This is a well-polished turd. Seriously; that's what it felt like to me.
1.) For starters; the intro is ~WAY~ too long. As a rule of thumb; either develop backstory over time or show it; a bunch of blocks of text in the early game are not something ~ANY~ player wants to see. It's a barrier to playing the game. People come to your game to play it, not read a novella explaining the backstory.
2.) The animation on the main character is smooth. But none of the other sprites are at anywhere near the same quality level and even on him, you could stand to half the resolution. (Going smaller makes for more exact pixel art and a retro feel; atm, you have an MSPAINT feel). Some of the enemies plain look like you took sprites from other things and kind of frankensteined them together.
3.) Is there any indication of when the 'suicider' is going to jump? ...like at all?
Overall it seems like you spent a lot of time on backstory and on (attempting) art; without managing good art. While mechanics and level design fell quite flat. I tried to start to pick at a few things, but it's like picking at the middle scab on a gaping wound.
Well some the art is made in paint and temporary, it's not highly polished, it was made in a few weeks by one guy. The intro can be skipped. I didn't want you to know when she would jump because i thought that wouldn't make any sense.
I didn't spend loads of time on back story. I thought it would amuse some people, it can be easily skipped. There is only lots of text in 1 level for those who want to read it, or you can just run past it, which is why i did it like that.
Complaining about an entirely skippable intro is ridiculous.
It's just a simple prototype.
I like the main characters look, others do to, i don't want to half his resolution, it's obviously not meant to look like a small 8 bit character
If you don't like it, fine. Critiscm is useful. But you don't need to be a jerk about it.
I did enjoy having a go on this I think there are a few areas for further development but I kind of felt like I was playing an enlarged app, maybe this would lend itself pretty well to a mobile game. I think the overall concept might lend itself to a 3D adaptation for a console perhaps? There are definitely plenty of much worse games out there and I found this more enjoyable then plenty of games i have tried in the past.
I like the idea of gaining speed and height but i did find some levels a bit tricky to navigate, perhaps the map could be adapted slightly to give a clue to more difficult obstacles but this is just as I am an impatient gamer and a relative novice to online games, consoles are more my thing rather than PC/online games but as far as an online game goes I think this could develop into something quite enjoyable hence my 5 stars.
P.S. I am so stuck on I think the 5th world with the thick blue platforms in the sky hence my thoughts on the additional detail in the map.
Lets start with the first and simplest thing. NO mute button. The music is good but on a 30 second loop it gets irritatin REALLY fast.
As mentioned before, that long LONG intro, really annoying.
I dont know if you've tried this game on anything other then chrome, but playing on firefox, there is ZERO way for me to get to the falling girl, on the training level. it says 'just run' but I always arrive a second after she gots splat.
Another issue, is you can actually JUMP over the trigger to cause her to jump in the tutorial, so I got to the building ready to save her... yet she just stood up there, refusing to come down.
When people can't even get past the Tutorial, things are bad. A suggestion, use an input OTHER then move to skip past stuff people need to read... like, I dont know, enter that was used for the text before.
Interesting idea but I just can't give the game better when its unplayable.
I have added a mute button! Just hit the [S] key whenever you want the sound off!
Sorry as I mentioned cannot guarantee it's proper function in anything other than Chrome at this time, which many other game jam competitors have also said. Anyone can download and use Chrome so it was not my main concern at this early stage. But I will work on this.
As for the tutorial, I fixed that bug before, so that is very odd, I shall try and fix that immediately.
You don't like the music WOW that is absurd!? It most certainly isn't a 30 second loop and if you get into the game there is 2 more fantastic tracks too!
If you don't like it then surely you can just mute it yourself? I will work on having sound settings in the future though. The intro can be skipped. I will work on making the beginning more easy to skip.
Press SPACE to skip initial intro, and then just keep pressing enter to get through the story quickly!
I'm going to bring some balance into these obvious sock-puppet reviews with my own opinions. (Note that every review before this one is from an account made within the last week)
The unskippable several minute introduction cutscene and wall-of-text tutorial levels make this game incredibly inaccessible and hard to enjoy. To add to that, if you don't read the tutorial fast enough, the "poor suicidal princess" jumps and forces you to redo the tutorial level multiple times. I'd like to also add that the princess offers no emotional value to the story, as every single level I played ended with me saving some copy and pasted woman falling from a building of her own volition.
By level 5, the game has offered me nothing interesting but some poorly designed levels that take less than a minute to complete. The mechanic of jumping and falling could have been better explored with more interesting level design, but the levels this game offers are incredibly lazily built. Even so, the mechanic of jumping repeatedly to jump higher is simply tedious, not fun.
Let me clear one of your concerns up straight away, you can skip the intro with a simple slap of the space bar or start button. Which it does say at the beginning but perhaps you missed it as it is subtle.
You may have found it very easy to get to the end, this makes the game accessible even if the tutorials don't do so well to do that. But I bet you didn't find it easy to get 3 stars on every level, if you do you may realise the level design is far from unthoughtful and lazy....
You are entitled to your opinion. Although there's no need to be this harsh, and I'd say it borderline goes against the Newgrounds code of conduct.
That said, the game hasn't been in development very long, and it definitely needs work I agree, I can appreciate what you are saying about the long introduction and awkward tutorial, that definitely needs some work for sure. I just wanted to make sure first time players didn't miss the intro and was trying to set the scene in an amusing and yet dramatic way.
The save function was suppose to let you skip this completely in future play throughs, but that is not functioning correctly just yet.
I was never going for strong emotional value, so no surprises there. If anything it was just meant to be quite a funny way to get some good fun gameplay, nothing emotional intended.
As for the reviews, you are completely right in what you said, but I don't think my friends wanting to support me with my new game is a bad thing, so they set up accounts to do that, and they are still valuable, valid and truthful opinions.
If you didn't enjoy it, that's fine, I'd like to believe you perhaps missed the point of the mechanics, but not everyone can enjoy it. To say it has poorly designed levels is really quite harsh, but they were designed around the mechanics which, if you don't appreciate them will seem not so good I suppose.
I didn't want to use the standard platform mechanics so it can seem a bit weird at first.
To call it lazy, is just plain wrong.
The mechanic of jumping higher can appear annoying, but there is a trade off factor between charging your run and jump, so you can't simply keep pressing jump and do well in all the levels, it is quite thought out, I assure you, I spent time designing and testing the levels repeatedly to make sure they suited the new mechanics and offered a balanced challenge.
Another thing to note about the intro, is that for many people that was one of the selling factors of the game, but it should be more obvious how to skip if you want to.
As for the repeated woman, not only did I have a lack of time, but how many classic games have the same princess at the end of each level!? Super Mario, Super Meat Boy. I don't see how this point is negative in the slightest!
To wrap up.
Not every review before yours is from someone signing up in the last week, the one before yours is from the owner of this very website and he has given me 5 stars.........................
Please be a bit more constructive with your criticisms in the future!
Great concept and great music! I think this is the first time I ever played a web game using the Xbox controller hooked up to my PC. The future is bright!
