Coatl

Hi @dwemthy,
Thanks for providing coatl for this FF.

I really enjoyed playing it. The menu is nice and the music sets a great mood. I also like the continuous movement of the snake without a grid and I think this is an awesome idea!

It would be super easy to stress the "all directions" idea even further and making a real gameplay element out of it by just putting diagonal or sin/cos shaped tunnels into the game. Or just leave some bigger free areas for the player to move freely.

Playing with a mouse or a touchpad works flawlessly. I can also imagine that playing with a gamepad would work great or just by tapping on a mobile device.
The only thing that did not work from a ui perspective, was clicking the pause button. I had to move the cursor down there to click it, which made the snake eat itself. D:
Also clicking the resume button immediately moved in the direction of the cursor, which ate the rest of my snake. :(

The puzzles are well designed. It can however happen that you bite your tail and thus cannot solve this level. A "reset level" functionalty would be awesome here. I would also like to see the layout of the level from a bird's eye view at first so I can plan my path.

Although I put out a lot of criticism, this is not meant in a negative way but as opportunities for you to improve! I hope to see this emerge into a full game.

Best,
Laguna

After replaying it, I noticed there is a "replay" button in the menu. stupid me.

This was a very interesting game to play! It was fun to see how you explored this idea of turning Snake into a top-down adventure in a physics engine. I liked the overall looks and atmosphere of the game, with this strange maya snake exploring what I picture as a huge pyramid full of secrets. The music also sets the tone well for a relaxed mood :)

The main feedback I'll have is mostly about game design:

• Physics: That choice of not using a tilemap, but instead full 2D physics was a bold move, and while the physics are a bit rough I think the move was a good, original choice. It allowed you to mix puzzle solving & reaction skills, opening plenty of potential! The snake itself worked mostly well, with only some glitches upon spawn ("late" parts "jumping" to the back to the snake). Doors can also behave strangely which had been more annoying in certain levels, blocking the way in unexpected manners.

• Controls: The mouse-based controls is cool overall! My main suggestion is to limit the rotation speed of the head, so as to prevent some glitches and accidents when the cursor is close to the head. It would also prevent some moves that almost feel like cheating (eg. walking aside a fraction of a second just to catch a fly). Oh and the dash skill is pretty fun, apart maybe from level 17 which I found to have some annoying jumps. Which brings me to…

• Camera: An issue I have is that the close camera often forces us to rely to chance and trial-and-error to discover a level layout. Instead of thinking about solving puzzles, we spend quite some time just exploring stuff then pressing restart when we get the level. Simply having a much wider view of the level would have made things more fun. Another thing is the multi-level layouts starting with level 20. I found the idea very interesting, but in practice level 21 was a bit confusing. I was stuck at that level so I couldn't go any further, but I suspect this might be an issue is the next levels as well.

• Snake length: The reason I was stuck at level 21 is that in level 20 I accidentally bit my body (which was 111 parts long!!! :D) right before the end. I lost my body because I was tempted to grab the ~5 flies in the final room :P That means I ended level 20 with a body around 10 parts long, which was far from enough to make level 21 playable. There lies the biggest flaw of the game: how the snake size is kept in-between levels means that sometimes the levels are super easy, and sometimes plain impossible… And when we're stuck, we have to go back to level 1. I wish I could at least go back to the start of level 20 to replay it correctly. Sorry I didn't restart the game to see the final boss ^^

Overall, despite the flaws I still think Coatl is good, especially because the main issues are easily fixable. I'm also sure there are many more opportunities for exciting and challenging puzzles with the mechanics you already have here. Finding a different way to manage snake length in between levels is the main question to address.

Thanks for sharing your game!

Art: Very slick, with quite a neat aesthetic direction, really got the mayan feel into the snake, the levels, the UI, it's very exhaustive. The pixel art quality is not super high, but thats just a matter of practice and time. Everything is very well itnegrated, and while I dont feel like the art speaks to me a lot and feels a little bit rushed, its formally very hard to criticize. It's really clean, clear art direction, good cohesion, and its clear that an interesting artistic decision have been made about almost each asset.

Music: I like it. It fits the game. Feels a bit repetitive and lacks a bit of color and fanfare, maybe, but I know how abstract and hard that is. Im really not good when giving feedback about music except wether or not it fits the feel of the gameplay, and in this case the only thing I can say is that when the stakes raised a lot, levels were a lot harder, and especially with the inclusion of the pits, having that repeating rythmic music didnt fit as well with the very precise movement and didnt help me keep trying.

