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Hi!

First of all, thank you for playing! Second, thank you for the elaborate feedback including video footage!

The grapple buffer was something we'd talked about, but I couldn't quite find a proper-working solution for this in the timespan of the jam. However, your comment did just gave me an idea of a potential way to implement this, will be giving it a try for a post-jam build later this week!

As for the jump, you're absolutely correct about the jump sometimes being higher than intended- had me double check everything haha. Turns out a late "fix" I pushed in an attempt to fix another problem, caused this one: basically, the grounded radius has become a bit too big, which only sometimes causes the "isGrounded" check to return true more often than it should, causes you to get the first frame of a jump twice as you go off the ground, giving you just a tad bit more height than intended.

Once again, thank you so much for the elaborate feedback, it sure is very helpful and I'll make sure to get to it as soon as I can!

~Kepsert

Hi! Thanks for trying the game!

So in general, you're going to want to hold the mouse button to keep the grapple going- from there forward you can use your directional input (A and D) to swing back and forth, let go of mouse button once you've made enough momentum. Alternatively you could jump into an angled grapple (hold mouse click, when you do this!) and let the gravity's moment give you some start-up momentum.

Hopefully that helps! ^That's based on the game running as intended on your device, but in the case it's an actual issue, I'd love to hear about specifics so I can look into a solution :D

@Noaxen - I tried that for a speedrun leaderboard as well, which shows the results in the correct order- HOWEVER, lower times does not update the beaten time on the leaderboards. A higher time does :D

@WerwiewasAnanas have you found a solution? If not, check out my comment (most recent comment on here) or contact me on discord: Kepsert if you need assistance :)

Hi! First of all.. thank you for this AMAZING system! I love it! Been using it in a few projects haha. Now for my question: Is there any implementation to have records based on lowest score by a player (such as a speedrun timer)? Or is the way to go right now simply checking whether the player has gone quicker than their previous time, and only THEN upload/update the result?

Thank you!

EDIT: Figured it out! In case anyone else needs something similar:
1. Upon entering wherever you would submit your new "high score", first check to see if a personal entry already exists.
2. If yes, check if your new score is lower than your personal entry.
3. If yes, and the user presses a submit button:
4. Delete current personal entry
5. In the "Success" callback, put the code to upload an entry.

Hope that helps!

Thank you for playing! I'm glad you enjoyed the aesthetics, it took me a bit to get music that sorta fit the vibe I was going for :) 

As for the balance, I agree! It was very hard to balance it around different builds- I'm hoping to get back to it post-jam, more abilities, a better "upgrade"/"shopping" system, more enemies, and hazards ^^

Powerup visual feedback (but also the feedback for pickups) were on one of my to-do lists but sadly didn't make it in haha. Time constraints D: Maybe prioritizing a palette swapper was a bad call by me :D

I'm glad you enjoyed the chaos and the game! Thank you for playing!

No problem! Also, didn't mean to say you should add a leaderboard, just wanted to let you know this exists and it's surprisingly easy to implement, in case you'd like to :D

Hi!

Interesting use of abilities, but I found them somewhat hard to control (especially the dash and the bounce ability). The graphics, while not amazing, were very clear which I really like! Level design is interesting and made use of the different abilities in different ways, which is a big plus as it stops the game from feeling repetitive. Controls were very responsive, but the physics felt just a bit clunky(?). Overall a very cute little entry. Looking forward to your future games!

Cool concept! Controls were responsive, music was banging. As you'd mentioned yourself, the physics DID feel a little bit clunky at times. I feel like the core concept was great and there's a lot of exploring you can do here! The graphics were simple, but cute and nice animations; did exactly what they had to do. The gameplay felt a little slow but I read below that this was a bit of a physics issue, hopefully you could get it sorted out in a potential post-jam (otherwise if you choose to focus on other projects instead, completely understandable haha).

Also, you're using Unity and a scoring system so let me just drop this here: https://danqzq.itch.io/leaderboard-creator (I'm not related to this creator in any way)- it's a very simple tool, with unity integration, to set up online leaderboards. In case you're not familiar with it, pretty much THE best thing I ran into for my own game :D

Thanks for your submission and looking forward to future games!

