Beat it...but at what cost. Even got through your bonus level.

It was a really fun concept to mess with. I'd love to play more, though maybe with a slower difficulty curve.

Also (and hopefully this is just me), SPACE has always been JUMP for me and platformers. The number of times I hit space and smashed my heart into a wall was frustrating. Perhaps DOWN arrow? Less chance of a mistake, and you could keep the game on one hand.

@sacrface, I am very glad for your feedback. About the controls, I did not put down arrow into it. In some situations you have to press "up + side + speed rotation", and i think it will mess up your fingers on arrow keys.

About the difficulty, last LD i did a very hard difficult game. I think people who judge your game should not be frustrated by the high diffculty. Just bad experience from last game jam.

Thank you again for your time.

Interesting concept, hard to understand controls though. Its hard to break a long hard life of spacebar being Jump! Would love to see more from this mechanic as its fun to play.

Super inovative game it's so inovative that Im having some brain lags while playing it actualy (just can't get used to it even thoo it's soo simple) For future players - you WILL die a lot! For developer - they will die a lot so make it satisfying! add some particles, maybe persistant blood where player died, particles and sound effect, make player scale while jumping moving to add simple animation

PS make that blue obstacle more obvious - maybe black spikes or red gloving lava like surface

The heart is a really cool mechanic I've never seen before. It's fun to play, love the art, music and sound effects. Feels very polished.
It's very challenging, took me ages to complete the first level. The controls were a bit confusing, I often mixed up SPACE and UP.
But overall, really good game :)

Goddamn! This was a grueling. I love playing this game, and i have spent about half an hour playing it. Its just wonderfull. A slight problem that i found was that sometimes, keeping the jump button midair locked me out of using the heartspin, but that is an easy fix, so no points deducted for that! Good luck on keeping this project going!

I want to say I love it, but it was a little bit too frustrating for that! :D A very cool idea, and very nice level design! If you are going to continue exploring this idea, you should try removing the speed up thing (or make it affect all objects). I didn't even realize you could speed up the heart at first, so I tried to beat the first level without it. It looked as if that was possible, but very difficult.

Really cool game play mechanic. Funny how it makes simple things very difficult.

I loved the game, the mechanics are very innovative and the bonus level was super cool (though a bit difficult to control). As for feedback, I think it might be better to have the player respawn faster in order to lower the downtime between tries and make death feel less frustrating.

This was fun, and I really liked the core mechanic! I was confused about how to do it at first, but once I realized (and said out loud) "it's like jump rope!" it got really fun! Granted, it was a hard game (every time you said "heartbreaking!" I got progressively madder, which the people on the Discord call I'm on will tell you), but I still really enjoyed the core mechanics and level design. Overall, fantastic job!

I'm glad you didn't drop out of the jam, the concept is great. The core mechanic is great and the level design is really smart on exploiting all the ways that you fail on keeping that heart safe...
The game is hard but it's easy to identify why you failed and my own lack of skill kept me hooked. Congrats!

didnt think i would end up playing a game about using a heart as a skipping rope! innovative concept. difficult but rewarding when I started to figure out how it worked.

its like jumpin' rope to safe your life, and I am not good at jumping rope lol

Core mechanic is really innovative and fun. This game is really challenging. You need to take your each step carefully. However, the game flow is bad; you encounter a hard jumping sequence at the first level. Which is inappropriate to put some advanced stuff, before how to navigate your player with the core mechanic. Also affordance can be improved. I wasn't expecting to die when I hit blue lasers or enemies colors are same as the main character. Thanks for this cool game

It's exactly the kind of game mechanics i usually like playing with, but i don't really like this one. I think it could be awesome if the heart had an other purpose than just making me restart the game. For the audio, the "heartbreaking" and "prshhh" made me laugh at first, but in the end it drove me mad and i ragequit mostly because of it. The game isn't bad but the mechanic has a lot more potential and you did not make use of it, that's too bad. Anyways good job for not giving up the jam and hope to see your mechanic evolve in a future game :)

Really cool! The other comments sums up everything! It's just like jumping rope! Super awesome idea.

cool little game

Love the concept, really nice. I found it a bit irritating that holding up jumps - that killed me more times than I care to admit :sweat_smile:
It's a nice little spin on the basic platformer genre, that actually feels quite fresh to me. That's an impressive achievement in 3 days.
The sound interruption is a little bit off (when you die by landing on a blue area), and the graphics are bare, but it's endearing even so. It also has a pretty reasonable level of difficulty which curves nicely as you play. Nice work!

