Awfully twitchy controls,but level design is pretty good.
Author Comments
One Autumn day, Green Spider was out hunting around the family tree, when suddenly he realized he had wandered too far. Oh no! Use Green Spider's special abilities to knock down cobwebs and climb walls to help him find his way home!
Programmed at WPI in 2011.
was this made with game maker the character looks similar the graphics still look cool
LittleBlueAnt responds:
Nope. It was made in a Javascript engine called perlenspiel.
You can check it out at perlenspiel.org
Like a piano, it's pretty easy to pick up, but difficult to master ;)
Very interesting. Just wish the control wasn't so jerky.
Positives:
-Level design wise, this is fairly solid - the puzzles are mostly clever, and I enjoy the ceiling hanging mechanic.
-I like the sound effects - the scale going up and down is charming.
Negatives:
-I am a big believer in gameplay over graphics, and I'll happily play a full game as nothing but a square on a simple background, but I feel like this is the point at which graphics begin to affect gameplay. The minimalism is fun, but the square's movement effects makes timing jumps rather frustrating. This may be a limit of the Perlenspiel engine, but if so I'd consider trying to switch to something with a bit more versatility.
-I'm not sure what this "title text" I see referenced in a review below is, but if it's supposed to be in there, I'm not seeing it. This may be a browser issue - I'm running Comodo IceDragon, which is for all intents and purposes Firefox 26.0.
As an experiment in minimalism, this game has quite a lot of charm - unfortunately, aside from showing how little is really required for something to still work as a game, there's not a lot here. It's a fun enough playthrough, but it needs more of a hook. Still, for what it's meant to be, it's pretty good. 3.5/5, and I look forward to seeing projects from you in the future.
LittleBlueAnt responds:
Hey! Thanks for taking the time to write a solid critique of the game :3
The title text people are referring to is some text from the game I removed due to poor writing quality. The engine also has been recently updated by its creator and it seems some of the text is now cut off. I decided the easiest solution was to just delete it from the html file :P
The perlenspiel engine is a weird beast. Brian Moriarty intended it to be a super minimalist engine designed to push students to their limits as game designers. Perlenspiel's only method of animation is turning giant "pixels" on a grid (16x16 in this case) on and off. My project partner personally thought I was crazy for trying to make a platformer in perlenspiel, but I decided to do it anyways :P
I've thought of switching to a new engine for the sequel, but after giving it some thought, I rather enjoy pushing the limits of the perlenspiel engine. It's comparable to programming for retro systems like the Atari 2600 I guess. There's something fun about taking such a minimalist system and running with it in this way.
this game is a 2-bit pixel game
LittleBlueAnt responds:
And this effects the quality of my gameplay how exactly?
Gameplay over graphics man :P
(And there's no such thing as a "2-bit" game system now, or ever)