itch.io

I thoroughly enjoyed this one! I like that there’s some real semblance of story in the game, including having a proper villain and final boss. The actual movement and combat was a bit clunky, mainly due to there only being two jump heights as far as I could tell, but the bigger issues with it were the character clearly using a capsule for collision, which made it possible to slide off the edges of platforms, and I presume is why you slide down slopes. Also, for some reason, jumping into a ledge cuts your jump short, which did make some more precise jumps more irritating than they should’ve been. That being said, I stayed engrossed until the end because the world design is extremely well done, with the only blemish being the overly simplistic map making navigation more difficult. Every upgrade felt useful, and every time I got one I immediately wanted to go everywhere I could with it, and often instantly remembered places I’d seen where each one could be used. And despite the map not being very useful, I never had too much trouble getting where I wanted to go. And each upgrade was unique! And I loved the transformation sequence every time you got a new power.

At the time of writing, this is easily my favorite game I’ve played this jam.

First, I want to highlight that the movement in this game feels really good, and that’s not as straightforward in a platformer as it may seem, but right away all the movement felt good and intuitive, the only issue I had was that movement in air felt really imprecise since it seemed like you accelerated too fast to do any minute movements. The character coming to a complete stop for either attack also felt a bit awkward. I also noticed you can crouch, but you can’t perform crouching attacks, which is a bit of a bummer. But besides the overall short length, there really isn’t much to complain about, everything that’s there is overall very polished. The character sprites and room graphics are really nice, I like all the sound effects, and the mermaid transformation for the water sections was very unique and creative. Great job!

I really like the concept for the game, but I think it missed the mark in a couple key areas. I really like the way the game looks, the spritework is really nice, and the dark palette fits very well with the overall dark tone of the game, and I enjoyed how simple the intro is. The biggest problem with the game is definitely its movement, you’re just… you’re too fast in all directions, you move extremely fast on the ground (even slowwalk is still fairly fast), your jump has an incredibly fast upward and downward speed unless you’re firing, it really feels like any movement action at all is some kind of emergency get out of an area button. But then the first boss requires a lot of precise movement to dodge effectively, and you don’t have a good capacity for precise movement, so it’s easy to get yourself in a situation to be forced to take damage (honestly, I’d say it’s hard not to), and that only worsens as the boss shrinks and becomes more nimble and necessitates even more precision in dodging. Ultimately, despite my best efforts, I wasn’t able to beat the first boss. I initially didn’t like how the first weapon at max fire rate aimed extremely slowly, but once I learned I can just release fire to aim quickly again and then press fire again, it created a fun stop start rhythm to the firing.

As a minor aside, the first boss’ sections could have used some tell for when they were going to attack, it was easy to dodge too early or too late since you just have to get a feel for the timing of their lunges. Also, while I don’t think it’s the game’s fault, I did notice the game randomly was locked to a lower frame rate and I did have occasional frame drops, but I played the web build on Firefox, and I have had issues with that happening on some web builds in the past, so I won’t fault the game for that.

I didn’t make it clear in the tooltip, but it’s not actually required to press both simultaneously, however you can only press the direction first, you can’t press jump early. In hindsight, I should’ve made it more clear that you can do this in the description text.

“Dragon Girl Punches Traffic Light People” 10/10 premise for a game

Obviously, it’s really bare bones, but I can’t say I didn’t laugh a lot throughout my time sliding through walls while launching everything in front of me into the air. I couldn’t figure out how to activate the lever though, hitting it didn’t seem to work, so I didn’t get super far into the game.

The presentation of this game is absolutely stellar, especially the whole fully voiced intro. Of the more finished areas, the spritework and graphics are incredibly well done, especially Brooke. I also appreciated that there was actually music! And I felt like the theme usage was great, the overall feel of the game would be entirely different without it. Now, it is mentioned in the description that it’s more of a prototype, so the lack of polish isn’t too surprising, the only major movement gripe I have is how hard it is to land precisely on a platform, Brooke seems to carry a lot of momentum in the air and especially where there were narrow platforms I had tons of trouble trying to land on them. Beyond that, movement was solid. The attack hitbox also seemed unclear and the inability to attack in air made the flying enemies really annoying, and since the projectile can’t hit grounded enemies or flying enemies it felt kinda meaningless. And it’s been mentioned by other commenters, but some enemies being right on transitions was definitely a little mean. That all being said, I do see potential in it, and I’m really happy to see there’s plans to continue working on it following the jam.

