Foon → Ludum Dare Explorer → Users → JesterSeraph
| Year | LD | Theme | Game | Division | Rank | Ov | Fu | In | Th | Gr | Au | Hu | Mo | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2023 | 53 | Delivery | Delinquent Delivery | jam | 3.50 | 3.50 | 3.50 | 4.00 | 3.00 | 3.00 | 3.75 | 3.25 | ||
| 2022 | 50 | Delay the inevitable | Unspilled | jam | 2.75 | 3.00 | 3.50 | 3.00 | 2.50 | 3.25 | ||||
| 2021 | 48 | Deeper and deeper | Bl*bert | jam | 452 | 3.80 | 3.72 | 3.27 | 3.70 | 3.87 | 3.55 | 3.62 | ||
| 2020 | 46 | Keep it alive | Egg Rescue | jam | 787 | 3.67 | 3.40 | 2.74 | 3.92 | 4.13 | 3.70 | 2.27 | 3.25 | |
| 2018 | 43 | Sacrifices must be made | 👥 | Eye of the Master | jam | |||||||||
| 2018 | 42 | Running out of space | Displacer | jam | 779 | 3.21 | 2.88 | 3.09 | 3.70 | 3.58 | 2.69 | 2.30 | 3.10 |
Very cool game, much more than I thought was possible for this game jam: AI, long play time, and a fun RTS feel. Awesome job! The controls could be a bit more smooth, but overall really great work!
Very clean HTML5 game. When I first heard the drowning sound, I laughed for a solid minute. Very interesting concept and fun game. Reminds me a lot of some old PS2 games, like Spyro, or Toy Story specifically.
Great work!
Very interesting turn-based game, never played anything like it before. The movement between characters was very smooth. Good work!
Very fun game! The game play is easy to understand, I really liked the graphics and theme. Awesome work, was truly fun to play!
This game is a masterpiece. The introduction cut scene with the music is beautiful. The game itself played really well, very fun, the audio was outstanding, and the graphics were top notch. Other than the fact that there only seemed like one level and no scaling of difficulty, you accomplished so much, awesome work!
Can't play Windows says "SDL2" not found. That's easy to install on MacOS and Linux, but you can include the SDL2.DLL with the .exe, but doesn't seem to be present unless I'm mistaken.
Have not played a dark game yet, but this one caught me off guard. The game play is not that easy, would have loved more of an intro tutorial. Overall though the mood is amazing, good work!
Game was interesting, a unique puzzle game. I found it a bit challenging at the start to understand how to play, but it made more sense later.
Awesome job!
The concept of the game was very unique. I wish there was a tutorial or you had more time on level 0 to get the hang of the controls. My window kept freezing (could not "try again") as you mentioned, so just refreshed.
Overall really cool game idea, good execution, and a fun, fast paced gameplay!
Overall very fun game, and very smooth execution! The game is really fun. It's very satisfying movement and putting the boxes into the truck is great. It does match the picking process in a warehouse as well, so great theme.
I wish I could push the boxes in and they counted as completed. Maybe when you grab a box in the truck, you don't have to go outside the truck and back in for it to count.
Great work!
I loved the audio and paper graphics. The gameplay is very smooth, but definitely very challenging, would love maybe a levels 1 and 2, and the current level be 3 in terms of ramping up the difficulty.
Awesome work!
Interesting game idea. A more flushed out tutorial would be something really cool to add. I really liked the music and main character animation. Cool stuff!
Very fun game. The controls are intuitive enough that each level I couldn't beat, I quickly figured out which new commands (wall jump, dash, double air jump...). Great work!
The feel of the game was really nice, cool graphics and fonts. I really liked how you had a tutorial that was simple, fun, and in a minute or two you learned how to play the game!
The game itself was fun and a bit too challenging for me, but it was really awesome and would be a fun speed-run type game!
This game was awesome! The introduction segment was very informative, yet concise. The game play is long, which is a good thing. Overall really good work!
Thank you all for your comments! I'll try my best to respond to the criticism and advice.
@nick-shooter I agree cpmpletely! Sound and music were very much lacking. I wanted to add constant wind SFX, sounds for the flying garbage trucks of the future whirring through the air, and trash flying about. My major constraints were A: all sound and music was made and added in the final 2 hours (1 man team means something takes the L) and B: I couldn't be sure to test sound effects on junk collision in a way that wouldn't overpower the user's ears as tens of effects trigger in unison. I have ideas now to fix it but none then.
Physics was SUPER janky, and trying to figure out a solution to just keep frames from dropping as more items entered the game took me a lot of testing and effort. There's some stuff I can do to smooth out animation, but I'm a bit stumped on improving the ability to jump. That one was very hard due to the nature of the item colliders and their tendency to change or be any angle of rotation.
@darkguardsman I probably should mention somewhere that you can wall jump, so so long as you're touching something solid somewhere around your character you can jump. Helps when you have to scale the mountain of trash later in the game. I really struggled to find a way to male the trash both fall naturally and not kill the frame rate by having hundreds of rigidbodies all interacting with each other. That's why they turn static after they stop moving until you toss them. I had to make some weird, tough design decisions due to technical limitations.
But yes! I should have dropped the player near the shop. I didn't want to show the current desired item on the HUD because I wanted to force the player to have to kill time waiting for the shop keeper to tell you what he wants, just to further slow you down and let trash pile up. Then as youre rooting through the mountain maybe you see a few other shiny things and forget what you were looking for. I'm not sure if changing the game to display the want of the shop keeper would impact the gameplay greatly, but I'd be willing to try those kinds of changes out! Thank you for your feedback!
@rayne but isn't getting stuck in the middle of bad physics half the fun of Ludum Dare? ;) I'm glad you had fun! I was spending toi much time on the coding and had to stop to accept what I'd designed and redesigned over and over as I tried to make the game at least playable with the mechanics I thought of.
