Hey there! I played this game for about half an hour, seemed pretty fun, especially when I got to the later levels! Before I put down my notes, I'll say that these impressions are coming from someone who does not have a lot of twitch platformer experience. Here's what I have to say in convenient bullet points:
- I like how jumping gives you a little extra boost of speed right at the start of the jump which fades away as you stay in the air. It makes platforming across the small platforms really fun in the later levels, makes me feel ninja like
- The mechanic which allows the character vault over corners once he's reached the top of a wall takes a little getting used to but is fun once you get the idea. I just found myself a little surprised by how fast he starts moving forward again, especially in situations where I'm trying to climb to the top of a wall to get a big wall jump, hit jump a pixel too late and then just vault into spikes by accident. Again, not very experienced with twitch platformers so I guess that's just the way it is.
- Those walls are sticky! I know I just made a bullet point about how quickly the character vaults up and over corners, but when it comes to actually grabbing the walls in the first place, the player character really sticks good. This is nice in some cases but it posed a few problems for me:
- For example, in 3-2, the level ends with a very narrow hole into the exit. I guess the idea is to perfectly swish right in without touching the walls, but I found in the event that I did touch the walls, tapping to get off the wall just stuck me onto the other wall instead, eating away my bonus multiplier at the same time.
- Also, I noticed the character's entire hitbox can grab onto walls, which feels a little weird when you can basically grab onto walls with his hat. In short, I found a lot of moments where I expect to make a jump, but instead, I juuust barely get snagged up on the bottom corner of a wall and start climbing it instead.
- Just curious but is this the intended way to complete chapter 2-1?
Man, I had some trouble with this the first time! I'm lucky I got it on my fourth attempt when I recorded this! I don't think I've gotten better then a 0.5x bonus multiplier on that level yet. I saw that this sort of jump comes into play later in the game but I think it might need to be made a little easier for 2-1 - I mentioned earlier that I was having a lot more fun on the later levels because I found they were much better structured for getting into 'the zone', where you actually start making twitch actions in order to complete things speedily and precisely. I found that was harder to do on the earlier levels because they were more focused on finding the ideal route for gems instead of just plowing through platforms.
Again, everything I mentioned above is from the perspective of someone who does not play a lot of twitch platformers so a lot of this might not apply for your core audience. Also, I did find that a lot of the stuff I mentioned above getting somewhat easier once I put a little practice into it, but I thought I should just throw out my two cents.
As for the structure of the levels and chapters, I think they're pretty much adequate. To be honest, I was actually expecting four levels per chapter instead of five, but I'm not sure why I expected that and it's not important anyway. On just trying to find the levels though, I found it was difficult to remember which levels were where. I don't know if a level preview thing is in the works but it might be an idea to consider!
The only thing I want to bring up outside of level structure and controls is, I found that picking up gems minorly obstructs your visual lock on the player, which for the most part is a miniscule problem, except for moments like in your final gif where a set of gems are placed on a wall where falling or going over could result in death. I remember one level had a wall with gems on it and spikes above and below it. Whenever I would pick up gems, with a combination of the particle effect, the point floater ("100" "10" "50") and the player's own ribbon emitter, I would lose track of the player for a few frames and find myself mashing jump in the hopes that I was still touching a wall.
Final consensus though, the game is pretty fun, especially later on when the gems are laid out in such a way that the route is obvious, with special gems requiring some more fancy footwork to get (while still on the main route).
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