itch.io

The Soundtrack by Cammy!

https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLxg39PZVcnV0adH3t_BXZ-24S6CwQw-vC

Thank you so much for playing!! Now that the jam judging period is over I've uploaded an update to the game based on user feedback that makes a number of improvements to the world progression, fixes a few of those softlocks people were running into, and overall just a bit more polish I didn't have time to get in before the deadline. I hope if you end up giving the game another shot that the updated version is a better time!

Totally agree on the levels feeling a bit too spaced out - I ultimately want to go back and completely re-evaluate the world progression from the ground up, and making levels a bit tighter is a huge part of that goal.

Really appreciate your feedback and kind words!

A HUGE THANK YOU to everyone from the jam who played and ranked Within a Marbelous Maze - I'm blown away at the positive reception and everyone's thoughtful feedback and couldn't be more honored to have placed 5th out of such an incredible pool of games! I've just released a post-jam update to the game (v10100) which makes a number of improvements to the general world progression, fixes the few softlocks folks were running into (at least the ones that I know about!), includes some slightly enhanced music from Cammy (who knocked it out of the PARK with this OST!!!), and some additional visual polish I didn't have the time to get to before the jam deadline.

I may make one or two other small updates in the coming days to further improve the experience, but the future for Marbelous Maze is likely to be a much more thorough re-evaluation of the entire world progression. I spent almost 2/3 of the entire jam building the different marbles and the assorted mechanics of the game, with around a week to build the entire world, and there's a lot I want to do differently. Stepping back to completely re-evaluate the order marbles unlock, the challenges the player experiences, and sorts of puzzles possible through the tag barrel system will result in a game I'm extremely proud of, and hope to one day rename this page to be the "Jam Version" of a full commercial release. Gotta finish Slime 64 first though!

Once again a huge thanks to everyone who played during the jam period - to the folks who streamed or speedran the game, and to all of my fellow developers who left really great feedback. Enjoy the updates!

Hey, thanks so much for playing!

I completely agree on basically all counts - I have an update to the game locked and loaded that smooths over some of the more confusing aspects of the existing world layout, but in reality have plans to take the fundamentals here and completely redo the level progression from the ground up. Go figure when you start level design with a bit over a week left in the jam you end up making some pretty big mistakes 😅

World being too big is a point I totally agree with, and I had wanted to add boostpads but simply ran out of time. I super appreciate you taking the time to play through the game, hope you'll give the updated version a shot once I upload it after the judging period closes, and really I hope to blow you away with a bigger and better version somewhere down the line 😃

Thanks so much for playing!! Were you using KBM or a Controller?

One thing I didn't get time to do was ask players which they were using - if on KBM I strongly recommend disabling AutoCam in the camera settings. I hope to release a post-jam version where I'll add that as a pop-up before the game starts.

Thanks so much for playing!!

Yes, can confirm the marble mechanics, tag barrel, most of the environment objects (battery and bulb terminals, campfires, lasers, freezing water...), were all done as part of the jam period. Aspects of the camera logic, some background logic for BGM, scene transitions, saving, some menus, started from Slime and were modified for this. In the end I ended up spending around 2/3 of the jam time on the new mechanics and getting all the systems up and running, which left a solid 10 days or so to build the entirety of the world haha.

Appreciate you taking the time to play the game and to leave a comment!

I enjoyed this a lot!! As a fellow marble-game creator and enthusiast this concept is awesome :D 

You crushed it!!! I know it isn't "minimalist" but I would LOVE to see these systems but with different items for your hands - holding a physics-y torch, a pickaxe, magic wand, brass knuckles, a gun...so many hysterical possibilities with this!

