I like the style, but it felt like the game just needed more variety both in the level design and in the endings offered. I know it was just a weekend project, but every ending felt basically the same, and "exploring" just meant going back to the start when the sky changed color, which wasn't that interesting.
-The jumping was delayed and I think stopping might also have been slightly delayed because I ran right off platforms a few times.
-I found the look of the world kind of appealing, although I think maybe a little more variety in the elements that make up the world might be nice.
-By making it so clear what the player has to do, and when, in order to get other endings, you kind of rob us of the chance to explore our options and figure things out. I think it might have worked better if maybe there were other spots in the world that the player could go to that were tricky to reach and/or find. I expected some of the switches, for example, to have multiple results so when a door opened in front of me I guessed that maybe something happened behind me too that would allow me access to a higher route. That sort of thing might've been cool and made the endings a little more enjoyable to find. Even if you want to have people go back to the start, making the route back slightly different would be good.
-The game was crying out for some music to increase the atmosphere.
While I was expecting more from the endings, it worked pretty well and felt decent to play.
Thanks for the constructive feedback!
* I'm not certain about the controls, the game reacts to inputs as soon as it can (there's only a single way to deal with this in pico-8). I have heard a similar complaint from one of the people helping to test the game, so as a countermeasure the game allows the player to jump for several additional frames after they fell off a platform. Whether that helps probably depends on how much delay there is in a particular case.
* The scenery mostly uses the same tiles from the
first quarter of sprite sheet. The second quarter is half-filled with transition and ending UI graphics. I was intending to have some additional graphics (clouds and ending-specific animations) in the conserved space but could not get either to look decently so I've settled for a more minimal set of graphics that seemed consistent.
* The game explicitly tells how to disable clues (gets rid of "n/4" text, hints, and the visual clues at the levels) for ones that would want more of a challenge. The original concept was slightly different (example:
gif of the ending screen before revamp - far more cryptic) but most people testing could not figure out how to find the endings. Though I agree that the current method may be compromising the puzzle part for "accessibility". Will probably approach this aspect differently next time I do something like this.
* Music (or some sort of background ambience) indeed would have helped, but pico-8 requires music to be made in a built-in tracker. The thing seems good but I have no experience with music making so could not do anything consistent in that area. Will update the game if/when I'll find someone to help with this.
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