Incredibly fun, aside from maybe the nephew (okay that's a little hard on him haha, but I really like the writing aspect. I respect the WarioWare style minigames, though). I really love the gameplay loop, it's anxiety inducing and tedious in all the right ways that build up tension and release when you're done. It's borderline addictive, and I find myself wanting to play more. Would love to play a version of this that was just an arcade mode that was a quota of words to meet on set intervals of time, like deadline extensions so long as you've written a set amount of words.
Fun platformer with really good visuals, really enjoyed it.
This is one I'm really interested in possibly offering more feedback for, the problem is that all of the feedback I could give is subjective. The game is great as is, and there's nothing wrong with it, I'm just a huge nerd for platforming games and like talking about the fluidity and rigidity of platformers, as well as how games can incorporate both. It's really interesting to design a platformer, but for what it is it serves its purpose really well.
Very cute game, I love the character and would like to see more of her!!! That said I think the gameplay is pretty short, as soon as you get the hang of it it's practically over. It feels like the kind of game that could benefit from an arcade mode where you play the levels and they get gradually harder as you try to see how long you can last. No real notes, aside from maybe the hitbox being a little misleading since being able to catch isn't as tight as it looks.
Another incredibly cool platformer! I really liked this one, the puzzles were nice and intuitive, and the game feels pretty polished all around. The only thing that could use more work were the environments themselves, but I understand more than anyone level design is hard and the focus is always to make it playable and then maybe make it look good later. I really like the last gauntlet level, but I cannot tell if you're meant to approach it from several directions? Could just be a pure min-max / time save thing. The game also does a great job of introducing mechanics whenever it starts to feel like you've already mastered some, and focusing on them alongside stacking them.
Not sure what the median time is, but I beat it in 12 minutes, which sounds like a lot less time than I thought it was considering I got stumped on one of the earlier puzzles.
Oh my god I also felt the level design crunch at the end of the jam as well, so no worries there. With the softlock, the little orb guys stop spawning after a few resets, so there's no way to reset the room since the R key is broken and you can't force yourself to die. You're just left with 0 rockets after you've used all of them, with no way to get up to the last platform to kill the last guy.
I have mixed feelings on the tutorial, if you are experienced with Quake or other movement shooters, you'd already know how to do a lot of the things that the tutorial is trying to teach you. At the same time, a less experienced player might be put off by the amount of mechanics being taught to them at once, some of which never really got a chance to be used (like b-hopping), and others more important (rocket jumping, since it's explicitly used later on).
The difficulty curve also doesn't really build up to the use of those mechanics, the first gameplay rocket jump challenge requires you to rocket jump 4 times in a row while avoiding enemies that can't be killed. I feel like this is a difficulty jump that wasn't very warranted, especially since you can get soft-locked in that room if you die enough times. Unfortunately, I was unable to see if anything else came after, since I got softlocked in that room.
Regardless, for a first time making a 3D game, it really does feel like a solid movement shooter. It's got a lot of the fundamentals down and even the weird and niche movement abilities, so I can understand why you'd want to try to teach those to the player. The unfortunate thing is that they are inherently a little unintuitive, so it can be hard to directly teach the player how to, for example, b-hop (especially within time constraints). I think the game does as much as it can in that regard.
Overall I enjoyed the experience when I wasn't struggling with the controls or the balancing. The premise and story are pretty cool, even if they stray from the theme of the game jam. I'm a sucker for these kinds of games, so I hope you'll continue developing games like it :)
I actually had mario vs donkey kong ON my r4 hahshhahahaha but thank you we worked really hard on it!!! It means a lot that you think it deserves to win :>
I might give this one another chance but I really tried to sit through it and got frustrated at the end of the tutorial.
Some unsolicited advice from a first time jammer to another, I feel like some of my frustrations come from the conduct outside of this game. Was a little disheartening to see someone complaining about the circumstances of how their game was played on stream, when other devs would really love to be in that position.
I bring it up because I feel like part of me understands and wishes you succeed, I mean you're just getting into game development and jams after all, but as someone with not that much experience with the scene itself (Again, mostly just a programmer, not much game dev experience :p) I can already tell that it's always going to be an uphill battle that takes a little bit of luck and patience and a lot of determination. Will replay this one eventually, and I hope it wasn't uncalled for or anything to bring this up. Best of luck.
