Feel Good!

Awesome and polished 2D platformer that suits the theme well. Loved the wall jumping!

The floaty camera took some getting used to, but this is a great game otherwise.

Very juicy, nice bleepy sounds. I found the wall-jumping controls a bit weird somehow, but that may just be my lack of experience with this type of game.

Suggested alternate names:

* Indiana Jones and the Curse of the Initial Coin Offering
* $$$$$$

The graphics are gorgeous, and the mechanics are interesting to play with; always a trade-off of an easier path vs a long-term loss.

The floaty camera has been mentioned already and does take some getting used to, I think the game would've been better with a camera that only moves when the player does. The controls themselves are solid, but because of the camera they feel heavy at first.

I only got as far as the 3 tiny platforms with vertical lasers along the floor. Couple reasons I had to stop there. The checkpoints are a bit too far apart, for one, so I couldn't get back into trying that area without a fair bit of repeating what I'd already done. The laser hitboxes are also much wider than the graphics indicate. The damage area seems to cover the entire tile, not just the thin band of the graphics. So half the time I'd lose health and get knocked off the platform without actually being in the path of the laser. The floaty camera also made it a bit hard to land on the tiny platforms when I wasn't being lasered. Finally, I'd always try to get on the first small platform from where the lasers dropped me down to, and the platform was just a bit too high.

I'm disappointed I can only review the first area of the game, but try as I might I can't get through to see the rest. What I've played looks great, feels alright, and was pretty fun to play. Thanks for the game.

One of the best games I played this LD! Walljumping platformers are always nice. I didn't really mind the camera. I liked the combined gold/health bar mechanic.

Wow this goes right up there to top 3 for me this LD!
The mechanic was incredibly smart and fun to interact with.
However, when you die, you keep your money, but it also respawns, so it is possible to respawn with no way to avoid enough coins to survive (and it gets progressively worse).

Movement was a bit slippery but other than that, extremely well done! Best of luck

Really enjoyed this game, ignorant at first of the fate waiting for me and collecting every coin I could find. After that I knew better and it was even more interesting. I had some trouble with the wall jump, especially when lasers are shooting at me and interrupting my jump. It could also be interesting to have a use for the gold, or a alternate super hard way to complete the game while collecting every coin. But the game was fun, I liked the level and the message at the end. I wonder what it say when you collect 0 coins.

It's so satisfying picking up coins! :laughing:

Congratulations on a decade of participating in Ludum Dare — that's almost as long as Ludum Dare has been around. I believe I started around 2012 so I've only participating for a Quinquennium (5 yrs — yes, it's a word!).

Really fun and challenging platformer, it's nice to see a game that turns a general collectable item into a hazard itself. Would be nice if there was some music but it's understandable if there wasn't any time considering the 48-hour limit. Great work nonetheless!

Nice graphics, good sound, great controls (except wall jump). Great job, I really enjoyed playing it.

Wow! Great platformer, the controls are excellent. Hp and Gold trade off is a really nice concept!

Nice game it is ridicolous what people can do in such a short amount of time. The controls I did not like as much as the rest of the people here, but overall a great game

I really enjoyed this game, good in every aspect. Good job!

Great mechanic and I love that your dude becomes more gold as you collect it. Great job! Sound effects are very fitting for the game too!

Congratulations! This is a really well-thought game. The trade-off between money and HP is genius! I think this is my favorite Pico-8 game so far (not only in this jam, but in general!).

This is really good; one of the best entries I've played so far! I did have a little bit of trouble with the walljump (the area with a bunch of vertical lasers got me more than once), but other than that it was really solid as a platformer, and the incorporation of the theme was pretty clever.

The attract mode was also a nice touch!

Very well executed game!! Graphics were great and the controls were fun and it fits the theme really well. I love the little guy!

This is one of my favorite pico-8 platformers. Really cool mechanic tying the max health to gold collected. Just the right amount of difficulty in my opinion. Great job, not much criticism to give since almost everything was done well, especially for the platform you chose.


Superb. What most amazes me about your entry are the hundreds of little details you were able to get in: the jiggling hp/gold bar whenever you get a coin or heart, the attract mode at the beginning, the waggling flag when you touch a checkpoint... One of the best games I've seen so far.

Very well executed. I struggled with the wall jump chaining, which was a bit technical, especially after the 3rd flag I think (or I missed something?).
Good take on the theme, with the gold vs hp bar which was a addition :)
Couldn't stop my greedy dark side to try to collect one and every coins of the room!

Nice job!

Very nice game! A lot of fun to play! Thank you for making this game!

It~s so counter intuitive to not get the gold. Loved it. But I think there should be a way to throw the gold away or spend it, so you have to keep balancing on the wich one you should have.