@magix oh thanks, I really struggled with idea generation. I was ready for a lot of the other themes, but not this one. When I got the idea for this trash hunting thing, I immediately stopped brainstorming and ran with it, so I'm glad you liked it!.
@cg-fred surely you jest, that humming is barely to a time signature and one set is slightly off-key! I'm glad you found it silly at least X) I definitely agree the controls coukd be tuned better. I ran out of time working on them, unfortunately, and had to take what I'd ended up with. Beloeve me when I say they're better than the v0.1 controls they started as. I also think giving the olayer some kind of score that they can see go up as they play would go a long way for replayability.
@wetbox @zicboy Thank you!
@n00b Yeah, I should have at least plopped the player down near the shopkeeper. There's been great suggestions on how to inform the player without straight up "telling" the player. I'll be making a modified version later with many of the suggestions, but I'll be keeping the original copy available for download and clearly state which download is which if I make the modified version before results end.
@digital-bacon Considering how long that cloak took, it was either it or the sound/music. I played to my strengths, but next LD I'll have a couple team members to help me out. Sadly I ran out of time, and didn't want to risk "on collision enter make sound" for 400 objects bouncing around against each other without a good amount of testing and a smarter solution.
@luckydaisy Only once!? You lucky dog! Though having to dig your way into (and back out of) the trash is the most hilarious part in my opinion. That's when you really start to break the physics.
@matank @nyri0 @tinykidtoo I definitely need to add a score. I knew that while play testing, but didn't have the time and didn't consider it more important than, say, sound, music, or art & animation. I've got some other ideas for how to make it less repetitive and more pressuring, but at the end of the day this game is meant to be a simple arcade "high score" game.
@jern I'm really surprised by how many people liked the humming. I guess it's true, you are your own worst critic. Was the humming not loud enough though after turning the music volume up in the settings? I would have to re-record it an inch from my mic to get it louder. I can't really turn up the gain without getting the sounds of Toronto from outside my window.
You wouldn't believe how many police sirens, firetrucks, and ambulances went by my block while I was recording music & sound. Nothing all weekend, then almost non-stop during the recording time. With two hours left in the jam I was having none of it.
This game reminded me of Flash Trek, which is a Star Trek-like game where you go to planets, make money, upgrade your ship, but of course this game being more turn-based-like. It'd be really awesome if there was a tutorial before the game started. Really good job, this was a well fleshed out game!
Very nice user interface / graphics, and very smooth gameplay. Tutorials or other notes would have helped a bit more as I had issues with level 3, not sure how the elements work (a part from same != same).
Awesome job with the HTML5 game!
I was confused at the start on how to play, but afterwards I totally got it, very fun idea! Getting all the gold, and being a cool dragon was fun!
Fun game! The puzzles alone were addicting, but add onto that the interesting screen space defender aspect and it was on another level. Very cool!
This game was fabulous. Definitely a fun dungeon crawler with a theme I have never seen before. The introduction and tutorial to the game is really slick, the graphics are awesome, and the movement is very smooth.
Great work!
The voice acting was top notch lol! It was an interesting visual-novel-like game. I really wish that the dialogue had text or was a bit shorter, and we had more options to choose from. The humour was top notch, good work!
The title screen had really cool animation! Then got into the game and it had a cool style, and cool audio / mood. The death sound (which I heard too often...) was a bit jarring / scary. Great job!
Really fun game, truly. The graphics, introduction, mood, audio were all so perfect. Not being able to jump upwards on the same wall was a bit jarring, but that was part of the game and made it challenging. I couldn't beat one of the later levels, wish it mentioned level # at the top.
Overall extremely well done, you should definitely think of doing a post-jam update to the game, this is really fun and something I'd expect a lot of people would enjoy!
Game had a simple theme, and was well executed. The virus count UI was very nice as well, felt imminent threat of being taken over by the viruses! It would have been really awesome to have a quick tutorial / text blob with how to destroy the viruses, but I learned after a bit of trial and error how to add disks to the devices to terminate the viruses. Awesome work!
Very fun game! I played it much longer than I expected. It was really enjoyable, the character movement / jump dash thing was VERY satisfying. Awesome work!
After reading the premise of the game, I had a solid chuckle for a whole minute, absolutely awesome!
The game itself runs well in browser, and the controls are simple. The concept and sound is really fun.
The overall game itself is very simple, I would love if the chromes sped up a bit faster, and maybe a variety of chromes (versions? faster, stronger...).
This was a really fun idea, thanks!
Game was very fun and addicting. The slash attack was very satisfying. The graphics were really fun, the game play was fast and intuitive, and the audio was great.
Really great job!
Very slick game. The graphics, audio and game play were very cool! I also would love to see upgrades, more terrain obstacles, item drops. Great job!
The game is very fun, the movement is challenging but makes sense. The objective to get the pearls was a bit addicting, would have loved for some more notice of the water level and if you went above it intentionally you died, or some way to see where it was more visually.
Overall really fun 3d underwater themed game!
Interesting game, never played a simple block-like arcade game with this idea before. The game is definitely difficult, but fun! Awesome stuff!
Really interesting puzzle idea, haven't played anything like it before! It was definitely a bit challenging though, but had fun!
You've got a great sense of humour and it's expressed really well in the game!
Really cute game! Definitely one of the better games of the jam, overall. Lowest ratings were innovation & theme, because while the game is really cute, shooting animals with a slingshot isn't a new idea, and while you were keeping something alive, the objective felt more like shooting the burglars than keeping something alive. Seems like a majority of us really went for "gameplay that happens to be linked to something living or dying," either in protecting something or in maintaining some energy bar.
Otherwise: always appreciate sound controls. The music & effects came in way too loud to begin with.
Game was innovative, but definitely felt less like playing a game and more like fighting with the randomness & the system. Half the time the ball would just spawn into an untouchable space, and it took a while to figure out when swinging the paddle. Overall a good attempt! Maybe some other camera angle would have made it easier to time the paddle swings.