Hey!! Thanks so much for playing! Someone else found this and it was a total oversight - very sorry you ran into it! I'll be fixing that as part of a post-jam update for sure 😅

I couldn't agree more with your feedback regarding the greater structure of the world - by the time I had built the critical path through the start of the game, through Cistern leading to the Wood Ball, and then Caldera, I had about three days until the jam deadline. Getting the Ice Ball, all of Ruins, all of Vault, and some of the interstitial pieces of Cistern were built in a feverish 72 hour sprint leading right up to the deadline and unfortunately I think the quality definitely suffered for it. Getting lost after getting Ice and Gyro has been a very common point of feedback 😅

My hope is to take the fundamentals we've built here (the marbles, the mechanics, the basic themes and vibes of the worlds) and fundamentally re-evaluate the progression and interconnection of the world, to turn this into a game I'd be proud to sell on Steam. Plus bringing some collectibles into the mix couldn't hurt either!

I also think in that process I'll take better care to scale the world down a bit - there are definitely times when the player isn't asked to do much except roll through a mostly empty expanse. But, everything is trade-offs! Spending 2/3 of the jam time exclusively on getting the marbles and their mechanics working and feeling good was definitely A Choice but it was very important to me that they all feel good to use.

Thank you so much for playing and your feedback!!

(also couldn't agree more Cammy CRUSHED this soundtrack and Vault has been stuck in my head since I first heard it!!)

Honestly huge props to you for even committing to a fully 3D animated character for a jam like this. That I'm even able to give specific pointed feedback shows how far along you made it in such a short time! Hugely commendable.

I'm always happy to chat about this sorta thing - feel free to hit me up on Twitter, Bsky, or Discord if you ever want to talk shop on 3D platformer design/implementation!

This is a masterpiece.

I LOVED that animation right at the start. awesome stuff.

I've been building 3D platformers for a *long* time so I hope you don't mind some unsolicited feedback! Honestly for the fairly short jam turnaround you built a *ton* of content and should be super proud of what you did!

• The player's acceleration curves feel pretty off - which seems to be a common point of feedback. I'd suggest playing various games in the genre you view as inspiration, taking recordings, and literally noting how many frames / milliseconds on average it takes the character to go from a stop to their max base speed, and then upon releasing the stick how long it takes that same character to go from max base speed to a stop. You'll find it tends to be snappier on both ends, though with a good bit of variety depending on the game. By designing your character locomotion in a way that exposes those acceleration and friction numbers you can experiment a ton by tuning those knobs until just moving your character around feels good, and you can proceed from there.
  • Bonus points if you tweak the target base speed up or down depending on whether the player is going uphill or downhill based on the normal of the ground they're standing on - helps make the character feel like they're actually reacting to their environment.

• You've gone for the choice of making the character's facing direction lock-in upon jumping. This is a pretty big schism in the world of 3D platformers - with plenty of great games on both sides of the fence. What I will say is that games that do what DELLA does (locking the direction on a jump) tend to offer options to correct or redirect jumps at least a bit. SM64 kick, Sunshine hover nozzle, etc. They also make sure to preserve your forward speed into the jump, and I'd swear there'd be times in DELLA where I tried to drift a bit sideways and would actually *lose* forward momentum for having done so. The player's forward-backward and side-to-side aerial speed should basically be entirely separated in this case, with tunable values for how much the player can add or subtract to their forward-backward airborne speed (0 would mean like, castlevania-level committal jumps), and separately how much side-to-side drift you give them. You should also take a look at the games which allow the player to rotate in midair - this case is actually generally easier to implement (grounded and airborne cases are handled basically the same under the hood) and plenty of great games with complex movement do it too. Lots to explore here!
• I'd want that Dash move to more instantly snap me up to a fixed "run speed" - I can appreciate the acceleration but from a dead stop it felt tough to really get into a flow. Maybe rather than a smooth acceleration simply having a base dash speed and then, if the player sustained it for X seconds, they reach a Gear 2 Dash speed? You could also do different particles / sounds / animation poses for each stage, and it could all read a bit more cleanly.
• In general if I could give any feedback I'd say most actions in the game felt like they could be *snappier*. The player claw attack felt very tame (like a light 'nyeh' rather than a real scratch), when I hit a rotating wheel it rotates super gently and the door / platform moves slowly to its destination. All of this should be faster, more exaggerated - it'll read much better and keep the player in the flow.
• You did great on the ledge grabbing. That's not a trivial thing and you totally nailed it. No notes.

