Foon → Ludum Dare Explorer → LD48 → Fathomless
By silkypantsdan and zaktage
| Category | Rank | Score | Count | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Overall | 405 | 3.82 | 59 | |
| Fun | 679 | 3.49 | 59 | |
| Innovation | 180 | 3.95 | 58 | |
| Theme | 228 | 4.13 | 59 | |
| Graphics | 466 | 4.05 | 59 | |
| Audio | 764 | 3.36 | 58 | |
| Humor | 748 | 2.88 | 51 | |
| Mood | 1011 | 3.43 | 57 |
I like the hand drawn aesthetics (that S^^) and the recursive idea is great :). Sadly even the easy path was to difficult for me to finish the game. I noticed that the green boxes move the player vertically but not horizontally which makes it quite hard as well. Anyways great work!
Thanks for the feedback @dominikscholz - we will take that on board for future ideas as well (we didn't want to make the game too easy, and might have overcorrected :S)
pretty cool! going 'deeper and deeper' into recursion is definitely a cool spin on the theme. i really like the art style and the audio tops everything off quite nicely without overdoing it. i'd love to see this idea fleshed out in a full release!
Definitely agree on the difficulty, I gave both paths a good 50 deaths before giving up :P It's pretty fun though! Just overly precise.
This game is very good. It might be too difficult (but the old NES game was hard to have a longer life). The skecthbook aestethic is a great idea. It's like the first drawing of your game began to move and you decided to put it in a webpage :smile: Very good job !
Love the aesthetic, as other commenters have stated, difficulty is a bit high in terms of jump precision. However, the game concept and gameplay were well thought out. Great work!
The take on the theme is great and the game looks beautiful.
Your game looks great :) i love the idea of your "deeper" mechanic :)
this is very nice game with an amazing idea, but as others mentioned - the difficulty was very high. otherwise its a great execution of the concept. well done!
The aesthetics are great (love the doodled art, and the pencil scratch music), and the core mechanic is a very clever take on the theme.
I have to agree with the comments about the difficulty. Smaller hitboxes on the hazards/character would be good. At the moment, you die long before the art looks like it's touching, which makes it feel a bit unfair.
Overall, a great entry.
The hand drawn graphics give this a really cool like, absolutely loved the music being done with pencil scratches as well, that's a great touch!
Excellent interpretation of the theme too!
Interesting style, but the game is too hard sometimes :D. An ability to jump lower (by holding space for a shorter time) would be really useful.
I love the sound effects and art style. Good twist on the standard platformer. Maybe a bit too difficult but overall really well done!
I love the idea of worlds inside world and the inner-indications. I'm not able to finish the level where you have to control your fall. It's a really good experience. Thanks!
I like the interpretations of the theme, and the graphical aesthetic, but the game is really very hard.
I loved the hand drawn aesthetic and the scribbling sounds. Its only some areas that are too hard- I had 20 deaths in one place, and then another 30 in another where I finally gave up. Even then the main reason I gave up was because I respawned so far away from where the challenge was. I did not notice any bugs though, so congratulations on that! I would love to see this Idea expanded on also, so maybe instead of full boxes around the sub-levels, some of the structural elements of the inner level will be usable in the outer one. I really enjoyed this, good job!
As others said, probably a bit too difficult. I think that the contact spike ball/player is a bit too large, but that might just be a hot take. Loved the style and the idea. The hand-drawn design and the animation of the player work quite well!
Really awesome idea, though after 20 min of failing I have to give up xD Maybe the players hitbox feels sometimes a bit unfair and the sideways moving platforms feel really counterintuitive, but maybe that's by design?
really clever game! the pencil "found sound" percussion as the music was a great idea. the hit boxes were unforgiving, i'd make them a little smaller next time, and giving the platforms some spring like inertia when the change direction would make them more predicable to the player. still a really cool game. well done!
I'm about to smash my keyboard, the game is hard! Very nice work, love the art style and the background sound of a pencil drawing was a really good idea
Thanks everyone for the feedback - and sorry about the difficulty (our level designer is a sadist).
We are considering to work on this further after the Jam, and will be taking all the feedback into account! :D
The best entry I have rated so far. Maaan I love the level design, good job. I gave up after 15 minutes, but I definitely would have played more if I had the time and it doesn't seem impossibly hard at all. This type of game is meant to be hard, that's the point. It is difficult to find any flaw in the game from start to finish. My only complaint is the resolution was to big for my laptop screen and I didn't see full screen option as well, so I didn't see part of the level. Overall great entry. Good Job!
this game was wayy too hard. The hit boxes feel a bit big, or maybe it's the capsule collider that is big. Anyway I way able to beat easy after 138 deaths at 35:59:12, after figuring out that inside of going up into the room with the tiny spikes and gaps you just jump after you run off the moving platform going up and you're able to get to the right side. I think if there were check points were challenge versus room than that would feel a lot better. nice work.
i found the graphics cute, but it was a bit hardcore, gj!
So many good ideas! The music was a funny and a wonderful surprise! So brilliant!
Cool game! It's very hard! Interesting graphics/sound design!