@rsim Aaaaaah, yeah, that part was definitely missed. Dang, lol. We actually managed to beat both levels with nothing but the flippers & the ball happening to land on the bounce pad lol. Definitely gave it a funky "challenge" mode. Well that definitely improves the fun & reduces the frustration! I do still believe the paddles could have been a little bit faster to swing, and the camera angle could have helped make it clearer where the ball was in relation to the space. Or maybe some kind of indicator on the wall to show the relative height. :sweat_smile:
This game is really solid. Never expect a multiplayer game to turn out well during these, but even playing alone you could accomplish a lot, which is excellent! I can see what the gameplay would be like with more people, and I firmly believe this is the kind of arcade game I'd find on xBox Live & play for hours with friends in couch co-op. It was so goofy and the resource management works beautifully when you have multiple people.
Main complaint would be that the visuals weren't cohesive. I get mixing 2D with 3D, but the 3D elements felt like they were significantly lower in fidelity than the 2D assets, and between the various 3D elements it seemed like different styles were applied. Making the whole game feel more visually cohesive would have jumped my graphics rating up.
Game was an absolute mood. My friend & I got super invested. What hurt the most, really, was getting soft-locked twice. Once when we didn't have enough seeds to complete a shape in combat, and once when we tried to make the white flower (couldn't place it anywhere. just glitched).
Would have liked: sound effects. The music was excellent but there were no sound effects.
Could have been better: The combat felt more like a chore than a core element of the gameplay. The gameplay felt like the puzzle of solving the storyline & building the flower shapes. Could definitely see this expanded more into an Undertale-esq game where the plant combat has more complexity.
Overall, holy heck this was a full game, and had so much shoved into it for a compo. Excellent job!
Might be a little fatigued from rating, but overall felt like the game did what it set out to do. The main issue my friend & I had with it was that it was very simple, very straight-forward, and didn't really leave us wanting to play more. It kind of felt like this is the extent of the game, and what we saw was about as far as the game could go.
Music and art was good though!
Based my feedback off of the gameplay video:
This game is super cute! All around it's super cute and appears quite well executed. I can't comment on how clear controls are or the learning curve, but assuming you've learned them it looks like the challenge ramps up nicely, in a wacky "punish you for your mistakes" kind of way while also making it harder for the player to *not* make mistakes.
My primary criticism is around the audio & graphics. Namely: the graphics are very simplistic, and certain animations such as the wolf attack animation seem disjointed, as well as lack certain visual feedback for what's actually happening. I don't know if a wolf bite is a 1-shot kill on a sheep, but some kind of additional visual or audio cue indicating that a sheep has been bitten (and is about to be bitten) by the wolf would help, especially as a sheep can travel a fair distance away from a wolf by the time the wolf's animation is finished. My experience working around accessibility is that you should do your best to have distinct visual & audio cues whenever something deserving of feedback is occurring, and something like an attack windup that you need to respond to before it finishes is one of those things. Otherwise a player will be left confused about why they lost. I didn't even notice the wolf that killed a sheep in the gameplay video, instead looking at a different wolf winding up an attack. I get that it's a part of the game, but some visual stimulation to make it more clear what the player is dealing with helps reduce their frustration. Feeling like they lost fair-and-square is always better than going "how was I supposed to even see that!?!?!?"
The audio was rich, in that there's a lot of audio going on between the cloud, wolves, sheep walking around, and the music, but a lot of the sounds come across as the same, or very similar. They all seem to fill around the same frequencies. It's worth trying to vary the frequencies a little more, such as having the thunder sound use more bass, the rain more hi-hats & rim hits (along with a pitter-patter pattern to discern the rhythm), and wolves... well honestly the wolf sounds are perfect and would be better with the variety of the other sounds. Other than that, the music is quite loud, making the sounds of the game harder to hear. The music definitely helps with the mood, but it shouldn't impede gameplay. I assume the volume's adjustable though, so I'm not considering it in the ratings.
Overall, awesome job! Definitely an above average game, and the reason I'm harping on these finer details is because you're a team of 4, and therefore with your individual roles you can afford to focus more on each of your crafts.
Friend played it. Here's their feedback: As a fan of FPS games & old-school stuff like Wolfenstein, this felt super immersive and fun. Really liked it. It was minimal, but all of it felt extremely effective. The mood was great, and the audio really helped contribute to that. Even if you didn't produce all the audio during the jam, knowing what sounds to use and how to use them is its own skill. Would have liked a slightly less barren world & volume control to tweak the SFX/Music volume.
@cg-fred Thanks, Fred! There's actually a hold-to-fire toggle in the settings. Not quite auto-fire, but I find it helps for when our thumbs get tired, or if repeatedly mashing a key isn't possible for the player. Still, I wanted to hold to that classic feeling of smashing the fire button to shoot bullets like you would in arcades. Glad you enjoyed it though! :v:
@muchobestostudio I agree, the HUD needs some work & a score was originally in the plan, but had to be cut to save time. Originally there was going to be an accuracy multiplier too, which is why there's press-to-shoot & hold-to-shoot controls (in case players want more control over their shots fired). I'm planning to add score in after the rating & everything is done, along with some other quality of life improvements to the HUD to make the life counter more informative. I also need to add in menu & boss music.
@webox Thanks! Yeah, it's a really hard game even in this genre, lol. The whole "protect the laggy egg" concept really pushes against standard bullet hell strategy, so I like to think while it feels very much like a classic side scrolling SHMUP (like Gradius), it still brings something new to the genre.
@hyunkelw I'm glad it was interesting even to watch! The spectacle of games being played is just as important as the game itself, and if you get excited & frustrated with the player just by watching, then I count that as a success. Also really glad the atmosphere blended in well! I uh... really know very little about music making, so I did my best to push through & produce something that would be both interesting & fitting. Glad I managed to work a miracle lol.
@grizzliusmaximus Thank you! I try to focus more on polish, since my past attempts to do crazy ambitious amounts of gameplay resulted in not finishing in time. A good, well made short game is way better than a barely-working, half-baked epic. Hopefully though as I get faster & better at doing this, I'll be able to make slightly longer equally polished games.
