itch.io

1. In my personal opinion, I actually preferred jumping around like a madman in your previous build, so I do not like the cool down as much. Especially because you can't tell when you can use it again, it was really frustrating when the lava catches up and you can't do anything because the cool down is too long. If you wanna keep the cooldown I would make it significantly shorter so it doesn't kill the pace of the game, and also add some visual or UI element so I actually know how long the cool down is. 

2. I think it makes sense to have some kind of bar that visually shows how much distance is between the lava and the player. 

3. As I said above, I think you should just start off with a much faster cooldown, and if the player gets too far from the lava you can have it do some sort of rubber band effect to catch up and keep the difficultly consistent.  That way difficulty doesn't rely on the player waiting around to be able use the grapple again.  

1. A lot of running around but mostly because I was a little confused.

2. I would rate it a 5, because honestly the hardest part was figuring out where to stand so I could put out the fires. The enemies were very easy and it took me a while to figure out how to steer the ship, but I basically never did because to do so you need enough fuel, but fuel is only obtained from the enemies who drop space crystals, but a lot of the time the drop rates were bad and sometimes I wouldn't even get an enemy event until it was too late.

3. Enemies feel like they have too much health and they take a while to kill. I also think they should be faster because I never really had any sense of urgency trying to kill them, it was just tedious. 

4. I actually do like the alarm sounds and that they sound different for different events. However for the pop-up message I think it goes away too quickly sometimes and there's not enough time to read when I'm trying to do other tasks at the same time. 

5. I think the space crystals were a little confusing at first, but that was because my first play through I got like 3 fire events in a row and since you can only get the crystals from killing the aliens I didn't understand why I couldn't get fuel or steer the ship. I think there needs to be other ways to get fuel for it to stay interesting.

6. The game is very "ehh" to me. I think it is a little slow and I found myself mostly just walking in circles waiting for the next event and refueling oxygen. I also think there needs to be something more interesting in the center room, since that is the transition room to all the important areas. You visit it a lot but its basically just empty space with no real purpose, so I think there should be some kind of event or even just more decorations/ obstacles to make it feel a little nicer. I also think there needs to be more visuals indicating when days start and end, because the day counter doesn't really give that sense of tension that I want it to. 

I also think the player should be able to run and have more events at a time to make it feel more like multitasking instead of waiting around. In the first question I said it feels like running because I'm confused, but I want it to be running because I'm excited and focused on surviving. 

7. One thing I don't really get is the minimap in the corner, it's zoomed in so much that it doesn't really give a whole lot of information that I couldn't just gather from looking at the screen. Zoom it out a little or get rid of it completely.

1) Honestly I don't know how to run in your game, but the walking felt alright, nothing to crazy. The jump feels alright, but there's not a lot to really jump over so while it's fun I don't know what other use it really has.

2) The foliage in your map looks nice so far, but one issue I noticed is that you can basically climb any of the mountains and it is pretty easy to climb to the edge of the map of fall into the endless abyss below. I think if the map was even bigger that would be nice to help give a sense that you are in a dense forest, something you could potentially get lost in until the bears find you and attack. Also I think the mini bear is cute, but a larger more menacing bear is probably more fitting for your game. 

3) The throwing seems inconsistent, sometimes the arc tracks correctly but other times the wood goes way too far. You can also see the sphere at the end of the arc all the time, even when you are not holding anything which is a little annoying. 

4) I think a campfire level would be great, and if you do add a night counter it might also be nice to see how much time is left per night. 

5) One thing I noticed is that sometimes the framerate would be pretty choppy, and also I could hear my laptop really crank up the fan and it sounded like there was some intense processing going on. My computer is fairly new so I think there may be some performance issues that are slowing down your game you may want to check. 

The dash feels pretty good, though usually I found myself dashing backwards away from the enemy instead of towards them so the i frames weren't really a concern for me. 

The enemies feel ok, however I think the players attacks are a little weird. The fast attack feels really slow, and the slow attack is glacial, so I pretty much never even used it. Also, I'm not 100% sure but it felt like the parry also gave the player recoil frames, and because the attacks are so slow, you couldn't really do anything after a successful parry which kind of ruins the sense of accomplishment you are supposed to get after doing one. If there were 3+ enemies I imagined they'd all just pile up on each other while you dash backwards and slowly chip away at them, which could get tedious. 

My suggestion for balancing would be to make everything faster, especially if you are planning to have healing after killing enemies, that reminds me of bloodborne where you would want to encourage a faster play style to regain health. 

