I think the game needs a lot of work before I can personally consider it fun, as each of my playthroughs lasted less than five minutes each due to how quickly it goes by— but with some work, I believe it could be decent, since I believe you plan to continue developing the game.
As long as you take criticisms into mind, I think many improvements could be made.
This is… blatantly dismissive. In the future, I recommend two things: one, that you listen to criticisms given, and two, that you don’t spam submissions into several game jams. As I said in my first reply, I counted sixteen submissions total, which leads me to my first point: the game doesn’t even try to fit the theme, which makes sense considering it wasn’t even made for this game jam.
You dismiss my thoughts on the game simply because I haven’t submitted a game to this game jam, and because my account is new. I made this account to try one of the games of this jam and leave my thoughts on it, and figured I’d leave reviews on the rest of them too. The other games, while they are of varying quality, all clearly try to match this jam’s themes— while yours obviously doesn’t. The game’s only powerup is a fireball… which is a far from peculiar projectile, given the way it functions is that it simply shoots where the mouse points. This makes sense, because again, I believe this game wasn’t created for this game jam, nor fourteen of the other ones you submitted it to; but the Your Culture jam, given it fits those themes the best.
To start, yes, I played through your game. Four times, just to make sure my thoughts were accurate. The tiles are misaligned and bumpy; not that the tiles “weren’t repetitive”. The problem wasn’t that you attempted level design, it was that the tiles are very obviously placed individually, which leads to uneven feeling platforming when they’re not aligned correctly, and clipping— as in one of my playthroughs, I clipped into the ceiling while escaping Heaven. Make sure the tiles are connected, because it leads to an uneven and buggy feel, especially if clipping starts to occur.
Another bug was with the crouch, as the small bit of airtime it gives you allows the player to just… bypass the entire game. The first level becomes half it’s length, both times you play it; and the Heaven level becomes a cakewalk because of it. To fix this, don’t allow the player to have airtime with something as spammable as a crouch, because it leads to some broken glitches.
Back to the powerup in question, it’s borderline useless. The only use it has is to kill the cloud enemies and the single slime that blocks your path; however these enemies are more often than not simply avoided, given you can just jump over them or walk away from them. The clouds only fight back via firing water at you, so just walking away is a viable option… especially considering that that’s exactly what I did in my four playthroughs of the game.
In the future, try to take criticisms of your game seriously rather than trying to brush them aside— in some of your other replies, you attempt to brush off other criticisms as well, even those where other reviewers call out the spamming of this game, you simply tell them that ‘you didn’t spam’. Though it’s increasingly obvious that you didn’t make this game for this jam, but submitted it to it anyway; I judge it as if it was made for this jam, which brings me to the following points.
This game feels extremely unpolished, with uneven platforming and buggy physics. The themes are barely, if it all present, and I believe that it could benefit from fixing said bugs regarding the uneven tiles and the crouch jumping glitch. In the next game you make, or the supposed continuation of Heart of Fire teased at the end, take the criticisms you received into mind, as they are meant to help your development, rather than harm it.
Decently fun little game, though it certainly felt more like an engine test than anything else. The flip doesn't seem to do much of anything though, besides giving me a dose of motion sickness. And the theme isn't all too prevalent, although it is there in some capacity via the terrain pickups.
Overall, I think it needs work, but for what was there, I certainly enjoyed it.
While the concept of the game is fine, the overall execution of the gameplay itself and the theme is quite lackluster. The strange powerup theme is almost non-existent, as there is a powerup in play; however a fireball isn't exactly a strange one in the slightest, and in my short playthrough it wasn't used, even once. Speaking of the gameplay, it's extremely buggy; the ground tiles aren't connected, so you could clip into walls just by jumping into them at the right spot, and the crouch having a small bit of air-time before placing you on the floor allowed for skipping half of the entire first level, along with making the second one trivial.
Not to mention... this game doesn't seem to fit this jam's themes very well as previously mentioned, and it'd been submitted to a whopping 16 jams. Was this made for this jame? Either way, I can't say I enjoyed this one all too much.