@jk5000 Thanks! Yeah, it's really fast-paced. The game actually has a very short runtime (2 minutes of moving track, followed by a 1 minute or so boss fight) so it gets hectic fast to push you as a player. I had to make sure every bit of those 3 minutes was a fight to get through, and rely on dying & sitting on the death screen as a chance to breath & relax. If I had more time, I'd have made the level two or three times longer & built up more gradually to the intense pace the end has.
@zerohbeat I'm glad you enjoyed it! The damage indicators were my way of trying to show how much damage you'd taken without outright putting numbers on the screen. I feel like I could have done better still, but I'm trying to take up as little of the screen space as possible so that you can always be aware of bullets flying at you.
@westmave yeah the difficulty curve is a little intense lol. I ran out of time for level design. Ideally the level would be 2-3 times longer and do a better job teaching you the various enemies & situations. Instead though, I went for a game where every section has its own unique challenge, and getting past it all to the boss doesn't take too long since, really, the boss is going to kill you a few more times before you finally win.
I don't remember retro arcade games being easy at all. I remember them looking like there was a way through, but being punishing hard enough to eat all your quarters for trying lol.
@drums it warms my heart whenever people get the arcade vibe I aimed for. Those games were stupid punishing, threw the kitchen sink at you, but were still beatable if you figured out all the tricks and patterns. Thanks for playing, and for the feedback!
@yellowlime Yeah, the particle effects were something I lacked a bit of time with. My main issue was that my tablet I use for 2D anything had display issues, so I was stuck with my laptop & trackpad, thus the 3D models lol. I know some people can do amazing pixel art with a mouse, but I lack that skill, so I relied more on colours & the particle system to get the job done. I couldn't crank up the pixelation of the screen more without a lot of the 3D models becoming unreadable. The struggles of being a solo dev in the jam ^^; The dream was to have more classic metal slug era explosion effects. I settled for what I was capable of doing. Maybe with some quality shader knowledge I could have make something that looks more like a real explosion lol.
I definitely used Bosca Ceoil for the music. I uh... don't actually know how to make music, so it was a journey in experimenting. It was mainly me going to the complex drum kit and filling the space with a lot of percussion hits, plus random piano roll for the bass melody. I'm glad it worked out, lol. I tried to pair the enemies / gameplay / challenge moments to the music so that it would feel like it was meant to be there, when really I have no idea if that's the kind of music that should be playing for this game lol.
The game is definitely hard though! It's meant to take a long, gruelling while (and eat up all your quarters) to beat, despite only having about 3 minutes of actual level. I believe there's parts that are flat out too hard, such as the corridor after the mini boss, but that's because I accidentally filled it with gun corvettes instead of regular corvettes, so the ships that fly out at you also unload a wall of bullets before they go too far lol. Someone has beaten it before though, and I've both beaten the final boss & the level, but I didn't have enough time to really playlets & fine tune it sadly. Tips is a really good idea though! The death screen needs more content, and it would be an easy thing to slide into the next Ludum Dare I enter.
Thanks for appreciating that little cinematic. I actually figured out I could do it without changing any of my code just by setting the ball to follow the camera cart (that causes the camera to scroll) until the player spawned event triggered, sending it flying behind the ship. That same code is used to make the egg fly back to the ship after it's destroyed, so it just worked out really well. Before I made that switch, the egg would fly in from behind, and that felt like it was a lot less relevant (and a lot less clear what you were protecting!) so between the big text & the initial spawning sequence, I hoped it would portray the main game hook better.
thanks for playing, and for all your feedback! :smile:
@stanleygray Humour is kind of my weakness :weary: I mostly focused on other aspects and figured I'd take the hit on humour, either getting no rating on it or a poor rating on it. I don't believe every game is meant to be humorous, otherwise darker, moodier, or more serious games would be considered "bad." I definitely wanted to add more fun elements to it though, like an announcer voice for a score multiplier (score also had to get cut for time), a score multiplier, sillier sound effects on death & game over, etc. But again, those were all meant to lend themselves more to an "arcade" mode as opposed to a "humorous" mood.
I tried to make feedback different with the yellow vs red screen effects, as well as the different sound effects for the egg being hit, but I clearly needed to do more (like an actual, small screen shake, a *more* different sound effect, heavier emphasis on the screen effect). My main goal was to portray as much of the information as I could without using numbers or a typical health bar (or anything else that would take up more of the screen), and I do believe this was a good attempt, but there's definitely room for improvement. :sweat_smile: Thanks for the feedback and thank you for your time.
@rsim Thanks for playing! I really wanted to pay proper homage to Gradius & the classic genre of auto-scrolling space SHMUPs. The theme is definitely not the largest part of the game, but the interesting aspect is actually how unusual this style of protection gameplay is in bullet hells & SHMUPs. Normally your ship is everything, your life is everything, and you have INCREDIBLY fine-tuned control over said ship. With this, you have the laggy egg that moves to sort of follow behind you, and is therefore far less accurate in its precision navigating a storm of bullets flying every which way. You can keep your ship safe but end up killing the egg, or you can purposefully fly back quickly to take a bullet for it, keeping it alive but making your ship more vulnerable. The death of your ship isn't the loss of a life, but the opportunity for your egg to be hit unguarded & stationary.
I agree that it's not the strongest showing for the theme, and there are certainly other games that have done the theme better, but I hope this explanation at least clears up the theme's use from the perspective of a SHMUP player. I had other ideas that were more fitting for the theme, but this idea, for whatever reason, really struck a chord with me. Such a small change to the SHMUP genre, yet really heavy implications to how you have to play the game compared to other nearly-identical SHMUPs.
