Light It!
Platforms, lights and little puzzles
**Hey everybody! **This is my first game jam! Hope you enjoy my game Light It!
Light It! Its a platformer that takes the advantage of not seeing everything to make some couple of tiny puzzles and platform action!
The mechanics where kinda hard to make, however a really enjoyed every second of creation. As a person who wants to get into the video game industry, I am curious of the feedback I'll get of the game. I used Unity as the game engine, Affinity Designer for graphical assets, and BoscaCeoil for the audio.
I apologies for any bugs a might not have discovered and solved
So far everything seems cool, thanks for playing the game!
(edit: added the platforms tag: "web" and "windows")
Comments (32)
This was great, loved the flame in the darkness aesthetic. One tip is for the risk/reward flame mechanic: it's an interesting balance to strike, but the "risk" suffers from being both not enough of a risk, and also too much of an annoyance. You're risking suffocation, which isn't much of a threat to the player as they are probably just going to sit around for 5 seconds, get annoyed and maybe even close the game. You could kill two birds with one stone by having suffocation kill you. It would add a heightened level of tension while failure might make the player more determined to beat the game
Hey!
First, the little ball of heat / light is super cute! Remember me of those "sun guys" from Spyro 3. Well, the difficulty was just right - I just think that the jumping could be improved a little (sometimes I had to jump and then press forward, other times I got a little stuck, etc)
Also, the "burning out makes you smaller" - nice concept, but I didn't realize it at first. It made sense after some time, though.
Last thing, about the light itself. It burned out too fast and took too long to recharge. I get it that this is part of the challenge, but it's a little frustrating. Maybe having it stay for a little longer and charging a little faster would be nice.
But for a first jam, overall, very cute and solid game, even if it's only 1 level!
Hey!
Thank you very much! I agree, I tried to make the jumping and other movements as smooth as posible, but it still needs a lot of work. I specially when you fall and die just because the jump isn´t responsive enough. And definetly the risk of burning out needs to be readjusted.
Thanks for the review!
This felt really smooth and fun to play. I love the little character! I also love the mechanic of using the suffocation of the flame to get through smaller spaces. I thought I would die if the flame ran out, but this was much cooler :D I hope you continue this after the jam, there is so much you can do with this!!
@treslapin Thank you! Yes, I'll continue pulishing it and adding new ideas to it!
So what is "sofocation" anyway? I don't think the bar would have needed any label at all. Also kinda weird how the bar had a bit of the yellow even when it was empty. The help message in the start could have been more visible and even not even require one to do it to completely see it. It's kinda pointless having a tutorial help message which you can only see after you know how to do the thing it's trying to teach. The recovery speed of that "sofocation" was too slow in my opinion as well. Since there was no danger anywhere, it was just an unnecessary pause on the gameplay.
There was something a bit off with your jumping script. How did you do the "ground detection"? Or it could be something with the input handling as well. Quite often it just completely ignored my jumping when I tried to do a running jump.
The first squeezing part took me quite a while to figure out. The size of the character getting smaller wasn't that clear because of the camera zoom that happened at the same time. Took me even longer to get through the second one. It looked way too small to fit and I failed to be fast enough on my first attempts. So I figured it wouldn't be the same thing again and must have something to do with those different looking blue floors. Finally gave up on those and went for another try with success that time.
Not a huge fan of the whole left hand only control scheme when there is sweet FA to do for your right hand. Adding alternative keys is quick and easy and makes more people happy.
Could have added more sound effects (like one for the W ability, landing from a jump, etc). And even those two that were there were kinda, umm, weird. The jumping effect sounded more like a coin/pickup sound and the death sound could have used more oomph.
Good job on finishing and your first jam! It one hell of a great and addictive hobby ;)
@anttihaavikko Agreed, specially with the bar issues, the jumping and the input keys, I'm planing to change the input keys, and really get the jumping feel better, I tried to fix it but the things I did so far have not worked. The ground detection is through box colliders and Unity's physics.
Also, I kinda like the background audio, and that jumping definetly sounds like a coin ahahaha, I'll work on both! Also I'm pretty exited for adding more audio and more mechanics to it.
Thanks for playing and for the interesting review!
(edit): Just replayed the level and Yeah, the message is kinda hard to read haha
Oh I see, that is why it sometimes didn't jump. So you set a grounded bool in CollisionEnter/Stay and set it to false in Exit? That isn't the most reliable way since small bumps can make it fail. You should instead raycast down from several points on the character or use Physics2D.Overlap methods to do the detection.
Another nice thing you can add to 2d platformers is some jump buffering. So if the player hits the jump button like few frames before the character actually landed, the game will remember it can jump as soon as they hit the ground.
I was really pleasantly surprised by this game.
- The mechanic of shrinking when you "burn up" is very creative and I was able to discover it quickly without explanation - that's a good game design.
- The animation of burning up adds a lot to the "feel" of the game. Even with such simplistic graphics, that animation adds personality to the character. I would have liked to see more of a cue to tell when you're about to run out of light, but I also don't really have any ideas for how best to do that.
- Other than the jump issues mentioned above, the controls are pretty good overall.
- This game could probably use one of those "adjust your screen brightness until you can see everything" screens at the beginning, if you don't mind doing a bit of research into contrast and gamma and such.