But yeah!! 3D platformers are *so* hard and you have a really impressive showing for only a month - I hope you're able to take what you've done for this jam and build more cool stuff!

Thank you so much for playing! Happy to confirm that yes by design there are a few routes through the game!  Most players will get Wood -> Ice -> Gyro -> get lost for awhile (oops) -> Glass, but you can actually immediately get Gyro once you get Wood, and then there's an alternative way into Caldera to get Ice and then Glass.

There are definitely a few softlocks some I missed and I'm always thankful for folks pointing them out - I'm happy so far all softlocks have been fixable by quitting to title and loading back in...earlier there were a few where if you hit a checkpoint your entire save file was permanently doomed. Definitely a hazard with this style of game that requires more playtesting than I had time for (the entirety of Vault was created with about 3 hours to go before the jam closed)

A checkpoint reset button would have helped! But I was a little worried you could break things by teleporting back (last checkpoint is underwater -> freeze surface -> teleport back down to checkpoint)...lots to think about. 

I hope to take this general concept and kinda re-evaluate the world design and overall progression in the future since I really love the concept - I'm glad even this version with some level design quibbles was still fundamentally an interesting time!

Lots of promise here! Needing to swap between rolling and moving normally makes for an interesting challenge - I'd love to see what some more time in the oven could do for this concept!

And maybe a bit more limitations on how often you can swap forms? Maybe only while grounded? It was tricky sometimes to know what was an intended solution vs what was me just sorta mashing my face on a problem until I somehow got past it

Mainly I'm just delighted that I wasn't the only ball-rolling submission to the jam!

This was a lot of fun. Even outside of a jam context this fundamental approach of a first person game with super physics-y hands and objects to wave around feels like a recipe for a knockout game in the future. Played through to "NICE!" and had a great time. Awesome work!!

Yeah - I definitely built some areas while a little too zoomed out in the editor 😅. Definitely something I want to fix when I return to this idea to polish it up into a "real game"!

Thanks so much for playing!!

I didn't listen to the advice and picked up the cursed sword and proceeded to get crushed lmao

But really, wow. An absolutely stellar jam showing. Great metroidvania progression, appealing and cohesive audio and visual style, and interesting mechanics executed well. I'm basically at a loss for words. Awesome work!!!

Great work!!! Yeah I've seen that a few times too very sorry - were you playing on the web build or desktop?

Will definitely work on the bug once the judging period is over!

Omg great catch that makes total sense. Ty for the feedback! Glad that that was a temp checkpoint and didn't softlock your save!

I think the concept here (gravity manipulation across fixed-size screens) is awesome. Unfortunately I think the game opened up way too quickly - the moment you get gravity manipulation you suddenly have access to several different puzzles. The very first one of making a colored tile reach a square was fine, but they quickly ramped up in complexity in a way where I couldn't tell if I was missing powers or if I simply didn't understand what was going on. The hitboxes of the "kill the box" red zap tiles were very large and unforgiving for a game where you don't have tile-precise control over the box's trajectories. Coupling in the occasional "critical object clipping out of bounds" and I ultimately somehow wrapped back around to one of the starting rooms and backed out. I'd need to watch the solutions video I think.

I did play on the RapierWeb build. Physics seemed mostly stable, but with the occasional clipping or lag spikes as a lot happened in quick succession - truly not sure what to do about those issues except for aggressive OoB checks for critical objects haha.

While the current state makes sense from a minimalism perspective, I think I'd really love this concept if you gave the relevant puzzle rooms some more breathing space - with simpler navigation rooms between them, and expanding the world out to more gradually introduce the mechanics. Later on would be a great spot to have the more tightly interwoven puzzle screens, once the player has already come to grips with the basic systems. This is an *extremely* good idea you could do a ton more with, and I'd love to see it.