@1punnyguy44 Thanks! I don't know if you played the bug fixed version or the original submission. The bug fixes included the yellow damage indicator actually reacting to egg damage, and primarily menu fixes / the game actually ending fixes. The menus were the most rushed part, lol.
the way it actually works, and I should have made the lines thicker / larger in hindsight, is each hit your ship takes, it adds another circle around the screen edge in red (after 4 hits the ship explodes, the final red screen outline appears, and all of the red screen outline fades away. With the egg, a hit does the same thing but with a yellow outline. The egg can only take 3 hits before the game ends completely.
In hindsight, I should have made the yellow more clearly distinct & taken up more space, as well as made the egg's hit sounds more noticeably different. It does produce a different sound when hit from the ship, but I could have done more to really drive home that the egg has been hit.
Anyway, thanks for playing!
@rsim Seems we both missed the mark a little on each other's games, lol. I'm glad you were able to enjoy it more! We give so little time to each of these games we rate, when sometimes they need or deserve hours.
Love that art style and sound effects. A nice simple game with great rhythm.
Had a great time playing this! Fun, and lighthearted, with a funny twist. I was wondering if it would be infinite.
Graphically it's really simple, but quite pleasing to look at. It's a nice minimal approach, and it's very gratifying to successfully build a tree. Each branch & root made felt great. This isn't my kind of game, but my friend admitted that he would absolutely waste way too many hours playing just this version of the game. Good job!
Biggest challenges: The menu button quitting the game caused my friend & I to close the current playthrough way too many times. Some indication of the resistance to bugs, or a health bar or something would be nice for showing where the damage is at instead of a branch just suddenly falling off. finding the build button took us a while, and the build mode vs not build mode isn't really needed, building can just always be active & the upgrades screen could still be there to click. A volume control also would have been nice, since after a while the music started to get bothersome.
Really cool idea! Feels like it just needed a little more time, or little more intuitive indicators (such as a person's cone of vision, of how long before they wake up). When my friend & I finally got a body to the house to perform surgery on, it was unclear how we actually gave the body parts over, or if we needed to at all, and it seemed like no body part would take, and we also couldn't make space on Henry. It didn't appear like there was a timer for how long we had before Henry would die, so there no real sense of urgency.
Overall it felt like it was really polished, and just a couple steps away from being that perfect game for the competition. My advice would be to focus more on the gameplay itself next time, and ensure the core game is fully fleshed out before all the polish really goes in. This entry felt like it nailed 4.0 and higher in everything other than being an overall fun game, which seems to be a trap larger teams can fall into. It takes a lot of work to organize & plan everything out from the start so that all members have work to do, especially with such an ambitious project as this was (visually & mood wise), so pivoting to improve gameplay becomes a larger challenge. Best of luck!
So much hard work went into this! Good on you for all those extras.
The game didn't stand out in any major factor, but overall it felt like a solid game. It's something that's playable, keeps you interested, and upon finishing would feel like you played a full game (which is hard considering the time constraints, so 10 levels is a LOT). It felt like it was greater than the sum of its parts.
Biggest feedback: my friend and I would just let ourselves die to get 75 spark to start a level with, making the spark lifespan more of just a 75/100 timer than a mechanic where we needed to recharge it to keep going. Starting the spark amount on respawn as a lower number (like 35 or 50) would have better incentivized charging the spark to a higher value on the prior level in prep for the next.
Definite big plus though, having a colourblind mode. Huge kudos for that, thank you :)
It was definitely fun! The ceiling fan killing the balloon was a nice touch, though it was very hard to actually get the balloon to hit it. Making the fan a little lower could have increased the difficulty. The music was simple, but was a bop. The track doesn't loop into itself well though, there's a hard stop, but overall the loop doesn't really get tiring while playing.
Definitely unfinished, but oh my gosh my friend and I laughed a ton playing. Comment from my friend: the selecting a player with the mouse constantly was surprisingly innovative, and having to constantly switch between them was great.
Pretty basic concept, but well executed!
Good attempt! Really impressive project for a less experienced team. The 72 hour time crunch is definitely hard. I recommend aiming for a smaller scope next time. If you didn't finish your idea in time, it's a lesson to scope smaller & make that smaller experience great.
I didn't really understand how to play, and after a few tries, still couldn't get into the swing of it unfortunately.
More instruction would have been helpful as it took me a while to figure out what was expected, and even then the difficulty right form the start seemed a little high.
Oh my gosh, overall not the best game out there but in terms of humour & innovation, my friend and I nearly peed ourselves with laughter and surprise. Could have used a lot more of that fun & love during the general gameplay, since overall it felt very simplistic and boring, but that single moment of when the plant reached full maturity brought the whole experience up a ton.
Nice work you two! The biggest comment from my friend was that this felt perfect as a couch co-op game for two people. He struggles a lot with platformers, so controlling both characters at the same time just didn't jive with his head, but it was still one of the platformers he seemed to enjoy the most out of all the LD games I had him play.
The graphics were great at communicating visually everything that mattered. The use of the theme was similarly solid. The game was fun, though would have been more fun as a two-player game. It felt innovative as a game, not mind-bending but still a unique enough twist on the genre. Its strongest point however was definitely its mood. We didn't make it through the whole game (as my friend wasn't able to get past all the puzzles), but the sense of atmosphere was fantastic. The characters and their narrative back-and-forth was entertaining and also excellent in-game directions/tutorials without feeling like they were directly telling us how to play the game. The main piece that was missing was some kind of background music to accompany the low rumble. Had the game had some kind of dreary, cavernous ambient music it would have been perfect.
Dang, I wish my friend was good enough at platformers to play this game to its end. I only got to see a few levels before the frustration became too much for my buddy and he had to stop, but if I was still able to play games I would have absolutely adored these kinds of puzzles. I was able to put together what needed to be done and was getting really excited by the puzzle design. Maybe if the timers weren't quite so short, or if there was an "I'm baby" mode that set their clocks to 5 or 7 seconds to make it more about the player manually triggering the resets then it would have been more accessible to folks less savvy with platformers.
