You're not the first to mention rhythm game. I might! Who knows, I love rhythm games and have done some small rhythm based projects in the past
Slider Games
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Nice. Good luck! I use unity so I have no idea about the technical details on godot audio :( but yeah, delay handling is the first programming thing to solve, or the first design thing to go around, if you can't solve the delay the 'right way' haha
In Unity you can schedule audio ahead of time. But playing a sound on demand will ALWAYS give you a delay that's too big to be acceptable as the success/failure feedback sound
Cool game, smart aesthetic choice, probably made the assets very cheat to produce while also being very clean and retro.
If I was to redesign an aspect of the game or make any change, i would remove the dash and add some subtle movement on the deflect itself. It is cool and reminds me a little of the ori projectile redirection mechanic. Maybe it could do a little dash and this dash is the area considered for the deflect, or the deflect itself could add momentum to the player so i have to be careful on my positioning after a deflect. The dash I think only added noise and didn't reinforce the feeling of slickness the deflect was going for.
Also, I feel like the projectile bouncing off walls could be better explored. Maybe add enemies that don't shoot pink bullets and are kinda hidden behind a wall, so you have to deflect another any and bounce it on a wall to defeat the hiding one. Or maybe add some enemies that shoot bouncing projectiles as well, so you have to reflect back with a bounce.
Great entry, good job!
Great entry! Didn't complete the game, but if you guys keep working on the project, I have some suggestions:
- Double or 1.5x the size of the camera. For a momentum based platformer, there is not enough time to react to the level, so you end-up hitting the spike because you didn't expect a curve and end up feeling like it was not your fault. And I think this sensation would be far less frustrating if I had more time to look ahead and react
- Make the cursor pop out more. It looks like the eyes of many objects, so sometimes I took a while to find it. That would make the difference in hitting a hook point or not in some situations.
- It is hard to make the double wall kick back and forth for many jumps (when there is a tight column up and you hit left then right then left...). I think it is because when you are sliding on a wall to the right and press left, you have a super duper small window to jump before the character detaches from the wall. And if you keep pressing right after you jump and take too long to press left, your character start moving to the right again, so its very frustrating. I think there are two things that would help here: 1) make the player keep the momentum 'outward' for more time. This might kill the same wall climb (liken megamanX) but might facilitate the 2d mario climb. 2) when i press the outward direction, don't detach me immediately, make a player do a small animation and hang for a little bit before detaching, so player can use this window to jump to change direction and jump to the opposite wall. I hope I was able to express myself on this one hahaha, not easy to explain in plain text.
Also sometimes the music stopped and sounded like a bug
The idea is not super original, but the artstyle is very cool. Minimalist and with a cute striking character. Great job guys!
Cool artstyle. I play a lot of rhythm games (and made some simple ones as well).
The game is lacking basic feedback for understanding the result of your input. There is delay on the sound feedback and no visual feedback, this makes a rhythm game super hard to play as you have no correction cycle during the gameplay so you play 'blindly'. The sound delay is a classic problem because the game engine usually adds around 100 to 150 ms of delay for on-demmand sound effects no matter what. For this style of gameplay, I would suggest scheduling the sound of success to play exactly on the beat for every expected, and then showing the visual feedback (perfect, good, bad) dynamically. This is the way I found the easiest. The hard (and correct) way is to write low-level code to play a sound directly to the sound chip without the full sound pipeline to reduce the response delay to a minimum. Usually requires C++ or some native plugin.
I made a lockstep clone (from rhythm heaven) in the scheduled way described above. And the last rhythm game I made for gmtk jam, you can take a look on my itch page (Karaoke SQUAD).
The second point is the difficulty curve. The second level already adds a lot of off-beats and syncopations. I thought it was too early to go crazy like that.
Hope I can help! Good work on the project, congrats, and good luck if you keep working on it!
So cool you got that, was aiming this exact feeling haha. And yes, a victory screen with more fanfare was planned, but had to be cut :( I actually wanted to make some more story beats before and after the fight with some shounen cliché dialogues, but I prioritized improving the level design and polishing the gameplay itself
I think I have too little control on the player, It's just too slippery. At this point it gets frustrating and you lose agency, feeling like you can't express yourself and you are fighting the controls instead of the designed challenge. One change that could make it better would be to add a 'claw' button? Like holding space to increase your friction so you could make turns like power sliding in Mario Kart. Another common way in racing games is having different coefficient of friction moving forward and sideways, so if the player is going forward but suddenly rotates to the right, it will have more friction on the previous forward direction momentum
Also, an easy addition that would improve the game is to add a circle shadow under the player's xy position. When it is flying you have no idea where he is.