Well done! The gameplay mechanics work nicely together (shrinking, jumping, levels). The fire graphics is very cute, the darkening looks awesome and the small particle effects help alot in finding the correct jump distance.
Great work!
If you want to make movement even smoother, you can try and implement a small "post cliff jump timer", meaning that the player can still jump for about 0.3 after he has walked over the cliff. That massively simplifies jumping mechanics.
Pretty cute game, couple of awkward things, I also didn't realise the light up thing for quite a while, i notice later there is some instruction on the wall but its pretty easy to miss, it also took me a while to realise that you are smaller when you are burned up, hard to see because everything is dark :D. Agree with @Laguna that it would be nice to smooth up the jump feel becaue it seemed that if i was a bit too close to the edge i couldn't jump, so I had to resort to inching close to the edge, then jump then move. Anyway some nice ideas. cute if simple graphics. Played till the end.
Impressive for a first jam entry! It looks great, especially with the particle effects and the glowing view circle. The audio is pretty good too.
Gameplay-wise, this has potential, but it could be better. In particular, there are no places where you have to be quick (or maybe I didn't get far enough) so burning out is no big deal, as you can afford to wait. I also didn't figure out that burning out makes you smaller, until I read the comments here.
Also, thank you so much for adding checkpoints! If I had to start over on every death, I would have given up very quickly.
@automatonvx Thanks for the review! I'll be working on the jumping mechanics and updating with new levels! Also will be checking the tutorial part I'll see what I can do.
Thanks for playing till the end!
Nice idea with respect to the theme. Sadly, I felt the lit radius was a little bit too small; as an example I had difficulties reading the introduction text. I have a knack for particles so I liked your design a lot. Also, nice home screen, it's great you took the time to code a proper one! Also thanks for the web version, much easier to test.
The low hanging fruit have already been collected so lets look at deeper issues.
A platforming challenge with limited visibility is about what I predicted from the jam taken the theme. The size changing isn't enough to mix up the interactivity as it hardly makes a difference to the formula: Move forward, look around with the light, notice the problem right in front of you, overcome it with one of your two abilities.
More abilities are needed. Importantly these mechanics should be used in conjugation, not merely one at a time. For instance, giving the player a set of elemental powers could result in someting like this:
- Use light (fire) to see around
- Use double jump (air) and shrinking (uh, earth?) to fit into a small room half way up a wall
- Power up a machine (electricity) in the small room which reveals moving/disapearing platforms in the main room
- Sqeeze back into the main room
- Jump from platform to platform
- Temporarity disable flame hazards (with ice) while platforming to reach a checkpoint
- Locate another machine to activate an elevator
- Dodge/freeze/electrocute falling debris and baddies while the elevator is moving
- etc.
For something like this to work each ability should probably have its own key. Requires experimentation. And, sure enough, I didn't expect this sort of complexity from a jam title so worry not.
Adequate entry. I'll check the post-jam version when it comes out.
Overall: 5 (Average)
Graphics: 5 (Average)
Audio: 4 (Below average)
Gameplay: 5 (Average)
Originality: 4(Below average)
Theme: 5 (Average)
@HuvaaKoodia Thanks for the deeper analysis of my gameplay, seeing the way you are judging games is giving me multiple new perspectives. I'll spend a lot of time developing ways to improve controlls, visuals, audio and gameplay, maybe also some background story.
I also was thinking to add more abilities, I'm very thankfull for all your ideas. I'll be looking forward for your review in the updated game.
Thanks for playing!
wow that was a solid game. and i actualy meneged to finish the level (that white thing at the end) it feels like an acomplishment good game.
https://media.giphy.com/media/SiEJtaJ5NRevDOYr7w/giphy.gif
you can realy devlop this thing, you already have a freamework for a full game.
about gameplay you shod play test it some less hardcore player may drop this after the first few chalenges.
im not a platform game lover but would pay to play a full version of this.
about platforms. i dont know why but unity makes my life hard as somone with an old computer and 0 budget (aka poor gamer) i dont have windows 8 and almost cant run unity player(or games) and webgl is almost always slow.
thats why i devlop with java and have builds for linux and mac too. for web i use phaser js. alwayse consider the little guy these people make the most passionate fans if you menage to get them to like you (like giving them an awsome game that runs on their weak hardwere).
Pretty cool! I took longer than I dare to admit to understand that you were smaller when burnt out.
Gameplay: The game works great and the mechanic is cool. I feel like it has a lot of unexploited potential (the game feels like your light abilities only work to hinder you, instead of being a tool). The line of sight being blurry makes you have to force your vision sometimes. Also, waiting as a mechanic is almost never appealing, but I'm not sure how could that be solved.
Art: Serves its purpose and looks nice and cute (especially the character). The "programmer art" (particles and effects) work really well, maybe you could have pushed that more. Sometimes it's hard to differentiate background and foreground, f.e. it was hard to see the crevice in the wall.
Music: I like the music, feels good and relaxing. On the other hand, the sfx doesn't fit (sounds like a coin collection instead of a jump) and makes my right ear feel lonely.
Great work! You should post your work on itch.io or something to have it etched on the internets and build portfolio.
Also, if you haven't, I recommend you to try Game Maker with the help of HeartBeast's tutorials. For 2D small games like this, it's a lot more handy than Unity.
See you around! :)