What is the name of the song?
Author Comments
Middleland is a small platformer. it is heavily story based. It's our first game, so don't go too bad on us! But if you have any criticism or feedback, we're all ears!
You don't have to tell us about the jump problem: you drop faster then you jump. I tried (and failed) to fix it. Future games will be better!
Listen to the soundtrack here! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dvdDpiOBeqY
Platform def needed that fix and some quality of life (1 I can think of is when you die you can show the message first and give the option to skip to retry)
amazing
I really liked the game, nice short story that didn't take too long to get interested in, the only real problem was the falling too fast thing but it was an already known problem that couldn't seem to be fixed so I won't take away anything for that
I'd like to start this review by congratulating you for starting your game development journey. Things may be tough, especially right at the start, but if you keep going, you can be one of the greats one day. I feel a lot of really good intentions coming from this game, so keep working on improving yourself.
With that being said, now I need to lay some criticism that will hopefully be helpful.
The jump is way too floaty, and the speed at which we fall off platforms seems to be random or something. Sometimes we fall off a platform at mach speed, and sometimes very slowly. You may need to check if the game is failing to reset the falling speed when the character lands. The speed does seem to reset when we jump, though.
If you need help getting the platformer mechanics right, you could check out some tutorials on how to make platfromers for your engine. These tutorials exist for all engines from Game Maker to Flixel, Construct, Godot and even RPG Maker MV.
Also, the level design is rather uninteresting. All we do is jump on samey platforms over and over, no different obstacles and no variety. Also, there are some blind jumps (i.e. jumps where we don't really know where we're supposed to land) and that's never good (except in that part where the story tells us to drop down. That one's okay since the game indicates where you need to go).
Also, the story of the game is nice. It made me curious to know what was going to happen next. However, I didn't understand the ending.
As a final word, I'd like to say that your intentions and your heart are in the right place. Keep going, don't let harsh people discourage you, and you'll be good one day. I'd say the top priority right now would be fixing the platforming. I'll be following you.
EkaGriffin responds:
Hello! Thank you for being truthful! I am aware of all the above, the falling speed when jumping is different from the one while falling, it was a kink I was maybe to tired or just burned out to fix. I did try tho.
I checked out pleeenty of tutorials! Now I’m working out how a rpg works and we’ll try that the next time! We’re just a clueless team of 14 year olds trying to make sense of game dev.
I went for a very boring level design indeed, but we were aiming to submit at a weekly game jam so we had to move very fast. We were a few days late but we did all right.
As for the ending: the pc has two friends: let’s call them person A and B. Person A is male and B female. Both the pc and B are dead at the moment of the game, that’s why they were represented by shadows in the cutscene.
Now. In order to die/move on the pc had to make peace with the friend he unrightfully blamed for B’s death. After that, B was waiting for him and they both moved on to the afterlife.
It might be confusing but I didn’t want to make the Pc and B seem like they were ghosts at the moments of the cutscene.
The difference between the ghosts are made using hairstyles.
Now I know I messed up on some points but again this wasn’t the biggest/most serious project. We all put hella lot of work into it but it just had ‘ehhh’ areas, I’m not saying that would be false.
Again thank you a lot for all the feedback and criticism.
-Anastasia