my playthrough was this: i spent 12 minutes doing random movement until the door opened for a reason i was unable to figure out until i had the revelation that the symbols were not the "untranslated" version of the text you see on each note, and instead probably meant something else; i noticed that the weird black shape on the note that says "CRESCENT = SLIDE" looked a lot like the sprite of the player sliding. then took a few mins of experiments/tests and analyzing the symbols to figure out what TRIANGLE might mean, and a bit of how these symbols map to actions chronologically. i will say i felt very clever during this time period, which is a good thing--although i still thought the game was too cryptic.
then i got the sixth note and spent the next ~20 mins trying to parse what the note was trying to say. after doing my best attempt of executing what i think the note was saying, i heard a door open sound. i excitedly walked up to where that last door was only to see it was closed. okay, maybe it's the door i saw back at the start of the level. walked all the way back there, reactivating each door that automatically closed. the door was, again, closed. executed the combo again to hear a door open sound--still closed. then i gave up.
my suggestion: reword the note that says "this door listens to motion" (or something along the lines of that) to instead say, "this door listens to a specific sequence of movement" (or something along the lines of that). additionally, make a few puzzles at the start that are much simpler, and also have some notes that do not have annotations on them.
but also i still have no idea what to do for that sixth note
My highscore in EVIL mode is 7/9. i played with keymap:arrow and control:std, as the game originally was. I really wonder if anyone can manage to beat me. God EVIL mode is so stressful.
I do strongly wish an audio cue played when you successfully completed a loop. a lot of the times when i collected something the block was off-screen, so I couldn't see it disappear.
i realized it was too slow because i just mindlessly went to round 8 without placing down anything and realized i was barely paying attention. and i don't know your skill level or any results in regards to difficulty from any playtesting you might have done. which is why i figured to trust my intuition more. i think the only problem is that i increased it too much. probably would need to lower the max speed by 0.05 u/s per round. i know that doesn't seem like a lot but im certain it's pretty noticeable. the current is 0.31 u/s/round iirc.
Also i have no idea what the average skill level of the game jam rater is so i just thought my assumption that they were at the skill level where they can beat it after about 3 game-overs was fair. that they would, in that time, memorize the layout of the map enough (i don't think it's particularly large) in order to avoid the spikes or cover them up with the bridge, and figure out a route they can make that makes it easier to play through. maybe im wrong and 3 game overs is too much. actually it might be now that i think about it because its probably an overestimate of people's patience and too optimistic that they'd actually enjoy the game. ugh i don't know is it? i don't want to make the game easy but i also don't know how difficult something really is until i observe someone else playing it.
also we don't actually know how long it took for the players to beat the game, or if they even did in the first place; they just say it's difficult or point out some jankiness in the controls. which is fair but that would also be useful data.
or i guess it's simply that strudel is trying to get the artifact and macey is the guardian of it. that's possibly what ordonine was going for when he drew the background and the artifact.
i think the lives system and your proposed health bar are mechanically the same. the difference is that with your proposed system, the game doesn't soft-reset when you get caught and instead the player can continue as normal. considering the idea, it would make the game more immersive, and also probably less punishing since you're not forced back to the start. I think this is a good idea. thanks for the suggestion!
(Also, Did You Know? the lives system was added last minute. in response to me observing the difficulty of the game during playtesting. it was very close to being significantly harder :p. thank god we added that.)
(unfortunately we didn't have time to do a second playtest, so i think the game is a bit too hard after i increased the speed of the mace after decreasing the number of rounds you have to play until you win. sorry about that.)
my headcanon is that macey and strudel were buddies or at the least acquantainces, and they went into some cave/mountain and some supernatural force or maybe some spell/curse/prophecy that caused macey to turn mad and evil. and make them enter some sort of time loop. strudel has to collect the artifact at the end of each loop to escape the spell.
about the difficulty: i didn't mean to make it too hard. i only meant to make it moderately difficult. like to where the average player would probably win on attempt 3-5.
i tweaked the speed of the mace for round 10 to the smallest speed where i was actually concerned that i was not going to make it without any level modifications. then i figured it would be easier because a couple of well-placed bombs, springs, and boosters should be enough for the average player to outrun macey at that speed. like not even anything that crazy, just blowing up like 4 walls and placing a couple springs and one or two boosters.
but then again i feel like every game i design is always unintentionally harder than it should be. anyway, thank you for sticking with it and commenting (and presumably rating)!
oh also about the slime: i do agree that a lot of "slime cache" areas do not reward the player with enough slime to make access to it worth it. (we kind of forgot to add more slime there. and by i guess by "we", i mean "i", because i'm the one who added more slime pickups to certain cache areas). but from my experience playing it, i think it's adequate enough to be able to build enough structures. i feel like i'm able to do a lot of level modifications after getting the hang of dodging macey on round <5 speed. or maybe i played the game way too much during development and i think the game is easier than it actually is.
also, i feel like restricting the player's slime count would probably help with replayability because . uh... the player would have to compromise a little bit. then maybe they want to try again so they can do better on the next playthrough. ..maybe that's fun? actually it sounded better in my head
i'm aware of the "wall-friction" issue - i couldn't figure out why it was happening. i have a feeling it has something to do with godot's physics even though i'm using a CharacterBody2D so i don't think it should have friction against walls? regardless i apologize for the issue.