Overall it was a really awesome and innovative game with amazing graphics and solid audio/mood. Sadly we didn't really get far enough to see if "Deeper and deeper" played out at all, as in the first few levels it really doesn't seem to come into play at all.
The puzzles were honestly so fun and interesting. I really did love what little I saw, and wish I could have seen more. Marks for improvement would be that the music, while thematically repetitive to fit within the whole "3 seconds" idea, could have had a little more variation in its loop to keep from getting old too quickly. That and having a mode to make the game more accessible would have been perfect.
Cool game! I had a friend play it while I watched (as I can't play games), and we discussed the game as he played it to get a sort of "2 heads are better than 1" approach to rating your game. Overall it was a solid entry with some absolutely stellar graphics, definitely blew us away when we opened it up after playing a bunch of other campo/jam games, but it seemed unfortunately that it just wasn't the kind of gameplay my friend could enjoy.
High points: The graphics and audio were all great. 5/5 graphics no questions asked, audio was near-perfect with the only complaint being that the voice lines were always the same and started to get annoying after hearing them too much.
Middle points: mood, humour, and theme. The humour felt like it was trying but never quite landed right. The mood was set up very well by the music and the art, but kind of fell flat in creating deep tension or a sense of danger/foreboding after any extended gameplay. The theme, I think my friend put it best: "I don't feel like I'm doing deeper and deeper. I feel like I already started deep."
Low points: fun and innovation. Again, it just wasn't a pleasant experience for my friend. He was constantly frustrated with the controls, felt like the game was fighting against him to do what he wanted to do, and we didn't feel like we had any real direction for where to go, what to do, or what the end goal was. Otherwise it felt like a refueling flight game.
Maybe this just really isn't his kind of game, and that hurt the rating a lot. Maybe the game's movement could have been a little less frustrating to make it more friendly to players who aren't used to this kind of gameplay. Maybe some focus on the fun of the movement and gameplay was lost in the attempt to get a game out the door in 72 hours. Whatever the reason, this felt like a very polished and beautiful game that just barely missed the mark. Looking forward to future releases and improvements!
Hey Fred! I don't know why you didn't include audio or humour in your ratings because it was my friend's and my absolute favourite so far for humour! Between the silly lines of the dialogue and the sound effects all being various mouth sounds, we couldn't stop laughing and smiling while playing. It constantly kept us entertained in the best of ways. Throughout the game we kept noticing more and more sound effects that would make us laugh all over again. They were especially good in that it took a few seconds of listening closely to realize they were actually sound effects of a person literally making the sounds out loud.
As for the other aspects of the game, it was simple but fun! It didn't feel too long, and one of the biggest compliments from my friend was "a lot of these 3D games have really clunky, unresponsive, or subpar controls to movement, but in this game the ship moves exactly as I want it to and feels great." The use of the theme and innovation weren't groundbreaking, but not all games need to be innovative and the theme isn't the most important part in my eyes anyway. It's just a jumping off point for inspiration.
Overall really good job!
@weirdybeardyman Thanks! Yeah, the slimes are definitely a lot more dangerous than you'd initially think. I maybe should have scaled their difficulty a tiny bit more, but I personally like the learning curve of "okay I know how to dodge them, now I just need to not make any mistakes for as long as I can!"
@qorthos Thanks! With more time I would have given some death screen tips like "slimes spawn on the sides of the map and beside holes!" or "slimes always move in straight lines!" I feel like it would go a long way to helping folks learn the behaviours so that they can predict them.
@webox I've seen leaderboards in a couple other games. Is it easy to implement? I'm always terrified of trying to get something like that working within a jam lol.
@leggy Thanks for playing! Yeah, the music was made in 8 minutes and slapped onto the game in 4, for a total of 12 minutes of effort right up at the deadline (thus all the bugs were music-related :sweat_smile:). You may have played before the latest fix, but the music is a touch quieter and also pitch bends the deeper you travel (see patch notes for my goof on why that wasn't working).
@tomtomgome Yeah, I would have loved to make this native to a joystick but unfortunately that wasn't really an option for a game jam, so I defaulted to standard TRPG D-pad controls. I didn't want to make people even more confused by having to learn some weird new set of input keys like QEAD or something, but maybe it would have worked better with a proper explanation instead of letting players try and figure it out themselves.
@squerf Thanks! It was kind of my cheating way to make up for the music being insanely simplistic and rushed. It works better as a short loop that's incredibly repetitive when it pitches down as you travel deeper and deeper. Plus I don't think I'd be capable of making music any better than that LOL.
@nyanpierre Thanks! I really rushed the music, but I tried to capture that classic arcade game vibe with the square waves and repetitiveness.
@anuke Thanks! Game difficulty is definitely something I'm trying to work on. I wanted it to be punishingly hard to give that classic nickel-eating vibe of classic arcade machines, but I could have at least created a smoother difficulty curve to begin with, like the first slimes spawning further apart and moving a little slower. Sadly I ran out of time before I could really tweak those kinds of numbers, so the game suffered from the typical developer dilemma of "well it's not quite challenging to me, so it's probably fine."
@cg-fred I just might have to do that! It wouldn't be super hard to turn this around and slap it on an app store. Unfortunately I lack confidence in my artistic abilities so I don't know how well I'd be able to make a bunch of unlockable characters and such ^^; Thanks for playing, Fred. I'm glad you were able to get into a groove! I fell into that same zen a few times while testing it out lol.
@noeloskar Yeah a lot of your critiques are actually hallmarks of the era and the type of game, but you're absolutely right the difficulty is a little much and a little fast. The controls are standard for isometric games on a grid, but the game is actually about learning how to predict slimes, not dodge them. The jump is intentionally very clunky ;)
@verygenuinecraze Good point! I tried to add some distinguishing features like how the orb has a faint light, but what I really wanted to do was make the ground an orb was dropping onto to turn a different colour to signal it as safe. It wouldn't hurt to also give it more visual difference though, thanks!