Now I hate coins.... I hate them! And don't get me started on green lasers!

A very cool concept and spin on the theme! Such a simple yet effective idea.

The graphics and sounds are very pleasing and it feels like a very polished 8-bit game!

The only point I had a problem with were the controls. They felt a bit 'laggy' and I had a hard time timing them. Some sections seemed impossible to pass without damage or collecting coins (mainly places where you had to jump but the ceiling was too low. But maybe I just need to git gud ;)

sidenote: on itch.io your filename says it's for LD48 ;)

A good game, simple to understand, with an interesting level of difficulty. I think a soundtrack would add a lot in feeling! Congratulations!

Um bom jogo, simples de entender, com um nível de dificuldade interessante. Acredito que uma trilha sonora acrescentaria muito em feeling! Parabéns!

I really like the idea, nice job.

Very good one! Solid platformer well balanced with obvious idea. Yeah idea not original, but you're implemeted it masterpiece!

I am very conflicted about the way the wall jumping feels.

Solid gameplay, inherent to the theme and fun to play. Lovely graphics. Only downside is controls, wish they were more responsive.

Great job!

It genuinely took me a while to realize what was going on with the coins - when then made me want to go back and re-play it from the start. Making the health bar so large was a great idea. As other have said though, the wall-jumping felt a little bit off. Awesome job overall though, a pleasure to play!

A fantastic little game. The art was very good for PICO-8's restrictive palette, and the gameplay was great and innovative.

By the end of my playthrough, both my coffers, and coffin, were full. ;)

i love this idea. only one problem though, trying to aim a jump is hard bc the camera moves when you move left and right

Interesting variation on the theme and great use of the Pico8!

I was already blown away by this game, and then I realised that as well as modifying the health bar, the character was also becoming more golden the more coins I collected! Just an astonishing degree of style and polish. Probably the best interpretation of the theme I've seen so far. The only thing I didn't like was the wall jump - I think the problem was having to press into the wall to do one, rather than just being in contact with it.

Love this take on the theme and also looks great! Jumping could use a little work, but overall controls pretty well.

More money than man! I stuck at it. Once you get used to the controls and pick up on the fact that you aren't meant to collect coins, it becomes fun!

I have a few pieces of feedback:

- The camera shouldn't move immediately as you turn. There should be a range in which you can move without the camera moving. It's disorienting otherwise.
- You should be able to wall jump if you are up against the wall even if you aren't moving into the wall. Wall jumping is very hard at the moment.
- You shouldn't wall jump if you are holding jump, only if you press it while against the wall.
- The gold count should reset when you die. I kept accumulating gold when I died and the game became very hard!
- Some of the pits were practically impossible to get out of if you fell in.

I really like the gold vs life mechanic. It's very innovative. The fact that I stuck at it and made it to the end shows that you managed to make a fun game. Decent graphics too. Bravo!

Whoa. Nice work. This looks really nice and, overall, the control feels really good (though I echo a bit of the comment about the camera motion above). Having done a little Pico-8 myself, I know this is no small feat.

Awesome integration of the theme. When I started I was worried that it was going to be a relatively obvious more-money-makes-you-heavier thing, but when I figured out what was going on I was really impressed by the originality.

All you need is some fat Pico-8 music!

I lost my life by getting to greedy and not even noticing how much greed was inside me. Really neat idea to combine the coins and health together. Great job.

Awesome platformer! Loved the graphics and matched the theme perfectly.

Really nice gameplay, great work ! 👌

Very cool looking, good usage of theme and decent controls. Add music and you've got a very nice game!

Very well thought out and executed game. Great work on the polish.

great game!

I wish I had some constructive criticism, but all I can say is a really like this entry. The feel of the movement is good, and it's a clever interpretation of the theme. Nice job!

Just amazing. One of the best I've played. I love how he slowly becomes gold and the level design is just perfect. I had plenty of fun finishing it. The only thing that bothered me was the camera movement every time I tried to make a difficult jump and pressed back and forward repeatedly, making me lose my balance. But overall great game!

Great concept! I've just died from greed, got my HP super low -_-

Aside from a couple of things that have already been mentioned (wall jump controls, the camera at times) the game is awesome, one of the best I've played so far.

Congrats!

Perfetc implementation of the theme and very innovative mecanic. Well done !

congratulations on a decade of games - really great - also great is this game - very polished and impressed with the level design - nice

Brilliant game, with such a clever concept. Highly-addictive gameplay and great graphics. My only minor criticism is that the platform collision is a bit sensitive and the player movement is a little "slilppy" (but that could be intentional?). Either way, really great entry that is SPOT-ON the theme. Congrats Sophie! :D

My friend had the exact same idea but didn't go for it. Happy to see someone did and that it was very well done. Congratulations!

awesome balancing mechanic. had a lot of fun!