I should write that im not usually a fan of a game having a mechanic thats overly hard without there being a reason for it, but it works well with the overarching themes of this game and its in a pretty controlled environment that can be used to learn it decently well by just playing the game, so I respect the decisions surrounding it a lot in terms of design & storytelling
I wish I could give better advice on how to improve the feel of the gameplay itself. The collisions sometimes push you upwards while you're halfway into a block. When hugging walls, you could hit spikes from the sides, even when not exactly holding the direction. I would recommend making the sides of spikes not kill you, as that can be frustrating.
While the lack of a death animation helped to make it easier to get back into the action, it also lends itself to very aimlessly attempting the platforming sections over and over without really teaching the player anything.
Personally speaking, the one handed control scheme made the game feel a little strange to play. I feel like it would have been a little easier to simultaneously dash, jump, and move in the direction I wanted to correctly had I controlled the player with one hand and their moves with another. Since this section is more subjective, I would also like to point out that I felt like the amount of moves made the game feel a little convoluted. I feel like a few good moves to structure your platformer around, as well as their quirks and gimmicks would be nice, but having wall jumping, double jumping, dashing, reset jumps with wall jumps, etc. made it feel like it'd be possible to cheese through more open levels if given the chance. This isn't entirely a bad decision, having a high skill ceiling is cool, but in a final game it might help to introduce those mechanics gradually.
This leads me to yet another opinion I have, and it's that I feel like this game is a little claustrophobic? The size of the player paired with the size of the obstacles and the height of the ceilings in the rooms felt like they were all working against each other. This, alongside the vision impairment the darkness provides from the spikes just felt disorienting to play against. I feel like if you were to have a larger character, it would be more fair to go for larger obstacles and pieces of terrain.
I hope this doesn't come off as harsh, I am very passionate about platformers and this is one of the first I played in this jam, but I didn't write a piece about it until now because I wanted some time to gather my thoughts constructively. I would really love to see another pass done on this game, with bugs fixed and potential level design improvements!
Pretty cool and neat game, I really enjoyed it! The only thing I can say really bothered me was not being able to turn off the effect on the screen. The bloom made everything feel hazy and blurry, and I felt like I had to squint to read things.
Aside from that, my only criticism is that when you level up on prestige, it takes you out of the loop instead of challenging you with the next wave and making you get your ass handed to you. I feel like it'd feel more natural if that were the case, and I could accept it being the end of the loop if I either ran out of fuel or died, as otherwise it feels like it grinds the game to a halt.
I disagree, it would help to make the player feel like it was their fault they died yes, but even still it wouldn't justify the punishment of going back to the start especially if there's no way to speed up the process somehow. Ideally, when a player gets sent back to the start, you want them to be able to use their knowledge of the game to advance faster, but it feels like you advance at the same pace every re-attempt.
"be as harsh as you want, I need criticism so I can improve"
This is by no means a bad start, I will try to be as helpful as I can here:
To start, you can export an executable file by going to "Build/Create Executable" in GameMaker. I can't entirely remember if that's available with the free version, but I'd reckon it at least lets you export to zip with GX.Games so you can upload it as an HTML5 build.
I have some criticisms of the game itself, and also of some of the conventions in the project file itself, since this is a rare instance of someone actually providing the repository of their project: Try to stretch your collision instances as much as possible, the current level alternates between tiling them for each collision and stretching them. The way you have collisions set up means that it is just plain better to stretch them. Say you made a level that was much bigger than the current one, it would start lagging because of the instance count. So less collisions = better in your case currently.
Some additional advice would be to not layer your collision below the tiles, but to instead toggle "visible" in the object itself. This makes it so that you can put the collision above the tile set in the editor, so you can clearly see where gaps and issues are. It would have helped catch the missing piece of collision in the 3rd room.
I can say that for the most part, the sprites are actually pretty good and coherent, and the colors pop out and have good contrast and aren't blending together.