No problem! A bit of a shame I couldn’t get more info on the save file issue, but still glad I was able to point out some things so you could fix them!

Okay, so I have absolutely no idea why, but when trying to see what it said in the console, the file appeared to load perfectly fine this time. My exact sequence of steps was to load the console, attempt to load the file, the first time nothing happened, I loaded a different file without issue, I returned to the main menu, and this time the broken file loaded just fine. I’m even at the correct save point. Also, only on this test did I notice the life marker was at 1 while it wasn’t working, but now it’s at 3 while the file is working.

As a result, I don’t have any errors listed in the console, nothing from past sessions either from what I can see.

By refusing to load, I mean that pressing Enter or Z to load the file simply does nothing, it doesn’t even kick me out of the menu. Starting a new file or loading other files seems to work fine. This persists even after refreshes, and it still does this even loading it just now.

What I was trying to do was just quit and reload as fast as I could, so since the file I was using was the top one, I was just mashing Enter once I hovered over quit. I don’t believe I was in the death animation when this happened, but I could be misremembering. After that, I was at a black screen with the HUD visible, so I opened the menu again and tried quitting. After that, I appeared in some gray area with only a partial background and the character quickly fell off screen. I once again opened the menu and tried to quit, and it got stuck at a black screen this time. After I refreshed the page, the file was bricked.

I don’t know how relevant it is, but I’m playing the web version in Firefox 148.0.2.

Really solid! Because of what I’ll mention at the end, my save file bricked and I wasn’t able to get particularly far, only to the Lost Village, but I liked the overall feel of the game, my only real complaint about the core movement is the jump just feeling a little lacking. I really liked the… aerial slash, that’s the best name I can come up with for it (lol), while I feel it’s a little finicky since you need to make sure you’re below it if you’re trying to go up and make sure you’re on the correct side of it, it’s not super hard to adjust to and mostly only gets in your way if you’re going too fast. That said, sections where you had to use it on enemies did really frustrate me, mainly because it seemed like sometimes you wouldn’t be able to slice through an enemy without taking damage, other times you would, so trying it with low health could be punishing, and if you accidentally killed the enemy, you’d need to completely reload the room to try again. As far as presentation goes, the music really stood out to me, I felt like it added a lot to the vibe of the game, and the visuals (though a bit dark at times) were all around well done.

I somehow managed to get into a glitched state where the game wasn’t loaded past a black screen, and then the pause menu appeared twice, after which the game just stuck at a solid black screen. This happened when I tried to quickly quit and reload my file, and afterwards my file refused to load.

I definitely will admit that the combat was really unfinished, as I prioritized overall map design first and foremost. I considered buffing enemy damage and health close to the end of development to help the health and weapon boosts feel more substantial, but I worried it’d create huge difficulty spikes, so I left it as is. But I’m glad at least the map part worked out, since you enjoyed the secrets all around the map.

I’ve gotten a lot of complaints about the wall jump being too difficult or awkward, which I’m surprised by since I tried giving it a very generous window to execute.

I had actually tried allowing holding jump, but I found with my implementation it trivialized wall jumps because you could hold jump the entire time and you’d jump as soon as you hit the away direction, so I removed it. I think that’s just because of my implementation though, since it was designed around the away press being first.

Overall really solid! The graphics are really cute, and the progression is good, I like each of the powers you get, just wish I got more of an opportunity to use the construct ability, I thought it was very creative, but the frost ability on its own was just really fun. The gameplay feel was solid, though definitely a little unpolished, mainly with how slow your attacks are. I also wish there was an HP display of some sort (maybe there was and I didn’t notice it). The level design was really nice, did a lot of good hinting at what you were supposed to do, and the realization you can actually jump through platforms felt really good.

What issues were you having with it? I can try to give you some tips if you want.

You actually don’t need to stay on the wall you press against to do a wall jump, the check is lenient enough that you can be a good distance away from the wall and it’ll still let you jump. Can I ask why you felt you needed to stay against the wall to wall jump?

I’ve seen a number of platformers in this jam based around using limited platforms to progress through stages, but this one makes the most of the idea that I’ve seen. Everything feels centered around the spear, and the puzzles really make use of all its unique quirks. Most of the puzzles were laid out in a way that was easy to parse as your understanding of the game grows, but still allowed a lot of “aha” moments when you figured something out that was stumping you. My main issue is the enemies; particularly the archer, it was just really frustrating, their arrows felt like they always flew too fast, and though there’s a tell when they’re going to fire soon, there’s enough of a delay that you can’t really use it as a cue for when to jump if you’re too close, and if you try to jump over one before it fires, it’s near certain death.

