A solid entry. I feel the game's death penalty was just a little too punishing. It felt like slow super meat boy, only If I fell I had to watch a slow death. Areas like the balloon bonus round really showed the potential, but the majority of the game was just shy of that.
Still, good contender for some awards.

I didn't see the reason for every jump needing to be a double jump, but other than that it was a fun play, and I loved the music.

fantastic game, really fun and I loved the art! very stylish :). I got stuck on level 14 tho, after 6 tries I ended up giving up, sorry :/. There seems to be a jump which requires a leap of faith and missing it is instakill. At first I was really pleased to see the water was not instant death, and you could recover- however more and more in the later levels it does become instant death. I love that you even coded a bonus level!

Solid game. I was having some slowdowns sometimes which made me fall from the moving ledges. Besides that, awesome music and graphics.

Great little platformer. Wonderful art, nice soundtrack, fun gameplay!

Really mature game. This should get some postcompo improvement love.

A polished hardcore platformer, just my type. LOVED the pixels and the music. Very well done !

Sweet music, awesome pixelart. <3

Lovely pixelart and music ! Solid gameplay and nice level design too, interesting assets combination and presentation ("deceptively easy" ? eh :p) albeit quite hard sometimes (damn level 8) but that's the oldschool charm :)

Plus, kudos for managing to pull everything off on your own in only 48h !

I love the level names. So far this is the most humerous entry I have played.

Controls were a bit unforgiving and I was often annoyed by the inability to jump onto a platform from directly below it. Just didn't feel right.

Water rising is a nice idea, makes for some nice challenges if you want to collect everything.

Enjoyed the music and art.

I liked the theme and the audio, but the gameplay mechanics could be a little more balanced. I had a lot of fun escaping the water, though :)

Cute. Pretty pictures and rather good sound. Like bmfs, I had issues on level 7 where the game stuttered for a moment and I just fell right through a vertical elevator. Guessing that you have some kind of variation timestep thing going? I'd recommend fixed timesteps to avoid such issues, and make things easier in general.

The jumping was a bit uncomfortable sometimes, maybe because of a too rapid crest in the arc. Stumbling with the buttons a moment will ruin a critical jump where you need all the height you can get. Should be more forgiving if there's a longer hover phase before falling again.

Actually, trying it again now I think it's more to do with the input keys used. It's very hard to double-tap up while at the same time tapping left or right to adjust your sideways movement. Jumping on Z should be more smooth since you will use both hands.

Another issue I found is that leaving the mouse pointer outside the applet will cause strange issues. Particularly when starting a level. I got a situation where I only saw single pixels spread out in a grid since the diamond wipe hadn't completed.

*Thank you* all for the precious feedback. The compliments make me feel warm and fuzzy =)

@Andrew
Valid point. I guess I implemented double jump because I like providing players with more possibilities to get immediate feedback following input. I should have made a better use of it in the level design and maybe save it for the later levels.

@RichMakeGame
Don't worry, there were only 15 of them (+ the ending screen) so you did not miss much. I love Stratus by the way !

@DrPetter
I wholeheartedly agree with your analysis of the jumping mechanic problem, thanks a lot for helping me putting words on it.
The collision bugs are much more fun than a timestep problem, the issue is that the moving platforms were coded using a display hack of my framework, and they're not actually moving in the game's world. This is what lead to issues for collision detection with them. Sorry about that.
The black screen bug can be worked around by waving your mouse over the applet. It is triggered when you move your mouse out of the game during a level intro and then press a key to skip it. It has been fixed in the post-compo version though.

Nice platformer, the art is good as it gets the contrast right. A little chaotic map design and lacks variety though. The controls/movement is a bit too fast (for me). Every move a double jump could have been short/long press and single jump.

Excellent audio and nice art, too. It felt very polished and I enjoyed playing through it.

I HATE being forced to press Up to jump, though. I would have loved to see it also mapped to spacebar or something like that. I don't understand why so many games insist on using that control scheme when you could just have it doublemapped.

I found it a bit hard, but probably because I'm bad at platformers. I found once I was in the water, I was pretty much dead anyway so it seemed useless to struggle (unless that's what you were going for).

All in all, an excellent entry!

Solid, fun, and functional. A little bit frustrating with the jumping at times, when I knew where I needed to go but didn't quite have the distance. Still, a good solid entry and I'd love to see it fleshed out more

Awesome game! I've had much fun while playing (which sometimes felt like torture due to slow respawn time... :P ) and your game really fits the theme to perfection. This is a good platformer you(ve got there, with a balloon cuz that's cool, nice graphics and really good music ! I liked the comments in each level (there were a lot of them btw) title screen. Maybe you should have written progress report during the compo rather than that huge postmortem, but that's nothing to worry about ! Next time, you might want to post a timelapse to add awesomeness.

To sum that up: outstanding entry !

The jump physic is too nervous for my taste and I also get some glitches with the elevator ( falling through it ).
Aside of this, The graphism are nice and the music tune is perfect. I liked the title screen, and the simple but efficient level name transition. Great overall !

Really really solid platformer. Kind of straight ahead but it is fun to play LD games that hold together well and feel complete. Great art, fun concept, nice retro music. Good (IMO) difficulty curve. The biggest problems were that some of the levels seemed a bit similar (even different backgrounds might have helped), there was a bug about falling through platforms, and finally, it might have been nice to use a different image for the falling platforms. Otherwise you just end up dying to figure out which ones fall before completing the level. But overall great job! Definitely keep improving it!

Best game I've seen so far. Really polished. Great level design. Only complaint: falling of the moving ledges for no reason. Apart from that, the game is perfect! More levels please :P

Solid platformer!

Yeah nice and solid this game. Lots of work gone into your 48 hours here. I'd like to see this one developed - I especially liked the risk-reward of the hearts and collectables. Do I jump and get a life, for the risk of swimming back up here...

Great. Should definitely be developed further.

Solid platformer with very nice pixelart and good music. Overabusing double jump kinda annoyed me and I wish there was a bit more then just jumping and jumping.
But definitely one of the better ones.

interesting little platformer. the graphics and audio make up for the somewhat frustrating jumps and quick and certain death (thats probably just me though). not bad.

Polished entry :-)

Wow! Love love love the pixel art and the music. Really stylish, and very polished. I felt like I was doublejumping for every single jump, which was a little odd - would perhaps be better if jump height was dependent on how long you hold down jump for, perhaps (Mario style). Otherwise, really impressive.

Awesome entry. It's hard to write anything more - there are quite a few levels, graphics are really nice, audio is fine too. Game is pretty unforgiving, but I don't really mind: it's fun to play anyway. Great work!