Rollsy & The Surprisingly Short Vertical Mazes

well. Okay i get it, its first project but you totally forgot about game design (which is most important). Camera scrolls down to portal and you are still able to controll your player even if its out of camera. From design perspective it would make sense that player wold be "killed" when camera catches him up and he is out of sight. In current state you can just hold left/right to finish game (even if you dont see your player). Every game needs challenge. In your game it needs to be "keep player on screen or he will die" otherwise its only playable tech demo.
Also i found bug: when camera rolled down to portal, after some time it came back on start position. Technically it did not matter because player was somewhere in middle of level (so i couldnt see him anyway) but it surprised me anyway.
My suggestion: make camera little bit slower (player rolls quite slowly), levels little bit longer and add case when player is out of camera and kill him for restart

And you forgot how to make sentences @Tbohdan.
You forgot multiple commas.

yes. Since when grammar is important in game jams posts? Message is important, form is secondary

@Tbohdan Thank you, I've made improvements to it and updated it using your suggestions. Hopefully that bug won't pop up, I think i fixed it.

Those mazes are surprisingly short! Wasn't using the ability to stop at first, but then when I discovered it makes a delightful sound I started using it at every opportunity.

@dwemthy Thank you for your feedback! 😄

I didn't actually realize what "Stop" did until dwemthy pointed it out - I tried out all the controls when I started the game, noticed W and S did nothing, so I didn't use it until I read the comments. Maybe you want to make it more clear, since I wasn't able to complete the first level until I learned to Stop.

I really like how the background looks, and the ball graphics and stop sound are really cute. It's a great use of a very minimal art style. Not sure why you opted out of audio ratings.

The game's punishing and a bit reliant on memorizing the levels, and that's not neccessarily a bad thing. My biggest issue with the title is just how long it takes to respawn after a death. I understand that you want to give the player a few seconds when they first start a new level, but when respawning after a death the screen should start moving immediately. Waiting several seconds every time I die to get a chance to try again is really frustrating.

In the last few levels you had the player go through some invisible holes in the floor. Normally I'd criticize this design but in your case it actually works quite well - all I needed to do as the player is alternate going left-right-left-right. I did die a few times because of searching for the right spot, but once I got the rhythm I didn't have much trouble.

You included a high scores section to your entry but since you don't display the time ingame I wasn't able to submit anything. Here's proof I completed it though

Its soo tiny, was hard finding it on my screen XD

Sounds were really delightful, and overall game was nostalgic.
However screen was surprisingly small.
Can't believe people actually finished the game.
Too hard for me, although,I tried it four times (only ?)
But the most wonderful part was size of the game, awesome work.

Deceptively hard!
Nice challenge, nice use of the theme.
I like that! Great job.

I enjoyed the challenge, until I copped out early. I saw the portal on level 2, and that's as far as I'll make it.

It reminded me of how I felt playing Super Meat Boy, mistake after mistake, death after death, but I keep coming back because I learned just enough each time to want to get through the next obstacle but forgot just enough most times to die again and start over. Excellent example of a hardcore, simple platformer. One thing I noticed is that you can stop in some very dangerous situations where you're mostly falling off a block. Nothing wrong with that since it becomes a kind of advanced tactic, but if you wanted to prevent wall-clinging, you could add a touch of gravity when the character is mostly off a block. Then they could wall-cling for a second or two but would slide off. Might make it harder.

Good luck with more games in the future!

Really impressive but the screen was way too small making it lot harder for me. I tried it out 20 and am not bored of the game. There is a lot scope for environment and keep inproving. Best of luck for your upcoming games

Great job for your first jam. The art is cool, nice retro style. The controls seem to work well and I like the idea of the game but that resolution is killer. The difficulty was good, not too easy!

If I had to offer some criticism I'd say the killzones are too tight and the reset is too long. I died when the platform I was trying to land on was visible on the screen a couple times. Also the delay at the start should be shorter when you are retrying a level after playing. Stops the flow of the game being interrupted.

I admire this game!

@duel_05 - Thank you! But why?

First, @Orionintheforest, Rollsy him/herself. You just made a simple character. I would have tried to make a beautifull work of art, which I can't draw or use Blender, so….
Second, it's so hard, and simple at the same time. Even I could have made that in a weekend, but it was still a game worthy of being bought. Simple mechanics, controls, and art. Yet it was a challenging game.
I hope Rollsy wins. You deserve it.

Also, what programming language did you use? Can you somehow give me the source code so I can disect it to find out the secret of its strange enchantment…….

Hey, do you want to join my own 3-month jam, TribaJam?

Rollsy has a simple gameplay, but it's wrapped in unusual style choices and a very original retro feel, which make it stand out! It was an interesting idea to make this in a pseudo-2-bit palette and a very small window. Somehow that reminded me of old LCD portable games like this tetris clone.

I loved the little animations, especially at the game launch and during level transitions. The audio also fits really well - except the basic "walk" sound which gets irritating quickly but that's part of the nostalgic feel :P The level design & balancing are a bit weird, very hard and based on trial-and-error, but once again I can forgive that as a retro thing.

A pretty cool & original entry, especially for a 1st game jam! Keep making games!

I got a rather NSFW popup from your download host. Just sayin'.

@thomastc Ack! I'm so Sorry, was not intentional at all! I'll change it.

@thomastc That's part of the experience! Back to the 90s :D

Considering that this is your first game jam, I think you did well. You chose to make something simple and you succeeded in that. I think the level design was pretty nice.

I just have one complaint: The levels start too slow. It took me at least 10 deaths before I figured out that I had to wait for the screen to go down. Not only that, but it made it frustrating when I "died" because of how long I had to wait to get back to where I was. Fortunately, the levels weren't that long.

Good work though!

This is really cool! I love the aesthetic!

But oh man is it difficult I am so bad at this.

I love the graphics (although they are definitvely hard to apprechiate on a high-resolution monitor…). You even put a small face on the sphere! The controls also feel quite nice. I didn't get very far, because the very beginning is a bit slow and boring, which is fine for understanding the controls, but gets frustrating when you loose a bit later on and have to replay the start. Given the title though I assume I had almost reached the end of the level…

Is the sound glitching on my PC? The death sound was disturbingly noisy. Other than that, the game is pretty well made. The initial delay (before the scrolling starts) could be a bit reduced.

@euske What audio glitches where happening on your PC?