@hare-software Thank you so much for saying the words every game developer wants to hear: "This is a very fun game." Hearing "this is polished" or "the visuals are clean" are appreciated, but it's hearing people say they had fun that keeps me coming back to game dev.
@100th-coin Yeah doing some playtesting I wished I'd added a depth high score as well, but originally didn't think it necessary since there's a max depth of 150 anyway. And I ran out of time before fixing the hitboxes ^^; Rest assured, it's on the list of adjustments to make in the post-jam update. I had to make a similar adjustment with Egg Rescue in LD46. I did actually make the hitboxes a little smaller than the characters this time, but not quite enough clearly. I also got cheated out of a couple runs during my playtesting from the mid-air collisions. Thanks for playing!
The orbs are definitely a bait :eyes: but if you can find your zen and collect all the orbs, you can get scores like this:
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Generally the orbs are actually something you should aim for after you're able to complete the 150 depth run without collecting them. A sort of NG+ for separating the casuals from the Epic Pro Gamers:tm:. In that above run I collected all but a single gem on my way down.
Nice idea! Unfortunately the submarine seemed to jitter a whole lot when my friend played it, which made controlling it feel uncomfortable. Not sure if we were too close to the ground or if maybe it was a bug.
Some advice for making controls feel a little more natural: There's some great "flight sim" style games where the controls are mainly just moving toward the player's cursor. Implementing something similar would have likely made the movement controls a lot smoother (albeit more limited, but that just becomes part of the game's charm :wink:).
Additionally, making objects you could interact with (trash) have some kind of visual indicator such as a faint glow effect would have gone a long way toward giving the player direction in the game.
Overall this must have been a very interesting experience making a procedurally generated 3D world in the compo!
This was such a fun throwback to LEGO Rock Raiders, and I'm amazed you managed to actually pull it off fully! It felt very much like a slimmed down version of the classic game. Sadly I can't give you very high on innovation since I know exactly where the inspiration and gameplay comes from ;) but I can still love it all the same.
My friend absolutely adored playing, and tried his best to get further into the game. Unfortunately he was never quite able to reach the major milestones of having a barracks and hospital, but he kept trying anyway. What really would have made this game shine was some sort of ambient music and SFX during mining / resource carrying to really make those longer stretches of watching the little people work feel good. The graphics were cute, and they also perfectly accomplished the task of visual clarity. It was never unclear what could or couldn't be done in the game, or where to gather resources from. The game wasn't very humorous, and it had some tension but again the mood would have really been set had there been a soundtrack in the background, even if you didn't make the audio yourself and still marked the game as not being rated for audio.
Going through the individual scores, fun was the highest rating followed by graphics. The rest weren't very high, but the overall score was solid because this very much felt like it was doing something right. It was more than a sum of its parts. Really awesome job!
Holy moly this was incredible! Context: I can't play games for reasons so I had my friend play it and stream it while I watched and talked to him about it, as a sort of "two heads are better than one" approach. He's not the best at platformers and so he struggled and got frustrated, so some of my review had to be based on watching a full playthrough on YouTube.
Overall superb game, I absolutely adored it and it's the exact kind of game I used to love playing. It looked like a lot of fun, with the only knock against it being how hard it is to control the momentum and swapping between drill and non-drill forms. It was a little too challenging for my friend, which caused him to quit while still in the 1 foot under set of levels. The controls could have been a little less challenging to use for folks who aren't super into perfectly precise platformer controls.
Some comments from my friend from his experience, both good and bad, innovation wise "I've never seen anything like this" (in terms of mechanics), the retro vibe was fantastic though true black & true white is very intense, and maybe the dark grey and off-white should have been the default palette as the high contrast got hard on the eyes. The deeper and deeper theme was felt throughout the gameplay and the narrative elements, so "full marks." The audio was really good, and thankfully had a long enough runtime (plus the muffled track when underground) that made it feel less repetitive than some other jam entries' music. Also changing positions in the soundtrack on death was a smart move for keeping it fresh-feeling.
The mood was excellent, and I especially loved the ending. The humour was very much a sense of cartoonish and cute, but I didn't find it that funny. The animations helped make me giggle a couple times especially the first time I saw the zombie run with momentum.
The art was all really well done and clearly fit a specific retro vibe. I only wished the background was maybe a little more interesting than completely blank. While the design of everything was monochromatic, some parts of the levels just felt empty because of the vast void behind it all. It's really hard to put a background in though when you're monochromatic, or to find a way to avoid the empty spaces, so I didn't knock it against you.
Above all else, this game had so much content. I was not expecting to watch the full playthrough have something like 20 levels. This felt more like a month-long project to pitch to a publisher than it did a jam entry. Hats off to your work.
@kepsert unfortunately there isn't, but I absolutely love your enthusiasm to provide accessibility! In my case it's actually a history of video gaming addiction that keeps me from playing video games. I've been sober for over 3 years now and I'm not looking to change that. I still adore video games and have a serious passion for them, and making games is a completely different experience from playing them so I can at least follow my dreams of crafting experiences for others. It's just the playing of everyone's games that I can't do alone, so I bring in help to make sure I can still provide feedback and not just be a ratings mooch.
Amazing game! My friend and I absolutely loved it to bits. It was honestly hard to find anything to critique about it. Overall this was a mind-blowing entry for the compo. My friend and I played a bunch of jam games, good jam games at that, before trying your game, and it beat them all by a significant margin. After beating it, my friend's immediate comment was "if this game were expanded on, I'd play the rest of it." For context: my friend played while I watched and we discussed the game to figure out a rating + feedback.
It was super fun. Normally with game jam games the fun is sort of there, or decent, but this one had my friend fully engaged from start to finish. The only gripe that kept it from a solid 5/5 was that the whole game felt like it was building to some big, climactic moment at the end, and then it just wrapped up with a "you were tricked!" discovery. Would have loved a boss fight in the final room, even if it was a simple boss, before finding the body and learning we were tricked. The boss could have even been the animated body of the last person tricked to carry a lantern down to the bottom.
