.PERIOD by Olivier Millochau

You are PERIOD, COMMA is your girlfriend
You and COMMA want to escape.
Escape from what ? How ?
You will see in this TEXT BASED PLATFORMER !
You will use letters and words to unlock new abilities !

Tips :
To restart a level quickly you can go to the pause menu (ESC key) and type R to restart :smile:
Changelog :
1.6 : change a bug where the player could cheat the game
1.5 : fixed some typos
1.4 : ... at this point I'm crumbling under pressure
1.3 : more bug-hunting
1.2 : fixed a bug where the last level would not load
1.1 : fixed a bug where the player was stuck in the first level
Ratings
| Overall | 139th | 3.75⭐ | 32🧑⚖️ |
| Fun | 236th | 3.467⭐ | 32🧑⚖️ |
| Innovation | 39th | 4.117⭐ | 32🧑⚖️ |
| Theme | 129th | 4.017⭐ | 32🧑⚖️ |
| Graphics | 288th | 3.383⭐ | 32🧑⚖️ |
| Audio | 280th | 3.052⭐ | 31🧑⚖️ |
| Humor | 65th | 3.696⭐ | 30🧑⚖️ |
| Mood | 32th | 3.907⭐ | 29🧑⚖️ |
| Given | 32🗳️ | 34🗨️ |
I found a bug: you can type any number to gain abilities, even if you don't have that number (for exemple `dash100`). This makes the game much less challenging.
I kinda don't like that you can fail or introduce other commmands with the letters. An example of this is when you get "jump2" you can just type "jump" and be left with a 2 and can't pass through the wall.
I imagine that is a gameplay mechanic, but you just have to let you die to restart the entire level.
@ccglp Thank for the review ! Actually it was planned to handle that case in the tutorials but time came too short ...
Good job!
https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/41/hype-time
Thanks for your review !
I was expecting that at some point in the game you'd have the letters jumbled and force the player to unscramble them to get what they need. The closest I saw to this was when "jump 3 dash 4" could be written as "jump 43 dash". Having everything appear more or less in order in the level did communicate what you wanted the player to do, but also removed part of the challenge.
The writing in the game wasn't really its strong point. The relationship with comma felt a bit awkward and unnatural. It didn't hurt my enjoyment of the game, but it's worth mentioning.
I really liked that many levels had multiple routes and backup letters lying around. It's rare to see a platformer with branching paths in a LD entry.
All in all, I'm impressed, and I really enjoyed myself. I wish I could see the full ending, but I got enough out of the game without it.
Very nice game and concept. There is no need of more graphics than that, and the sounds of typing and jumping do the job very well. Good work!
Sound design is pretty nice too!
Also, I love your game idea! Instead of giving player certain power to use, it let players think which power they should use.
It's a clever way to make a platform game different!
Perhaps there should have been a "checkpoint" command? I found myself doing a lot of the stuff over. But nonetheless it's still a great game!
Never come to my mind to do that while coding the game, that could be a great improvment.
Thank you for your review
A great entry.
We only felt that it maybe lacked checkpoints to avoid frustration of redoing certain things.
Other than that, great game and experience!
We spent quite some time trying to find a third "out of the box solution" ending. We had loads of innovative ideas and eventually even looked into the sourcecode, to see if there was one. - would have been the icing on the cake.
@Markus That's so heartwarming to hear ! Sorry to disapoint you ...
If I knew some people would go this far, I would have surely hid a worthy reward !
I would have love to have the time to hide little easter eggs like that !