4&1/2 Lives

Hi, I'm Marco and I'm quite good at programming. I liked your shader, I'm not so good in programming shaders. also yes, pixel art is fun to create :D :dog: and interesting adaptation of the theme! I didn't come up with a theme this year :( :cry: But the block placement was horrible, I often couldn't get past the first few blocks. I was sad. But I thank you for paticipating. Yours sincerely, Your Marco.

Thanks Marco! Yeah the random block placement is one of the things I would have liked to improve upon if I had the time. Unfortunately due to other commitments I had to submit early.

Well done. Excellent game. Hard to play. Should take a look at the level generator and make it easier in the beginning and harder later on

It is exponentially easier at the beginning but perhaps I should have just manually placed the first 50 or so platforms as it is still random and you could get bad luck on your first attempt. Thanks for the feedback Beebster.

I like the artstyle :)

The audio is cool and the graphic style has interesting ideas but in a majority of my tries first platforms wasn't even accessible with double jump.

Our ideas are very close to each other. Your platform design gave good ideas for my future projects.. it was a bit difficult to play but it was exciting.

That's fun! I loved the moment when I landed on a purple for the first time, wasn't expecting that. It handles well and is enjoyable to run through a few times to try and improve your score. I think the randomness is okay, although maybe some more forgiving early setups might be smart! Great work on it.

Congratulations on achieving so many personal firsts! Each time you create something, you increase your toolset of things you can use for your next creation.

Nice job for a first jam! The music wasn't bad and the goo shader did look good. I ran into a few instances where I wasn't able to reach the any platform from the start. I think another aspect that could be improved is the movement controls. The side to side movement had pretty slow acceleration and made the character feel a bit unresponsive. Another thing that I think could make it feel a lot better to play is input buffering for the double jump. There were a lot of times where I tried to time the double jump to execute at the peak, but I hit the button fractions of a second before the peak and the input was ignored. If you can track when the player last hit the jump button, once you detect the peak was reached if the player pressed jump in the last 0.5s (for example) execute the jump. Little things like that go a long way in making platformers feel good to play

Ooooh input buffering, of course! The thought didn't even occur to me but it would have made a big difference.

This was pretty good. Kinda gave me some doodle jump vibes. I did have some issues where it was impossible to keep going. Only being able to double jump after reaching the peak was a bit annoying at first, but it worked out once I got used to it. Also, after a while the walls on the side disappear and the side movement get really slow. I don't know if this is a bug or a feature, but it caused me to die twice. I think overall it would have been more fun if the sideways movement was faster.

That was well put together! I think the starfield effect really tied everything together to make it feel like a game, it was fun to watch them slow down and speed up every time I jumped.

I'll try to be brutal for you :P

I agree with other posters the movement was pretty clunky, very slow. A couple tips for that: one is of course having a higher acceleration factor, you can set it up to calculate the acceleration based on top-speed and time-to-accelerate which I find useful. Another HUGE thing is when you turn around either instantly set the speed to 0, or have a way faster turn-around-acceleration, up to you, but that really helps things feel snappy.

Another thing is the jump, a secret about platformers is you really want the falling gravity to be higher than the rising gravity, really helps give it weight. (An exception I can think of is Kingdom Hearts which takes the opposite approach, it has a very low falling gravity) Here is a GDC talk about it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hG9SzQxaCm8

Other things, I'd say try to prevent the platforms from intersecting, it looks pretty gross when they do I think. And there were times when the next platform was simply too high up, at least I couldn't make the jump.

But yeah, good showing! As I like to say, if people are criticizing that means your work is worth criticizing :)

Very good advice! Thanks a bunch. I find it's very easy to get caught doing things that others solved years ago.

This is amazing work for your first jam! I'm really impressed. Simple concept but well done with the different platform types and awesome that its procedurally generated as well. I like the music too.

