I'm super excited to finally release my hardcore platformer, Gravitry.
It's a hardcore platformer that focuses on gravity mechanics: you're able to walk on the ceiling and on whatever you can land on to complete the levels.
I'm curious to know how many people can beat the whole game: there's only about a dozen of levels, but they might keep you entertained way longer than you think!
I can't tell without playing how the respawn feels but you could compare timing with supermeatboy and vvvvv and others to get it right. Long restart delay is frustrating (which you might or might not want).
The jumping sound appears to be too loud (potentially annoying) compared to the music.
Frustrating-hard is a genre and all players' comments are based on their preferences. Puzzle platformer players who love frustratingly hard games are a different target group from puzzle platformer players who like checkpoints and little punishment for failure.
I'm the latter
lg.newImage("cat.png") -- made possible by lg = love.graphics
-- Don't force fullscreen (it frustrates those who want to try your game real quick) -- Develop for 1280x720 (so people can make HD videos)
This game is pretty fun... I've made it to room 8 so far. The controls were pretty hard to find out... I actually had to go source diving to find out what they were. Once I found out you could run, I could actually play the game. So here they are.
left and right arrows to move left and right
space to jump
left shift to run (this is the one that really wasn't intuitive)
and 'm' for debug - not sure if this is useful players though.
Do the up and down arrow keys do anything? I really couldn't tell if they did even though they are mapped to something in the source.
Maybe in the tutorial level if those are listed it would be easier to get past the big jump in room 2ish.
It wasn't obvious to me that the third picture over was shift or that last one was space. Space for jump wasn't hard to figure out, but shift for run wasn't obvious. Maybe if the word 'shift' was on the picture with the up arrow, it'd be easier to figure out.
I found the game to be surprisingly not fun. And I kept playing it longer than I usually would have to try and figure out why I wasn't having fun with it. It's weird, because I like platformers! It's my favorite genre. I think my issue with this game is that it's hard for the sake of being hard. I get that you're making a hardcore platformer, but I think you interpreted that too literally. All you made was a game that was a) a platformer, and b) hard. It didn't really have anything fun about it.
It feels kind of sterile and clinical to me. It's just a bunch of hard obstacles in a row. You never feel the joy of motion and jumping really high/far, or the satisfaction of an obstacle that is tricky, but within your skill level. It's all just finnicky, annoying obstacles that take a bunch of trial and error.
I'm sorry to give you vague and unhelpful feedback, but I guess here's some specific things that would probably make the game more fun:
--More juice!
--Take out the dialogue; I don't want to stop and listen to your non-threatening GLaDOS ripoff (any game in a lab environment with a computer that talks to you starts to feel like it's trying to be Portal)
--Slower difficulty ramp
--Make the controls a little less touchy
Tesselode wrote:I think my issue with this game is that it's hard for the sake of being hard.
I'm sorry, but that's exactly the point. I made a hard platformer, simply to make it hard
I think it wasn't fun for you because you maybe couldn't pass a level, and thus were frustrated: I can totally understand that. That's what I felt when I played VVVVVV. Perhaps you should give it another go and try to beat the whole game.
Tesselode wrote:I'm sorry to give you vague and unhelpful feedback
Don't worry, I'm used to getting that - unfortunately.
Tesselode wrote:--Slower difficulty ramp
I'm afraid this won't be possible - this game is aimed at players who like hard platformers.
Tesselode wrote:I think my issue with this game is that it's hard for the sake of being hard.
I'm sorry, but that's exactly the point. I made a hard platformer, simply to make it hard
I think it wasn't fun for you because you maybe couldn't pass a level, and thus were frustrated: I can totally understand that. That's what I felt when I played VVVVVV. Perhaps you should give it another go and try to beat the whole game.
Tesselode wrote:I'm sorry to give you vague and unhelpful feedback
Don't worry, I'm used to getting that - unfortunately.
Tesselode wrote:--Slower difficulty ramp
I'm afraid this won't be possible - this game is aimed at players who like hard platformers.
Thanks for the feedback
I'll give it another shot and report back.
Edit: well, I beat the game twice! I think...? I still didn't have a lot of fun with it. It's fine that there's really hard levels, but I think you should at least include some easier ones first so people get a chance to have fun and play around before you destroy them with difficulty.
Anyway, at the very least this game could use some better music and sound effects. The death sound is really grating, and that 10 second music loop is not very interesting. Do you want me to write something? I could probably come up with some better sound effects, too.
