Feedback Fortnight - The Greater Good
Short mess I made
Just a thing for Ludum Dare 43.
Comments (4)
Nice Entry! I like the really simplistic colors as well as the artstyle. The animations are awesome!
Although the game is quite short, I pretty much enjoyed playing "for the greater good". Even though it does not use a lot of text, it conveys a certain mood and got me sucked into it.
The only "bug" which I had (might be my screen resolution/aspect ratio) was that I could not read the text of the other guy. When I noticed I can easily walk through the enemies without dying that was not an issue anymore.
Controls are solid and direct. If you want to improve here, adding some forgiving control mechanics could make the experience even better. Examples would be
- allowing to jump for a short amount of time (up to 0.5 seconds, but that depends on the specific movement mechanics) after the player walked off a cliff
- when pressing jump while shortly before landing (thus not yet on the ground) the player should still jump as soon as he touches the ground.
Both are super easy to implement using a timer.
All in all this is a very solid entry and I enjoyed playing it a lot!
My biggest point of feedback would be to add a nice image or even an animated gif for this page (thumbnail and text). People love images and animated ones are even better. As you have an awesome artstyle you could definitely benefit from that alot. ;)
Art: Like it. Few, colors, black&white, pixelly… Up my alley.
Music: Haunting and bothersome and fits the game well. Wouldnt work if the game was longer, probably.
Gameplay: Nice platformer cotnroller, theres not much to the gameplay really.
Final thoughts: I see it as one of those small haunting text platformers that are simplistic, somewhat naive, and a bit creepy, and works well as that, but it might be too abrupt. Its haunting in that way that it gives the player almost nothign and just leavis him there wondering why the experience that he just had exists at all and what was its purpose. I wonder where would you have teken it with more time.
I'm guilty of liking this kind of story-based platformer, so while this one was super short it is quite my cup of tea. You've got a nice starting point here, with a simple but pleasant retro style (I'd say somewhere between Commodore & Game Boy stuff?), fitting music and effects, and a cool quirky tone.
The game is pretty short and unchallenging, so I suspect you didn't have the time to make a full story. All I can say is what's here is polished overall and leaves us wanting more.
An issue I had on my first playthtough is with the ending: as soon as I saw the creatures, I tried to jump over them, thinking I would have the time to read the text afterwards. Turns out I got a black screen immediately, and because of that I didn't understand the ending. A fix would be to just tune the final level design: if you made it breathe by splitting the text into several places and making the player walk by them like in the first level, I think it would work fine.
Also I didn't realize the monsters were actually harmless! I guess it's all thanks to the hat :D