deniz-aras 2022-10-03 06:35
Game is lovely. Easy to play hard to master. Those corridors are so narrow, nearly every time I used my dash I hit a wall. Got 10 checkpoints in 119 second. This game could be expanded into speed running game. Nice job.
Foon → Ludum Dare Explorer → LD51 → Relay PeaJay
By aeveis
| Category | Rank | Score | Count | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Overall | 24 | 4.09 | 39 | |
| Fun | 53 | 3.92 | 40 | |
| Innovation | 202 | 3.39 | 39 | |
| Theme | 95 | 3.97 | 39 | |
| Graphics | 18 | 4.32 | 40 | |
| Audio | 36 | 3.97 | 39 | |
| Humor | 76 | 3.51 | 36 | |
| Mood | 20 | 4.13 | 38 |
Game is lovely. Easy to play hard to master. Those corridors are so narrow, nearly every time I used my dash I hit a wall. Got 10 checkpoints in 119 second. This game could be expanded into speed running game. Nice job.
This game is so cute, I love it so much!! The art, the music, the premise, the npcs... It's all soooo adorable! Excellent work as always @aeveis!! Here's my high score :3
Relay.png
A game with a built in speedrun timer? I accept your challenge.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=urbO6bXI3z0
I had a strong start, but lost a lot of time from bonking. (Also, how are you supposed to beat that last checkpoint? In all my attempts I never got it.)
Very strong game. The characters are adorable, especially the little dialogue faces. The background is a bit empty. I see there's a bit of blurry detail, (and there's even parallax!) but a couple layers of lighter or darker orange to make the parallax really pop would've been cool. It would be a bit of a balancing act to prevent the background from taking the attention away from the foreground, but a little more to it would be nice.
The music is very relaxing. I guess since I was going for the speedrun I was wanting the song to be more upbeat and high-action, but the current song is very nice. I like the brass horns!
This game is fantastic, by the way. I'm grasping at straws to give some critical feedback. On the topic of a speed-game though, I have a good history of speedrunning, so allow some optional feedback about making the game more enjoyable to speedrun. My first note is bonks, and not even with the feather boosts.
_______Bonk1.png
This is entirely just my opinion, and depending on what kind of game you want this to be, this note can be thrown out entirely. There are pro's and cons to both sides here. I would love to see your momentum not get cancelled when you crash into walls. A note about difficulty scaling: The section after flag 3 has a lot of corners for you to bonk on, and I found myself losing upwards of a second and just for bonking any corner. Losing that much time in the early part of the game requires me to either put in a ton of practice to consistently get a "good run" after flag 3, or accept mediocrity. Making the late game difficult makes sense, but I think the "easy to pick up, difficult to master" curve is a bit steep for the early section. Keeping the momentum would negate this issue, but make the game easier. Again, I don't know how precise you would want the estimated "prefect run" to be, but this addition would make it way more approachable to run.
The feather boost-bonks are pretty great, I like that feature. That's a good place to punish players for their mistakes. (and the bonkless feather? *chef kiss*)
Solid game. Great work as always!
So cute! A lot of great frames of anim like when landing. The wing flap and feather wisps are really cool too. Makes you feel really powerful by the end. The courses seemed pretty balanced, I got 7 on my first try and I feel like some were just outside my grasp. Really fun overall.
Main thing I didn't like is the cooldown on several moves. You can only re-flap after you reach your apex, which felt unresponsive. Also when chain dashing, you could insta-dash in another direction, but in the same direction you had to wait for the cooldown, which made it feel randomly unresponsive. It also felt really heavy to change horizontal momentum in the air, especially with the ground-dash.
I was stuck trying to get the game to accept input. I was about to give up when suddenly spacebar started working. Then everything was great. I'm terrible at it, but I really like how it rewards you with powerups as you go on. Being OP is fun!
Great speed running game. I like how you just us infinite dash in the middle of the game and that changes how I have to play.
Not sure if it is intended but even though I took more than 10seconds, I could still continue.
Edit: ohhhh if i miss the checkpoint is not added. Gotcha
@deniz-aras Thanks! Yah, you end up having to pretty precise to avoid the walls (staying near the middle of the course).
@nate954 Thanks! I wanted to make a time attack game feel as un-stressful as possible haha.
@100th-coin Thank you for your playthrough and comments! I'll have to see if I can beat your time haha. For the last checkpoint, the trick is to take advantage of that fact that you can now dash "again" by changing direction before your dash ends - this way you can go around corners pretty fast. I kind of state it from the crow npc but it's a bit vaguely worded.