Cool game!

Pros: 

- Controls were responsive

- Both art and music did what they had to do, and even though not triple a game "amazing"-like, it didn't matter for the type of game.

- Direction of the game, was clear (grab 2 keys, head towards the exit).

Points of improvement:

- COYOTE JUMP- please ;_;

- The levels seemed a bit lackluster, more so a random jumble of tiles and the player could use whatever abilities available to get through them. I think it'd have been super neat if the platforming was more built around figuring out which ability to use when (but if the abilities are taken away in a random order- I didn't test, then this might've been the best approach.)

EITHER WAY, I enjoyed the playthrough, very simple, but the different abilities were entertaining. Did end up beating all levels but 1 and the final level using just warp though :D

I saw the screenshots and sort of expected a platformer. Did not expect a gambling game haha. The idea was interesting, roguelike gambling where the upgrades influenced your gambling luck? Don't mind if I do! It did take me some time before I properly realised what I was doing, but once I got there, I enjoyed the grind to escape. Fun little entry, wonder if there's more you could do to explore this direction!

Interesting take on the good ole energy concept! Responsive controls, a banger of a soundtrack choice! (Even though from what I understood, not made by you? But it definitely adds to the aesthetics). Has a coyote jump. Level 3 had a really rough segment in my opinion with the coins directly above the spikes, but a very neat entry overall!

Cute entry!

Very simple, but enjoyable! I feel like it might've been a bit better if the snake didn't fill up the entire screen right away, though! Controls felt a bit unresponsive at times, maybe just a WebGL build thing? Besides that, the game did what it promised on the package, and fit the theme well!

Thanks for the submission!

Cute little entry, fun idea with picking up the keys you can then press! The music did start to get a bit repetitive after a while though!

The level design was simple but neat, exploring the many different possibilities with this gimmick. The controls were very responsive and I think the game itself was very self-explanatory. Some of the platforms felt a bit toooo small for this type of game but it didn't bother me much. Beat the game, flexed in each level!

Thanks for your submission!

Great graphics! Very nicely done! Another commenter mentioned the music being appalling, I beg to differ. While not perfect, I think it fit the game perfectly, it brought me straight back to the old-school games, gave me a bit of castlevania vibes even, perhaps?

The gameplay was somewhat limited and sometimes I had a bit of a hard time keeping up with the text panels; also, were they more different outcomes to the game than the one I got?

Thanks for your submission!

Hi! Thank you for playing! The bounce pads are a bit different than you might be used to; the higher you fall from, the more height you get! In this case, you'd want to be in a vertical L position in the top left gap, dash to the right (to avoid the hands), then use your double jump / airjump right as your dash finishes. You then get the highest potential bounce from the spring which allows you to rotate onto the ledge top right. I hope that helps! Gl! :D

Thanks for playing and taking the time to leave a comment!

The speedrun / achievement menu were two things I'd always have wanted to do, and I tend to use jams for learning purposes as well, so when the other programmer was sleeping and I had no player character or anything to progress with, I figured I might start working on these systems instead :D I'm glad they're actively getting noticed!

Hi!

Thanks for playing! The thing you marked on the screenshot is sadly a wonky glitch that's only present in the WebGL build, which we ran into after the submissions ended. We did do some research afterwards and we now know where it comes from (Unity's very own pixel perfect camera component, thank you Unity :')) but as the submission period had ended we were not able to fix it.

Very sick game! I love the simplicity of the graphics, they're adorable and do what they have to do, not overwhelming at all. The colour choices were top notch! Gameplay was tough but a lot of fun, frustrating, but had me trying over and over. All in all, great entry!

I'm sorry to hear you couldn't get the final version out, the screenshots look neat, I really love the style on them!

I really did enjoy the different effects on the original pong game, simple, but literally game-changing. The sound effects were solid, fit really well! The music was very soothing, too!

