No worries, I was just confused why you're making a game that I already played. For a few minutes I thought I was crazy. If it's a remake endorsed by the original creator, great :-) I'd still advise to change more things, because your game should be fully an expression of you, not of your mentor. However great his imagination might be, you have to put trust in your own.

Why don't you differentiate from Grave a bit more?

I just reached 01:49 in an unusually good run. As far as I know, that's furthest anyone ever got in the game. Maybe someday someone will prove me wrong!

I've put up an imgur album of all the current palettes. With that and the recent UI changes, I will probably finish the project soon.

Yesterday morning I looked at the palettes again and decided that they all suck. So I wrote another quick tool to help me pick colors manually:



Just updated the game with many resulting palette changes, more still to come. Also I've removed the glow effect completely, because it was making my eyes hurt.

Yet another update to the game over screen, toning it down even more.

I've updated the game over screen again, now it's animated. Still not completely happy with it though.

Here's the new game over screen that took me way too long to design:



The biggest problem was making it feel lightweight, so the loop of play -> fail -> check score -> restart goes as smoothly as possible. Many possible game over screens, including Super Hexagon's, are too jarring and eventually make you ragequit.

Also I've removed the time indicator during gameplay, it feels much better without it. I was a little sad to throw away the beautiful seven-segment display that I spent so much time on, but maybe I'll use it for something else. On the plus side, the game code is below 700 lines again :-)

Also I've added a slowdown mechanic (down arrow). You can slow down as many times as you've sped up. This way you don't have to separate your training runs from your high score runs, and a good training run can lead to a high score.

Also the help text now says simply "Press up to start, left or right to steer the line."

Bumping the game completion up to 50%, yay!

Just posted this on Newgrounds: http://www.newgrounds.com/portal/view/679178.

Yeah, I'm trying to make the perfect game for myself and that means it has to be very hard.

Just uploaded another update that tones down the glow effect and adds some more palette tweaks. The game should look a little less eye-watering now.

I've uploaded another update to the game. It adds a new difficulty curve, where the zoom speed and the rotation speed don't always grow in lockstep. I've found that it feels more hypnotic somehow, because the ratio of rotation to zoom speed is fluctuating instead of stable.

Also I've added a subtle glow effect:

Hey, good work. You have an original game feel, a rare thing these days. I don't care too much about the graphics honestly, would play this even if it was a JS/Canvas demo. Your writing is great and conveys the mood very well. Don't give up :-)

About your trees, am I right that you're testing different methods of procedural generation? Then just go all the way and generate the trunk too. That's very easy and well studied, generative grammars do a great job. Just do a google image search for "cfdg trees" and work from there.

About uploading:

I'm very happy with itch.io, it's the main place where my game lives. The updating functionality is very snappy, the pages look good, and the analytics are very helpful.

Not so happy with Kongregate. Each time you update your game, there's a random amount of processing time (about 1 hour) before the update shows up. You can't tag your game yourself, need to wait for other people to tag it. Which is tough, because your game won't even show up in "new games" for the first few days. The last straw for me was the lack of an option to delete my game. You actually have to contact them to do that, and it took them a day or two to reply. I think I'm done with Kongregate for now. YMMV though.

Hi Juan! I found you through your old comment on Hitbox Team's post, and wow, it looks like your critical insight does translate into making great games. Thanks for making Heart & Slash! I just posted a link to /r/gaming, will try to think of more places to show off your game.

While experimenting with some new mechanics, I realized that rotation speed and zoom speed create two different kinds of difficulty, and rotation is the more fun one. On the other hand, if rotation speed outpaces zoom speed by too much, the animation becomes a mess. So I've uploaded a new tweak that increases the rotation speed, making the game harder after 1 minute but hopefully more fun.

Also I've uploaded a subtle change to palette transitions. Now the colors interpolate more slowly, except the innermost color which just snaps to the target value. Hopefully that looks a bit more distinctive without being distracting.

I noticed that the movement speed begins to feel a little slow after 1 minute. Just uploaded a new version with snappier movement.

Today I was writing some music for my game, then I stumbled on your devlog and noticed that my tune goes much better with your running gifs than with mine! https://clyp.it/mo0yrd4l If by any chance you like it, I'll just give it to you for free :-)

Added another new palette today:

I made another short music loop: https://clyp.it/mo0yrd4l. When I put it in the game, it feels kinda okay but still not quite right. In the next one I'll try to get rid of the dark parts and keep everything light.