A fun, but also really hard game. The music and graphics is simple and great. Well done.

Is there by the way a end goal in this game?

@jk5000 Yes, there is an end goal. I've added a YouTube play-through to the entry page if you want to check it out.

Thank you for the video. I see what my problem was, I did not nodes the ladders. So I have only seen a very small part of your game, but with my poor fighting skills I would never reached the end anyway.

By the way I also what too say thank you for playing my game.

I have now also rated your game.

A simple game, but really well put together. I especially like the little mouse avatar.

First of all props for the title. Gameplay is pretty simplistic but also engaging, randomized enemies (i belive they are) add to the experience. This game really reminds me of Chip and Dale NES games and other games like that. Pretty cool art style and audio matches it well. Impressive for such a short development time.

Love it!
Really well done, was it done with libgdx?

I like that the jump height corresponds with the button press time. The enemy variety and the controls are great too.

Also the music, when you die, the phrase is in the same key as the rest of the music. Seems trivial but many devs don't do that.


Every time you have enemies on both sides reminds me of ninja turtles on gameboy :P

Congrats on the game man!

Rated!

@Rombus No, it's not done using libgdx. I'm actually using my own engine I made in Java.

I agree with @Rombus here. The button press timing with the jump is nice. Overall, challenging, and I liked the escalation of difficulty as you went through. Ladders were a bit tough to see the first time, but after that, easy to recognize. Also, checkpoints! Awesome work with that. The graphics and the audio went together well, too. Great stuff!

Super cute and challenging :D
The graphics are nice, I really like the animations of the mouse character.
Music is a bit repetitive but charming.
Good job!

The name immediately grabbed me, but overall I came away wanting a bit more. Recognize it was your own engine, so a lot of the time was prolly eaten by that but I feel like some sort of extra mechanic would have pushed it further. Also I like that it has music, but after a few loops it starts to get that droning effect due to how short the loop is.

All that said, props to makin your own engine, thanks for the game <3

Very challenging and addicting. I made it to the end!

Great job. I like the graphics especially, as well as the variation in the enemies. Level design was nice too. Checkpoints were perfect.

Kinda retro-style platformer setting in a small mouse world. Pixel arts and sound are great. Hard-core level design. I like it.

The graphics are very well done and the music fits the game, it almost feels like a Gameboy game. My only problem was when I tried to figure out how to proceed after the first flag as I haven't recognized the tablecloth as a solid object to walk on. The walkthrough video helped. Overall a great game.

Beautiful art style!

I missed some innovative/unique mechanic, something to differentiate your game.
The level design could have more variety (you'd probably need some new mechanics to do that)

Overall, good game!

Very nice graphics and retro theme. It really feels like and old 8-bit platformer. Made it all the way to the end. I liked the variation in enemies and the difficultly level, and the checkpoints were well-placed. I personally found that the jump height corresponding to the button timing was a bit awkward, but others seem to like it. Well done!

Thanks for taking a look at our game, [E.(a)T.](https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/38/e-at). Much appreciated :slight_smile:.

Wow this game is really hard!
Love the retro vibe though. Reminds me of a cuter version of Kung Fu Master from the 80s
And to be fair, the games back then were way harder too!
I like the enemy design too. Each enemy has their own behavior pattern. I don't know what the blue popsicle/candles guy is but he is really hard! But it's very satisfying once you learn the patterns so you can beat them consistently.

The cute Graphic can blind you, the game is really hard due to the fact that enemys spawn again if you go back.
On the edge to be frustrating I got satisfied to the hole.
Nice entry!

This was really fun! It was challenging but not unfair and the graphics were cute! Well done!

Cute game :) I really like the graphics and music, they are simple but really well done. I like the variety of enemies too, kinda reminding me Megaman's enemies. I would like the game to has some more deep, and not a single level, but I get this was for the compo, so good job anyways. The game can be a bit hard sometimes, and the jump can get a bit tricky, but this is a good game, overall.