At first I thought this was just another one of those hard platformer games, but I was wrong! Well, it was still hard, but the hp vs coins mechanic is really clever!

I tried avoiding any coins as soon as I was on to your misdirections and it became quite challening. At some point I did start to collect some since I wasn't sure if there would be any use to them later. But soon I was 'messing up' and got to much gold that I only had little health. I thought a heart would help me out, but it seemingly only regains what you've actually lost, which makes it not always as useful. But I guess it makes sense to swarm them with coins in that case.

I do wish there was some way to spend your hard/easy earned coins. Most of the time I just tried avoiding them, since the pay-off seems a bit long term (I think the end of the game). I think it would be cool if you could spend them at checkpoints, so if you one is close you know how far you could try and get your health down before you manage to get there.

All in all, I didn't make it to the end, but it was fun to play!

Awesome platformer here!

Congrats on the entry :D

Great job! Constrain the way of the character by an collectable element is a great idea of Game Design.
If you want check our game : https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/40/the-darkest-light/

There's a character in Necrodancer, the Monk, who dies as soon as he touches gold, which is such a huge inversion of the normal way that game plays that it turns a lot of it on its head. This feels the same way! It's super clever.

Congrats on your 10 years of LD! :D

Great little package, great presentation and details in this pico8 gem :) The controls felt a bit too slippery, and sometimes the walljump didn't fire when I expected it to (I appreciate being able to hold it down to just continuously jump, but if you keep doing wall jumps they fire earlier than if you jump at a wall and held it down - it would touch but not fire like if you repeated the jump. It felt like a mistake).

As much as the coins as an inversion was cool, it didn't do much mechanically besides being another form of damage, given the health thing. So was the goal to get a high score, or to finish the game? If it were both, I think the feedback loop needs to be much shorter (shorter levels, so you can "bank" your score or whatever) rather than having such a long game then realising "shit I can't get through this next bit because I collected too much gold". If it's just purely about getting through the game then the gold has no interesting tension rather than just being something to avoid like lasers that were pretty much unavoidable.

In all, interesting and well presented! Beautiful work as usual!

This is fantastic, my favourite entry so far. Such a polished entry that uses the theme perfectly to create a unique platformer. Loved the balancing aspect of gold and health, which made me play it a few times after my first attempt I was collecting all the gold as you'd expect.

Nice game.a bit of music would be nice

I'd say the best idea involving coins that I'v played so far. Also graphics and sound are on point for the sweet mood. And the game title is very well chosen :)

This is a pretty interesting game. I liked the innovation of the game in where the collectibles lower the max health of the player's health. This mechanic reminds me of Fallout's radiation mechanic. The gameplay was also pretty fun as the 2D platforming in the game was pretty polished for a game made in 48 hours. I especially enjoyed the wall jump mechanics. I also appreciated how the graphics delivered the aesthetic in the game. One concept that I am not too pleased about is the audio. First of all, the game would have been much better if there was a nice soundtrack. Second, the sound effects get a little bit repetitive. I would recommend making at least two sound effects for each action and add code to randomly switch between those soundeffects to decide which soundeffect to play once an action happens. I also would recommend to randomly change the pitch of the sound effects a little bit. Doing this to the soundeffects should add more variety to the soundeffects. Overall, I think this is a pretty good game!

Amazing game, I really love the theme interpretation!

First play through I didn't know I wasn't supposed to pick up coins, so I obviously didn't make it far. The platforming seemed solid. It was very lenient about the boundaries for where you fall off a platform (seemed like one pixel of the foot could be on the platform and I wouldn't fall off). Sometimes the hearts didn't seem to refill my health, so I wasn't sure what was going on there. Plus, when I died it respawned me at the checkpoint, but it didn't restore my health, which I thought was unfortunate. I've never been crazy about wall jumps in games (some parts reminded me of Super Metroid), and using a keyboard made it even worse. It's still really good considering that you used Pico-8 to create the game. The animations like the waving checkpoint flag seemed really well done.

Cool polished platformer. I'm always blown away by this pico8 entries. It was tight and fun. I thought the core mechanic was quite clever, though perhaps it'd be more interesting to have some way to use those coins, that way players would need to take lots of risk-reward decisions.

Nice to see you jamming with us! I've been following your twitter for a while now (don't know what I first followed for, but anyways...). This is pretty clever, and again makes me excited that I got gifted pico8 as an early xmas gift so I can give it a whirl someday. This is definitely the best execution of the theme I've seen so far. Platforming was pretty clever and I really appreciated the way it made you think differently in terms of avoiding the coins while still making it through the obstacles. Glad I came across this!