Love the concept, ths is very good. Graphics and sounds are very nice. it's a very good game !

Good stuff:

Liked the music, it just sounded nice. I really liked the idea of speeding up the heart as a mechanic-- it helped spice the game up and give it a unique feel. The controls were smooth, which helped make the game not feel frustrating, even as I was dying multiple times. There's a good amount of content here, the game felt long for having been made in 48 hours. The difficulty was perfect-- not too hard, not too easy, which made the game satisfying to play

Areas for Improvement:

The sound effects were a little grating-- maybe making them a little less jarring would help (given that I heard the death sound quite a bit). The graphics were a little unpolished, but that's to be expected in a game jam. I really wish you had used the mechanic in your bonus level more-- it would have really emphasized the innovation of this game. Your level design was hit-or-miss: some parts felt good and made use of the mechanics (I'm thinking of the level with a bunch of little platforms), but others just felt like generic platforming levels.

Overall:

You have a cool concept, and some good clean execution, creating an enjoyable game to play. However, it would have been nice if you had fleshed out your idea just a little more. Also, you actually came up with a very similar idea to me (something circling around the player) but went in a totally different direction with it, which was super cool to see.

Very cool and innovative mechanic.
A bit too difficult for me, but very creative indeed.

I liked it! The heart was a fun mechanic and in my opinion a unique interpretation of the theme.

okay this might take a bit of explaining...

when i was playing your game, i was on a discord call, and i got super angry every time i died and the "heartbreaking" effect played, and it quickly became a bit of a meme. i went into the source code to find the sound effect and then posted it on the discord to give them context.

then... today i was bored. so i made a quick song out of your two death sound effects to play with rythm on discord. so, uh, yeah.

here it is: https://youtu.be/LkqKrYTU4Dg

@chaseplays amazing dude, pretty funny that someone is making this kind of things. I love mashups so this made my day. Thank you, you did my first fanart ever!

The mechanic is quite innovative, and frankly, I think it has some cognitive interest as my brain tend to know what to do, but just cannot hit the space and jump in the proper sequence anyway ;)

Congratulations for nit giving up !

Very interesting idea! Was a fun mechanic to try and master, unfortunately I wasn't able to beat it 😭 My brain couldn't hack it. Was definately a fresh take on platforming that I hadn't seen before! Great entry!

Cool game bro! Niche challenge. Got to stage 5. When jumpingto the left the space button gets overruled by the up'n left keys. Besides that little frustrating issue is a great game that keeps the player at full concentration. Excellent work!

Fantastic game. Very challenging. I love the problem of the heart that orbit around you. Really cool!

Really nice mechanic well executed in the time! Always love seeing Gamemaker games in the mix. Really enjoyed playing it.

Very difficult! I beat the first level with much effort and got super close to beating the second (heart hit the ground right next to the flag)

I like the mechanic and speeding up the spinning heart felt satisfying when I timed it correctly.

The blue rectangles don't look particularly dangerous, so it felt a bit odd to die to them.
I would have liked there to be less pause before restarting after a death
The 'heartbreaking' audio clip also got a bit annoying (perhaps just because it keeps reminding me that I died :P)

Really enjoyable concept! It was really difficult for me to get anywhere but it did not feel frustrating.
Thank you for the experiance :D

Very cool game. I enjoyed the difficulty personally. Just the right amount of heart-breaking. (don't take advice on difficulty from me though. You probably wanna make it easier when targeting a wide audience...)

Bonus points for making it possible to die on the win-screen. =P

Anyhow the gameplay is a really neat idea. As some people already mentioned it'd be great to also see some additional use for the heart, so it's not *just* a thing to get you killed. But jam-deadlines and all considered the given amount of mechanics is complex enough. Pretty sure there's a lot you could still explore without changing the mechanics much.

Oh. And please don't use 'space' for a non-jump mechanic in a game that has jumping. XD This killed me a good few times just because 'space' is usually the jump-key. Bind it to anything else. W, +, F11, just not space. =P

I love the core mechanic! The levels are simple but effective, with more time it could be improved i guess! Awesome game! (PS: I loved the programmer design xD)

I like how hard it is. Congrats.

Good mechanic! It is a good idea.

Your level design is good, just in the last stage before the bonus level, the cycle of the last moving platform is very long and it is really frustrating to wait for the platform.

Also, you should change the sound when the heart touches something, it becomes annoying after dozens of deaths ^^'

Well done!

This game is insanely difficult(not in a bad way). I like the original mechanics and game idea. Played this for a long time. Nice job!