Delinquent Delivery

cabritta 2023-05-04 21:31

What a fun short experience. I laughed so much with the sound effects, the "bang" will stay in loop in my mind. The slide jump tho was really difficult - almost gave up because I took me so much to get the correct timing(?). I managed to make it probably by luck and never looked back hahaha. Really nice that the different objects have different weights, and so go further than others, made the game way juicier. Good work!

enra 2023-05-05 13:28

Nice game ! I also had a few problems with the slide jump, but overall, I had a good time. The different objects weight and speed mechanic was pretty fun!

hacksawunit 2023-05-11 17:09

An extremely interesting entry!! The movement mechanics feel *amazing*, and I almost wish this was purely a navigational platformer and not a combat based one. Maybe you actually did *too* good with the controls, because all I wanted was to slide-dash-jump across the map as fast as possible, and those pesky little punching and kicking people were just in my way! That being said, grabbing and tossing things was *also* very fun... I wonder if there's a way to meld mechanics in a different way so going fast without having to memorize item/enemy locations is more viable? But! This is all just nitpicking because of how compelling I found the movement. The overall entry is excellent, and you did a good job of making the different rooms feel interesting to look at, be in, and also feel mostly cohesive. Also, suprisingly bug free with so much physics shenanigans going on. Excellent entry, and I hope you consider using this movement style again somday!

100th-coin 2023-05-17 16:51

Fun fact, a pacifist run is possible (with the exception of the final room's cutscene)

Oh my goodness the platforming is great. The momentum of the character from the slide jumps is a perfect blend of moving fast, and feeling good. The voice acted sound effects are also marvelous. Great work! Here's my recorded gameplay.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oiXFEFG-Scc

jesterseraph 2023-05-23 00:24

Thanks for playing, all! Really nice to read your thoughts ^^

@cabritta Ha, the bang SFX is definitely my favourite in the mix. The slide jump is a little funky, in that the game is actually primarily built around it. I think, from some other feedback I got from watching friends play, is that the timing is just a little too tight with the slightly unusual controls. I think if slide was, say, Z, and jump was SPACE, then it would be way easier for people to press both buttons near-simultaneously, whereas the switch from pressing down to pressing up requires a little more dexterity?

It also really depends on how you play the game. For example, my best time is under 2 minutes and uses a TON of slide jumps while hitting almost no enemies with thrown objects. Once you master slide jumps the whole game's movement really opens up. Still, I'm glad you had a bunch of fun with just normal running, jumping, and throwing!

@Enra ha yeah, learning the different weights when you have to throw them over a wall at something feels like you've cracked the code. Sorry you didn't quite figure out slide jumps! I talked above about some of the challenges I noticed folks faced, and how I would approach it differently in the future. The main problem I ran into was wanting to make sure throwing an object / picking up an object was bound to the space bar, since it is the crutch for beginner gameplay that generally makes the game accessible to more folks (vs using primarily slide + jump movement to skip past enemies).

@hacksawunit Thanks! I'm glad you managed to master the slide jump mechanic. It _really_ unlocks the whole game and turns it into something so much more interesting. I kind of presented a movement-based puzzle platformer in the Trojan Horse of a combat-oriented platformer (through the throwing mechanic). You'd be interested to know that there actually _are_ aspects of the two forms of gameplay that meld together. There's 2 key aspects:

1. While other objects break, the gift bounces. It also always specifically bounces with some extra upward momentum. If you're close enough to the enemy when you throw the gift, and you press space again, you'll catch the gift out of the air. This isn't a planned mechanic, so much as it's emergent behaviour of the system. There's no extra code to make doing that exact sequence _easier_ but little things like that would help the fluidity.

2. When you throw an object, it has additional forward momentum based on your forward momentum (with some funny edge case quirks). This means if you slide jump and throw an item, it goes waaaaaaay further, way faster, because the amount of time the object travels for before gravity begins to impact on it is fixed. This means that tossing items can have different effects based on how you're moving as you throw it. Example: the first gun room has an enemy on the other side of a couple low cabinets. If you stand at the first cabinet in the room and throw your gift, it won't reach the gunner. If you hold right and walk into the cabinet though, and toss the object while doing so, the gift will go far enough to hit the gunner.

