Once again pepnou and enderswype are back with a Ludum Dare submission!
This time we baked you a platformer/puzzle game. With 13 levels and a huge focus on the look of the game, you are invited to try and beat the game!!
In a tiny squarre with little to no space to spare, our little guy needs to reach the end of the level through obstacles, jumps and manipulation of the gravity. But be careful, you only have a few uses, some limited uses of the spacebar to be precise.
Get Ready to cry out loud before jumping!
CONTROLS (rebindable):
W/A/S/D -> move
spacebar + A/D -> to rotate the gravity left or right
spacebar + W -> to flip the gravity
R -> restart level
be sure to leave a comment about what you think about the game and we'll make sure to do the same to yours!
That was a lot of fun to play. The jumping over spikes was rather hard to, could be more forgiving. Although most levels had a clear path, I felt like I could experiment with changing gravity multiple times in one jump or going against the intended direction, which was quite satisfying. The icons could use some text for accessibility. Great entry, enjoyed it a lot.
Nice game. I believe the focus should either be on the puzzle or in the platforming element. Trying to solve the puzzles and constantly being killed by spikes wasn't very fun to be honest. In the other hand, the difficulty made it more satisfying. The idea of the game is very nice, and the graphics also very good. Well done!
Loved the graphics. The control felt very responsive, but it felt like there was some accel- and deceleration on the player controller which, in combination with precisive moment and spikes and all (or jumping over keys to avoid them) - which basically turns it into a precision platformer - felt very unfair at times.
The mechanic was very cool, I recently played something doing pretty much the same on itch, but in that game you were only able to rotate on top of specific "orbs" floating on specific locations in the levels. Being allowed to rotate the map / flip gravity wherever you want, but a limited amount of times, was a nice touch and added a different type of puzzle element to the levels.
Fun to play and has a good pace to it, doesn't feel like there's much downtime which is really really nice and hard to achieve. Lovely level design also helped.
Enjoyed the overall aesthetics, all of it worked and complimented each other well to create one consistent mood, audio was also quite fitting. The only gripe was also previously mentioned in the comments, the icons needing some text or perhaps more contrast to them to make them more clear.
Level 4 was a challenge for sure. I like the level design and the gravity mechanic. the controls need a bit getting used to but overall good game. great job.
Nice game, got pretty hard after level 3. Managed to get outside of the level once when rotating the gravity. Solid entry, looks and sounds nice as well as feels well polished. Maybe the difficulty ramp up could be a bit slower.
This is really well made, but very frustrating. I'm not a fan of the high inertia of the character, especially in a platformer that requires this level of precision. I'd probably suggest to decrease it a little bit. Other than that, and that I didn't feel the theme much, everyhting works great and it's a very cool game.
@bauke-regnerus after looking at a few late game tester we realised some stuff we found easy to do and easy to understand wasn't, game designer isn't an actual job for nothing sorry :(((
@halvardo13 the hitbox is kinda forgiving, jumping very very late doesn't insta kill you, we tried our best to make it playable :((
@halvardo13 thanks you so much, we tried to put some indications ingame but no enough obviously :'(
@kepsert@pepnou and I disagree on wehether or not including a tiny bit of sliding since we are making a precision platformer, i agree with you but we ended up adding a little bit of it, we didn't realise it would be that annoying..
@svenerik tbh we put so many effort into game design, tutorial levels etc comparing to our previous games we didn't realise it until you and others told us about it, comment noted, we will do better in futur entries for sure!!
@chaineddreamer OMG we made 13 levels and we thought levels 10 to 13 were hard, being developper AND level designer is HARD!!
@kuggenhoffen yeah we tried including some tutorial levels into the game but daaaamn, that's no easy task
@sbeif tbh the lack of air control and high inertia is voluntary but we understand it might be annoying, we didn't make a forgiving game on purpose, however, the difficulty curve is unbalanced for sure, our bad :((
@mortusnegati we tried our best to introduce mechanics slowly and one by one but maybe being both game dev and level designer we couldn't understand outside players.. so sorry about do you think a video presentation of what if actually doable in terms of gameplay and game mechanics is possible would help ?