EDIT: oh, it's because it ends the jump when you enter wall-slide. so of course you wouldn't be able to jump as high. im stupid .-.
as for the ability to walljump on a single wall, I kind of just assumed it would be bad for the game's design and tweaked the wall jump physics against it. perhaps we should reconsider in a post-jam update. (but i do feel like it would make springs less useful. (or, i guess they would still be useful when entered from a booster, (or when there isn't a wall to climb. (and the spring is faster than a wall-climb.. (should i even worry about this?)
anyway, i'm very thankful that you decided to play the game and even comment on it!
i'm sorry but this is way too laggy i cannot play this. its like at 3 fps. i tried disabling all the shaders but it didn't really help.
i think it might be the trees because it doesn't lag when i die. i presume that since the camera is looking down, the engine is able to cull almost the entirety of the map. but i'm not really sure.
yet another example of greedy game companies feeding on nostalgia and "graphical fidelity" but completely undermining the game's art direction. smh my head.
music is great though. i also just realized that the vehicle is not a weird ufo-car but instead that the white sphere in the center is the head of the guy you play as
i was going to joke about how this is a puzzle game where you have to map out the area you are in solely based on if the character can move in certain directions without any other sensory input. then as i was managing the game window and a paint editor for mapping out the area, i accidentally moved my mouse on the game viewport. and learned you can rotate the camera around.
god it's like just have a song that at least hints at the phrygian mode and have drums and my brain is like "wow this good." why is my brain so phrygian rotted. i blame percy roger smith.
kind of fun. Visuals are pretty good and polished, and also i kind of eat up this like style of minimalism sci-fi ambient music type stuff. But i do feel like it's a little too luck-based though. especially in the earlier levels. its balance leans way too much into attackers. i'm rarely ever concerned about if i have too much defense forces. only once or twice was i actually concerned about having too many defense -- and then for one of those instances died to attackers anyway 1 or 2 rounds after i suppose i overcorrected. the other instance i won anyway iirc. i think it should be more balanced in that regard. somehow. But yeah cool game.
the sixth level is way too hard i think. or maybe i'm just dumb.
I found this tool while trying to make a custom symbol font that'd work with the ProggyClean pixel font with Dear ImGui. The tool itself works well but when I tried exporting it and loading it in my ImGui program, it was very blurry and no amount of tweaking things in the tool itself and the exported font in FontForge fixed it. To be honest, I have very little idea on how to use FontForge. I also have little idea on what the units for em size ascent descent pixel size mean and not enough patience at the time to learn it. I was trying to make a 6x12 monospaced font. (well i think proggy clean is 6x12) How would i fix this?
I should note that I found another solution to my underlying problem, by registering custom glyph rects using imgui's font api and then blitting the raw pixels for the glyphs into the font atlas. but I would also like to know how to do this using a ttf font. Maybe it'll be useful in the feature.
i have one curiosity about the controls. why is it C to jump? in games i've played with a similar keyboard control layout it's always Z to jump. i know it's also bound to Z by default so really i don't have a problem but I'm just curious. is it like what's usually used in pico-8 games?
i think the idea is pretty cool, but the difficulty curve seems a bit uneven. i got a bit stumped on the level after the one that requires knowledge of what the dots below the flowers mean, simply because i just followed the second possible path to beat the level without understanding what the dots actually meant. also there are levels that require some thinking and then, in one instance, the next level is just you press down a single time to win. which was pretty funny but this is excusable for a game made in a mere 72 hrs
the p doesn't stand for pumpkinhead, the p stands for "pOS" so the full name is "pOS pDOS"
i actually don't know what the p stands for. i got the name from a fake os i tried making on scratch like 4 years ago. it only has a login screen. i don't remember why i chose the letter "p"
i have something you can try compiling, to demonstrate the ability to create executable files for pDOS.
it's a new builtin file, so if you already opened pDOS before you will have to reset the filesystem. do this by typing "rm -r /", refreshing the page, and typing "y" when it asks you if you want to reset. if you don't get this prompt then you'll have to delete the indexedDB database using the developer tools.
anyway when you do "ls /home" you'll see that there is a file named "hello.wat". write "dnload hello.wat", then go to the site wat2wasm demo (webassembly.github.io). once you are there, delete everything in the WAT section and then drag the "hello.wat" you downloaded, from your computer to the section. then press the "Download" button, and then drag the newly downloaded "hello.wasm" into the pDOS terminal. then finally, write "hello.wasm", and "Hello, world!" should appear on your screen.
i know that seems overly complicated, but when i finally manage to port wabt into pDOS, it'll be builtin and all you'll have to type is
i finally added the help screen. most command arguments aren't implemented though.
i'm not gonna formally submit this until it's finished in probably 27 days.
i wanted to make a fake os that was actually useful as an os.
so this is basically just a shell. i mean, not what someone would think of as an os. but i was gonna make the shell and then have the graphics and windowing systems later.
i wanted to make a fake os that the user could write their own programs in. so this uses webassembly for its executable files. thinking of making it execute js files, but js isn't exactly the easiest thing to sandbox.
huge thing on my todo list is compile the webassembly compiler to webassembly itself, so that people can make executable files in the os itself. i most likely will run into problems doing that though.
also get the webassembly binary toolkit in here too. i tried doing that but i ran into problems with it trying to create a shared library, which the wasm compiler does not support. FUN.
