Nice work! I love games like this!

My only suggestion would be maybe making the music stay at roughly the same volume, could just be me and my preference to lower volume though

~~(Maybe a 'hacked' version of this too with godmode and infinite hearts. Those last levels were tough)~~

@lone-wolf I spent forever tweaking the audio mixing but sadly could never get it just right. A godmode could also be a cool feature, or at least a Celeste-style assist mode. Thanks for the feedback!

An interesting and hard platformer. I like the sound and the graphics. Strange how when I made the gamefullscreen my view expanded without any zoom, so I guess that thoise with smaller screens will have a harder time playing this.

My biggest gripe with this game is the floatyness of the character. It os ok to have floaty jumps etc, part of the challenge, but this character seems to have very little inertia to the floor. What happens is that precise postitioning for vertical jumps is unnecessary hard, because the character just never stays put.

I see this having a future beyond this compo, even if it were to be small.

I love this. The art's great (Especially the little floral spirits) and the mechanics are fun. Although, the heart system for spirits seemed to be a little pointless. This is one of the few games I played to the end (that last level was devilishly hard!)

I love this. The art's great (Especially the little floral spirits) and the mechanics are fun. Although, the heart system for spirits seemed to be a little pointless. This is one of the few games I played to the end (that last level was devilishly hard!)

@hanamigi I totally agree that the weird momentum you have on the floor is a problem. I think the physics are mostly okay except for the fact that you just keep sliding. I kind of noticed this during the compo but just never did anything about it. :(

@murpyh Glad you liked it! My original plan with the spirits is you would lose them after one hit. However, I figured most players would probably die more than once, and it would nice if you had at least some chance of keeping a couple of extra spirits.

Hey there! Nice to see you again. After I logged back in for this game jam, I saw you answered my LD45 jam. Cool to see that you're back for another year.

Your game is awesome. The grapple is super cool and the way you set it up is great. I spent about 15 minutes on trying to get the key :laughing:
I have a feeling that I wouldn't be able to finish the rest of the game if I couldn't even get past the key level.

Great job!

Fun! The mechanics were very unique! It was a bit too hard for me to get very far, but I had a good time with it!

This was super fun! some of the grappling hook section I found to be a bit strange to control but apart from that I loved the lighting and sound design for the game. Super Cool :D!

As someone's who's coded one or two platformers, I think I can give a more comprehensive breakdown of the platforming's problems and potential fixes. There needs to be a lot more responsiveness when it comes to moving left and right. This could be achieved by either increasing the friction between the player and the ground or slightly increasing the force at which you accelerate horizontally by a small factor when you're pressing a key in the opposite direction to where you're moving (and slightly decrease this when you are in the air). Just allows for tighter turns but still keep the physics system. Also, I assume it's not a bug as it was the only way I could beat most sections, but jumping and pressing shift immediately after gives you nowhere near as much upward momentum as holding shift and then pressing jump. This is probably because the jump force that is being added to character combines with the flying force immediately and exponentially increases the acceleration. I'd suggest either setting the upwards velocity to a preset value at the start of flying or increasing the flying acceleration and capping the possible upwards velocity you can have to just a bit shy of the jump velocity so you get a nice bit of Coyote time.

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Of course, please feel free to entirely disregard this, the platforming should be just how YOU like it, no-one else. Both of those things are things that I've struggled to figure out in platformers before so I figured I'd offer the knowledge in case you wanted to fix it too.

Overall, I really enjoyed this game. Lovecraftian Celeste sounded right up my alley. I liked how every section felt like a puzzle where I can to figure out the right combination of my abilities and I liked how it was difficult but not entirely impossible even though I died a tonne and was punished for it. The reason I felt the need to bring up the floaty controls is that whenever I felt like I had an unfair death, it was due to them. Often I would have to die fling myself into the spikes just to see where exactly the fly would take me. Still few people succeed in making platformers this difficult so you should be very proud.

@madalaski Thank you for the detailed feedback!

The jankiness of the flying is something I'm not exactly happy with. Internally, the way it works is that flying is most effective right when you start flying, and then has quickly diminishing returns. It also has a separate velocity variable because otherwise the height you got from flying would vary wildly depending on your initial upward velocity.

The reason for the weird way the flying is programmed was so that I could force you to put down a platform and then fly in some of the sections. Sadly this probably made the flying much less intuitive. :(

One small note, though: in my playthroughs of the game, I do press jump and *then* fly. One potential thing is perhaps you weren't pressing up when flying? Unintuitively, you actually don't get any real upwards velocity unless you hold up while flying. Which is, of course, probably a problem (or at the very least should be clearer). :sweat_smile:

Either way, thanks for the ideas and suggestions!

@honey-pony Haha to be fair, I was also losing spirits left and right due to deaths so my troubles with fly times could have come from that. Regardless, great game, I'm glad you appreciated my feedback. Flying is definitely something that's difficult to put into a platformer and make it feel right, hence why Celeste opts for the dash. If you want a good example of a platformer perfecting it, I'd recommend Cave Story with its rocket boots.

Cute game! Like the music and graphics -- they work well together to establish the mood you were going for. The concept of using up spirits was really neat, but think I'm not nearly as good as the others in the comments, because I couldn't get very far at all!

The zoomed-out scale made things a little hard to see sometimes, but I liked the sense of scale it provided, and let me see what I was looking forward to further on in the level. Well done!

