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Sorry to hear the platforming wasn't to your taste. It was intended to evoke a very particular era of PC platforming games from the early-mid 90s (probably most obviously Secret Agent, published by Apogee), and I know that's not going to be everyone's cup of tea! I likely won't go back to tweak it at this point, partly because I think it actually hit its mark pretty well, but mostly to avoid going back forever to old things.

Thanks for the feedback, though; I'll probably make another platformer some day, and based on the response to this one I'll definitely be tuning things differently -- I like fast and nimble platformers too!

Sorry for the delay! I meant to respond to this but it slipped my mind and I realized I'd never gotten around to it.

I considered allowing replays, actually! There are a few levels in the game that you CAN replay (they're all optional levels off on the edges of the map, and I don't have a different visual for them, which is my bad, really). They're mostly there to let you grind more money if you need it to buy stuff in the shops. I ultimately decided not to allow replays on the rest of the levels for a few reasons. First, it's how the particular kind of game I was aiming for worked; the levels were obstacles to the end of the game rather than something intended to be played again and again after you've beaten them. (This was also the original reason I didn't have checkpoints in the levels, which is another choice I might do differently if I made the game again.) It also means I didn't need a different way to enter levels other than just walking on them, though really that would have been easy enough to fix.

For what it's worth, though, there's actually only one level in the whole game that has multiple functional exits -- it's the Seaside Hut (if I'm remembering the name correctly), right near the beginning of the map. There also aren't any persistent  functional things you can miss, other than missing some money or ammo (which is why the repeatable levels exist!)

Anyway, thanks for checking out the game, and thanks for putting up with my rambling about the design choices I made!

Thanks so much! I'm glad you enjoyed it.

I really like how you distilled the mechanics down -- once I figured out what the different actions did, the balancing act between discussing things enough vs spending time actually fixing the problems (and never having the time actually improve skills or tools...) felt, well, pretty true to life. :) Great job, hope to see more!

So glad to see you finished this one up! Every now and then I feel the urge to get some (real world) dominoes and set them up but then I imagine accidentally knocking one over and ruining it all and quickly give up on the idea. This lets me live out my dream of knocking tiny rectangles over without all the mess. 😁

This is a fun idea! Once I got the hang of it, I loved how firing applies a force to you, so you're constantly balancing shooting at enemies vs having to keep yourself from gliding into the damaging blocks. If I had one wish, I'd like to be able to shoot the green projectiles the slimes shoot at me -- since your movement is pretty slow it's very hard to dodge (it does feel pretty great when you manage it, though!) Gameplay eels really good, especially for a prototype!

Thank you! Capturing the right feel was my primary goal here, so I'm glad to hear I managed it.

Thanks for checking it out! You're right, I should have added a brief invincibility period on spawn... 🤔

Thanks for the heads up, and thanks for covering the game!

Escape From Evil Island is a retro level-based platformer, based on the feel of DOS games from the early 90s, available as pay-what-you-want for Windows, MacOS, or Linux!

https://speveril.itch.io/evil-island

You play a spy infiltrating Evil Corp's island headquarters to figure out what this beloved international conglomerate is really up to.

Gameplay consists of classic run-and-jump-and-shoot platforming, with a retro-lean (in other words, this isn't a tight, precise  jumping puzzle platformer) . Levels are placed around an overworld map, allowing you to progress through levels in whatever order you choose. Most of them are optional! Shops let you spend the money you collect in-level to stock up on ammo or extra health, or to buy passes to access gated off parts of the island. Every level must be done in one shot -- there are no checkpoints mid-level -- but you're free to save on the overworld wherever you want.

  

Took me a few tries to get the hang of jumping on the houses, but after that it felt pretty solid! I love hand-drawn assets for games like this. Great work!

Great work! Adding the recoil/push-back from shooting the fireballs adds an interesting element to the running-and-shooting, and the lava chasing you adds to the drama. 