Thanks all of you, we take into consideration every single comment and will improve next time, much luv
@enderswype I fully understand the design choice and I feel your struggles with tuning the difficulty, I also often make my games a bit too difficult because when it comes to level design I usually already have almost a day of training on the controls. This time on my game I tried to start easy but I think only one person managed to complete the last two levels :( BTW it probably just takes a bit of time to get used to your character, especially considering your last screenshot, where you had an almost perfect run
enjoyed playing it. The level design are really well thought and i see the love in making this game. But would love to have a tight controls instead of having a inertia based control because the level itself a challenging one. It would give the player more freedom to move. Other then that, loved it.
Oh we came up with the similar idea of constraining the use of spaces bar funtion and set one of them the gravity flip. It is so nice to see the well-managed challenging stages with the similar idea. I love the graphic and the SFX. The stages are hard both on control, but the puzzles are intersting. In total I'm having so much fun. (Btw sometimes I got stuck in the platform and can't move:(
It looks like a very nicely designd game! However, I think the gravity is a little too heavy. By level 4 I was already failing jumps a lot because of how precise I feel like they have to be. Great job
I liked the visuals; they were a tad dark but for being a game about a square it was very appealing and the animations felt responsive. Again, echoing what some other people here have said, the jumps and movement almost felt TOO responsive, requiring a lot of precision. A good entry though! I'd love to play a game like this "for real" if it was tweaked to be a little bit less tight on the jumps. Good music, too. Great job!
@nanamaki oh, i'll definitly check out your game, gimme a little time, but regarding the getting stuck in the floor, it's a bug we know but couldn't enbtirely fix before release :(
it's quite impressive how much content you managed to pack into your game within 3 days! the visuals are great, the music is as well, the difficulty was insane but it was okay because I'm the epic'est of gamers 😎 really good!
@enderswype I managed to get to level 12 legitimately, but i did look at and almost beat level 13. the later levels got insanely difficult to the point it was taking me like 50 deaths per level XD. Level 13 itself was pretty cool but the "coyote time laser jumping" in level 8-ish (I can't remember) felt like it wasn't an intended mechanic and took me a while to figure out. I really enjoyed your game though!
It's very difficult... Amazing amount of content in a very short time though! I love the physics and the idea itself of rotating the gravity like this. I personally am not really a fan of the 'hard to beat' platformer genre, so I didn't get past level 4 unfortunalty. But, I'm sure people who are a fan of the genre love this game!
I didn't rage I promise. But I really wanted to try to speedrun this, but it obviously needs much more practice and I don't have that much time now, especially when streaming. Other than that - loved the original visuals and unforgiving gameplay.
My main issue is noclipping into the floor randomly and uneven jump height (at least for me). Othe than that - great game 👍
I managed to beat all the levels! Overall, it's a great game, both very challenging and rewarding. The game's learning curve becomes noticeably steep around level 4. If you can overcome that hurdle, you can likely make it through with enough time and effort. However, I did notice more bugs in the higher levels, particularly in levels 9 and 13. These bugs included characters disappearing into walls or experiencing sudden, unexplained acceleration.( see picture below for example) My favorite levels were 12 and 13, with 13 being particularly satisfying when everything worked out smoothly. Level 12 was very well-designed overall. I had a great time playing, and perhaps I'll attempt to achieve better times in the future!
@gamedevjeroen Thanks for the feedback, you're one of the few to have completed the game ^^ We're aware of the problems with the character controller. Monday a 10pm (2h before submitting), we noticed that the player would fall through the floor consistently, but only in the built version, not in the editor. Everything after that was a race to figure out the problem (we didnt found it) & to try to add some hacks to prevent falling through the floor. One these hack was to check if the player was inside the ground & to move it upward if it was tha case, that's why you can be "teleported" upward if it detect you're inside a wall. We'll try to fix it for the next jam x)
Pretty enjoyable game! A little frustrating in the gameplay, the jumping and platforming didn't feel very comfortable to play and occasionally felt like i would die for no reason? Other than that the puzzles were very interesting and the aesthetic was also very fun!
Good game with good graphics, the gameplay and aesthetics remind me of the flash game days. The movement was sometimes hard because the character slids, but that may just be me sucking at platformers in general. Still enjoyable and a solid entry.
Congratz of finishin your project! Was very tricky for me and giga challenging but still nice to play. For some reason i couldn't rebind input on web build. See you on the next one!
