itch.io

The gameplay loop works nicely, I would appreciate some interactivity during the wave though. Currently, purchasing is not fully obvious and has no feedback. Same with tower placement and costs, such as tower range before placing. Additionally, more enemy variety and tower selection.

The first platforming section was without problem. However, I got stuck at the second section after passing through the portal. The pickups were probably supposed to give me a way to exit the area, but I got softlocked in the hole with the portal entrance. Dying and playing the section of the level over did not reset the pickups, so I unfortunately got stuck again. Pressing Escape also seems to cause a softlock and blocks all further player input.

Nice implementation of the wall-climb mechanic! I'd suggest zooming the camera out while climbing due to the vertical movement. There were also some minor bugs with it (such as when hitting an upper corner of a wall), but otherwise it worked well.

When the game restarts after death, the energy is kept, but keys are not. It makes retrying a little easier, but the lack of checkpoints still makes it annoying when only one hit kills the player.

In any case, good work! I like the custom game mechanic implementation the most.

The level is visually more complete, including lighting. However, personally, I didn't enjoy the aspect of memorization paired with unforgiving one-hit-kill obstacles. Even when the crystals are visible, platforming is extremely tight at times and hurtboxes don't match up with graphics, and the tight platforming is even more pronounced during the invisible parts. Having to repeat levels to refresh obstacle placement was also tedious - it would have been better to be able to return to the end of the level.

While unforgiving games like this may not be my favorite, it is still a good simple demo project in my opinion. The memorization aspects could be utilized in a more enjoyable way in another projet - perhaps with more forgiving obstacles, for example.

The current visual state is fairly bare-bones, but I think that's expected for a small-scale project like this one. The lighting could be fixed with a global 2D light. The layout is okay, has reasonable pathing (though I did have to backtrack a bit once), and I didn't encounter many issues with movement. It might be worth it to zoom the camera out a little bit.

At the start, the falling platforms do not reset upon death, making jumping up a little trickier (easier thanks to air control). The boss fight also doesn't seem to reset correctly upon death (if that's intentional, I'd expect the shield to reset at least). The life meter also doesn't update properly for some reason (it only ever dropped to 4 hearts).

Otherwise though, good work!