I'd like to say more but most of it is subjective stuff, I just wanted to cover all of the important things that I know would definitely help anyone in your situation. I hope this wasn't too harsh or hard to understand, I can really appreciate the value in a project like this as a first submission to a jam. You've got a solid foundation and understanding, stuff will get better over time! :)
The game looks great, and is undeniably polished in different aspects like the menus and inclusion of multiplayer. I, however, do feel the gameplay is a little lacking. I didn't know if I was doing things correctly half the time, especially at the end where I vaulted over the entire tower instead of climbing the stairs. The mechanics felt like they were unintentional or buggy, and there were certain odd things that happened like enemies instantly killing me with health upgrades.
Please don't take this the wrong way though! I only want to bring attention to these things because I had a lot of fun playing this game. It's incredibly impressive and well made! I look forward to replaying it with my friend sometime soon :)
also I do presume that the "cutting carrots is hard" thing is on purpose I should clarify, if thats the case I do think thats really cool storytelling wise I just like ragging on my friend
I'll be real I'm very bad with horror games so I just forced my friend to play this one for me instead of playing it myself, but I understood the mechanics pretty easily, he just really SUCKS at cutting carrots. I wonder how he plays undertale.
Anyways really cool game and design (reminds me a lot of ENA but I'm sure I'm not the first to say it, and not in a bad way) especially for a first game! I'm sorry you have to deal with perfectionism I absolutely get it </3
I like the idea, but the lack of healing and sending the player immediately back to the start makes combat encounters unforgiving. This paired with the fact that the player feels pretty slow doesn't make replaying early sections feel very good and makes them drag on. That said, I think the idea is interesting, coincidentally one of our original drafts was a concept of a game that never progresses past the tutorial, so I think it's really cool to see that executed.
Also the last stage was honestly a lot easier and less frustrating if you don't engage with the targets mechanic, it's easy to undershoot or overshoot the targets and they serve as more misnomers meant to distract you from the fact that you can make the jumps with diagonal dashes
I think there's a lot of interesting ideas and mechanical depth with the gimmicks (especially the way reusing targets is done), but it feels like the difficulty might be a little too harsh, and the timing too strict with the tricks (mostly because of the controls, they felt a little clunky). Certain sections had me thinking I had to approach the targets vertically instead of diagonally because there was a lack of speed boost sometimes if I hit them. Could definitely be fleshed out into its own interesting platformer, and is still honestly a really good twist on the traditional celeste-styled dash platformer!
SERIOUSLY THIS IS SO COOL ??? I LOVE platformers, the art for this is amazing and the level design was really fun. I really hope this gets turned into a full game although I would say maybe the controls can feel a little unintuitive? I ask you please set up your page so people are more likely to play and download this because it deserves as much attention as some of the top jam games currently
It's tough to come up with what to say, but it was a very raw and real experience and I appreciate that aspect of it. You should be proud of yourself for putting something out there, especially something as personalized as I would imagine was your experience with the jam, nobody can take that away from you and I think that's very sweet. Keep going, for a first game you've accomplished a lot :)
Cute concept and idea, but it can feel frustrating at points. I feel as though it would have maybe been better had the staff given you a sort of predictive route, and then it was up to you to min-max the amount of bounces you get by using obstacles and moving objects similar to later levels. It's my opinion that you can have one or the other, but if you have both having to predict the amount of bounces yourself in your mind alongside doing so with obstacles, the game can become frustrating. I hope this doesn't come off as negative, because I do really like the game and appreciate the amount of effort put into it!
Cute idea but there are a lot of glaring issues with the gameplay loop and the details of the game. The jump sound plays constantly while in the air instead of when the player actually jumps, which makes it incredibly grating to listen to. The physics feel very slow and unforgiving in certain sections, which could be to the strength of a game, but it really just felt like getting anywhere was taking too long for me to really be enjoying anything. Jumps aren't buffered, which means that you can fall when it feels like you shouldn't be able to, and overall the game design feels like it's lacking to some degree.
Sorry about the amount of stuff at the beginning. Really wanted it to feel better in that regard but we were running out of time, so I kind of just had to put together a tutorial with all the essentials. In case you missed it, you can also right click the director to punch him off screen
Very reminiscent of old flash games. Felt really nostalgic. I liked the loop, even if it felt a little unintuitive at times, it definitely kept things fresh and experimenting with ways to do stuff / trying to figure out what to do did was pretty fun. Overall awesome game!
Incredibly fun and replayable! There's not a lot but I really love min-maxing moves and coming up with different strategies to approach the same levels! SILLY GOLF!!!
