I also want to praise the art!!

Like everyoen else I think a good tweak would be choosing weapons that lend themselves better to a rock paper scissor matchup visually and intuitively.

And then despite seeing how the theme is incorporated I also think it gets a bit lost because there is no real gameplaly difference between “you, the knight” switching weapons and you handing him a different weapon.

Awesome job for a first completed project, I really dig the stylistic choices. I think you could have leaned even harder into the cardboard-y thing and it would probably be even better as a small puppet play kind of thing which is the vibe i got

Thank you!

I mean luckily it kinda was humerous to have the bed and stuff in the game. It was not originally meant like that, those are actually just our internal communications we didn’t have time to remove lmao. Just an artifact of it being a jam game.

I did not have time to investigate why the fairy room was laggy, though I suspect it has to do with each wisp/fairy thingy being light source since something weird is going on there and they also turn on and off for some reason. Or it could be something to do with poor instancing on my end and I ended up duplicating assets a bunch … It didn’t break the game on my own potato laptop so it stayed xD

Oh if you fell through the floor of one of the bookshelf that was intentional but probably poorly communicated. The idea is that you get pushed off the shelf by the book that is going out. The bottom floor does a check and will never push out a book where the cat is to prevent falling out of the map ^^

Oh please don’t think of it as super harsh, definitely one of the games I enjoyed the most reviewing yesterday! Maybe I should have put a positive note at the beginning, I guess I was kinda in a complaining mood…

But yeah level design is tricky for sure, we also messed that up on our game lmao (I did most of it 😅). I just wanted to give you a list of everything I would like to have seen improved!

As for the final level I was not sure what the goal was, maybe I just needed to press the other red switch? I just did things that were possible, not really with intent if that makes sense.

After I accidentally closed a door I had unlocked on myself I stopped playing since I felt like I had experienced what the gameplay was like and it would be more of the same

You can click to advance the text at the beginning. It was a last minute change I upped the duration because you could not read it in time and I did not know it would affect every sentence change lmao since I did not implement it. Oops xD

I think the level design could be tightened up a bit, maybe it is not nessecary to use the whole screen for the levels? Also it was not clear what to do in the final level and it did not feel that fun to move the character around with the cloud. Maybe change the controls so that the cloud stays forever but you cannot move with it while solid and add a cooldown to transforming. That makes it less of a “skill” game and more of a puzzle game.

Other notes are that the cloud should probably not be able to collide with player guy from the top, use one-way platforms for that to make it only be able to lift him up.

The combat felt tacked-on. I would have preffered a no-health bar situation game I think. Either you have the guy shocked or not.

I liked the animations!

It looks like I did not figure out the gameplay here since it appears other people have “figured it out” but I didn’t.

For a jam game this is fun, but I don’t think this selection mechanism would actually make a great game people would play for a long time because it is just too unwieldy and bakes frustration into the core loop of the game

I think resetting the level each time you die would make for more consistent gameplay. Lean more into the puzzle aspect of the game. The first level was not set up in a way to teach you the main mechanic of how it works that the hero has to be picking up the gold. I think making it grid-movement based would benefit the game greatly (Baba is you style movement where things move a tile when you move). Having to eat the right chests in the right order to make the hero path-find correctly so that you can eat him is fun.

I would play this as a whole game if you fixed the gameplay. I think it would be a fun little puzzle game.

Let me illustrate my experience with this entry:

Oh what nice Post-Processing, this looks really cool and polished. Then, I was staring at the starting door for like a minute because tapping keys on the keyboard or mouse did not do anything, after which I spent 3 minutes attempting to get out of the first room. Then it worked fine for a minute. I picked up a red ball and dropped it, there was a horse cart. I go to horse cart. I get on horse cart. Horse cart seems to work, alright let’s ride down this path. I look off to the side because I assume the mouse will steer me, no okay gotta use keyboard, i spam left, some dialogue pops up, huh why did it pop up. Let me read, something about a hero going somewhere… In the meantime the horse cart drifted off over a mountain of some sort… got stuck in a hole for 3 minutes trying to dismount the horse which has gotten glitched and is now sideways and I can’t seem to accelerate anymore. Let’s go to this large windmill I am at. Hmm, nothing here, looks like I’m on a path though which I got from the dialogue I was supposed to follow so let’s try to stick to that. I wander through some terrain until I get to a large tree with no collision and decide I must have ended up out of bound so I close out of the game. 10/10 horse drifting.