The game wasn't overly innovative, but not all games need to be. The lantern was fun but lighting torches isn't anything new. The combat itself was quite engaging, and my friend especially liked the idea of having to plant yourself stationary to shoot.
The use of the theme was solid, if a little on the nose. One of the comments from my friend was "I like how the use of the theme isn't just in the narrative of deeper and deeper into the temple but also going deeper and deeper into insanity."
The graphics were fantastic. The art looked amazing, the UI was clean, and the animations were beautiful. It was all we could have asked for and more.
The audio was also superb. A huge compliment from my friend (who is also a musician/singer). Also, he wanted to thank you for not making the starting audio offensively loud. Most jam/compo games have audio so loud it breaks your headphones to start, whereas your audio was at a reasonable volume. The music and sound effects were all spot on, with the only request being "I feel like the sound track could have had just a little more... something."
As for the mood, the game really did grip my friend. He was actively engaged the whole time, and was reading all the text in the diary entries instead of just skipping through them. He honestly wanted to see where the story was going and what was happening to the player. The cave itself, with the sound effects, music, the enemies, and the gomen, all built a terrific atmosphere. A few spelling mistakes here and there but it's a jam. I also appreciated the enemies' eyes being lit even outside of your light's range, and the world not being completely dark outside of your light's range, as often that happens and it makes the gameplay near impossible to play.
Again, final thoughts: this is something you should be very proud of. Easily the best game my friend and I have tried so far.
Cool entry! My friend really loved the graphics and couldn't stop talking about how nice the CRT TV vibe was. The main graphical complaint was the lack of visual indicators on the enemies being hit. The single white flash didn't feel like heavy, strong impacts that the rocket launcher should have been delivering.
The gameplay was solid for a bullet hell, especially for a game made in 48 hours. controls were smooth and responsive. Enemy attacks could have been a little more predictable, or more signaled. The reasons for not getting marked higher were mostly that it was very much just a bullet hell. It wasn't very innovative on the genre, more just doing what's already been done before.
Probably what hurt the most in the ratings, and is the area to look to improve for next time, was the audio. The sound effects that were included in the game were great, but there were just so few of them. No sounds for when the bosses fired their attacks, no sound effects made by the bosses when hit, no sound effects made when the bullets hit walls, etc. And then on top of that there was no music to fill the empty space left by the lack of sound effects. I would have rather seen this game stretched into a solo jam entry with the extra day spent on juicing up the visual and auditory feedback.
Cute little game! I would have appreciated a soundtrack personally, since even if you need to use a song from somewhere else instead of making one within the 72 hours it still does wonders for the general mood and atmosphere of the game. It's one of those aspects where you don't notice it as much when it's there, but can't stop noticing when it's missing.
Awesome game! My friend played the game while I watched (as I can't play games) so we talked about it as he played to get a sort of "2 heads are better than 1" review. Overall: really impressive work.
The game was so dang fun! The levels were very well designed. The difficulty was just enough to challenge without ever feeling unfair or uninteresting. Having a boss fight was a very cool twist. While your game scored well across the board, fun was definitely a stand-out and received the highest rating.
The innovation was the weakest in terms of judging, though I don't hold it against the overall score in any way as not all games need to be supremely innovative. The glue pads were neat but I've seen them before in other golf games, and the boss fight was a new twist, but ultimately this felt like a (very polished) miniclip golf game, of which my friend and I have played many.
The use of the theme was good, but the main comment my friend made that stuck out to me was "the deeper and deeper theme is more just incidental. I could have shot into the sky at the end of each hole and it would have been the same game. The theme didn't really inform the gameplay at all."
The graphics were super clear. It was always obvious what you had to do to progress, what was dangerous, the route that could be taken to beat the level, where the terrain was, and so on. It was very well executed and clean. The complaints mostly come in the form of "it felt like there could have been more," in that the visuals all gave the information necessary to understand the play area but it felt like there could have been more decoration to flesh out the world a little more. Also, the menu was default unity UI components. Nothing against default unity UI components, as they're functional, but they very quickly ripped me out of the immersion when I saw them as they didn't fit in with the rest of the game at all.
The audio was fantastic. Truly fantastic. The layered tracks of the music on each level were so nice and well done. There was one level in particular, when the melody came in, where my friend and I both just had to stop and bask in the experience. It really defined the tone and atmosphere of the game. Also, having boss music is always a big boost. The only complaint was that the sound effects could have been just a little bit punchier, as they really got overpowered by the music and felt lackluster in comparison.
Finally, the mood was just awesome. Again, the music with the cleanly executed graphics and level design all tied together to create a solid atmosphere that sucked my friend and I in. This is a game you all should be very proud of, and I only dream of making something this good.
Cool game! My friend and I felt like it suffered a little due to some really easy to fix or easy to add elements that would have greatly increased its ratings. Others have already suggested the visual feedback to landing (and receiving) hits, so I won't harp on that.
Heavily reducing the number of attacks it took to kill the enemies would have helped make it feel significantly less tedious in moments. Requiring 2 or 3 hits to kill a zombie would have given the zombies a chance to attack back. Requiring 5 or 6 hits to kill them made it felt more like a chore, since the enemies themselves didn't provide enough variety to give new experiences from extended combat.
Adding some sound effects, some ambient background noise, and some music, even if you didn't make the music or sound effects yourself, would have gone a long way to making the atmosphere feel stronger and the game less repetitive. Part of the power of doing the jam instead of the compo is that you can make up for lacking time or skills with 3rd party assets to still make a whole-feeling game. Instead the lack of sound effects and music made the player (my friend) focus all that much more on the repetitive task of combat.
The lighting was good, but having ceilings in the locations would have helped really set the tone and atmosphere. Without the ceiling it gave an unfinished feel.
Overall this was a solid first attempt, and I bet you learned a lot from the experience to try next time. Looking forward to your future entries. For all my "this could have been better" talk, the highest rating you got from my friend and I was "Fun" :smile:
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.
@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.