Cool game! Good work! )

Seen as your just starting with gamedev (I presume) I applaud you for taking in a Game Jam on your own. I hope you learned a lot from it. The way the shield was implemented is something I'm sure I wouldn't have been able to do a year or so ago and it's actually a really novel concept with a lot of potential.

While the game has music and sound effects, let's just say - they didn't exactly fit? When I'm thinking of trying to escape a dark and desolate cave heavy rock isn't exactly the first search result that returns to my mind. The jumping sounds were too human as well (a simple "boing" would have sufficed).
However! Your game still at least HAS both of those things and they weren't obnoxious so you're already ahead of around 40% of all games in the sound department.

I found a glitch where if the player isn't able to use his shield (hugging a wall for example) the game queues the action until I can throw it. Ladders were a bit shoddy I found, if you want to implement
ladders I recommend you reduce the players horizontal force (or completely lock it) as they feel a bit floaty.

Lastly I found the game painfully difficult. You need to keep in mind that the person playing your game didn't build it from the ground up. I recommend you get someone to playtest your game to see how they react to different situations.

Overall, don't be down on yourself, as long as you tried your hardest and you were proud at the end it all went to good. My first LD Compo was my first serious game, I don't recommend you look :D. I really did enjoy the shield mechanic, if you want to keep that idea for a later project I recommend you do!

I liked the silly vocal noises :) Controls need a bit of tweaking. When you are next to a wall you can't throw the shield, it feels unresponsive when that happens.

thanks for the feedback so far, peeps. Yep, the 'can't throw shield while hugging wall' thing is really annoying, & is the result of a last minute hacky fix when I discovered that you could actually throw the shield _inside_ the wall, & it would bounce around the inner bounds of the wall and never escape it. In the cold light of day it's not a good fix as it's really counter-intuitive to step back from the wall before you throw - also it's awkward if you're standing on a one-block platform. It wouldn't be too hard to fix but I'm letting it stand in the spirit of reflecting my 72 hours work.

And yes @call-me-nutty, it is early days with gamedev. Started teaching myself to code about 2 years back. I really appreciate all that quality feedback. =) I learned LOTS this weekend (first time using tilemaps, first time using an event system, first thing I made using any animation at all, & first time using a state machine for movement, to list a few) and it was super fun to take the concept from page to screen. I'll be back and I'll be better =)

@karmafarm Oh god animations. Animations with Unity is pure nightmare fuel, good luck with that. But it's good to see that you learnt you a lot and had some fun too! It only goes up from here.

@karmafarm Also, (sorry for the double post), if you want to fix the shield throw bug I recommend you look into Raycasting. Simply cast a ray and check if the shield will collide with any wall upon throwing.

Raycasting? Ohhhhhh. That makes SO MUCH SENSE. Added to the learning list =)

I like the game, especially the sound effects. The controls are a little hard to reach, so maybe it could be easier if you were to make the right hand do the sheild throwing? Other than that, I think the game is fun.

@joshuc avoiding the Windows key adds another layer of depth to the gameplay ;) point taken though, & thanks for playing!

nice entry
the character seemed a little bit on the heavy side, wich could make sens since he is armored, but dosen't quite feel very satisfying.

Good job tho 👍

The voice :laughing: it is hilarious! I loved playing it.

Exclamations during jumps are very funny. It's cool that your projectile can't only help but and cut the path to your rescue.

Interesting gameplay and mechanics, but maybe decrease the amount of time the shield has to fly around. Maybe another level would have been a lot better, but I understand why it's just one. Perhaps increase the lava speed to make the game more tense to play.

OMG, those sounds are E P I C !

The controls for this are really awkward, I'm not sure if it's just something wrong on my end but it felt very unresponsive to play (there seemed to be a delay between me pressing the jump button and my character moving as an example). I found it a little frustrating that I couldn't use my shield when I was too close to the wall. The music is catchy and goes well, and the graphics aren't bad. You have an interesting idea for a platformer here that I would like to see you continue to develop and take further, I think it's got a lot of potential.

looks kinda interesting. the lava approaches too fast and games tend to be short.

@nicso I agree actually. Physics based movement takes a LOT of tweaking to get it right, I discovered!

@wetbox Heh, yeah, that was very much part of the plan. I needed to find a way to let the player get out of dead-end situations though... just didn't find one during the timeframe. As it is it's funny but kind of unfair lol. =)

I like the fact that there are several different routes that you can take in order to get to the end :slight_smile:
The shield concept is original ! I was surprised when I saw that the shield can bounce not only one time but can smash many walls in one throw ^^. A nice mechanic that can be improved, good job !

@tero-pulkkinen yeah... one of the things I noticed in my postmortem was that the soundtrack is actually shorter than the maximum game length, the lava reaches the exit before the track finishes playing!

That's the thing I love about LD and game jams in general though... permission to fail. SO important for learning & creating.

@historymaker118 yep- lot of work needed on control. I spent about 12 hours wrestling with a spaghettified mess of conditional logic before I realised what I needed was a state machine. Next time I'll go straight for the state machine and spend 11 more hours tweaking and fixing. Thanks for playing though =)

@karmafarm in fact i would suggest taking a look at the sebastien lague (youtube) 2d platformer controller rather than the brackey's one. I love brackey but the one sebastien made is soooo perfect.

Oh I loved the game! Shield mechanics are original, vocals are fun. Great job :)

@nicso yeah- I realised several hours in to hacking on the Brackeys script that it wasn't really very scalable, & the use of conditional logic was probably to keep it simple from a teaching point of view, rather than being the 'right way' to implement it. I ended up using an enum / switch; next time I want to reify my state logic and go properly extensible. I'll check out the Sebastien Lague channel- thanks for the tip!

hi @karmafarm.

For an one self-learning person team it's quite a nice entry ^^
This game would need some generated levels :p but it can be hard to make !

Hey its a nice puzzle game, and the timing makes it sooooo difficult to overcome. One comment I would have is to make it possible to shoot when I stand next to the wall, because right now if I am facing a wall and I want to shoot to that direction, it is impossible. A suggestion for further improvement on the post-jam version is to have the preview trajectory of the thing when you shoot it out, so its easier for players to pre-calculate where and when they need to shoot. Very promising entry!

thanks @nam-nguyen, really appreciate the feedback. =) I'm doing some iterating on this project I reckon!

The shield mechanic is super interesting, it has a Broforce feel and makes the exploration way more fun. I just wish the jump could be a bit higher and the shield didn't knock you back that much, because the game is quite difficult as is. Oh, nice touch with the voices of the knight :)