Here's a
very belated followup. I played through to the first boss (second? I guess the spawner thing after the bubble powerup was a miniboss?) and had some comments written up but...I didn't post them and then ended up closing Chrome and losing what I'd written. Anyway, my further thoughts as best I can remember:
the swim powerup I was going for kind of an original metroid, morph ball right away kind of thing. with the idea that later on in the game your float ability would be unusable for waters that are too cold and you'd have to use just the wall climb. Originally I was going to put that powerup into a room where you had to swim to escape so maybe that would help. I can also add some text saying what you picked up though I was hoping to have the player try to discover it themselves.
Makes sense, including it as necessary to leave the room seems like a good idea. Text doesn't really feel like it jives with the aesthetics of the game.
jumping physics can be improved, I'm going to be prototyping the distant valley game next most likely where I'm going to spend more time on the jump. Then I can take that and use it for this game.
Sounds good, it could do a lot to help sell the aquatic environment if it's nice and floaty.
Wall grabbing is buggy. The major issue I found was in the very first yellow room, that rock ledge for whatever reason is hard to grab onto and you slip off, I thought it was a width issue with the ledge but I think it's actually an issue with hitting a ledge at an angle. Is that what you're talking about? Also not being able to float/swim after clinging to a wall is on purpose but I don't think that was what you were referring to.
What I was referring to is that there seems to be a pause between the end of floating/jumping and the time in which I can grab onto a wall. Also I'm not really able to do it mid-jump consistently. This made a few sections more frustrating than they otherwise would be. Another thing you might want to consider is allowing pressing the down key when on top of a platform to prematurely end the jump. It's something I found myself doing instinctively since I didn't want to wait for the float countdown to end, but at this point doing so didn't accomplish anything.
With the fish being red, I considered that but I was hoping the player would figure that out, similar to how the net like seaweed is yellow instead of green even though it's not a solid object, it just looked better to me. What color would you change them to out of curiosity? If I can find something that doesn't stand out to much I'd change those too. power ups are red as well, I'm going to probably allow the player to eat the fish to regain health so maybe it will make more sense then.
I guess that red just = interactable makes sense. I didn't find this as jarring when I played through again.
The snail thing is completely broken. when the timing is right it's very doable but when it's off timed it's ridiculously difficult. I can fix that easily in the next update and if it's still broken like that then I'll just move it to a more open location. The volcano before that room is a bit unforgiving as well so I'll probably tweak that too.
The volcano is why I didn't beat the second/first real? boss: I couldn't deal with trying to navigate the volcano room right before it to keep trying at the boss, especially since it was so far away from the last save point. Speaking generally, more save points would be nice. While I appreciated the mini-boss not respawning, the traversal in this game isn't the fastest (which is fine in and of itself) and it felt like I had to re-fight through a lot of challenges just to get to where I'd been before. Granted, this is somewhat a matter of taste.
Thanks again for the feedback and I'm hoping it was still enjoyable even with the current flaws.
It was! Thanks for the opportunity to take a look at it. I know my comments may come across as nit-picky, but I think the game has a lot of promise, with great audio-visual design and some thoughtful game/level design, where I felt like I was exploring without getting lost or stuck. It's a fun game, and with some tweaks I think it could be really great.