(I used keyboard so maybe it does feel better with a controller fyi)

1. The grapple has a good amount of force, but I actually think a way to make it fun is to have even MORE force, and make the volcano wider so you have more room to zoom around. That way it's a little more chaotic, but in a good way because after playing for a while I easily learned the mechanics and it felt pretty easy to me. I wanna feel like spiderman zooming around really fast if that makes sense. Really fine tune the physics to make it smooth. 

2. I remember your group wanting to have a candy theme, so I think something like candy cane ledges, that break apart after you grab onto it would be cool. Or, maybe a gummy surface that's sticky and makes it harder to jump or reach the next grapple point.  Again, I would either widen the volcano or scale down the player so you have more room to add stuff and make it flow nicely. 

3. A few times I died immediately because as soon as you start the lava is right under you, and it was a little annoying starting out when you are trying to learn the controls. But, after that I think the lava is waaay too slow, since you can jump ahead of it pretty quickly. So, I think there should be a short wait at the beginning before the lava starts rising, but after that it should be fast in my opinion. 

1. I was a little confused about using k to navigate, especially since in class I remember how if you take a wrong turn it takes you back to the beginning, so I felt like a lot of times I was going in circles and not really sure if I was actually making progress or not. I just kind of went in the general direction of the arrow until something interesting happened. The slowdown ability would be good to use immediately after going to the next screen, because sometimes the enemies would spot you right away and there wasn’t a lot of time to react. So in a way it was good and bad, good because it works but bad because sometimes I feel like the enemies got some cheap shots and it was a little annoying cause they were hard to avoid.

2. The movement felt good, and I really love the art and music, but like I said above sometimes the enemies are annoying to deal with. One big thing that bugged me is sometimes I’d get cornered and would end up taking a whole bunch of damage in a row, so I think to fix this you could add a few frames of invincibility after getting hit so that you don’t instantly loose 2 and a half hearts when you were supposed to only take a quarter of one. And then to balance that you could just have a few less hearts so it doesn’t become too easy.

3. This might be hard to add but maybe something where you find more clues on where to go? Something to make navigating the maze more interesting. Maybe also add another ability that spices up dealing with enemies, I’m not really sure what though.

Also note: Doesn’t effect gameplay but I noticed while playing I had collected the third spaceship part before the second one, and on the inventory thing on the top right it covered the silhouette of the second piece instead of the third, so not like a super game breaking thing but a small bug that could be fixed lol. 

1.At first I didn’t realize I had to go to the game page to find the instructions and lasted like a good ten seconds lol. Eventually I figured it out and the longest I survived ended up being around 3 minutes. Once I got the hang of it it wasn't too hard to last a while, but after all the guns are used there's nothing else to do. 

2. This is hard to say because at first it seemed like too many enemies, but as I learned how to play it felt easy to run away from them, making it easier to deal with that many. So I guess what I’d do is have them spawn in slower at the start but increase the number of enemies as the timer increases. 

3. I think you can keep it as swapping the arms, because if they were bound to different buttons I feel like I would have a harder time knowing which one is “equipped” and taking damage. So I think even if it takes a second to learn how to swap the arms it is fine because it doesn’t feel “unintuitive” or annoying, it is more a small challenge that the player works through when first getting to know the game. 

4. I liked the controls, especially jumping and movement felt smooth enough, however shooting the gun sometimes felt off, like it was hard to tell if I was actually doing damage to the robots or not. (Perhaps this could be fixed by adding different sound effects to the different guns?) Even though one was technically faster than the other both guns felt pretty similar so maybe adjust the way they work a little to make them feel more different? 

5. The UI made sense, although I would probably make the timer a little bigger so it feels more important. Also since the UI is the same colors as the background sometimes it feels like it blends in too much, so something like making the contrast higher might make it look nicer. Also because of that, sometimes I would stop paying attention to health bars and not realize I’m about to die, so similar suggestion but I think doing something like changing the health bar when the guns are almost about to break would be helpful. 

6. I kinda mentioned the UI in the previous question but other than that I think the art style was effective in its communication. The player and robots are clearly separated from the background. The guns before you pick them up are quite small, so maybe making them glow or something might help to make them be more obvious, but that’s a very minor complaint so overall I’d say it looks pretty good. 

7. Sometimes when jumping and landing on another robot you’d jump a little extra high, I’m not sure if that was intentional but it was kinda fun and made it easier to reach some of the higher platforms. Also sometimes it seemed like the guns wouldn’t always fire consistently which was a little more annoying.