I did find the AI was just a tad bit too hard to my liking (was it beatable at all haha?) - I noticed, the moment I'd hit the blip, it'd go straight into the position where the blip would eventually go. Nonetheless, I did enjoy a good 15 minutes of playing pong with different effects and I hope to give the full version a shot once the jam is over!

Thanks for your submission!

Hi! Finally got to play the game! Beat it in 180 seconds first playthrough (with 30 deaths haha).

Your game gave me some really old-school DOSgame vibes, pretty neat for nostalgia reasons hehe. The gameplay was simple, but as a whole it was still engaging and made me want to keep on going! The short levels make retrying easy and make deaths feel a lot more forgiving so on the level design part that's a good call!

Some pros that I found in your game:

- The controls are very responsive, nothing more to be said there!

- The colour coding of enemies is a smart approach, especially one to keep in mind as you potentially build on this game.

- The difficulty curve in levels was very good!

- The design of the game was made done very straightforward and I'd like to believe not a single player will question what they're meant to do!

Now some things that I think might improve the game:

- A little polish such as a fade out/in screen upon new levels is a great touch that'll increase the perceived quality of a game by loads, without being too hard to implement.

- The hitboxes felt a little bit too tight (I think the hitboxes were exactly the size of the actual sprites?). Generally you'll want hitboxes to be sliiiightly smaller than the actual graphics (reaction time with the brain and whatnot) however, for the theme/style, this might actually be just fine as I believe most games back then had really strict hitboxes on their graphics.

- The level design, while good in difficulty curving, felt a bit random. A rule I tend to stick to, myself, is that I try to have every single block, obstacle, everything have a meaning in the level, in order to make a player do something, to guide them, or to challenge them. 

Thank you for your submission and I'm looking forward to see what you come up with in future jams!

Hi!

Your game fit the retro theme very well, I applaud you! The art is yet another modern/futuristic, sci-fi, close to neon-style art which I really appreciate. The controls were very responsive and the turret constantly spinning, only allowing you to change direction, was a great twist on other similar games, albeit I did have a bit of a hard time hitting my shots with this mechanic. 

The ammo as a pickup was a neat change which forces you to take risks, which is a great improvement from games similar to this that basically just allow you to sit still. The SFX matched the gameplay really well too. The music itself, while not bad itself, could've been a bit more "intense" or "hyped" if that makes sense - to my liking that is.

On top of that, the slow introduction of multiple enemies was a nice touch!

Oh! It's not any critique at all, but perhaps you could consider making points go up more than "1" per picked up 'coin'. Like 10 or 100 per coin, it makes it feel a bit more impactful and I personally think it'd add a bit to the chaos that becomes the game as you go longer and longer.

Thank you for your submission!

This is the definition of retro! The addition of the joysticks too, 6/5!

The game was very, very enjoyable to me, but I felt like the boss was a bit too hard. (I did beat it in the end!) It spawned enemies quicker than I could kill them which is okay cause I could kite them around to get to the boss still HOWEVER the big beefy guys that can't be killed (I think?) couldn't really be kited around so it became a bit of an RNG-fest. I still enjoyed the grind though, fun experience!

Both the chosen soundtrack AND SFX were chef's kiss and I really appreciated it- added greatly to the retro experience. The controls were insanely responsive and not having any smoothing on the character was perfect for this type of game. The art fit the retro aesthetics really well.

I feel like you have quite some potential to make a bigger retro-like game here, maybe some additional enemy types- perhaps a single extra ability to destroy the "beefy boys", I'd be excited to play more of this!

Thank you for your submission!

Very cool concept! Short and simple submission but I enjoyed playing it, left me wanting more!

It felt a bit like Ibb & Obb but with the reversed controls twist and I feel like it has SO MUCH POTENTIAL!

I'm a sucker for these simple sort of graphics, especially the neon-vibes it gives.  May I recommend maybe setting up an effect that would make it seems like everything's glowing? That'd be so sick, I reckon!

The controls were very responsive, which I like. I did wish there was some sounds to it (or was it just broken on my end? Let me know!) - it would've added to the immersion greatly.

