Give me your impressions, so i can improve future verions of the game
the controls are really badly placed.
I mean right hand on the arrow keys (very hard to also pres ener with that hand)
left hand space
at least put shoot and jump together and move movement things to the other side (for example arrow keys for move and xz for jumping shooting)
I know that it can be costumized but please change the inital setup to something else
aside from that , good game. a bit hard at times. only made it to the jumping spider things
The game looks really beautiful. I feel like I'm playing a long-lost GBA ROM. It reminds me of the Flashback Legends demo if you know that?
The air physics could do with some improvement. Jumping and falling feel very "floaty". You move up and down at a constant rate with no "arc" of slowing down in the middle of the jump as your direction reverses from up to down. Falling feels too slow.
The jump's spin animation doesn't feel very smooth, like you can tell it's separate frames of animation. Perhaps it needs more frames? I am not sure.
The default controls feel uncomfortable to me, I found [Z jump] [X shoot] [Shift run] to be more comfortable on a keyboard. Gamepad support would help.
The enemy movement is not great. If the flying bugs hit you, they jitter back and forth very fast. The big jumping enemies feel pointless early on with such a weak gun, their art is also inconsistent with the rest of the look, as those monsters are hugely pixelated compared to the rest of the environment.
You're obviously well-versed in Metroidvanias so the idea of being able to just ball-jump and swim straight away feel like a shortcut. You know how long it took to get those that in Super Metroid :P However perhaps I am comparing your game too strongly to Super Metroid.
Please don't take this as too negative. Overall this is pretty amazing. You've got 2/3rds of the way to making your own game which is easily better than NES Metroid or GB Metroid 2, and is approaching the quality of professional games like Super Metroid or Zero Mission. That's a great achievement! It just needs a little more polish to be great.
I hope that is helpful feedback. Please keep making games! Imagine how good you will be in like 5-10 years with more experience.
Hi superjaimie
Thanks for the feedback, i really appreciate.
I agree with you on many points:
- i modified jump many times, but i'm not satisfied... spin animation is only 4 frame, and i'm not the graphist, free assets so ...
- i modified default controls once, but every player is different, that's why i added a config page. I use a gamepad mapped to the keyboard, i tried to support gamepads natively but it seems not very well supported and standart on browsers yet
- enemies's script need a rework, the jumping enemy is scaled x2... i need more assets...
But the good news is that this game is just a POC. The final version will be different and more like super metroid with:
- rooms relied by doors
- more power-up and weapons
- more enemies variety
and i hope many other cool things
First off I want to say this is very good, and I love what you did with Luis' tileset and even the stuff you added! I liked it! For improvement I would I felt the platforming controls could use work here is a great set of stuff that you could do here, in the video the code is in C# written for unity, but if you have good understanding of phaser.io and JavaScript you'll be totally fine and be able to translate it over easily because all of the tweaks are very straight forward, and I always thought reading C# and JS very similar syntax, those are the two languages I like best. All it is is some camera and input tweaks to make player feel very "in-control"
If you know phaser then unity's scripting will be very easy for you to understand. The only real major difference is the way variables are declared and their scope. You can't just use let, var or const in C# you have to declare it's datatype first, vs JS can figure it out. But other than stuff like that and declaring public or private or void, it's like 99% same. I know because I started learning phaser through ourcade and codemonky then got into unity. :D
Thanks :)
I agree with you about the platforming controls. I made this prototype a while back, but i'm currently working on a new version of K438-B that already has the tricks you mentionned in the video, and this greatly improves the controls. Helpfull video!! There's another interesting trick you did not talk about, it's the gravity on top of a jump, lowering the gravity during few ms gives player time to handle the reception. But you probably already knows it, creators of celeste gives a lot of their tricks.
Jump is REALLY floaty. Right now, the character moves up and down at constant rates, which isn't natural. You need to decrease acceleration over time. Rolling in ball form could use some acceleration decrease to make it feel more "rolly". When you jump as icantbeliveitsnotsamus unless your moving in a direction, there is no sprite work. This decreases the realism of the jump as well. Art is the best though, and parallax is beautiful.
Hi,
Thanks for playing and gived your though.
This prototype is old, and doesn't use acceleration at all (i learned since). All the player mechanics are crap.
Art isn't mine, i'm not graphist. And the jumping vertical animation only have one frame :/, i'll try to make some change to it.
But i will soon release a new version of this game, with better mechanics.