This totally reminded me of Diamonds!
Which is a great thing, because I played a LOT of that as a kid. The similarity is only in movement though, your aim is different - reach the end - which gives familiar mechanics a new twist for me
So I played it! (Am playing it as I type actually - paused to write down my thoughts so far):
- The difficulty peaks and troughs quite dramatically, but that's to be expected, so it's neither a pro nor a con, though it is affected by...
- ... the fact that I don't really like the timer at all. I understand why it's there, though its value depends on the kind of gameplay you're going for; if you want someone to pull off a level perfectly, either because they whizzed it first time or have died enough times to NEED to do every maneouver perfectly, then the timer obviously helps prompt that, because it is so strict that there were more than a handful of levels which I could beat in terms of the obstacles and dangers... but needed to shave off half a second of my execution in order to not die before reaching the end. Which wasn't fun so much as frustrating, but that's just me, like I said it depends what kind of gameplay you're after. That kind of demanding-perfection works for some people. Because of my history with Diamonds, I found old habits resurfacing... including taking a breather after a particularly tricky bit (of which there are plenty!) in order to study what I have to do next and just enjoy the fact that I overcame that. Except that that means certain failure for the level in general because any lollygagging = more than half a second wasted = you lost.
This isn't SO bad because the levels are so tiny, which means that not only is it generally easy to get the 'lay of the land' on a first glance, but also that you don't really lose much per death. Only about ten seconds, really, which is acceptable. But if you ever wanted to do larger levels, having that kind of time-penalty on top of the existing challenging obstacles is just punishing more than fun.
Okay, back to the game...
And done! Very cute. A few levels which I found particularly hard, which I can remember:
- The first one with guns/cannons, the two pointing in opposite directions and shooting horizontally, just because there didn't seem like a lot of ways to avoid the bullets... and when I won, I felt like it was mostly to luck
- The one near the end with the two vertical corridors of disappearing spikes, because I found the timing really hard to figure out. The first corridor was generally fine, but this is one where I would have liked more time to just sit and plan, because I would have let the little dude bounce up and down and count the timings and then made my move, but instead I just kinda flung him at it over and over and hoped for the best. Again, kinda just luck.
A few general thoughts:
- The collision with the spikes could be made a little more forgiving, but only on the sides? Like sometimes I felt like I should have been able to survive that diagonal movement but didn't. Totally subjective though, if you want it harder than keep it as-is, I was still able to beat it
- Cute and cohesive visuals and animations
- Everything was pretty clear with no need for tutorials or anything, each new mechanic and obstacle explained itself
- The higher difficulty suits the small and short levels, which is partly why I stuck it out the whole way through - despite my critiques above, I didn't find the game *too* hard, because like I said, I did manage to beat it in a good time
- You have a good eye for puzzle and level design, each one felt different even when they just built on existing mechanics and the introduction and combining of new mechanics felt natural
Good job
Community
