S.A.M. (LD26)

[Lafolie]

Little SAM is fun to play with.

Thanks! He (?) ended up having more appeal than we planned to be honest.

Having little text popups come up to introduce the mechanics when you need them, as you play would be much better (and would give the player this sense of progression, "gaining" new abilities even though he had them already). I'm aware you guys had even less time than was allotted, so you probably didn't have too much
to spend on tutorials.

This was our original intention, but since we had major time constraints we didn't get chance to do this properly. The intro text was a last minute thing. I like to compare the first level concept to the first stage in Yoshi's Island.

I also ran into that music getting stuck glitch, which happens if you leave it for a bit.

Actually sorta löve<>openAL bug, not our fault In fact, the Mac .app uses a patched build of 0.8.0 that stops the bug from completely ripping the framerate to shreds.

The control scheme was a bit unintuitive

Haha I agree! At several points during the compo I asked the guys to change this, but it never happened. Something about 'that is the key'. If we make it properly this trivial issue would be sorted out.

With that said, I can see this being an awesome exploration/adventure/puzzle game... an even awesomer tweak ...

If I'd had more time to spend creating the second level (and the other 2 I had planned) there'd have been a bigger feeling of grandeur and exploration. The first big room of level 2 is a kind of hub. I intended to give the player some choices as to where to go. The third levels expands on this, the layout I planned was pretty huge and winding, with different passages and rooms leading back into each other and interweaving a sort of 'main path' that you could carve to beat the level in the best time. As a big fan of exploration/adventure/puzzle (basically metroidvania, though I dislike the term - [Super] Metroid is leagues ahead of the excellent SotN) games I understand that a lot of the 'hardcore' value from these games comes from finding, nay, creating these paths for speed running or some other alternative goal. So the finished game would definitely harbour these motives.

I like the fire propagation idea. I'd really like to focus some of the game setting on the idea of being in this disintegrating hulk. The double-edged abilities idea could be very useful for the execution of the 'player gets weaker' mechanic. Through progression we want to encourage players to discover ways to use the abilities that they did not at first realise.