Yeah, the environment is a bit lacking and I've would've liked to add some more layering. Recently I've been doing a lot of optimization and all I can think about it "oh no... transparency! layers! it's too expensive!" but it's a jam game so who cares. I think parallax-ing is a good idea as a quick way to add complexity without doing too much more tiles. I think ideally I'd want another set of BG tiles and have the sky poke through.. maybe if I do a post jam version or so.
For the normal non-dash bonks I definitely have some solutions in mind, but I did not want to do a slide-y solution around corners to preserve the "physicality of flying" or something like that. The first thing I'd probably want to do is introduce 45 degree sloped tiles and just smooth everything out - the jaggies definitely can cause a lot of headaches currently (I guess sloped tiles ARE slide-y but also just visually represented). Another solution would be to introduce wall jumping, where you will bonk, but can keep the momentum going by jumping off. Perhaps some things to maybe try.
@foolmoron thank you! Great feedback - the reflapping was something I was thinking about that I don't think I completely solved. I didn't want players to spam it to make the flapping more meaningful - but it not feeling responsive is something I'd like to address somehow... make you can flap still but it'll get weaker unless you wait for the cooldown.
Technically with chain dashing, you can instadash in the same direction, but you have to press the arrow key again. This won't work on a controller though... so it may make sense just to accept dash input again. With changing momentum in the air I'll have to think about that a bit - perhaps just adding feedback to make it clear it takes a while (slow down and turn animation), or I could just make it a bit easier (like a mini dash to change direction). I think I'm still kind of split with making regular flying fun but also still feel meaningful/realistic.
@comicsans with HTML5 games I think you have to make sure the game is "in focus" and then you have to press a key to get the audio working - but glad you figured it out. It might mean the game is not auto focusing on the LD site. Thank you!
@zwodahs oh yeah, you have to hit the checkpoint to "get it", but I didn't want to punish players by having them restart a level in order to see what was next. Thanks!
Extremely cute and fun game! The art and animation was great, the music was soothing and the gameplay was super satisfying! The feathers didn't respawn in my second run though, but I managed to get a better time than the first run, even without the dashing 😅
I would maybe prefer the dashing being on the shift button, as hitting X wasn't very convenient for me, but after a bit I finally got a rhythm with it, so it's not that big a deal. Really awesome entry, well done!
really nice! love all the dialog too =)
What a cute little game! It plays really smoothly, but is also really challenging. Love the implementation of the theme. Great job!
I got 118 seconds, 8/13 checkpoints.
@harry-alissavakis Thanks! I fixed the bug with the feathers not respawning, thanks for the catch. I don't explicitly state it, but you can use WASD/Arrow keys for movement, and X, Period, or Slash for dash, but yeah adding the shift key might be a good idea, can probably add it in a post version.
@alexander-epton Thank you! I thought the dialog would be very helpful especially at the start to get players in the right mind set for preparing and practicing.
@mateusboga Thank you! glad you enjoyed it!
It was really fun to jump around and art was beautiful! It was also made in haxeflixel (the engine I used for my game) so that's a plus! Haxe forever!
very cute game and art ! poor bird stuck ^^ (just one thing: the blue have a stange pixel on the border when he goes to left. it appear only when i am on full screen)
Oh man, this is lovely! gorgeous pixel art and animations, as always. sounds are super satisfying as well. The movement is very involved! I like a lot of the ideas here, I bet if i put a lot of time into it i could see myself really enjoying the movement. At my current practice level, it feels pretty cumbersome, but not in an annoying way, more of a motivating way to find out how to improve, haha. I was able to beat the relay on my second time around c.png Really enjoyed my time with this, great work!
@damedevy thanks!
@roroto-sic thank you! Do you have a screenshot of something of the strange pixel? There is a light spark right before the dash if that's what you were seeing. spark.png
@torcado Thanks, and nice job beating the relay! I think you are the first person commenting to get all the checkpoints. :smile: I would like to clean up *some* of the movement, but yeah gets into polishy/tweaking levels to make things feel a bit better.
no problem, here a screen shot
:Sans titre.jpg
@roroto-sic oh, could you let me know what browser and resolution your full screen is at? It doesn't seem to happen for me. Testing on my Firefox and Chrome, fullscreen I think bilinear scales it up (so just a bit blurry) and avoids this problem somehow.
i use chrome and my screen is 1920 x 1080
Well, it's hard but fun to try. Even if I'm too bad in "hurry and avoid" games (and I had some difficulties to manage my feathers, too much things to think about at the same time for me ha ha). And always that cute graphics and sounds of yours, I'm not disappointed :grin: Good job!