Basically I would like to see a lot more playtesting of the game, it seems like the map was enormous but if it’s not fun to traverse because everything is slightly broken or wonky or not playtested enough you end up with an experience like I described above. It looked amazing though, I thoroughly enjoyed the graphics

Writing was definetely the best part of this entry. I enjoyed reading the text but the full screen reading made it a bit of a hassle because you had to scan your whole screen with your eyes. Maybe halve the text size of the large text.

I would say the whole gameplay part of this entry needs some work, there was not a lot of game to the game, which it seemed to imply there would be. Why train your stats when they are not used for anything?

I do like the collection of minigames angle though, nothing wrong with that.

It is uncanny how much it sounds like you were part of the team and our planning phase before it all went off the rails, everything you mention was either discussed, originally planned, scrapped from scope, problems we noticed but didn’t have time to fix or other hahaha. I agree though, we really,really would have benefitted from a level designer on the team—The only section in the game that was not thrown together nilly willy in some capacity was the huge bookcase which had some setpiece planning around it for level design. And the execution on that one still has … room for improvement if we wanna put it generously (it was me who put that in, I can say that about my own work xD)

The original concept was something closer to “you, the wizard’s cat, are trapped in the fight between the heroes and the wizard. The game acts as if the wizard is the important guy and achievements are given for things the wizard does. The cat just happens to be there, and you play by doing cat things and interacting with random magic junk the wizard has lying around in his tower, not really caring for the fight going on around you. Also there’s a rat to catch, much more important than whatever those humans are doing.”

However the action and whimsical magical interaction things were at odds with one another so we went less down the action route, banking on having a lot of art to put to use and make unique small fun interactions (like the bubble room)… Then yeah stuff happened and here we are lol. I did put in some assets from the action playtest in though if you try to touch the cauldron you’ll see what that is.

Oh and very interesting feedback on the small jump. I advocated for adding that because I felt like using the pounce for everything was clunky (I was getting sick of having to charge a pounce over every little thing in playtesting) and didn’t really sell the feeling of being a nimble cat. We couldn’t find a combination that combined both purposes of the charged jump and a simple one button directionless jump into a single button.

What we really would do if we had another few days was to get the sound part of the game in properly, we have a lot of unused sounds that we didn’t get to implement due to time pressure. I honestly think this is the most bare bones sound thing we could get away with. I feel sorry for Joe who spent the time putting those together, but at least we got four out five of his songs into the game hahaha

Thanks for the feedback (and the love for my tail simulation!) <3

Adding to this, it’s the best we could do. This kinda became our forced interpretation of the theme because we haven’t heard from our then main artist for around two weeks now so we had to make do with the assets we had at the time. We had a much clearer version of this story in mind but it required wizard and hero models as well as full screen illustrations.

So uh, it’s up the the player to exercise their imagination in this version. lol.

(Also the reason for the mishmash of art quality and styles present in the game)

Hehe

<3

Did you find a team already?

We had one artist on our team who had sadly had to leave our team today due to sudden personal matters.

We’re trying to reach out to artists right now and if you wanna collab with at least one other artist we can hopefully get there despite being at 0 artists right now lol.

We want to make a more small scope but polished game so I can at least say you’re in good hands if you wanna focus on quality over quantity <3

Hey, we’re a team of four right now. Our artist unfortunately had to leave our team today due to unforeseen family matters… So if you still haven’t found a team we’d really like to have you! We’re flexible and value working around our skillsets so we each get to work on what we want to for the jam.

We’re three kinda generalist hobby solo devs (so more programming inclined than art) together with a music guy.

However we’re working in Godot as a heads up depending on how much of dealbreaker that is for you. I personally really resonate with the sentiment of wanting to build a small very polished game over something larger though, so you’re in good hands there ;)

Hit me up on Discord @SQLPY if you’re interested

Nah actually really neat concept. I think with a bit more polish this could be a fun way to waste some time. Unfortunate control scheme though hahaha

OMG ctrl+d ending too! ヽ(^o^)丿

Got the ctrl+w ending (/◕ヮ◕)/

I would have loved to see more of a integrated usecase to holding the lanter tight, currently I would have preferred just to see more of the level at all times

Alright since I never got past the second moving platform, here are my thoughts: Being able to tap the direction you want to go speedy in a for a short window of time after leaving the wall would be a nice quality of life. Since that’s a core mechanic (I assume), adjust the level design to reward moving fast for long distances and make it fun to do so. Especially the beginning of the game should not feel this hard. A tad of Coyote time (of course!). Now the reason I did not play further xD WHY ARE THE PLATFORMS SLIPPERY?? Don’t have slippery platforms, please. That’s almost worse than platforms you have to move along with because the character is not moved along with them. Idk, sorry for not getting further lmao. I really enjoyed the character walk cycle and visual effect for moving fast though!

