MION FOREVER

What a cute game! Loved the look and feel of the spell , pleasant sound and good weight. Dash did not seem to work for me but overall the game was really great

The art is super cute and the sprite animations are really nice.

Really challenging getting the enemies. They give as good as they get. I like the lighting and overall feel of the game.

Your game is simple and easy to understand what to do. Pixel art is cute and the music is very simple.
A light game!
Although I really liked the light effect, it has no use. I advise, in a next jam to make a build of the game that does not need to install. Many people don't play for fear of something damaging their computer.

Congratulations!

I really liked the visual and audio effect for the pulse attack!

I got 8. :)
The attack effect looks really nice. 👍

This game has an interesting idea, but I found it very frustrating to play (the highest score I got was only 6 before I gave up). The most frustrating thing was probably how close the camera is to the player. Such a small field of view made it more difficult to dodge the enemies, and it meant that it was very easy to shoot the ball out of line-of-sight. Speaking of the ball, it took me several minutes to realize that player position doesn't affect how the ball moves (I thought it had something to do with the light around the player).

The animation that plays when you left click looks great, and dashing was nice and zippy (it was _too_ nice and zippy... I wanted to do it all the time just like Hyper Light Drifter).

Overall, good work! Sorry I skipped out on at least 2/3rds of your game..

Nice work on the audio and attack effects. Quite tricky but fun, I scored 6

I love the art, and the mechanic's feedback (especially the sound effects) are so neat!

It is so hard though. Especially how the enemies ambush you from the dark fells pretty unfair!

So cute main character. :3

Wow I love the art on this game! The character, the explosion on the click, the effect when you get hit or dash, it all looks stellar! I did find it quite hard to play because the enemies are moving, your little ball is also moving and you cant just have them collide, you also have to have recently hit your ball to make it collide with the enemy. So it was tricky for sure, maybe stationary enemies that shot at you would work well. But regardless, I really liked this and huge kudos to the artist!

Interesting idea. I like the animations, particularly the inflating hurt animation! And the dash movement felt really nice

Overall I found this game too difficult -- the clover ball was hard to move, and the enemies are super fast, not fast enough to react to it felt. When one of them comes out of nowhere and hits you it feels a little unfair. I couldn't get past the first stage after a few attempts. Not sure if you got anyone to play test the game while you were making it, but that might've helped you figure out the difficulty balance.

I found it a little too difficult to hit the very fast enemies with the ball. I like the idea and the art and sound were cute though!

Hey! Just wanted to do a post update / insight as the artist and sound designer of the team.

I really fell in love with Mion's design and I was really lucky to like the first art I put to my digital paper! I am really glad the art paid off :D Not a bad start for my first time trying out pixel art for real. I hope I can do more with the design. The animations were a first as well for pixel art so I had to make a lot of references. Kudos to Pedro Medeiros (the pixel artist for Celeste), for their amazing work! I am so glad the feeling I was trying to convey got through!

I really love the dash and attack mechanic but due to time constraints, we never really got to see the whole thing through and match the feel of the animations to the gameplay so the game does feel a bit off.

This game has a very steep difficulty curve and we currently do not have time to fix it :( Although, I can give some tips:
- Enemies only die if the ball is in motion (basically the ball has to be bounced at the enemies to count). The ball has to hit the enemies, not the other way around.
- There are 5 waves per world, spawning 2 enemies each in the first world (forest), 3 each in the second (sand) and 4 each in the third (wood) (Totals per world respectively: 10, 15, 20)
- Blue Balls are low priority since they are slower and are always visible. However, they do hurt in numbers.
- Red Balls are high priority and blink back and forth. I've found staying in a corner helps.
- There is a weird "cheat" where if you attack just far enough from the clover ball so it doesn't move but still be affected, the ball will become an active hitbox for the enemies! Just have the enemies bounce at the ball and they will die!

While I would love to see the fabled "wood" world be beaten, I just can't imagine it. Please let me know if you ever manage to get there, that would be incredible.

However, if you want a challenge that is not the wood world, the "EX" button on the main menu takes you to the Bunny in a Car world with a super fast bunny in a car.

I've made it to the sand level myself so my highscore is about 13! (since the score resets every world)

Good luck everyone and stay safe! We appreciate all your feedback! Thank you for playing our little game in our first game jam!

If you ever want to chat, I'm on discord, IG, twitter, newgrounds, etc. by the same name!

Cute! This is a strong entry for a first jam! Loved the sound effects and the mood. I appreciate the innovation in the gameplay.

i found it difficult to aim the ball with my attack. good audio.

I really like the art and the audio but I feel a little dumb since I didn't pass the first level, didn't understood how to kill the ennemy even after reading 5 times the game description ... ^^"

I liked the sound effects of the attack and the art of the game, the mechanic is quite difficult to execute and I would have liked to have a tutorial. As a new player the game would probably feel less punishing by having an indicator for the enemies or a larger light radius.

Nice graphics and audio. But the gameplay is confusing at the ball is very difficult to hit at the beginning

Interesting gameplay ! I like the idea of having to push the projectile on the enemies, but the game is currently a bit too hard, the enemies are way too fast for the dash to be useful, I get hit before I have time to react so all I could to is hide in a corner and hope nothing will come to hit me. And the direction you push the ball feels quite unprecise sometimes. I think just slowing everything down would help players to appreciate the experience. Other than that, charadesign is really cool, and the FX work really well :)

Well done! The art and sound were great! I found the vision range to be a bit small, and it wasn't immediately clear how to actually progress. I feel like there could be fewer waves.