The overall presentation is solid, everything was clear in what it was, and nothing was hard to see or read, but they did feel a bit slapped together, and the sound effects were the same, clear and good but a little amateur feeling, which isn’t as big a deal in a jam game, really. Overall, this is one of my favorites for the jam.

This is one of the most addictive games I’ve played in recent times. The feel of the movement and the gameplay loop is so refined, it’s so fun to optimize stages as much as you can, and almost every new hazard is introduced slowly in an easily digestible way. I also really enjoyed they ability to run on walls and ceilings, it added a lot of depth to the level design that wouldn’t have been possible otherwise.

I did have a couple problems with the movement though, the main one being that horizontal movement felt really different between ground and air, which was somewhat frustrating in a precise game like this, 2-6 in particular I really struggled with this. Also, if you run into a wall, and then jump, it looks like you actually get your running momentum, meaning it’s easy to slingshot yourself way past what you were aiming for if you’re not specifically trying to avoid it. That said, I did enjoy that there had to be some planning when attempting a stage, and especially routing later on, ensuring the game wasn’t just blindly speeding to the goal. And the presentation is stellar, the graphics are simple but well done, making things easier to parse at a glance, the effects were great, the music was great, it really is just an all around great game. Well done!

I really liked the idea of using push and pull spells with limited mana to navigate obstacles, but I couldn’t get them working consistently, the behavior I got with either felt really random and unpredictable. I also think the darkness with how much enemies are swarming makes navigation difficult, but it definitely helped the overall atmosphere of it, and I love the isometric camera and the ability to rotate it.

I like the idea of researching creatures and exploring the environment, but it mostly ended up feeling like aimless wandering to find things to research, which just amounted to clicking a few times when I learned that things seem to only have 3 parts of their entry. I also couldn’t figure out where to get a sword, so I didn’t get to interact with the combat at all. However, this game absolutely has the best presentation I’ve seen in this jam thus far, the graphics are all wonderful, my only issue is the walking sound got a little grating after a while.

I unfortunately wasn’t able to test on controller, since for some reason Firefox just wasn’t detecting it properly, so I can only speak on how it feels to play on keyboard. Which is a shame, since I feel like it would feel really good on a controller. I think the premise is very creative, having the two ships to control and fire from, but it is a bit difficult to work with mentally. I personally felt like it was too difficult to avoid things with how it rotated when moving either ship, but I don’t think there’s really solution to that and is just something the player has to adjust to. I really loved the presentation, the paper scribble like graphics are extremely charming.

I want to start by saying that I don’t think the limitation is used well at all. The game having a limited number of levels doesn’t do anything for the game itself. For me, the game was insanely fast, any slight tap of left and right caused me to move a huge distance, and jumps were similarly fast. I don’t think this was intended, I’m assuming there’s some tick rate issue making things happen faster than they’re supposed to. Regardless, it did take a lot of fun out of the game, since things were just too fast for me to react to anything, and the fixed jump made the jumps require a fair amount of precision in combination with the speed.

I didn’t make it clear, but pits only damage you if you don’t have invulnerability.

Admittedly, there was meant to be less of a focus on recharging, that’s just kind of what came about when I was running out of time.

Thank you for playing my game!

I really like the concept of the game, and I think it uses the limitation in a very creative way. However, I didn’t really enjoy it all that much, because it felt WAY too easy to get hit by either enemies or your own bullets, it seems like you can only take two hits before a game over, but they seem to refresh? As do ammo and dashes, and it wasn’t very clear when you got more health or ammo or dashes, as well as the HUD was hard to read for that information. Besides the hard to read HUD, I did like the artwork for the game, especially the player character.

The concept is really good, and despite the simple graphics everything was clear and easy to understand. Really, my only major gripe with the game is that at least for me, the cursor control was very buggy, and loved to get stuck on blocks as I moved and just goes crazy a certain distance from the character. Still, considering it’s made in only 4 hours, it’s still plenty of fun. Well done!