As mentioned in another comment, level design could use some work but that doesn't take away that the concept is very cool and I enjoyed playing through it, well done! Thanks for your submission!

One of my favourite mechanics this jam! (SO FAR)

The concept is just very neat, smart, well done! My only problem is that I feel that it was fairly hard to actually score points cause most of the blocks didn't quite seem to fit together well at all, a potential fix might've been to steer away from the default tetris layout and instead went for a field that had a width multiplication of 3. Not sure!

Either way, game was very responsive and I loved the aesthetics, very well put together. As mentioned before, a little bit of SFX and VFX would've been awesome, but for me personally it didn't take away from the game. (Also, I loved the self-aware comment regarding the font haha)

Thank you for your submission!

Really enjoyed playing this game as a person who is into the oldschool machines!

The colour palette is great, I love the different greens on black, great picks! Big props to having multiple space ships.

Controls were responsive, and I appreciated the little addition of powerups.

The game was getting slightly chaotic in an "unfair" way if the screen got too filled. Especially with enemies being able to shoot through asteroids. Nonetheless, I had an enjoyable time playing this one, thank you for your submission!

Very fun take on pacman! LOVED the mechanics and you hit the theme perfectly! I found the movement was a bit too unforgiving for my personal taste (however, I might simply not be the right target audience for this specific gameplay so I won't let it count in my judgment haha).

I've played for approx 20~ minutes and haven't been able to clear the screen - I hope I didn't miss out on any extras/easter eggs!

OH, and the effect that makes the graphics... I don't know how to explain it haha, you probs know what I mean- I LOVE it.

Cute little entry! Pretty responsive controls and especially the intro's style looked really sick to me! Besides that you managed to stick within the retro theme fairly well and set up the basis to a nice little arcade-like high-score game. Potential improvements could be:

- Allowing player to go down slightly faster by holding down.

- Adjusting hitboxes to be a bit more lenient (a common strategy is to make the hitbox used to HIT an enemy (if relevant) slightly bigger than the sprite, but the hitbox that damages the player, slightly smaller than the sprite. Same goes for the player sprite, making the hitbox slightly smaller will feel more fair to players).

- Extra collectables: Health, parachute repairs, for example.

Thank you for your submission, I had a fun little playthrough!

Hi! Thanks for stopping by; could you let me know which browser you're using so I can look into it? Thanks!

Hey!

Quirky little game! At first I thought it was a bit too hard, I died over and over and felt like it was unfair - if others feel the same it might throw them off from trying. Mainly things as being shot by enemies I couldn't even see yet was a bit annoying.

Once I adjusted my mindset and took things more carefully though, I did appreciate it a lot more! The graphics were simple, lowkey reminded me of oldschool cdi games! The soundtrack, quite a banger, but did get a little repetitive as I spent more and more minutes playing haha. The SFX were mostly good, some felt slightly out of place but not to the point that I thought it'd get annoying.

The charging an arrow mechanic was cool, however the game was a bit too-highpaced (running around shooting and dodging) for me to fully grab whether charging the arrows actually had an impact; nonetheless, I shot all my arrows fully charged!

I made it to the bossfight (not sure if there is more than one!) and unfortunately gave up after a few deaths due to work coming up (might revisit later!), but I did like the design of the boss! Gave me quite some bullet hell vibes - I like those! For future improvement you could look for ways for the boss to "communicate" to the player what to expect, so the player can repeat and learn based on those tells.

Thanks for your submission!

Thank you for playing! I'm happy you enjoyed it! As for the length of the game, I think that's kind of my "jam" at this point haha- I basically get that for every single jam I participate in. I guess I just like pumping out levels/content!

Hi! Thank you so much for playing, I'm glad you liked it! I wish I had some more time for additional mechanics/gimmicks (I have ideas haha) but I decided to go with a strict scope to avoid overscoping this jam. As for speedrunning; some friends of mine and I have already been running this! My current record is 8:39 (in-game time only), with 1 death, but even without that death, there's plenty of optimization to be got!

Hey!