Nice throwback to the platformers of ye olde days, and it's not just the audio-visual presentation, but the game design choices as well. Seeing new types of enemies and discovering their movement patterns makes repeatedly dying not so frustrating!

I really like how the game gets step by step more difficult with the different kinds of enemies.
It keeps the game interesting and challenging. The background music is also very good and one of my favourite 8 bit tunes so far! All in all a solid game! ...sadly without cheese at the end :( :D

This was fun! Kept me motivated 'till the end! Interesting enemies, cute, very well-done graphics. I wish I could've jumped higher. Found out that tip-toeing was a good strategy to avoid enemy clashes. Mannn, I hate these enemies. All of them. In a good way! :D

The music got somewhat repetitive after a few minutes, but hey, it's a compo entry, heh? :)

Also, controls were really uncomfortable on a QWERTZ keyboard – consider mapping Y to the Z function as well, next time! :)

The old school graphics look awesome and the gameplay is very fun too. Even though the combat is very basic it was actually quite difficult and strategic. The design of the enemies is very cute :). The checkpoints were placed in good intervals so it wasnt too frustruating even with only 3 lives.

Really nice game, I liked the music and the graphics! Also pretty hard to complete...

It feels like a visual clutter when your backgrounds tiles are a similar value so it clashes with your foreground tiles. Controls are also very sticky and stiff. Despite sticky controls, managed to reach the end.

Nice little retro platformer. I wish it was easier to move around and attack, controls feel a little stiff and attack range feels just a tad too small. Love the look of the mouse and the enemies!

Getting 4 distinct animated enemy types into a jam game deserves some kind of award, great job!

Loved that! That was NES era hard and fun. Great job!

Adorable game, but soooooooo difficult. Really gave me those NES nostalgia feels.

Excellent excellent game. Really hard, really fun, I LOVED the jump animation, the level design was great. All across the board really loved it. On top of that the title was just hilarious. Well done

Really captures the feel of a lot of retro platformers. The difficulty too!

Wow! For a while, I thought I was playing on an NES emulator. The hard-as-nails progression, wimpy melee attack that requires precise timing, enemies respawning when just off screen, and flashing i-frames all come together for a wonderful and nostalgic experience with an impressive amount of content for for a Compo game.

What I like:
* The graphics are awesome! The mouse looks cute and lively, the attack animation provides good feedback, the tileset is varied and provides some great mood, the backgrounds contribute to the theme, and the enemies are all well designed and fun.
* An impressive amount of content! I was surprised when I saw 2 unique enemies, then I saw the third, and then a fourth! That's awesome for the time that you had. They're also all wonderfully varied and require different strategies to approach each.
* The level design is great. It's linear but provides a great sense of progression through checkpoints, has a lot of horizontal and vertical elements, and a lot of fun ways to interact with the enemies.
* Tight platformer controls. Not much more to say, a lot of people miss this. Bravo.

What I don't like:
* Audio. The main music loop isn't terrible, and the death jingle is a nice touch, but overall it's kind of repetitive. Furthermore, a lack of sound effects for things like hitting, attacking, jumping, landing, dying, ect removes a layer of polish that would otherwise make the game feel even better to play.


This is an awesome entry. Well done and good luck with the competition.

Nice aesthetic and animations. Felt well designed with lots of things to fill the void. Hard to distinguish background from foreground, but this is not too noticeable. Overall very good, aside from minor problems I had with the controls. Just a tad bit stiff.

I finally conquered my greatest nemesis... aggressive casino chips! Fun game, and very difficult. It felt cheap at first, but once I learned the enemy patterns, fighting them felt very satisfying. I think the game would have given me a better first impression if the mouse could jump a little higher, as avoiding the spinning "casino chips" (I'm sure that's probably not what they really are) was very precise. Good job!

Really amazing game! My only problem with it was the configuration of the jump key - I would have loved if space was jump (though that's mostly personal preference. Other than that, the graphics, music and gameplay were all very cool.

@cudabear

Thanks so much for all of the feedback. I'm glad you like the game!