The main piece of feedback is that the player movement just needs to be a bit more responsive (more acceleration?) and less physics-y to feel fun i think. It would be good to feel like you have more control over the player.

Great first jam sumbission! The shader looks really good and the music is also quite good.

To bo honest, I think it takes courage to go with procedural generation, I tried in the past with, lets say, mixed results. I don't know if many of us play each game enough to really matter (I played a couple of runs) and I got into a couple of really weird situations with the placement of the platforms.

However, if I had to pick something to spend time refining it would be the controls. It's really hard to make platform controls that feel responsive and refined. I would say that the initial acceleration is a bit high but then the character feels a bit floaty (maybe?) and the movement side to side feels a bit "heavy".

Great submission. My high score is 679

Think I liked:
- Great work with the shaders. I personally could not write those shaders
- Cool music
- Cool mechanic that the world wraps left and right.

Some points that I think should be changed:
- You should be able to double jump immediately after your first jump and not after the top of your first jump.
- The procedural placement sometimes is really unfair.
- It is unclear when you die (how deep you can enter the acid)
- It's not explained what the different platforms do.

Decent game. Sounds effects are fitting. Criticism already given. Either way good job for a first game.

Really solid base. Since you asked for feedback, I think you could get the biggest bang for your buck tightening the controls. Other than that, like you mentioned, making the procedural level generation more intelligent would be good. I got into a state, sometimes at the very beginning, where it seemed impossible to go further. Other than that, I like the variations and simplicity of the platforms.

Oh, I just read a comment that the world wraps. That might have helped! Maybe a way to make that clear to the player would help.

@daniel-username Thanks for the feedback. Yeah the controls really need another look. This is the third version of them. My very first ones were too responsive but I think I took it too far in the opposite direction, especially when combined with the ice platform. Which again I probably should update the description to let people know what each platform does but I like the idea of the player learning from their attempts.

I intended the wrapping to be a kind of suprise/reward for the user after the leave the building. I tried to hint at it by having platforms spawn closer to the edge from that height onwards but as you probably noticed it's not exactly obvious. Maybe some kind of hint animation would have worked.

Pretty great for a first attempt, especially for a solo dev; the art and music reminded me of classic flash games! As has already been criticized, the procedural gen and controls could use some work if you were to continue this, but you already know this.

Nice job overall!

I found myself playing it again and got a decent score:

Can anyone beat it?

Here I am, as promised :) Cool, solid climbing-platformer. The Goo looks great. The music is quite good, I like it. I also like that there are different platforms. I would add a restart or end-run button, because sometimes player drops down without ability to jump back and is just waiting for the run to end. The jumping feels a bit off for me. Besides that, great job, especially for your first time!

Great job, especially considering this is your first game jam. Creating a procedural generation algorithm in a game jam is always a big challenge, because there is a high chance that it creates very hard/impossible levels. Yours worked quite well for an algorithm that has been created in a few hours. I had a few situations where it was very difficult, e.g. only a single red block, which meant that I only had once chance (one opportuniy, to seize everything I ever wanted, oh wait :D) to make the jump. In my opinion the horizontal movement of the character could have been a bit higher though. The jump speed is like 10 times higher than the x-axis speed, which felt a bit inconsistent and made it sometimes difficult to reach the next platform when they were a significant x distance away. I agree with some of the previous comments, that a quick restart button would have been nice, waiting to drown in the goo wasn't great. Overall, solid entry!

Really well done. I was a big fan of Doodle Jump as a kid, so obviously this was my cup of tea ;)

For a first game and first time artist/producer, you should be very proud. This is better than the average game I've played from this year's compo and that includes games from people who've competed dozens of times.

A few of my friends mentioned the similarities to Doodle Jump which I find interesting since I never played it as a kid. I guess it is just a pretty simple concept. My inspiration for it was actually the rising poison from Mario.

I like that the blocks had different behaviours. As has been mentioned here already - the controls could use some work, particularily the very glidy horizontal movement :) Well done nonetheless!