Nice game. Its like playing games inside the game. Interesting artwork and sound but i can't stay on the moving objects had to continuously adjust position to stay on that.
Nice game. Its like playing games inside the game. Interesting artwork and sound but i can't stay on the moving objects had to continuously adjust position to stay on that.
Right at the outset, the soundtrack made me smile. This is a solid execution of a simple but smart idea. At first I was going to say it reminded me a of a game I coded about 15 years ago, but no, this is way cooler. Standing on the top boundary of other levels was a juicy meta moment. I hope you'll continue to work on this, there's so many directions you could take it.
Awesome work!
what an incredible amount of work has been done. this game is awesome. I immediately remember my drawings of the characters in the school notebook. I spent a lot of time, but I never managed to get to the end. this game is definitely one of the best in this Ludum dare
The game is really too hard for me (and I played Celeste). I think the colliders are bigger than they graphics.
Also, I recommand you to ajust your platformer mechanics to be more "permissive" for newbies (including me). Take a look at [this thread of the creator of Celeste](https://twitter.com/MattThorson/status/1238338574220546049), really helpfull ^^
The concept of the game is excellent. Some king of level-inception ^^ That's brillant, congrats! I will try hard this game if you made some corrections for stupids players like me XD
The recursive-level mechanic is interesting! Always fun when you can see the entire game on one screen, but it's deceptively larger than it looks.
Thanks for the thread @curtis-pelissier - we did implement some grace time in regard to jumping, but some of the rest there would be good additions.
@zaktage you are cruel level designer, loved your game though!
HAAAAAAAAAAAARD!!! This game is incredibly well conceived. The interpretation of deeper meaning “Recursively Deeper” is brilliant. The art is stick figures, but some how the stick figures look polished. The music is like nothing I’ve ever heard, and if this game doesn’t make the devs famous, I think they should take their pencils on tour. I truly had a blast.. or an aneurysm, Im not sure which. Thanks so much for bringing this by my stream. Here's a link to the VOD: https://www.twitch.tv/videos/1005922340?t=1h15m22s
I loved the interpretation of the theme, and using nested levels not only as obstacles, but as platforms themselves, was a really unique mechanic.
As others have pointed out - the difficulty is pretty brutal. Especially dying or falling in one of the "outer" levels, having to redo the "inner" levels starts killing your motivation to keep playing really fast. I made it a little over halfway until I goofed up and had to start all over.
Really fun entry!
Really cool game! The scaling mechanic along with all the shortcuts/alternate paths was done so well, the graphics had charming simplicity. The scribbling background sound is a little repetitive, but honestly it's straight up ASMR that I don't even mind it. The character input felt tight and responsive and other than the corner sliding, I knew exactly where my guy was going and that's SO important for a platformer. I also like that the character has an idle animation!
This part is for post jam suggestions, I didn't remove points for any of the stuff below because this was pretty SOLID! I think a lot of the difficulty comes from the character collider being inconsistent with the sprite. Even if you increased the player sprite size to match the collider size so it was the exact same game, it would feel at least a little easier, but definitely more fair! Gonna post a picture for the rest of my comments just to make it easier on me (You might need to open the image in a new tab to be able to read the text)
Fathomless2.png
@itsboats - thanks for the feedback, and the tip with the box colliders - will definitely have a play with that setting later. The main reason for the circle collider was to help the player 'roll' onto a platform if they just missed the edging, but this might work with the radius setting too.
It's also nice that you managed to get the bug in the same spot I had, and I'm 99% sure I know exactly what the issue is there too (fwiw it's to do with detecting the direction a player moves through a portal).
Really cool. Inception-like levels is a really good take on the theme. Graphics are clean and direct to the point. A bit hard maybe? Great work!!
This game is difficult even for an easy level. I gave up the game in the middle because it was hard. But the level of the game was fun. I liked the way there was a level in the level. The only downside is that the game is difficult. The paper drawing method was good. It's an interesting game. I thought of a similar theme. But I failed. This game is great.
The concept is one of a kind, really. So original! I loved the hand drawings as the art style choice for this. The pencil sound was not my favorite because it irritates me a lot, even in real life hahah so I had to mute the game, but I know it fits perfectly the atmosphere you guys were aiming to do. The game is hard, but I enjoyed the challenge and got very far, until a bug made me lose all my progress (I took one of the portals and fell down, then my character was so much bigger than the screen he was supposed to be in. Overall, even with this bug, I loved the experience. Thanks for this entry, it's amazing!
Congratulations on the game, I really like this art style, I found the background very clean I believe that if you put a noise it will be better with some imperfections of the paper, once I made a game in pixel art with paper theme once https://etrealjunior.itch.io/morph , a big hug, and I look forward to your feedback on my game.
This game concept is *really* cool - I immediately understood what was going on as soon as I entered the first sub-level, and I loved how kept recursing through stage after stage trying to get to the other side of the first screen.