Really love the art and the gameplay direction! Great work!
Immediately felt like I was in a cute and cozy little bird game and then suddenly I was faced with a bunch of complicated speedrun courses! I loved it. Great sprites and animations for the little birds and a nice touch with the little NPCs you can chat with - they really give the game some nice production value.
The game was surprisingly tough -- I eventually switch from keyboard to controller, so thanks for supporting so many control schemes.
I'm off to go chirp constantly!
My best score was 95.8 seconds and 11/13 checkpoints. I got 10.2 on the track right after the "unlimited dashes" and something like 15 on the final section.
It's pretty fun when you go fast, though I did a decent amount of crashing with the dash. I like the audio and visual feedback for jumping and dashing.
I think it might have been nice if some of the walls were slopes instead of square tiles so that there are fewer corners to bump into as you are dashing diagonally.
That one bird who is stuck is pretty troll lol, just there to bait me into an awkward spot.
@lereveur Thanks! I had the flag score system setup so someone could keep going even if they didn't get under 10 seconds.
@ideaspersecond Thank you! Glad you liked it!
@ronn-fever Thanks! I like to think PeaJay feels much better about attempting these courses with the right support and encouragement. I also didn't want the player to feel alone in their efforts to finish the courses. Glad the controller worked better for you!
@almost That's pretty good! I find sometimes with unlimited dashes I get too hasty and end up bumping into walls more haha (though the stun is removed with the last feather). For the last course, I probably introduce the chained dashes a bit too quickly with no real test ground so it's definitely more of a replay thing. I'll probably take a look at adding slopes for a post compo version at some point. The stuck bird is the only bird in the middle of the course so I thought it'll be worth it haha.
I really enjoyed playing your game. I love the graphics and the overall mood. Congratulations on your entry ;)
(sorry for the double comment)
Really neat game. The graphics, music, and dialogue were very cute and give the game a super cozy atmosphere. The game is definitely very tricky to master, though, and not forgiving. Acceleration is very slow both on the ground and in the air, with jumping from the ground being the only satisfying way to pick up speed quickly (which for some reason feels counterintuitive to me, though I have a hard time explicating why). Bumping into walls feels very punishing as well, since even just barely hitting a corner or ceiling completely takes the wind out of your sails. It often feels like if you mess up, it's really hard to get back into the rhythm and start doing well again until the next checkpoint. But I'm sure this game has a very high skill ceiling and would be pretty rewarding to master. Good work on this!
Even if the use of the "every 10 seconds" theme is simplistic, it's still super effective. The game is pleasant and on a relaxing tone. The graphics are certainly minimalist, but it allows you to really focus on the objective of the game, winning the race. The only thing that bothers me a little is the choice of the character's controls which in my opinion does not respect some basic rules. The use of the boost is not fluid and is difficult to master perfectly. I think that by allowing a modification of the control keys and by adding 2-3 more mechanics, it could become a great game. Very good work anyway.
postscript: sorry, not being good in English, this is a Deepl translation from the French language
Love the birdies! The game was quite fun as well, especially at the last bit when I could just dash with bonking into stuff! I think some improvements can be made on the controls, but overall really good! Well done!
So cute! I like the creative controls. I also liked that it didn't reset my run if I went over 10 seconds. I'm not that great at games like this one, so the fact that I could just keep going if I didn't get the best time make it enjoyable for me. From a visual standpoint, the world seems a little empty since all the other birds are the same and there's not really any change in the background or tileset. The bird sprite is so cute though. :smile: This would be so fun if expanded upon and given a narrative.
I did a terrible score, but anyway it was really cool. Good entry :v:
@torhaq thank you!
@empty-set yes, I wanted it so you want to stay in the air versus the ground. However, I could probably just increase the overall acceleration in general (so you go even faster on ground and in the air) and that would probably make things feel generally better, though that would affect the times of this version at least so maybe a post jam thing to try. thanks!
@demogia-av I wanted some complexity in the controls, especially with acceleration, but I think they could still be tweaked to feel better. I probably wouldn't add more mechanics as the sole focus of the game is the flying/dashing/platforming, though I do have ideas on how to extend the gameplay (ie the actual relay race or having different characters that control differently). But things to think about for the future, thanks!
@krasimir-balchev Thank you! Definitely noted some tweaks that can be made with controls!
@shimmerscale Thanks! Yeah, I wanted the game to be playable even if you couldn't get a good time, just to explore and see. Environment was definitely on the lowest priority for me, so that'll be something to think about.
@matoux42 thanks!