Well i wouldn't say that people usually do what you described. But i would be interested in seeing how a cooperative metroidvania could play out.

Those gifs though. I'm glad i found this

Nice art, it really differentiates from the standard top down rpg. I'm not a big fan of jrpgs, but i'll be keeping an eye at this one

First thing that came to mind when you made the game within a tiled a map was "2d descent"

I'll have to check that out! Is it related to the old PC first person space game? I think that was also called Descent. One of the biggest struggles with opening up the environments for exploration has been coming up with ways to guide the player through each area that make sense within the context of the world. Maybe that will give me some inspiration!

Yeah, i meant that it looked like a 2D version of Descent.

I want so badly to play a demo of this.

First thing that came to mind when you made the game within a tiled a map was "2d descent"

Exactly. That's my point. Laying down the ground rules for good level design is something relative to the game mechanics in question. I mean, sure, there are some universal rules you can come up with but that's a starting point at best.

By the way, I'm playing your game now and it's pretty great. Simple and few rules but each level ties my brain into a different shaped knot.

I'm struggling to make my apple game because I don't feel like there's enough meat on that main mechanic alone for a long game. I made a bunch of levels and I'm starting to understand its mechanics a little better though, what kind of puzzles I can make with it, what is fun and what isn't. But my main question is: did I really explore everything that mechanic has to offer in terms of level design? And adding more mechanics to it starts to lose some of the minimalistic charm I like.

I'll give my two cents on the level design of your game.
I've played the demo on GameJolt and i feel that you drastically increase the challenge and the number of jumps and twists between each level. The first level could very well be the fifth, or tenth. First few levels could have no hazards and could level by level introduce the ways to rotate the world (walking inside, walking outside, using the same corner to rotate over and over...), then introduce the spikes, and reiterate the same last mechanics, but with the spikes making things more difficult. And keep going like that.
The rest of the game is really nice, the visuals are cool, the character controller feels good to play.

Nice thread.
The game is looking pretty good and i really enjoy how much you talk abou the things that are going on.

Back in the day people did not have access to a wide library of games like we do today.
Players today jump from one game to the other in days, even hours. You're in for a herculean challenge if you want to make a game that purposely leave the player stuck. You will have to really make people excited about your game.
Dark Souls was the one of the few games that accomplished this kind of thing. And even when the player was left stuck, he had other places he could go to keep things rolling.

Tiled will help you create tiled maps with much more ease. I'm not sure how it is on game maker, but on unity is a pain to place tile after tile.

Hey that looks really good. I really wish there was a zelda-like game the way you described. Looking forward

Nice fx animations

You've mentioned a demo. Is it public? I really wish i could play a prototype. It seems pretty fun

Doesn't really make sense to me that some biblical name that date back thousands of years should be considered "modern" when some names native to my Scandinavian surroundings have only had their current form for a couple of centuries but still get called "old-fashioned".

Most likely because people don't know the origin of such names and rather base their notion on perceived trends. For instance if this generation has many grandmothers named with native scandinavian names, they may perceive it as old-fashioned.
This is something i've noticed happen. There's some names people say it's weird for a child to have, because they relate it to the old people they met who had such names.

Those animations look so fluid and smooth. Which approach did you go for when coding it? After seeing it done in Undertale I've been trying to get that into my battle system but don't know how to get it working. You don't have to answer this if you don't want to, but I'm genuinely curious on how people achieve this.

I belive the most simple answer to that is bone animation. So you rotate, scale and move the individual parts of the characters instead of animating the whole character frame by frame.

Really like the attention to detail you put on the effects of stepping on different surfaces.

in the absolute simplest way, I'm looking for a tile editor that doesn't require a grid on the world you are placing tiles into, and also supports tiles to place of various sizes.
This does not seem like a strange thing, but it's becoming increasingly clear that this sort of tool simply doesn't exist. I can just open multiple image files and copy and clone and dong with pieces that way, it just seems like something like this would exist.

Yeah, i guess it is somewhat of a paradigm that a tilesheet should be all of the same size and more complex shapes should then be created from more than a single tile. Hence all tile editors i know of work like this.

Nice art and cool concept.

Nice art style. Hope to see more updates soon.

That's some good looking pixel art.