Ultimately though, because it's secretly a time trial puzzle game, the memorization of the room is a big aspect of the game's mastery. Playing it multiple times, retrying rooms over and over, is what really makes the game fun. I'm glad you enjoyed the movement so much too. Fun facts in case you're unaware: you can slide under punch guys, and walk past/slide under gun guys, while you can jump over kick guys (though their range is maybe a touch too far). Also, if you're standing on something beside a water cooler that's roughly halfway up the water cooler, you can slide into the water cooler for huge air. This is because in the physics all objects have slight diamond sides < > to make the movement smoother against them, so because the velocity when sliding is fixed if you're halfway up an object when you slide it uses that forced horizontal momentum to shoot you up the slant. I didn't have time to put an in-game indicator of that mechanic lol.

jesterseraph 2023-05-23 00:55

@100th-coin Oh dang, you managed full pacifism? That's awesome. I wasn't sure if it was possible, but I was definitely hopeful that it would be. My sub-2 minute run is mostly pacifist.

I'm glad you enjoyed the platforming movement! That was honestly like 70% of my time spent on this game. I just kept tweaking and tweaking the movement & the pickup/throw until it was dialled into exactly what I was aiming for.

There's 3 lessons I've learned from watching a few folks play the game:

1. **The slide jump timing & input is a little too awkward** in terms of button positions for folks who aren't used to tight platformer controls. While I think having tight controls is fine, the barrier for entry shouldn't be quite as high as it is. You figured it out pretty fast, but I watched someone less familiar with platformers have a games-journalist-playing-cuphead-tutorial moment with the slide jump tutorial that just hurt to watch. I think the biggest barrier is the mixture of both up arrow being for jumping and down arrow being for sliding. If either one was a different button from the arrow keys, or both were different buttons from the arrow keys, it would have been easier for folks with less platformer dexterity to play and use the slide jump mechanic (as it's my favourite mechanic). 2. **I didn't teach players that they can slide under punch guys.** This lesson is critical for understanding how you can easily bypass them, especially in pacifist runs. I used the first punch guy to teach the player how throwing an object will KO a grunt, which sets up the player for choosing violence over pacifism & movement. Had I first introduced that you can slide under a punch guy, and throw an object to hit them as an alternative afterwards, I think people would have approached the future rooms with mobility more in mind. 3. **I didn't teach players about the "waterslide" physics exploit.** All terrain objects have diamond sides < > and, with the fixed horizontal velocity of a slide, if you're halfway up an object (like you're standing on a low cabinet or a table beside a water cooler), then sliding against that diamond side causes you to shoot up it like a ramp, getting tons of air with some okay forward momentum. The room you struggled with most for the pacifist run with all the gunners and such on the ground is actually easier to slide past by using the waterslide trick to shoot up onto the lights. I tried to signal that there is a way up by putting enemies and such up there, but I realized too late that "slide into a wall and expect magic to happen" is a very unrealistic expectation for me to put on my players. It doesn't make any logical sense, and they don't know how the objects work, so of course they wouldn't try it. You were super close to figuring it out, but didn't notice what was happening because, again, why would you? I didn't want to fully call it out as a mechanic though, despite designing routes in the levels with it, because as a mechanic it was a bit unreliable (being a physics exploit and not a coded function meant that sometimes it just worked less, and that inconsistency feels bad as a player).

Post-jam, I'll add in some additional notes on the walls to teach players about these mechanics to make it more clear they can and should use them. The plan was also to let players remap their keys to make slide jumping easier (and to tell them they can do so if they're struggling at the slide jump tutorial). Not much I can do about the timing though, not without it greatly upsetting the rest of the game's balance and such, since I designed the levels based on the distances you'd travel with slide, slide jump fade back, normal slide jump, and slide jump hold forward.

Thanks for playing, and for the gameplay recording! It offers me so much more insight into player behaviours that I can learn from to see what I did well, and what I can do better.