I can tell you put in a lot of effort into this, but I don't think I had the skill to get very far even though I wanted to see more. From what I played, I liked the animations, and the movement abilities are very well fleshed out. But they are quite technical, and confusing and difficult to pull off just right. The movement is also a bit slippery. You can use this momentum to your advantage as you try to pull of maneuvers, but I also ran into a lot of spikes. The mood was good. I felt like I was in a sewer or some dark humid place. It fits the rest of the game well. Great job on the entry! I just wish it was a little easier.

@baby-dino-herd @diego-escalante I'm super sad that I didn't have time to put in a couple easier levels at the beginning. I think a little bit of space to explore the mechanics would have really helped both make the game more approachable and help people who don't have enough skill at platformers to be thrown right in to the hard levels the game currently has. I'm actually surprised you all are the first two to mention it! I'm sure, had I not designed the game, it would take me a while to get past even the first screen.

Nonetheless, thank you both for your feedback! :smile:

Great game, the tutorial was done really well! I got stuck at the spike tunnel right after the tutorial, so maybe a slightly less drastic change in difficulty would be better...

I like the mood and theme to this; too difficult for me but still I liked figuring out the swing mechanic.

Loved the way the tutorial was handled, and overall just loved the game. The movement was pretty slow going and you build up momentum that is hard to slow down, but this added to the need to just figure out the pacing and learn the timing of the controls. I did have some issues with audio clashing with itself on occasional loops, not sure what was causing that, but overall fantastic job :D

Too difficult and annoying for me :/ I did found out, after several tries, how to use the swing, and I did get to phase where I got all the abilities (at least from what game told me) but I wasn't able to overcome slippery controls to get through the next part, I gave up after about a dozen of tries...
Nice mood and art though.

@shigor Thanks for the feedback! I am curious about your comment about the slippery controls. The first screen should be pretty doable despite the slipperiness as you don't have to move horizontally very much. Out of curiosity, were you trying to simply fly through it? If so, that is actually not intended to be possible, and I could see why that would accentuate the problems with the controls.

In particular, the intended strategy on the first screen is to make a platform and then jump to the left and fly up.

So I'm basically just wondering if you were doing the intended strategy, or if you were flying up. Because if you were trying to fly up, the awkwardness of doing so is actually intentional, to make you try different strategies. But if you were doing the intended strategy and still finding the controls awkward, well, that means that the controls are probably too awkward.

Anyways I hope this doesn't come across as an annoying or condescending comment. I'm just trying to, for my own sake, figure out whether the primary difficulty does come from the controls and physics--or if it actually comes from figuring out what to do. Knowing where the problem lies is, after all, important to fixing it. :smile:

Actually @baby-dino-herd @ogelgames @seothen I'm curious about your experience here too. If you remember, can you tell me whether you got stuck trying to fly up on the first screen (rather than some other strategy)? Thanks! :smile:

@honey-pony - yeah, I realized at start that I have to make a platform, jump and fly, but I just wasn't able to do that without getting spiked :/ sometimes it was just a pixel or two and I'd be able to get up, but...)
(I do have to emphasize that I'm certainly not a target player for this kind of game, although I've grown up on 8bit platformers, I don't play them any more, few modern ones I've tried that are requiring precise timing I rage quited soon enough, so don't take me as standard.)

@shigor That's actually super interesting! If anything I would have thought that deciphering my level design was harder than the actual execution but I guess I got it backwards! Definitely gives me something to think about.

Thanks again for your awesome feedback! :smile:

@honey-pony for me it was that the flying mechanic wasn't enough - tried several times but didn't work for me in combo with platforming or grappling.

@seothen Thanks for the feedback! I guess the takeaway continues to be that flying needs improvement! :sweat_smile:

Pretty challenging! I'm definitely no good at platformers. The movement friction was a little frustrating actually, frequently causing me to lose a life. Beautiful art work, and I liked the dialog system as well. Nice :)

Nice game! It looks and sounds incredible. It's extremely hard, but I managed to complete it eventually. I still don't understand the purpose of the hearts (I always lost all of them anyway) and there was one place which lacked a checkpoint near the end, but other than that, great game!

Was enjoyable to play, but got stuck at the section with the springs/trampolines couldn't figure out how to get all the way up to the top one much less have some spores leftover as it looked like I might still need some to make the flight right after hitting that one. As others have said the slipperiness on the ground felt wrong but it wasn't something I couldn't get over.

@Allas That section is *meant* to teach you that the trampolines refill your Sprites (so you fly up, hit the sideways trampoline, and then fly to the right), but it's not surprising that that's pretty easy to miss. Thanks for the feedback!

movement deceleration while on the ground and touching no controls should be tripled as you tend to keep sliding otherwise even when not touching controls, otherwise good work

Appreciate the craftsmanship! Too hard for me though. Terrible at the energy whip. Always was since super metroid.

Love the music and the art. It's hard :)

Wow, that was tough. I'm a bit disappointed the "you win" screen is as... 'lifeless' as it is? That's not the right word, but it feels like a very hollow victory after how difficult the game was. The music was nice though, and I liked the mechanics. nice work.

@blobo Thanks for the feedback! Sadly I only had a little bit of time for the you win screen, and yeah, it's quite anticlimatic.

This was super tough! I love the pixel art.

Not a huge fan of pixel art personally, but I love the stretching the character does when jumping - a very nice touch! The puzzles were a bit too tricky for me with the low friction, but perhaps they would be too easy for some if the friction/responsiveness was higher, I don't know :D