I don't think I'm cut out for space gig work, but that's probably okay. I love the concept of this game, and it feels very solid and, while the controls are kind of fiddly (by design, I think!) they feel fair. Great work!

Very solid work, good thumpy sound effects, and nice graphics. It feels like a great slice of a classic game genre. Great work!

Sometimes it's fun to just play around with a map editor, and you captured that well! The story is the right amount silly without being too much, the art is well-chosen and the portraits are nice. Great job!

This was a fun little game! I probably should have read the instructions before the first run, but that's on me. :D Great work!

It would have been easy to just have 5 relatively normal bosses but I enjoyed the escalation. I think UFO-guy's hands are going to haunt my dreams. Once I got what I was supposed to be doing, the game seemed to work great, nothing felt unfair or anything. Nice work!

Feels solid, and you didn't go crazy adding way more than you needed. I like the movement; I know it's not "realistic" but I always like friction in space games like this. Great work! 

Took a few tries to get the hang of it, but having to split your attention is a great twist on the infinite runner template, and it never feels unfair (at least in the first few levels!) Solid work!

Feels solid, and the music and the particle/juicy effects tie it together well. It feels great to play. Even more impressive as a 3 day effort! Great work!

Hi, thanks for checking it out! I haven't really touched the game in a while now, if I ever do go back to it, key rebinding is definitely the big thing I need to add. It sounds like you might not have found the menu -- did you hit ESC? That should let you change your equipment, use items outside of combat, and save. I actually thought I at least listed that on this page but I see I didn't... I should at least fix that.

Really straightforward, but fun! I appreciated that you could recover most (but not all!) of the score you lose from hitting the blue bunnies -- it's still worth avoiding them but it doesn't feel TOO punishing. Great work!

I liked this quite a bit. I think I like it better than playing actual PacMan :D Felt really solid and mostly fair. I'd love to see the effects of the powerups be a little more obvious (maybe I just wasn't paying enough attention but it took me a few times to figure out what the apple/shield was doing). Great job!

This is way bigger than I expected! The game feels responsive and the movement is solid, and the graphics are simple but do the job. I did run into one small issue, when you're near the "top" of the level (so the camera can't scroll up any more), sometimes you get enemies hidden behind the HUD, but that's pretty small. Nice work!

Good twist on a classic, nice work! Just wanna echo what Mystery Coconut said about the ball always seeming to bound off in the same direction, it ends up being a little predictable. :)

It was fun, once I managed to get it to work! If you launch the game on a 4k screen, the main menu buttons don't seem to work. I had to hit alt+enter to make it a window, drag to a different screen that is 1080p, and hit alt+enter again to make it full screen over there. That let me click "Start Game". (???)

I enjoyed it! The core concept is fun, and I love how the music track is tied into the number of clones you have on the board and builds as you go.

Did want to report one bug -- it seems if you run the game at a res higher than 1080p, menu UI elements seem to be all out of place. Gameplay seems to be mostly fine, though the camera may not be set up to deal with resolutions that aren't 16:9 either.

Zonker! Glad to hear from you. :) Verge was definitely on my mind pretty constantly while working on SimpleQuest (and, while I continue to work on the Next Thing).  I can't say I miss everything about VergeC ;) but I definitely miss a lot about the engine and everything around it. I miss having that community around and active. When did we get so old?

I've used Unity a little and I can't say it's my favourite, but some people have done some pretty awesome things with it. It could definitely do a 2d tile engine... (before I switched to the web-based stuff I was actually starting to build SimpleQuest in Unity).

Of course I remember you, Rysen! Thanks so much for stopping by and trying it out!

I've just uploaded a new version... I think it'll make your save at the boss fight work again. Let me know!

Hmmm. Okay, I have some suspicions I can look into. Thanks for the report!

Thanks for giving it a try! For the first two bugs, any chance you could tell me what sort of specs your machine has? As for the ghosts, yes, some of them are intentionally non-violent. Sorry for the confusion. :)