. https://anamerzlaya.itch.io/ignore-the-blackbird

So with the ratings/time pressure off, if you are interested in hanging out and maybe seeing somebody play your game. Feel free to post in this topic!

I promise to play any ones posted in here on stream. If anybody else has a chance to give my game a last look it would be hugely appreciated.
https://joe40001.itch.io/look-at-me-friend-playroom

Regardless I'll play through any games posted here.

It's next in my queue to stream.

Will be next in queue.

This will be next in the queue.

Only takes 3-5 minutes to beat, I'd really appreciate anybody giving my game a play/review:

It has tips and a walkthrough in case you get stuck. 
https://joe40001.itch.io/look-at-me-friend-playroom

https://itch.io/jam/brackeys-15/rate/4310214

Please anybody if you do have time, mine is in need of ratings. Also I'm still streaming, so feel free to come by and give a link.

https://joe40001.itch.io/look-at-me-friend-playroom
https://itch.io/jam/brackeys-15/rate/4310214

I'm going to play yours on stream right now:
https://itch.io/jam/brackeys-15/topic/6074890/im-streaming-myself-playingrating-...

If you want to check out mine, you can do so here, (it has less than 20 reviews)
https://joe40001.itch.io/look-at-me-friend-playroom
https://itch.io/jam/brackeys-15/rate/4310214

Really liked it, you can watch my vod of me playing it.

I'm going to play yours on stream right now:
https://itch.io/jam/brackeys-15/topic/6074890/im-streaming-myself-playingrating-...

If you want to check out mine, you can do so here:
https://joe40001.itch.io/look-at-me-friend-playroom
https://itch.io/jam/brackeys-15/rate/4310214

Come join me to request games for me to play/discuss or to just hang out:
https://www.twitch.tv/mrmoxie

You can post links here or in chat there and I'll play/review the games.

Also if you want, ratings may be closed, but I'd still be curious to hear people's experience with my game:

https://joe40001.itch.io/look-at-me-friend-playroom
https://itch.io/jam/brackeys-15/rate/4310214

---
(EDIT Note: This topic was a bit different before ratings closed, but same basic vibe, just updated the title so people knew they could *still* get their games played and discussed live.) 

I played this game for a while, must have made it to level 4 or 5? I tried to make it to the end but unfortunately in one of the classrooms (the one where the guy is there and I think you are supposed to walk up to him?) I kinda got stuck walking off the right side of the map, and when I did I fell and there didn't seem to be a way to restart.

Lots of positives to say about this game. I feel like you got the harder parts of game design: Ambition, Innovation, Passion, Creativity, etc with this game. I think taking this game and polishing it would be a really good exercise because there are other things that seem to be newer gamedev pitfalls you fell into. For example, lots of people do platformers, and when you do, it's a lot of work to try to try to build it all from scratch, and I feel that's what you did here. As a result parts of it didn't feel good to control. For example it felt basically impossible to jump from moving platforms.

The good news is this issue has been solved tons of times before, so if you experimented with doing a "platforming microgame" tutorial it might help you learn some tricks. The key things you'd have to look for is "state machines" and "parenting the player object to moving platforms". These aren't things you'd know necessarily on your own, but generally people can learn it once and then it helps all their projects moving forward.

The issue with how you had it set up is that because there doesn't seem to be state machines or parenting the character being pushed up is constantly being considered both on and off the platform at the same time, so the player can't know if by pressing jump they actually will jump or not. And you can't rely on unity's friction to keep a player object on the horizontal moving platforms. 

There were several things like that where things didn't work quite right, but the issues were stuff like that where a developer aren't necessarily ever really taught it outright, but you can learn it once and then know it moving forward. Other examples were things like using the scene manager to reset the levels or other smarter ways to reset the levels, because as I played it I could tell that sometimes the reset would bug the scene (enemies would continue flying left the whole way, etc).

I think across the board it might just be a good exercise to take this game and to polish off all the issues. Like I said, you did the hard part with your originality and unique mechanics, the part that needs work is just watching some tutorials about designing a platformer that feels good to play and building off the solutions that have existed for a while now.

Lots of little things just kind of added up, another example is I felt like you were going for a typewriter effect, but then you didn't pre-set the line breaks so the words that were too long and started a new line first were written above then moved below which broke the effect. Things like that, the movement, the level reset, the collision in the classroom, etc. All stuff that I think would be a good thing to polish.

Anyway, sorry for going on so long. I do see promise and ambition here so I wanted to try to give some suggestions that might be useful. 

I played this game for a while, must have made it to level 4 or 5? I tried to make it to the end but unfortunately in one of the classrooms (the one where the guy is there and I think you are supposed to walk up to him?) I kinda got stuck walking off the right side of the map, and when I did I fell and there didn't seem to be a way to restart.

Lots of positives to say about this game. I feel like you got the harder parts of game design: Ambition, Innovation, Passion, Creativity, etc with this game. I think taking this game and polishing it would be a really good exercise because there are other things that seem to be newer gamedev pitfalls you fell into. For example, lots of people do platformers, and when you do, it's a lot of work to try to try to build it all from scratch, and I feel that's what you did here. As a result parts of it didn't feel good to control. For example it felt basically impossible to jump from moving platforms.

The good news is this issue has been solved tons of times before, so if you experimented with doing a "platforming microgame" tutorial it might help you learn some tricks. The key things you'd have to look for is "state machines" and "parenting the player object to moving platforms". These aren't things you'd know necessarily on your own, but generally people can learn it once and then it helps all their projects moving forward.

The issue with how you had it set up is that because there doesn't seem to be state machines or parenting the character being pushed up is constantly being considered both on and off the platform at the same time, so the player can't know if by pressing jump they actually will jump or not. And you can't rely on unity's friction to keep a player object on the horizontal moving platforms. 

There were several things like that where things didn't work quite right, but the issues were stuff like that where a developer aren't necessarily ever really taught it outright, but you can learn it once and then know it moving forward. Other examples were things like using the scene manager to reset the levels or other smarter ways to reset the levels, because as I played it I could tell that sometimes the reset would bug the scene (enemies would continue flying left the whole way, etc).

I think across the board it might just be a good exercise to take this game and to polish off all the issues. Like I said, you did the hard part with your originality and unique mechanics, the part that needs work is just watching some tutorials about designing a platformer that feels good to play and building off the solutions that have existed for a while now.

Lots of little things just kind of added up, another example is I felt like you were going for a typewriter effect, but then you didn't pre-set the line breaks so the words that were too long and started a new line first were written above then moved below which broke the effect. Things like that, the movement, the level reset, the collision in the classroom, etc. All stuff that I think would be a good thing to polish.

Anyway, sorry for going on so long. I do see promise and ambition here so I wanted to try to give some suggestions that might be useful. 

Very polished, but doesn't seem like luck was a factor since I could just shake the window until I got what I wanted.

Really liked it, tons of heart and originality. Made it to the end twice.  The ending animation cycling three times confused me a little made me think I let go or had to let go. If there was some part of the animation that didn't reset it might be more clear. Also mechanically not sure about the half second or so delay after letting go but before time resumes. For tighter controlling maybe it should resume right away? I think this was done in unity, so you can also do Mathf.Lerp to make the transition into effects feel a bit smoother. That's my only real criticism, because the time effect is very start/stop, some of the timing tasks (like the jumping up from a box) one are kinda luck based. On my second cycle I considered trying to no-death the game but those levels make it effectively impossible.

Still, considering how made from scratch this was and how genuine and fresh it felt. I really liked this, moreso that games that are obvious and more "polished" but in that phony using tons of off the shelf assets and code kind of way.