Gameplay: The base works really well, and the idea too: action game with puzzle elements, puzzle game with action elements. The main problem I find with it is actually that, that it doesnt quite decide what is it testing you in, and the mechanics of the action precision game work against the puzzle mechanics sometimes. Butterflies dodging you, being able to sometimes circumvent the puzzles by doing some weird moves…

Also this might be more on the "bug" side of things, but a lot of times it feels like the punishes of the action parts punish you randomly when youre trying to solve a puzzle, and force you to start from the beginning, even tho you already know the solution, and that doesnt feel super good. Same for the bugs where the tail does weird stuff because of reasons. Reading other feedback I understood theres some problem about how the tail is preserved between levels, which I didnt notice in game but I did feel like somethign was off and sometimes puzzles gave me less or more tools than I needed.

I kinda ragequit once the pits were used far too much (in my opinion) cause I felt the puzzley part of the game (which is the one I enjoy the most) was being completely destroyed by the precision aspects and everything was so unnerving. Tell me if I missed some other major interesting mechanic.

Overall the gameplay feels pretty good, but the constant bugs do hurt it a lot.

Final thoughts: The project is really solid and Im sure it could be improved a lot. I feel like the main thigs it needs is gameplay polish so less weird things happen, and then decide how much puzzle and how much action you really want. Id lean hard in one of the two as to make sure one doesnt hurt the other. Quite a good game already tho, it really kept me playing for quite a long time, and it was the bugs and the too punishing holes that made me stop.

It's pretty fun actually. A nice twist on snake having levels and puzzles I like the concept and think its a fun game to play.
I got to level 8 but then my entire snake disappeared. I didn't bump into myself it just weirdly vanished, even the little tail end bit and then I rage quit haha.
As I was playing a lot of errors were flagging up in the console which was a bit weird so I'd get those fixed.
Some of the art is better than others. e.g the UI and the snake and levels and stuff are good but the start menu screen isn't up to the same standard. Not sure if it's placeholder or something but it doesn't look right.
Levels seem designed well and difficulty ramps up at a good rate.

Its good you included restarting the levels buit I might even go as far as to bind restart to a key like you have with pause. Maybe have it on R and show it on the UI next to pause for convenience.

Overall I feel like its really good. If you tidy up the bugs and polish it a little it will be in a really good place,

Here's an image of the bug

https://imgur.com/a/9jv0RhT

Thanks everyone for all the really great feedback! Really appreciate all the honest feedback that helps identify ways to improve the player experience.

Seems like the biggest issues are bugs and being unforgiving on mistakes. Going to focus on those issues primarily.

This is a very addictive game. I found myself taking far too long with it, trying to
manage my gigantic snake. A very good take on the genre. I think that this game should
totally be polished and developed. The presentation could be improved with some better
art and since it is a mouse-controlled game, a full screen mode is paramount. Otherwise
the player (me) just keeps taking the mouse off the game window. The physics objects
were pourly implemented and need to have a set of restrictions imposed. Particularly,
the games, which can actually be pushed by the snake along the corridors. The physics
of the snake itself are pretty good with the segments dragging along nicely in the chain.
You made a very good choice of assets, which helped keep me engaged.

Now for some Godot things:

• StreamPlayer2D should be replaced with StreamPlayer. Otherwise, sounds keeps coming
  only from one of my headphones.
• Debug console should be de-activated. There are a ton of errors popping up, which you
  might wanna tackle.

Love the idea! Snake but exploring! Slightly weird how you can twist your neck 180 and bite your body off but then again, my fault for turning too quickly. I enjoyed the game all the way until I got the the levels where the ability is needed - I think it was level 17 which got super annoying because the cooldown of the ability means you have to be pixel perfect (if you want all the flies, which I do) on many of the jumps.

I wasn't sure if you needed all the flies, maybe explain that somewhere? (maybe it was explained and I ignored it?) and also it wasn't clear what happens if you lose body parts (e.g. do I have to restart or can I still progress?) Just a bit more rules explained to the player would be good.

A very cool and unique idea- I guess the level design and difficulty rampup stopped me from finding the boss - atleast for now!

Initial Impressions:

Looks like snake with a traditional Chinese snake parade/kite like decoration/celebration, which is quite neat. Also gives vibes of being in a pyramid/temple and working a way through. Combining snake with a puzzle game is quite neat.

Issues

I did run into several issues, the first of which was eating my tail immediately and couldn't even pass the first level, as I had an assumption going in that I could continue eating more butterflies. I was able to restart though and completed easily second time around.

When going from one level to the next I did notice the tail had delays that was a serious eye sore, fixing this before adding other levels/content might be a place to start. I also noticed, that when you do eat yourself in the later levels, the shortened snake remains when the level restarts and so you can never complete the level unless you restart from the begining. I think having each level with a minimum or defined length is better for the puzzle aspect than depending on previous/current tail length.

Finally escape does not bring up the pause menu, and/or exit the game from main menu.