Soul Exchange by Dennis Jeong
Play the game (web)

A body-swapping platformer! Sell some souls to the grim reaper to unlock ultimate power.
Controls, if you forget:
WASD to move
LSHIFT to sprint
SPACE to jump (if able)
P to swap (when available)
Follow us on Twitter!
| HTML5 (web) | https://wonch.itch.io/soul-exchange |
| Original URL | https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/44/soul-exchange |
Ratings
| Given | 27🗳️ | 18🗨️ |
I wanted to jump but I couldn't like a real spyder! 🕷🕷🕷 I liked the artstyle!
Goodjob!
Fixed:
Crashes in the ending
Crashes when loading a level
Crashes when playing audio
Wrong music playing on certain levels
I would seriously consider changing your form change button to something OTHER THAN P.
Great concept, really felt like a spider. The exchange of characters was very good. The level design was well built.
Please, rate my game and leave some feedback too =]
https://kaish.itch.io/jukebox
@youbestrong , we had two different animals we had planned:
An armadillo that could roll through fire
A gorilla that could pick up and throw blocks
Ultimately, a lot of our time went into making sure the spider worked just right! If I had known it would take this much work, I would maybe have reconsidered making a spider :p
Something that we're still not sure if it was the correct decision or not was the decision to make the spider keep moving in a circle if you held the same direction. I think this is what @douglima and @kritas meant when they said the spider movement was "weird/counterintuitive", am I right?
```
____________
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
____X______
```
For example, let's say the spider is on the floor (X in the above diagram), and you hold right. Currently, when you hit the wall (position Y in the below diagram), and continue to hold right, we'll translate that input into going up. And then, when you hit the ceiling (position Z in the below diagram), we attach you to the ceiling and then translate your rightward input into a leftward movement, allowing you to use one key to travel clockwise around the entire loop. While this is nice, when you let go, now pressing right will send you right, which can be disorienting.
```
________Z__
| |
| |
| |
| Y
| |
____X_->____
```
In other words, when the spider is at position Y in the above diagram, what keys should you be able to press to go up / down?
I think because our level design relied so much on the movable platforms, which are small rectangles that you can go around, the input smoothing system helped people navigate those platforms? But I would love to hear everyone's thoughts on the tradeoffs we made!
The "input smoothing" for the spider worked fine for me once I figured it out, but still didn't feel like entirely natural, especially when I needed to go from one floating block to the next; it took a few tries to figure out I needed to stop holding right, then press it again to execute that maneuver. I think having the wall-to-wall maneuver triggered by a different button (maybe space? e.g. let go to grab on) would have helped there, because otherwise the input smoothing did feel useful.
One other minor point is that the hit boxes on the thorns felt just a *tad* large to me. There were several times, particularly on the last stage, where I thought I was landing a jump safely but went splat. For "thorny" sprites with a lot of transparent pixels around the edges, I think it is helpful to shave down the hit box a bit to account for the visual perception that the entity is "smaller" than the actual top-left-most/bottom-right-most pixels might suggest. (The piranha plants in SMB1 are kind of an extreme case of this.)
The game design overall was super clever, and it was clear that this mechanic could be taken far. This was a really impressive game jam entry and I'd be very interested to see it expanded into something bigger, with more souls!
I only have two minor pieces of feedback I could think of from playing it through. The first is the exact issue @dennis-jeong described in his response. I'm afraid I don't have a great solution to it, but it did feel a little wonky sometimes when transitioning from one side to another and then trying to go back. The second was that while the arrows guiding you were a great idea to serve as a tutorial in a bite-sized jam entry, as you continue to develop it I think the level design itself should nudge the players in the right direction without explicitly telling them. Might add a bit more of a fun puzzle element to it, especially with some of the other character ideas you mentioned.
Again, super minor details that didn't detract from the overall experience and how fun it felt to land a perfect double-jump-to-transform-to-stick maneuver. Great work!
The level design is solid as well, with checkpoints well placed, congrats. Maybe having arrows everywhere to tell you where to go is a bit overkill, but for a short game that works.
One more thing : I could play half of the game with a pad (thanks to Unity's default input mapping), but the switch on P didn't have a gamepad mapping, so I had to switch to keyboard! No big deal, but that's a detail that can be cool to think about on your next jam!
Congrats again!