This genre is recurrent and I'm terrible at it. But I believe it is very difficult at the beginning. Rotating the screen was cool, I like the sound and graphics. In the fourth phase I gave up trying to get the key, it seemed impossible, or I'm just not up to it. The character's weight is too high and perhaps too fast. I like heavy characters, but I think it's too much. But overall it was a good entry
It's a great game with a very capable development team. Wow, the game is a bit challenging, but the controls feel good. Hmm, but I'm a bit of a handicap, I hope the game will continue to add content, be released on other platforms, and I hope we can see our game.
Comments46
I believe the focus should either be on the puzzle or in the platforming element.
Trying to solve the puzzles and constantly being killed by spikes wasn't very fun to be honest.
In the other hand, the difficulty made it more satisfying.
The idea of the game is very nice, and the graphics also very good. Well done!
The mechanic was very cool, I recently played something doing pretty much the same on itch, but in that game you were only able to rotate on top of specific "orbs" floating on specific locations in the levels. Being allowed to rotate the map / flip gravity wherever you want, but a limited amount of times, was a nice touch and added a different type of puzzle element to the levels.
Enjoyable game, thanks for submitting!
Enjoyed the overall aesthetics, all of it worked and complimented each other well to create one consistent mood, audio was also quite fitting. The only gripe was also previously mentioned in the comments, the icons needing some text or perhaps more contrast to them to make them more clear.
Overall a jolly good little game, splendid work!
@halvardo13 the hitbox is kinda forgiving, jumping very very late doesn't insta kill you, we tried our best to make it playable :((
@halvardo13 thanks you so much, we tried to put some indications ingame but no enough obviously :'(
@kepsert @pepnou and I disagree on wehether or not including a tiny bit of sliding since we are making a precision platformer, i agree with you but we ended up adding a little bit of it, we didn't realise it would be that annoying..
@svenerik tbh we put so many effort into game design, tutorial levels etc comparing to our previous games we didn't realise it until you and others told us about it, comment noted, we will do better in futur entries for sure!!
@chaineddreamer OMG we made 13 levels and we thought levels 10 to 13 were hard, being developper AND level designer is HARD!!
@kuggenhoffen yeah we tried including some tutorial levels into the game but daaaamn, that's no easy task
@sbeif tbh the lack of air control and high inertia is voluntary but we understand it might be annoying, we didn't make a forgiving game on purpose, however, the difficulty curve is unbalanced for sure, our bad :((
@mortusnegati we tried our best to introduce mechanics slowly and one by one but maybe being both game dev and level designer we couldn't understand outside players.. so sorry about do you think a video presentation of what if actually doable in terms of gameplay and game mechanics is possible would help ?
Thanks all of you, we take into consideration every single comment and will improve next time, much luv
Fun game with a interesting mechanic. Good work on it!
BTW it probably just takes a bit of time to get used to your character, especially considering your last screenshot, where you had an almost perfect run
@smiley405 Comment noted, we'll keep that in mind for futur games :)
@anya-voinova NO FORGIVING!!!
@kevin-prehn We have a hard time tuning the difficulty of our games, sorry :((
@animatrix1490 roger roger, in 10 years when we release the successor to Super Meat Boy we'll give you the game for free x)
the visuals are great, the music is as well, the difficulty was insane but it was okay because I'm the epic'est of gamers 😎 really good!
Great work overall!
My main issue is noclipping into the floor randomly and uneven jump height (at least for me). Othe than that - great game 👍
I somehow jumped out of level 9 once, and sometimes the character got a bit stuck on corners. Soon after i got too frustrated to continue haha.
My favorite levels were 12 and 13, with 13 being particularly satisfying when everything worked out smoothly. Level 12 was very well-designed overall. I had a great time playing, and perhaps I'll attempt to achieve better times in the future!
We're aware of the problems with the character controller. Monday a 10pm (2h before submitting), we noticed that the player would fall through the floor consistently, but only in the built version, not in the editor. Everything after that was a race to figure out the problem (we didnt found it) & to try to add some hacks to prevent falling through the floor.
One these hack was to check if the player was inside the ground & to move it upward if it was tha case, that's why you can be "teleported" upward if it detect you're inside a wall. We'll try to fix it for the next jam x)
Dont overshoot the keys & graze the last corner for level 7 i think
The movement was sometimes hard because the character slids, but that may just be me sucking at platformers in general. Still enjoyable and a solid entry.
Was very tricky for me and giga challenging but still nice to play.
For some reason i couldn't rebind input on web build.
See you on the next one!