Wow, great idea.
The one frustrating bit was going back to your surfboard without being able to control the direction. I get it, from a design perspective, the concept is cool, to punish the player who keeps throwing the board nonstop, but sometimes you get stuck and the only option is to wait for a hit or swim towards a fish. One idea would be to move the player automatically towards the board (not pressing space) and the player can only make some directional adjustments. Or allow the player more free form control while swimming but putting time pressure on life, like you have an air bar that depletes a little every frame you are not on the board, so you need to get back to it fast or take a hit.
Something I would exaggerate is the feedback when you get hit. Make the screen shake, animate the heart disappearing, give the player a more distinct sprite. I didn't even understand how my game was ending for a while
Had a great time, the design is very interesting and very suitable for a short arcady experience. Great work!
Cool idea, a shuffleboard battler. There are some cool concepts but the game lacks some basic feedback for understanding what is going on.
It took me a while to understand I had to shoot 4 to see the results, maybe you could have used the concept of action points, a staple in these kind of battlers. Also shooting 4 from 5 is like leaving only 1 behind, which is not that interesting. Another direction would be to give 4 pucks and allow players to shoot them all, but the results are changed based on how many stuff it hit as well, like card effects that can change based on how you play the puck. Like the healing egg now. For example, there could be red pins on the board, and attack pucks gain +1 atk for the amount of pin hits, but loses 0.5 for wall hits, stuff like that. So the decision is not about which one to leave out, but the order and how you throw them.
Overall cool concept, nice work
A concept that I think could be cool. Actually, the fantasy is similar to my game, but with very different vision and in another genre. I didn't get too far, but here are some feedback that could help the project or maybe become experience for a next one.
I just played with the first mask, but I found the controls to be janky and confusing. This is how I would simplify:
Keep WASD for movement
Keep the jump working for every character and don't override this action. You can make the jump different for each character then. For example, the monkey jump can be shorter, but if it touches any rope, make it snap to it automatically.
LMB for the mask hability (Add then a HUD showing what the LBM does contextually. When I get near the box, show me "carry", and then show me "throw")
RMB hold to show the mask change wheel, then release to transform
I have no idea if this framework would work for the other masks, but I think it could be a limitation that would make it more intuitive and simple. This way, you keep movement and jump on left hand. Global actions that always work and won't surprise the player. And then mask related actions on the right hand, change the mask the and the mask specific ability.
The second annoying part were the gameplay mechanics and level design. I had no idea I had to collect the key. And throwing the box into the key did not make sense. And after collecting the key, nothing changed in the world to indicate that I had to go to the right platform to clear the level somehow. These mechanics and state need to be better communicated for the player.
As I said, i played for a really short period, so you can take with a grain of salt. But felt like I should give this sincere feedback that could help this or future projects! Good luck!
I like the vibe and the tone, the art and the music helps the aesthetic a lot. The gameplay itself is not for me, but I understand where it's trying to go. A problem I found was that in the first round I just made a crappy mask with like 3 things glued to it (again because I usually don't enjoy this kind of gameplay), and I ended up winning the round anyway? Maybe the punctuation algorithm is not ideal? Or the other competitors should be stronger?
Anyway, there is a nice vision for the project and its well executed for the jam duration. Congratulations!
Very interesting concept.
The starting tutorial text goes away really fast, and there is little tutorial on your actual goal. But it is not that hard to understand after some tries. The grid map could be larger.
I really felt like I had hurry to the next pocket of air. The sound and visuals helped to carry that weight!
Some feedbacks I feel can help the project:
It gets old quickly. To mitigate this, you could add some branching paths on the map. So the player have an extra layer of strategy instead of simple memorization and execution. With this, some new rooms could be added too, like a room with an extra treasure, a room with some kind of upgrade, a room with a monster that require some extra thing to do, etc.
Sometimes there is a very long section without air pockets in which you end up fighting the input delay/cooldown and the transition animations, which didn't felt so good. This could be mitigated with a clearer feedback of when you can input, and if you are still holding the direction when the input can be read, the input is validated. It could also be a balancing issue. Maybe add some extra logic to the map generation to avoid longer passages without any air pockets.
But I really liked the concept, the aesthetics and the emotion dynamic It generated. Great work!