I loved your take of the theme, a nostalgic-like game that goes "through the ages" when it comes to styles! I was kind of sad when it ended as I was excited to see what would come next; but also to find out what the next enemy type was!

The controls were very simple and responsive. The lenient hitboxes on bullets/enemies were perfect. The SFX matched the functions. The soundtrack got a little bit repetitive/tedious, but I guess I maybe wasn't supposed to keep playing up to 15k+ points haha. I wonder what else you could've done with the gameplay to keep things exciting as you go!

Thank you for your submission!

You win! Thanks for playing!

The mechanic felt like a unique asset and I feel like you could've done so much more with it (which you might've initially planned to? Haha), nonetheless, I saw the potential and loved it! The controls were responsive and worked very well.

The audio got a bit tedious/repetitive, but that's not much of a biggie! As for level design, I really liked the ideas you put in there, challenging and interesting bits, but I do  think the way the character controlled itself could've been a bit more lenient - for example the final jump (drop underneath the spikes than jump up to the next platform) was incredibly tight it felt like. Perhaps a slightly smaller hitbox for the player would do the job already!

Nonetheless, grats on submitting your first game jam ever, a playable game with a full gameloop! Congratulations!

Cheers to your first game jam!

To start with, here are some things I liked:

- The graphics, specifically the background. It felt like a chaotic kind of good, and I don't know, I just really loved it haha.

- The SFX feel good for what they do. Good picks!

- The HUD is clear and does exactly what it has to do.

- Volume bar in the options panel! <3

Now some tips I feel like they might be helpful for future game jams:

- The SFX, while good, are really off when it comes to volume levels. Some are very loud, some are way lower. This can be fixed rather easily by using a (free) tool such as Audacity. Drop your audio file in there, ctrl + a the entire track, go to "Effects" select "Amplify" and it'll automatically adjust the volume to the maximum volume without it hitting the red- if you do this for all of the audio, they'll all be on the same level.

- In a game like this with short fire rates, it might be beneficial to put on an "autoshoot" option by just holding the mouse button.

Besides that, I feel like you did great delivering your first playable game jam game ever, and hopefully you enjoyed it enough to do more of those in the future; it will only get better!

Thanks for your submission <3

I loved the visuals and the way you used the theme, then adding horror to an old-time classic such as Pong is a stroke of genius! I felt like the gameplay itself was a bit tedious, not your fault, it's just pong after all, but perhaps speeding up the ball a tad bit or making the AI just a bit more challenging would've been great!

The audio was also great, I loved the way you used the music during the tutorial and well, all the static noises throughout the experience itself were top notch.

Thanks for your submission!

Thank you for the kind words! People who take the time to play through the game and let us know what they think are highly motivating to continue improving on the product. I hope you'll be back to play the next demo version once it's out!

Hi! Thank you so much for playing, and also taking the time to leave a comment! Just a headsup; there are 35 levels in total!

I'm currently reiterating the game's design and the way I design levels for a 2nd demo version, using feedback I've received from you and others- less filler, more gimmicks, more interesting gameplay. I totally agree that the demo feels dragged out so from here on forward I'm looking to do better. Stay tuned! :D

Thank you so much for playing! I'm glad you enjoyed it- I think Stoff and and I pretty much worked on it nearly fulltime next to our regular jobs haha.

As for the controller; there seems to have been some problems with the stick for some controllers; I was wondering: if you have the time, would you mind going into our controls panel through the rebind menu and see if trying to remap the movement for gamepad using the stick does register any input at all? It'd help me greatly when it comes to sorting out the issue for future jams!

Either way, thank you for the comment! I've been excited to get into One More Try since seeing it on Rook's stream, you'll hear from me soon!

Thanks for the reply! I'll look into the controller, see if there is a workaround in the unity input system for that specific controller, there must be!

The abilities are a bit mega man-esque. You unlock a new ability after each boss you beat, and each one is used by the same button. Then there's an additional button to "scroll" through the abilities. It's a bit oldschool, but we thought it worked well with the bosses I designed and on top of that, it's scalable fairly well without ending up with many, many, buttons :D