Neat little game! I would have loved for the gravity to be stronger as that would have made the inversions feel more snappy. Also I would suggest having fewer mechanics in play, since it’s a side-scroller, make the player auto-run. Then stick to the main mechanics which are gravity inversion, slide and breaking barriers. I’d also remove the slowdown from sliding as that came a bit in the way of my enjoyment of the movement. That one mode in geometry-dash but with an attack button and slides—essentially. As for the sound, the music was great! The art communicated the game well. Work a bit to simplify the cracked texture so it has no isolated empty pixels on the inside of the sprite.

Very nice entry! Here are my notes on what I’d spend time on. Sounds like you already have sounds in the works, so that’s great.

• I would tone down the post processing filter a tad by default or at least make it an option
• Since we’re always going up, I’d default the camera as leading up and center the player smoothly when falling.
• Level design funnily enough. For such a movement based game it should be even more tight. I’d make sure the main “intended” path is obvious. The speedrun routes felt distracting at times like they were tacked onto an existing level and were distracting me as a new player. Just as an example I would argue that the wall in level 1 is unnessecary noise in the level design.
• More particle effects, for instance on the bounce pads and level exit flags. Of course also sound effects here that match. I feel like the bounce pads could do well with some rainbow shimmer.

Movement notes, since that’s what we’re here for!

• Coyote time should be added.
• More player movement friction would probably improve the feel a lot. The jumping up walls is already quite chaotic (but fun!) so it kinda takes me out of the fun when I nail that and then hit a random spike because the player slid a bit too much.
• In tandem with this, I’d take a pixel or maaybe two off the side of spikes which are on the ground (fine to still have spikes which are ledge-adjacent kill you so that you are unable to stand on the outermost pixel of the ledge). I died a few times jumping over what should be very easy jumps because I pressed too late and it felt like there was slight input lag (probably not the case but it’s simply gameplay feel).

Enjoyed it a lot though I don’t think I finished it as I never saw a timer (which… there may be judging from other comments?). Got to the seemingly empty level with a platform above you and a bounce pad on either side and figured that’s the end?

Not sure if I should have pressed all those elevator buttons. Well, I stopped my venture on floor 35.

Funny premise. Some funny dialogue, maybe add more variation to the floors or some sort of sense of progression? Or the ability to unclick floors? Dunno

The shooting made it quite chaotic and due to the level design I ended up just ignoring the enemies to get out because that worked better than trying to clear them strategically. So dunno, I’d try to rework either the enemy behavouir or level design so that it supports your mechanics!

BRUH! This is hilarious. It has no right to go this hard. It’s like getting over it … but with checkpoints, and bees! And.. flowers! And the flowers and the bees, you know… so speaking of jokes, hard mode joke and initial narration got me chuckeling xD

So I guess this is to “Getting over it” like “The looker” is to “The witness”

I was about to write:“Though there is the issue of missing collision… which causes… well you can’t get the dash power-up :/ “Then I checked the main page, lo and behold I could have not wasted my time finding grill-skip speedrun tech because I wanted to try to get that power-up despite the missing collision. It’s possible though to get to grill from down below using only the first two pinks… barely.I have to say I kinda found that even with the broken collision, that section feels a bit too frustrating imo, I wanna hear more narration. Not miss a pink blob five times and ragequit xD

Oh and the music. Remixed classics, love to hear it!

Ah gotcha. I thought that warning meant I was doing something wrong… Welp, we live and we learn xD

I’m not seeing how you got to this game based on the Theme… But good on you! Feels very polished and that weird telephone weather effect scared the crap out of me—and then I gave up because that level was brutal lmao

Oh no! Aw man, yeah I really gotta find out how to port to MacOS at some point…

What I mean to say is: Go find a windows machine!.. or your local Linux server!