One thing that felt a little bit unfair/awkward was how you had absolutely no friction with the moving platforms. When I was on this screen, it seemed like it might have actually been impossible to get across the two fast-moving small platforms - I'm sure that it was possible with pixel-perfect precision, but the player's lack of interaction with moving platforms felt really unintuitive.
level.PNG
I'd also echo other commenters' concerns about collision feeling just a bit off - Hazards would often kill me before I had even visually touched them, as seen in this gif. In general, you want the hitbox of your hazards to be smaller than their visual size, just as a matter of pragmatism. When a player dies by just barely brushing up against a spike it can feel very unfair, but if a player just barely squeezes by a hazard that they thought would be lethal, they feel great about it. That small visual change can make a world of difference in how much fun players have with your game, even if nothing changes about how tight a jump is.
ldjam.gif
I also found myself wishing that I didn't have a fixed jump height - The fact that I couldn't do a short hop was unexpected for a tight platformer like this, and led to several deaths against ceiling-spikes. Given how tight the platforming sections were, as a player I really wanted to have equally tight control over my character.
Overall though, really cool and solid entry! Great job! :)
Graphics and art are ridiculously cute and very crisp, with a distinct fun style. Sounds and music are great. Controls and gameplay are smooth and make sense. The game is crazy hard, but I had fun failing a lot and dying >100 times. Very nice work.
Cool idea! There's a bit too much inertia in the movement for my taste, but that's somewhat of a personal bias of mine (I'm a megaman / celeste person, not a super meat boy person). Some of the level designs also felt a little frustrating at times in the wrong ways, there were a few too many "gotchas" that seemed unnecessary to the main design goals of the level.
Still a cool game though! I can see it being a lot more fun once y'all clean it up and polish it a bit.
PS: Your WebGL embed size is quite large! I'm still an old dinosaur running at 1280x1024 screen resolution so I had to zoom out to make the game fit on my screen. A significant portion of desktop users are running 1366x768 and a non-trivial amount are running 1280x720 so please keep those in mind when designing for web :)
The presentation was nice between the hand drawn look and the sound. Your take on the deeper and deeper theme was cool too. It was cool to see levels within levels and transition between them.
The gameplay could be a little tighter for such a difficult platformer. Variable jump height is a must in these types of games that are all about precision.
The character hitbox also seemed to be too big. Making it smaller than the character graphics is always better than frustrating players by having them die when their character clearly isn't touching an obstacle.
Horizontal moving platformers are also frustrating because your character doesn't move with them.
Bruh.
chrome_2021-05-05_14-58-07.png
Okay, firstly, well done on making a cohesive and complete game. The graphics also worked well, and I didn't realise that pencil scratchings could be musical - meditative, even. I particularly like the way you styled your title and menu text as well. Plus the S. Classic. Levels being part of bigger levels was a cool mind-blow too. Your game feels pretty complete and polished for 72h, so well done there.
I hate to say it but I found the fun factor to be pretty mediocre - it was my love of the genre that enticed me to see it through. Most of the times I died, my character was not visibly intersecting with a danger, which is frustrating... Definitely make hitboxes small enough to account for that (even with some leeway imo). On top of that, the level of precision required for some of those jumps felt even more precise than the Farewell chapter of Celeste. Keep in mind that you'll always be like 5x better than the average player with the practice you had during playtests (and the fact that you tweaked it to feel good to you), so you should reserve that level of precision for only the hardcorest levels. On that note, keep in mind that every challenge you throw the player should be something they are warmed up to, unless it is a conscious decision otherwise. Um, actually less of an issue but I'll also mention that moving platforms were a little annoying for not moving you relative to them. I'll also say that having the same type of challenge a couple times in a row can be repetitive and boring, not that you did much of that.
Forgive me, I've railed on about the negatives because I'm passionate about the genre. They might be smaller issues for other people, so take what I'm saying with a grain of salt and your own compass. Something you did well was that you gave some leeway when just barely making it to a platform - that's the kind of design philosophy that will make a good precision platformer.
Above all, honestly you're in a pretty good position. You have what it takes to make a complete game, which is a really hard thing to do. A little tightening on your gameplay and level design, and I see a lot of potential.
Keep up the good work.
Very cool idea! Love the art and scribbling sounds in the background. The "going deeper and deeper" into smaller drawings mechanic is great. I didn't get too far, but that's down to me being terrible at platformers, and probably not any fault with the game!
Nice idea and very well put together! The sounds got a bit repetitive after a while but were a cool idea, and as others have noted the hitboxes seemed a little off at times, but really well done.
Done in hard in 28 death and 07:13:27. I don't know how you can do that in 4 minutes :o.
Some levels seems a little unfair, but overall it is a simple but effective game. I love the fact that you don't move with the platform, that add some good gameplay.
Also about the music, it is a good idea but it is kind of irritating after some minutes.
Good job !
Really cool concept. I found the hitboxes to be a little unintuitive and punishing. The art looked amazing. Good work on the game!
Thanks all again for the feedback, and the experience! We will definitely be back in October for more jam fun!
We are (slowly, between other work commitments) continuing the project based on everyone's feedback, and will be posting updates both here and on Twitter (@bananafistgames).
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