Good game, at start it was hard to understand what i should do, but after understanding it, it becomes quite addictive, also i like art and sound effects. Well done!

I like the core gameplay here it's a pretty cool idea! The sound effects and art worked well together with the overall gameplay. Here some suggestions if you plan on working on this more!

-Ball shouldn't reset after hitting a wall, rebound shots are satisfying and the time mechanic it uses currently can already feel unforgiving at times
-The red ball blinking in the first level just feels unfair with how quick it also moves. I think introduce a slower (slower than the blue one even) enemy that blinks, and the player can use his attack to keep track of it with the light it provides. I haven't gotten to the third level yet, but the blinking doesn't provide a gameplay change in the sand level where everything is brighter so I would keep this enemy just for the first level.
-Reduce the speed of the red ball. Even when you have clear sight of it, a lot of times you just don't have time to react, especially when its coming from above or below, where the camera doesn't show as far. Another option is to just zoom the camera out more
-Reduce size of health icons in the top left. They cover a lot of the screen in a game where you want to be able to react quickly
-The dash counter doesn't line up consistently when you maximize
-When the character is moving, it seems there's only 1 feather on her hat, but the health icon shows 2, when she gets hit and also in the title menu there's 2 xD
-Clicking the play button is weird in fullscreen mode (might be because I have a ultrawide monitor but idk)

I hope this didn't come off as nitpicking, @polkoii gave me pretty thorough feedback and I wanted to return the favor!

The game is really fun, just feels a little unfair right now. I hope you guys keep working on it because it's already solid in it's current state, mostly just needs some balancing!

@itsboats Aww thanks for the plentiful feedback as always! I'll try my best to respond to them!

Ball Wall Reset: I never actually noticed this wasn't in the game! I think my playstyle of just spam clicking around the ball made me never realize you cannot rebound the ball! This is definitely a good thing to have as I agree, rebound shots are amazing! Btw, if you want tons of rebound action, you and @ultimatewalrus should check out *Creature in the Well* as we were, at the beginning, trying to recreate this feeling of bounce!

The Red Ball of Death: I agree on all accounts. The red ball's inclusion was thought up to just blink and go fast and we never strayed away from that. I swear at the thing whenever I see it. I like the idea of introducing a slower ball instead and it never crossed my mind that we could just move the red ball to higher levels rather than just bombarding the player at the beginning. Stationary enemies was also a good idea as well! (kudos to @ryan-dotsikas) I also agree that slowing everything down would be an interesting difficulty lowerer as well @hojaverde!

The camera: This was also a thing we never thought of. Thank you to you and @lovewerk for bringing this up as I agree with the idea that it would make it easier to see everything. Unfortunately, camera was also one of the decisions we just made and moved on with. It didn't even come up in the talks about the game being too difficult and how to fix it. I'll definitely pay more attention to the distance in the future!

The health icons: I was worried that the icons would cover too much but I ended up forgetting about my worries and moved on. I wanted to have a nice HUD that doesn't obscure your vision however, the game build right now just has too many fast things going on to really warrant that big of icons. I really like HUD design so this will stay on my mind for any future entries!

Maximization Problems: I'm not entirely sure how to deal with that! I don't think any of the team have ultrawide monitors so we could not test it out sorry!

The Feather: I was actually imagining one feather on her hat but I ended up really liking the look of a heart replacing her feather as a health icon! Something like a play on heart containers but it's her hat! Her hat feather also changes to a broken heart when Mion is hit and an exclamation mark when she dies. I really wanted to play around with her feather but that was at the cost of the feather actually looking like a feather! The similarities between the heart and the feather make me see why it could be mistaken as just 2 feathers! Though I still like playing around with the feather design, I'll keep in mind that I need to first perfect the base design!

Lighting: Lighting was used to fit the "deeper and deeper" theme as you would be going deeper and deeper into the forest as we would be making the light get darker the farther you progressed. But then the sand and wood worlds came into play and the gameplay was revamped, it ultimately became just an aesthetic to have and it definitely did not help with the difficulty curve.

@euler-moises We were actually in the process of uploading a browser version as you posted your comment! We ran into a few bumps however and delayed it a bit. Hopefully many got to play it on browser because I share your feelings about installers.

@jezzamon A few of us did playtest it actually! But it was during the uploading phase (so like 1 hour to the deadline lol). Definitely will playtest throughout the game next time!

Game Clarity: As what @raphiell @mysticaldev and @hobzone said, our clarity in explaining how the game goes was very far from what we would have liked. It heavily relied on reading the description and even that was rushed. The game does have a tutorial but it should be more so named "Controls" than anything else. Clarity is important and I am sorry to those who the game confused and so flabbergasted that some got the hang of it right away. Also, @bobafett89, I'm glad you found it fun to play! Wish we implemented a leaderboards!

Thank you all for the feedback! It really gives us a smile to look at the comments to see that people are playing our little game! :D (@dagostino-audio @scott-steffes @cody-creed @junebug @mattwoelk @soul-grinder @frobros @asfdfdfd @tom-ruxley @verysoftwares @hojaverde)

Regarding Future Plans, @itsboats, we are actually not sure as a team if we were to ever come back and improve upon MION FOREVER. But I agree that if we were, that it would need some serious balancing! However, I, as the artist, know that I will definitely try to do something with our character *MION*! Her design is something I would love to work on *FOREVER*. Cheers!

A bit confusing on what to actually do but still feels nice. I liked the little melody