Unbelievably huge shoutout to Discord user @Marloncha for their incredible 21:53.536 speedrun of the game!

https://youtu.be/7GXfw6rcz7M

I appreciate this comment so much! Thank you :D

I'd love to see the camera focus on an invisible object that more smoothly moves towards the center of mass of the Slime, rather than so directly targeting some point on its constantly jiggling body. Unfortunately the combat was really not for me - couldn't get a sense of how to deal with anything with how infrequently I could attack combined with the movement and 45 degree camera pivot towards the first hallway.

Really awesome visual style and extremely satisfying jiggle on the player character. Smooth out some rough edges and this feels closer to a 'real release' than most jam entries I've seen. Great work!

I loved this!! It was a bit linear and the first half of the game starts very slow but by the end with all of the abilities I was struck with how fun the moveset was! Fantastic use of a polearm. Would definitely love some music and more diverse visuals in the "outside the temple" area, but all in all an extremely solid jam entry you all should be super proud of.

This may be my favorite use of minimalism in the jam. Fantastic work. That said I did sorta get turned around and lost after somehow wrapping back around to one particular spot on I *want* to say the third island? I thought I had made some good progress but somehow ended up backtracking and it felt pretty encouraging as I had no new tools nor vantage and had simply lost progress. Honestly I think outside of a metroidvania jam this concept is just awesome as a platformer with more self contained, time trial-y levels. The visuals, music, and overall vibes come together fantastically as well.

Great stuff!

Hey so I might be extremely dumb but I got hard stuck right after picking up the remains at the beginning. I was in the long thin hall way and could not for the life of me jump up to that ledge, which felt like the only direction I could go? Everything is super dark which made it hard to see (NVIDIA 3070, if that matters), I almost jumped up to the ledge by sorta jumping twice in a row which seemed to be like a high jump? but I never made it. Unless I'm entirely blind (totally possible) I didn't see any other way back up where I fell, or any other direction out of the room I was in...

What I will say is holy wow the game looks great and that file size is pure technical witchcraft. The fact that the game looks like *anything at all* for that file size is insane, much less how evocative and stylized you got it. Definitely let me know what I'm doing wrong because I'd love to come back and the the game another shot once I get nudged past what is almost definitely an obvious player skill issue.

THIS IS AWESOME.

Swapping between the different terminals with different ways to play, abilities in one unlocking abilities in the other, and the entire facility coming together had my jaw drop multiple times. I'm heartbroken that my playthrough was forced to abruptly end when trying to find the next way to go upon unlocking Jump in 3D. 

I couldn't figure out what the game wanted from me after reaching the conveyor belts since I could jump to the first but not from the first to the second nor from the ground to the second, and the machine between the two was clearly designed with invisible walls to prevent the player from reaching it. I was just sorta looking around and trying to jump to the second conveyor (I'm afraid this was the first time the game really stumped me and I couldn't find anything to interact with or any other way to proceed), when I ended up sorta clipping into the corner of the conveyor and became entirely unable to move. With no way to proceed, save, or respawn, I was forced to exit the game.

Easily my favorite of the submissions I've had the opportunity to play so far. There's SO much cool stuff you could do with this concept. With some polish to the 3D movement aspects of the game I think this idea has a ton of legs. GREAT work!!

Despite the Itch.io "suspicious account" warning I did download the game and give it a try. I did a number of checks to confirm to the best of my ability that it was just a standard Godot release, saw that you also had another game and a Steam page with a game in a similar art style, and ran the game with my computer offline just to be sure, but yeah.

Unfortunately I got stuck very quickly - Some of the rectangular gates seemed to let me through and others were solid with no indication of which were which or why that was happening  - I thought they were gates that forced me to beat a certain number of enemies but after clearing the first three enemies painstakingly slowly (for the first enemies in the game they sure have a lot of health and also forcing the player to mash CTRL is an...interesting design decision), they just respawned and I felt stuck.

I was able to sneak between two trees to the upper area and get the lantern but once I did the gray box again trapped me inside with seemingly no way back. I separately tried to go into the devil circle and basically died instantly twice from things I couldn't see. I'm afraid that's where my journey with Meekbart ended

All that said the art is very cute and with some polish and game feel changes (and with a different control scheme...please) I'd love to see you build this out further!

