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Moomoo's Maple Mishap v3 (Third Demo)

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Moomoo's back to save the world in the new second chapter of Moomoo's Maple Mishap!


Moomoo's Maple Mishap v3 adds an entirely new second chapter to the game which takes place in a wintery wonderland. It features new worlds, mechanics, boss fights, and a continuation of the game's story, giving the game effectively twice as much content as the previous release. However, you must be vigilant, for evil is lurking just around the corner. A mysterious magic force threatens to destroy everything Moomoo holds dear using the power of the magical Maple Syrup!


> THE GAME FEATURES:

  • High speed platforming action where you go from rail grinding to wall jumping to rolling down steep hills in a matter of seconds
  • Satisfying and challenging level designs
  • A plethora of unique enemies and bosses to face
  • Beautifully rendered pixel artwork
  • A headbang worthy original soundtrack composed by me, ThisGreenDingo and Sam Minahan
  • Two chapters, both with original stories and illustrated cutscenes


> CONTROLS

  • Move - WASD or Arrow Keys
  • Jump - Z / Space (or press up)
  • Roll - X / Shift / Control (or press down)


> CREDITS

  • Practically everything: Alzter (me!!!!!)
  • Boss Animation: Alzter, ElPonchitoPio, and Lum Mozz
  • Music: Alzter, ThisGreenDingo, and Sam Minahan

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Nice game!

I liked the almost-puzzle-like "mirrorcow" areas, just an indicator where they start and stop might be nice, just for the visualization.

I did not like the end of the snowball-dropping penguin area, it was very hard to jump over some of the snowballs due to their size, loosing the third heart close to the end of that area. This kind of makes the game unsuitable for a max-life game, so you had to put infinite lives.

Same goes for some of the eye-instakill-speed areas. Some training would have been nice to learn that you can not only press down once but multiple times in order to speed up. I only found that out by accident. I guess this is where @FutureCopLGF below had the most problems, too, so it made him quit.

Besides these points, overall a nice game!

Nice to see another chapter of this! Certainly a promising sonic-esque platformer that you're building up here, and it seems to get a bit better each time I see it. I'll just give you some play-by-play impressions as I went through:

Level 1: Decent level, basic stuff, very easy, but good to start off and get used to everything. Does feel a bit silly at times though, like how you can be standing right next to a rock wall and hit roll to smash through it: you'd almost expect to have to charge up or build up momentum. Can get health back so easy I practically don't need to think about it. Again, though, fine to be forgiving starting out.

Level 1 Cow Boss: Good variety of attacks, but sometimes it felt really confusing to figure out when you're free to hit him. Had loads of times when I tried to attack him right when he finished an attack, but he'd suddenly transform into a new attack right when I hit him and I get damaged instead.

Level 2 Snow Stage: Nice to see so many new mechanics like rails and see-saws. Can't really get a handle on rails, end up losing speed and coming to a stop, slipping around, reversing, feels awkward. Some nice puzzle sections like where you need to use the seesaw to make a ramp to get up...oh, maybe not and I'm just supposed to wall jump? That's a bit of a letdown. I appreciate the increase in challenge but it just started to get really annoying with so many see-saws and snowballs rolling down: a real uphill battle, pardon the pun. Felt like I was playing those annoying Hoth levels on Super Empire Strikes Back, it's just too much and I end up wanting to facetank through it!

Level 2 Hat Boss: Decent, fun animations, certainly easier to determine when I can attack compared to the first boss, but he was a disappointing one-trick pony.

Level 3 Mirror Stage: What a cool level! Love the whole puzzle element of having to look in the mirror to see invincible platforms and hazards reflected. I wanted more of this! Though, sometimes it was a bit annoying to be speeding along and suddenly you're in a mirror and you hit some spikes in the mirror you couldn't see coming. Speed and these puzzles don't mix well at times I guess.

Level 3 Eye Lasers: Again, I appreciate the increase in difficulty and having a unique race challenge, but I literally cannot beat this. Not only do a lot of the courses feel like annoying trial-and-error, but some courses I do not physically know how to build up enough speed to get away. I feel like maybe I'm missing some sort of hidden tech I'm suppose to learn about how to accelerate or something: maybe this is why I was having trouble with the rails earlier on, maybe I'm missing something. I tried everything though: spamming roll, spamming jumps while rolling, jumping and hitting down into a roll, backtracking to build up a head of steam, nothing works!

Side note: if you jump straight up when next to a wall, I don't think you could wall-cling to it unless you physically move towards the wall. Since this game doesn't do that, the character can feel too clingy.

Alzter responds:

Hi again! Thank you for playing my game and giving honest feedback, I really appreciate it!!

Level 2 Snow Stage: I'm sorry to hear that the grind rails were frustrating and unintuitive to use. A friend suggested I make it so that the player can turn around whilst on them, maybe I will have to make that possible for them to feel less uncontrollable and awkward like you said.

As for the seesaws, yes, initially I wanted the player to use the seesaw like a ramp, but I couldn't implement the behaviour well enough for it to work on its own, but clearly that's no excuse and having the mechanic not implemented in the way you expected was a letdown, so I will see if I can improve it to work more like a ramp in future.

Level 3 Eye Lasers: Damn, that's a shame that it's not intuitive or clear how to gain speed to escape the eye lasers. I will need to add some way of teaching the player how to move rapidly before this section so that they don't get stuck here like you did. If you're still stuck, try mashing the roll button whilst you are rolling, it gives you a short boost in speed, and tell me if you can beat the section using that technique.

Can't get to all of your points just yet, but I will say, if you want to disable Moomoo clinging to walls automatically without having to push towards them, turn off Assist Mode in the settings.

EDIT 28/03/24: I have decided to make the Gazers (eye lasers) NOT immediately kill you. They now only deal 1 damage like other enemies. This means that you are not FORCED to know speed techniques (which are not yet well taught to the player) in order to make it to Chapter 2's boss.

you fixed the issue of the boss not having a telegraphed weakness

This is incredibly promising! My biggest issue would be that I think there should be either a proper screen-anchored UI (not one following the player) or the player's sprite itself should represent how much health they have - the latter would obviously be a lot more work, but it would keep players' eyes on the main character. The controls feel smooth and responsive, there's interesting ideas in the level design that I'd love to see elaborated, the sprites are pretty to look at and very well animated, and the music is nice (if a little more dour than I'd pick for the main theme of a mascot platformer). I'd love to see where your team takes this project!
Edit: This is only a suggestion, but I think there could be some interesting movement tech if you give the roll a bit of push to it *in midair only*. I think if you could wall jump, then roll back toward the wall to accomplish something (maybe to break through, or to get just a little inch of extra height) it would feel really satisfying to play

Alzter responds:

Thank you for the constructive review!! The health system has a funny origin - it came from when this game was going to be an online multiplayer game (think Mario VS Luigi) where you'd need to see the health of all players on screen. I haven't yet found an elegant way to represent the player's health, but an anchored health bar could work better indeed.

The dour music is a side-effect of my pessimistic cognitive distortions LOL. I wanted to convey a sense of peril in some of the more dangerous environments in the game. I thought the title theme was pretty happy sounding, though.

Rolling already increases your horizontal speed in air, just not by a lot. Are you suggesting that I increase it so that you can scale walls higher? Sounds interesting.

Thanks for the review, and for playing my game!! You clearly put a lot of care into this :D

lovely

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Jan 4, 2024
3:21 AM EST
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