Paranoia

the-lame-brain 2021-10-04 17:22

Good game! Very atmospheric!

It would be cool to have a bit more variety in levels. Multiple paths, things to do in the level, etc... Example: The robot has to find a leaky pipe and patch it, or a blown fuse to replace or something.... some reason for the robot to be stumbling around in the dark.

A little weak on the theme. The light flickers and is unstable, so that qualifies, but I feel like you could have driven the theme home a bit better. Maybe the narrator text is more garbled? Platforms that crumble beneath you? Something like that.

Granted, I only played to 2-2, so if you introduce these things later, please disregard my feed back!

Cheers!

-LB

tomate-salat 2021-10-05 06:52

@the-lame-brain Thank you for your feedback. With level 2-2 you still were in the introduction levels. With level 3-0 another upgrade gets introduced which allowed more difficult levels. Because without that upgrade you won't be able to find certain paths.

This actually was the first platformer I've made and I enjoyed making it. So I am pretty sure I will do some more in future. Therefore appreciate your ideas :slight_smile:

zazz0000 2021-10-06 00:32

Awesome atmosphere, the combination of tense music and flickering light really set the mood.

cloistered 2021-10-06 14:06

I like the atmosphere here.Nice game. The walljump is a little tricky for me.

Followed you and waiting for your new games~Wish you can try my game too~

apple-dash 2021-10-06 15:02

So, I've managed to find a game breaking bug in 3-0/3-1. In 3-0, when the tutorial tells you to go to get the X-Ray -- don't, just jump down to the finish line. The level will end correctly, but at the start of the next one your character will not be able to move. So, 3-0 was the last level that I played. I would've replayed the game up to that point, but the introduction (and tutorials) are way too long.

But regardless of that, I think I can describe all the problems with the game I found (and seeing as it's your first platformer, I'll try to go into more details, so the feedback is more useful to your future projects).

So, the core platforming isn't all that fun. I get the constraints of a game jam, but the character animation is super important to get it to feel right. But I wouldn't even mention it, if it wasn't for the wall jumping. That one requires a clear indication that the character is sticking to the wall.

What doesn't help with that is the lack of light. I think I get where you're going with this, but in the finished game, it's more annoying that anything else. It makes wall jumping even less clear and reliable. Platforming suffers from this too, but to a lesser extent -- sometimes the platforms are obscured by shadows so you have to either try to cheese the game by leaping from the platform and getting back or just take leaps of faith.

I think the small tweak that you can do without breaking too much stuff is to make the light around the player a bit bigger. Or to introduce more lights into the levels on some essential platforms.

Also, the spooky atmosphere is a bit pointless. If the levels had more details to make them creepier, then sure, that would click perfectly with the flickering light and spooky music, but as of right now it feels only half of the way there.

But it's not all doom and gloom. I really liked the powerups, especially, the fact that they reset every stage, so it's more of a game about exploration, and *that* works really well with the whole darkness and limited light thing. So I do think there's something good in this, it's just the execution that isn't showing the potential

So yeah, that was a bit long, but I hope it was at least helpful. Good luck with your future games :)

tomate-salat 2021-10-07 07:52

@apple-dash Wow. Thank you for that detailed feedback! About the bug: this is really weired. I know there is a lot of text. Therefore the game asks you if you want to hear about it/playing for the first time. This gives you the option to extremly shorten the texts + most of dialoges becoming disabled. But I can totally understand that this bug + texts can kill the motivation.

I always had the feeling that there is something not right with the wall jumping. But I couldn't put the finger on it (actually I was really close to make it worse). I it is easy to loose orientation during wall jumps. I had the hope to get rid of this by keeping the distances short. Looks like that hasn't worked out as expected. Here I take with me that I have to weight my initial impression higher.

Again: thank you very much for that feedback. I really had fun making my first platformer and I definitivley want to do more of them. The thing with the lights was an experiment which I don't want to repeat (I really don't like that my game could cause epileptic attacks). Of course it is always nice to hear when player like my game. But I do jams for learning. Therefor I prefer to hear how I can make things better. So what you've wrote was very valuable to me :slight_smile:

ryusui 2021-10-07 22:40

I really enjoyed what I got to play of it, but I ran into the same game-ending bug where I couldn't move after 3-1 started. The music might be a bit more intense than the game warrants; I think something softer and spookier would've been more appropriate than the dramatic "Jaws is approaching"-type music.

I also agree that the walljump is a little hard to work with given the tiny field of vision; I'm really glad the sequences involving it are all fairly short and simple. ^_^;

forik 2021-10-09 20:19

Really cool atmosphere!

bqq 2021-10-11 19:35

Nice job on the atmosphere, scanning the environment with the light feels like exploring! I also hit the 3-1 bug where I got stuck. I think the thing the wall-jump would need is a bit of slack time where you can jump while steering away from the wall.