Also seeing that the download has been flagged as suspicious, and that someone who tried 16 hours ago got errors when trying to run it. Afraid I can't swing it - what'd you make the game in? Did you zip up all of the necessary exported components when uploading? If you download your game onto a different machine does it work?

I *love* the intro animation. I also enjoyed jumping around and exploring! Unfortunately I immediately hit a bunch of dead ends and gave up...

• Simply heading all the way to the right put me into a pit I could not escape from with single jump. Tried jumping onto the tile between the two spikes but due to hitboxes could never safely stand there and died. Didn't seem to do anything anyway.
• Found the alternative way down with the secret grass path from the starting town that forks.
  • Heading to the right leads to a fork
    • Heading right at the fork puts you back in the pit where you can't jump out
    • Heading left brings you to an area with spikes above and below where jumping up or falling down both hurt you and it didn't seem like I had an ability that would let me get through smoothly. Felt exactly like the kinda thing I should return to with a dash upgrade or something, but couldn't find anywhere else to go. Tried damage boosting through but could never manage it.

And with that, I gave up. Neat though! Very promising start - agree that the color palette left much to be desired - might be because I'm colorblind but it was extremely hard to tell what was scenery vs what was foreground / interactable. 

Very competent rail shooting systems! Though at one point in the third (?) level it did drive me below the floor, thankfully that wasn't an instant death.

Some points that stood out to me

• The particle effect for a shot landing is either deliberately a bunch of large squares or is that way due to a missing texture, and either way the particle is way too big and has way too long of a lifespan. Every time I'd hit an enemy that took two hits to kill I'd basically be fully blinded for a second or two which made it *very* hard to get my bearings.
• There is no cooldown on shooting and so I used two fingers to mash on the fire key - I found myself wishing there was a "hold to auto fire at some fixed rate" button or at least a cooldown on shooting so I wouldn't be incentivized to mash as quickly as possible.
• I do really like the concept of linear levels that open up into open levels which require items from different areas to traverse, metroidvania style, but I struggled a bit with the concept in its current form. I think the first instance of this should have been made a lot more straightforward - between all terrains on all levels looking pretty similar and being sorta instantly dumped into the free fly area with "go get the special boost somewhere else" (also that specifically felt a bit confusing since player already starts with a boost - maybe making the player start without one and unlocking the boost at all would feel cleaner?) kinda had me lost and aimless. I flew into an orange orb, beat a level, still didn't have the new boost (far as I could tell anyway), and just sorta tried shooting at the big tower with a bajillion switches while shockingly accurate lil guys chipped away at my health from off screen, died, and that's around where I called it quits.

I've done my best to not factor my skill issue into my rating - lots of great work here! 

Super understandable! :D

I used the extra grace day to make a few sections a bit less ridiculously demanding of the player and I believe that set of Cistern jumps was one of the spots. I really appreciate you giving it the time of day and for taking the time to comment - tysm!

Thank you so much!! You're right that your next stop should be somewhere in Cistern - but honestly the back half of the game was coming together within 2 days of the deadline so there's definitely a lot I would do differently to help make the world feel more navigable if I could start it over. I appreciate you taking the time to try it and leave feedback!!

Thank you so much for your feedback!! So I know - which part did you get stuck at? I was pushing really hard to finish the game at all I definitely didn't get to give everything the difficulty curve polish pass I wanted.

Excited to try your game and others when I get off work!

Hey! Looks really neat - unfortunately I unzipped, drilled down to the Windows folder, ran the Exe, saw your splash screen, and it has been hung on a Gray screen for over ten minutes. I see in the Readme mention of a longer-than-normal load on first launch, but somehow something doesn't seem right... 😅

I'm on a Windows 10 PC with an RTX 3070. Any ideas?

Also, for filesize reasons, I'd recommend separating the Mac and Windows downloads into their own Zips upon Itchio upload!

Thank you!! This one was a fun recreation that came together surprisingly quickly. The Pringles Speedrunning Discord even made a few custom levels using the level editor!

I'm so glad you enjoyed! Thanks so much :D