itch.io

Overall

Super cool premise! The shrinking mechanic of both the player and objects is excellent and I especially liked the settings menu and the start menu (I like good UI), the textures look high quality even at low quality settings and the creature animations are very well done. Along with this the music and ambience fit with the games atmosphere perfectly too.

I was very impressed at how large the world was and also how the settings menu remembers the settings from previous sessions!

Suggestions

The controls take some getting used to and some of them are very hard to figure out for example grabbing (v) or sprint (shift) which I believe have no notes telling you what key controls them, I think putting all the controls on the itch page just in case people can't figure it out would be good idea.

On the higher quality settings it's a bit too dark to see properly, I fixed this by changing the quality setting to lowest which seems to make all the materials unlit, I think if the player's staff had a little bit of glow to it then it would fix the issue and make it easier to see things.

Bugs

There are a few bugs too but that's expected for fresh 3D games of this size (and created in a short time frame!). There are some pretty big game breaking ones but thankfully you can avoid them and speed-run back to where you were once you know all the tricks and shortcuts

• If you walk away from notes while they are open you can't press H to close them unless you look at them again (Game breaking if you can't find the note or you've flipped the page)
• One of the areas with the glowing skull attachment seems to be missing a box, I got past this area by restarting and stealing the box from the previous puzzle while shrunken and the door was closing and levitating off of it onto the ledge
• The boxes are very elastic, i was scared one would fly of the map when it was bouncing around the pad
• Right click seems to be casting a debug ray
• Stabbing audio sometimes plays randomly
• The resolution in the settings menu seems to be missing an x, for example 1600 x 900 looks like 1600900, when i first saw it I though it was selecting the total amount of pixels on the screen and I was horrified😂

I think my favorite bug is the orb infinite levitation glitch which I used to explore the map, I briefly felt like a god before accidentally warping myself into the void. It works by pondering thy orb and placing it upon thy feet.

Overall excellent work!

Quite fun to get the hang of, the screen transitions and spritework are fantastic!

Having to navigate to the data by ears is such an interesting mechanic, especially when radiation obscures your vision and you sort of have to eyeball where the walls are.

It's sort of scary thinking about how massive the sunken ship must be, the reduced vision and sameness of the walls no matter your direction make it feel like an endless labyrinth, I love it.

Absolute banger, I love that intro sequence

Short and sweet!, It looks and feels super polished, love the spritework

The world kinda has an ASCII art look to it which is quite nice, I like the ambient noises and the water animations,

Ah, sorry about that, the tower is the only unenclosed space, I never ended up blocking many of those ledges off in some manner.

Mm, I think the stickiness of the character is mainly due to the collision system I'm using which instead of using normal colliders it instead reads the pixels in the chunk(s) memory to stop you in whatever direction which is cheap but super dodgy since you can phase though terrain at high speeds (Like when jumping) there's also no auto stepping so when you run into a single pixel height difference you have to jump over it meaning you have to bunny hop everywhere hehe.

Anyways, thanks for the feedback!

Love it, the later levels really make you use your brain, also the title is amazing

Super satisfying! falling sand & particle simulations take a lot of work so good job getting it running so flawlessly!

Being consumed by the  v o i d  has never been more relaxing, I love the ominous atmosphere

Yeah, originally there was meant to be a lot of focus on heat puzzles where you could do things like melt metal walls or fluid pipes so you could float around on fluids to progress, a lot of that had to be scrapped though since I was having issues with the falling sand simulation, so there ended up being a lot less burning gameplay than i originally intended : )

Fantastic!, love all the small details like the reflections, boat wakes and dash shadows, the sound effects are nice and crunchy and I love the music, that motif is so nice

This is so cool!, the combat / taming system combined with the RPG stats  and party joining makes this game feel complex and huge

The use of sound and music is excellent and the dialogue and animations are as well

Love all the newly introduced mechanics making the late game super chaotic, like the villagers that help you but also make it harder to beat the level at the same time

Also I like your level select screen, UI is hard but even harder at lowrez

The ambient audio is really good giving that nice island atmosphere

I also like the procedural generation and sprite work!

Short and sweet!

Each screen is creative and exploring to find all the trinkets was fun

The spritework is great and there's so much detail in the animations, I noticed that enemies will raise their cloaks when resisting attacks

The particle effects are very good!, I especially like how the blood diffuses though the water, I think immunity frames would help smooth the difficulty a bit since sometimes you can catch a stream of 2-3 bullets and die instantly

Super fluid combat! I was really getting into the zone with it

I love how everything is hand drawn, its gives the game this really fluid feel to it

Woah GBA, I was wondering why this game had such a retro feel to it, seriously impressive!

Fantastic aesthetic, I love that the items can fall off the shelf sometimes though I found it quite difficult to point the ray properly

The polish on this is insane, the boss fight was amazing

I like how polished everything feels!, the shadows the enemies cast look really nice, are the enemies and wagons 3D models?

The animations are really good!, I love how violent the enemy deaths are

I love the audio and the upgrade system, it adds so much variety

This game is truly ethereal in nature

Very polished and very challenging!, I figured out how to cheese by hiding in the top left and waiting for most waves of enemies pass hehe

I like the ambience and animations, the player is a bit slow so it takes a while to reach the ghosts but other than that its all good!

Super polished / juicy!, I love the way you need to sacrifice to progress

Thanks!, I may have forgotten to block off that area hehe

Very Challenging!, the spritework and GUI are really well done and there's lots of small details like coyote time I noticed that make the gameplay feel really fluid, it felt like there wasn't enough downtime from fires to manage repairs and heartrate so sometimes its super stressful, but other than that good job!

The sprites are quite cute, and the GUI is well made too, I like the way the controls are explained in the pause menu & that interactable objects show prompts

Thanks for the feedback, I've managed to squeeze out some more performance

Thanks for the feedback, I've updated the description so the objective is more clear and added a list of controls, I also added a nicer starting level for later

The art and audio are so good!

Very polished! I like how the ninja respawns back to where they were last standing

Yeah, the falling sand part of the game took 10 days to implement because I didn’t expect it to be so complex (mostly hard to find bugs), so I would say they are quite large time sinks, but it is really fun to add new pixels with weird properties and watching them react with each other

As for performance oh definitely, as I started adding larger levels the slowdown started becoming huge because every pixel on the screen (except air) would look around and move, luckily each level was split into 4 * 4 pixel blocks since the levels are loaded from images. This meant I could stop each sprite/block from updating if they were too far from the player and slightly further out after that they would stop rendering which made it very easy to implement compared to other things, you can actually see this on large levels because water for example might suddenly stop when you would expect it to continue down since the blocks they want to move into are dormant until you are in range.

High quality falling sand engines like in Noita, use tricks likes multithreading in larger 32 * 32 regions which are properly chunk loaded, and use virtual rectangles to mark parts of the game that have some activity in them, so it only needs to update those, this lets it run really well at a high resolution.

Sorry about the essay, there’s just a lot of cool technical witchery to talk about 👌

Very nice! the gameplay is quite fun since you can get prisoners in various ways depending on the situation

This is a really quite fun, I like how fluid the mining animation is