The concept is very good, and though the controls could use some refinement, I found they rarely got in the way while I was playing. One thing that stood out to me is that the game feels like it wants to be a slow paced puzzle platformer, but has things like the timer always being visible, which did feel like unnecessary pressure when trying to plan out how to deal with obstacles, and the lack of checkpoints make it extremely frustrating should you mess up later on in the level, which seems like it’d be more in line with a faster game. That all being said, as far as I got, it was fun to try and figure out each obstacle and use the spear platforms in different ways.

Although the idea is neat, and it’s presented fairly well, the lack of information on how things work makes it near impossible to play for most, but the display was at least clear enough that I could kinda stumble through the first couple of requirements, but I couldn’t get any further than that.

The idea of a store conveyor for the limitation is a fun usage of the limitation, and the presentation is super well done. The gameplay is overall fun, very fast paced and hectic, but it does get a bit frustrating when items are going so fast they're hard to pick up, and spinning is a bit slow at times. But when it does work, it works very well. Also, the very polished menu and game page were super nice touches.

Simple, fun, and well executed, you don't need much more than that. The asteroids hitting each other and breaking apart was especially cool.

I like the concept, hunting around a level for an enemy to kill, but I think the game's biggest issue is the camera: it makes trying to go left at all very frustrating, and my projectiles seemed to not go where I was actually aiming (though this may not have been a camera issue). But that's relatively easy to fix, and I think you really could take the concept pretty far with a larger stage to play around it.

The ability to switch gravity on both axes is super unique and fun to play with, and it's such a cool feeling when you do cool maneuvers with it, like in the spiral level. My only complaints about the level design are that some levels are too strict in their timing requirements, and I felt like I didn't have as great of an understanding of the switching as I needed earlier on. But in most cases, once you gain an understanding of the gravity switching, the obstacles are extremely fun to learn and blast through. And I really liked the nice touch that the music was more laid back after you died versus when you were playing. Great job!

I think the WarioWare style flurry of mini games is a really creative use of the limitation, and the games themselves all do a good job of following it as well. I really like the simple controls, though I admit there were a number of games I didn't really understand how to play, "Enclose!" being the biggest one. The presentation is really well done, I especially love the sound effects and the elevator door animation in between games, and how the colors change the further you get. Of the ones I did understand, my favorite was probably "Drive!", timing my button presses to not fly off the track was super fun.

You really nailed the sense of speed, and dodging obstacles feels really good. And every time I died, I always had the thought "nah, I can do better" and played again. I just had to keep trying over and over to top my best. I like how all the obstacles are designed so they can be told apart from a good distance, so you never really get into a situation where you only find out how you have to move after it's too late. And the presentation is just spectacular, I absolutely love the wireframe look, and the effects are all really well done. The only thing I didn't really like was that shoot on Left Shift felt kinda awkward to me, but it wasn't so bad that I couldn't get used to it. Overall, I really enjoyed playing this!

I definitely agree on the enemies, if I had more time I would've spent it making more unique shot types that force you to be at different parts of the screen. Thank you for playing!

The dithering pattern on them I think made them blend in with the background too much and thus made them feel like a background element. The shape also felt more shield like to me, which would feel like proper background decor in this setting. However, the room where you go on the left side to make the medallion on the right fall served as an excellent tutorial for them, so they can still be figured out in that regard.

I really like the autoscrolling idea, making a run n' gun platformer a lot more shooter like, and the grenades are really cool. The powerups I was able to find were fun to use, but the limited ammo stifled that a bit. While the graphics were overall good, the orange parts of the ground often hide bullets because enemy bullets are almost the same color as it with very little contrast, so I would often get hit by bullets I didn't even see coming. The brightness also kept making me think it was solid, so I would sometimes walk into it thinking I'd be stopped but just fall off instead. However, the actual control is great, and I never felt like I was struggling just to move around or platform. The music is also a great addition, and I love the little blip that plays when you die.

The graphics and sound are superb, especially that transition to the more fiery portion of the stage, and the fire itself. Even more impressive considering it being pure assembly. The lack of any real gameplay is unfortunate, but what you did manage to put in is excellent.

First things first, the music in the game is awesome. The graphics weren't super groundbreaking, but besides the medallions (which I initially thought were just set dressing) everything was easy to understand. The overall controls were fine, the main issue is that it feels hard to control your momentum, and particularly on the trampolines I kept overadjusting myself constantly and lost a number of lives because of it. This is my only major complaint with the gameplay itself though, besides that snag it was fun to play and move around.

Nope, it's endless!
Thank you for playing it! I intended that pickups become less frequent as time goes on, but I think there's a bug where that's reversed.

What was your final high score?