I just want to mention that there should be sound effects for jumping, attacking, hitting, and a few other thing as well already in the game. Maybe they're being drowned out by the music or something, in which case I should have made them louder. I can definitely hear them on my end, so maybe it's a bug. Your feedback is really helpful and appreciated regardless. Audio feedback is a very important part of games, and there definitely are some other effects you mention that I could have added, like landing. I know that Mega Man has a landing effect that sounds really good, so maybe my game could use one as well. I've also heard from some other people about the music being repetitive. I think you're totally right and it definitely could have used a bridge between loops.

I'm definitely glad that I was able to include so many enemy types as well. As you point out, having that huge variety of enemies is one of the strong suits of the game. I think the key lesson I learned here is the incredible power of code reuse. The last two enemies, the candle and the spider, use some of the same code as the skeleton and red slime enemies from my Ludum Dare 35 game. Being able to use ANY preexisting code as the rules state is a big boon and helps cut down on time. Over the years, I've built up a big repository of enemy behaviors that I can surely make good use of in future projects.

Anyway, I just want to thank you for your very detailed feedback. I'll be sure to check out your game too.

I'm now an expert in the art of mouse swordsmanship. Thanks for that.

Seriously tho, great stuff.

Huge variety of unique enemies, emphasis on combat over platforming (definitely a different feel! loved it!), adorable graphics. The game got a bit tricky but it was never TOO rough. I definitely appreciate the checkpoint system tho. :p

This is a really cool game. I like how all the obstacles and enemies are made out of common objects. The graphics overall are quite nice, especially some of the mouse's animations. The sound effects and music are also very solid. The gameplay is fun too, with a nice variety of enemies. It can be a little tricky though. Perhaps the sword range could be slightly larger.

@doc-ill

(They're supposed to be peppermints ;P but I like your idea too)

@zeriver

You're actually totally right that Chip and Dale Rescue Rangers on the NES was one of the inspirations for the theme of this game.

@candlesan

Yeah, I was definitely inspired by a lot of those old NES action games like Kung-Fu Master. My main point of reference for the gameplay was actually Ninja Gaiden (and, now that I think about it, there's a little bit of Trojan in there too, which is a bit like Kung-Fu Master). I actually took breaks during development to play Ninja Gaiden on my Mini NES whenever I got stuck on the game design. It was a huge help and actually inspired the mechanic of some enemies coming from behind you, which I actually hadn't considered doing before and is one of the defining features of the final game.

This game is a very solid platformer and compo entry. The enemies and character match well with the theme. Graphics and Musics are good and worked well together. There is just too much content in this game for a compo entry which is very nice.
The only thing I didn't like about this game is attack delay. When the player press attack key, it begins attack animation and the player have to wait a few frames to actually hit enemies. In that time the player already takes the damage. It kills quick reactions for unexpected enimes. I think it should be like this: Press key > Attack > Wait for animation.
Overall this is an awesome game. I really liked.

@mutfak-studios

Thanks for the feedback! That complaint about the attack delay is one I'm hearing from a lot of people. You're
definitely right that I need to work on refining the ADSR curve (attack, decay, sustain, release) of the attack.

I think if you packaged this as an EXE or had a BAT file to run it, it would be more approachable. I know that's what kept me from streaming it this evening.

@occultone

I actually used to package my games as EXE files, but an update to chrome a few years ago caused chrome to think that my games were viruses, I guess since they're not from a known publisher. This prevented people from downloading my games at all on the default security setting, so I stopped offering an EXE version. Anyway, I would hope that the video play-though and all of the comments would help prove that the game is legit, but I understand the hesitation around running potentially malicious files.

Very cute platformer! I included it in my Ludum Dare 38 compilation video series, if you’d like to take a look :)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=15RvXBjxVuU&feature=youtu.be

hey that was fun. Made it to the end, pretty tough but I found it pretty well balanced, actually the checkpoints are often enough that its not too frustrating. Would have liked the reach of the attack to be a little bit further and the movement feels a little bit slow and clunky. Pretty nice pixel art, music was ok, bit repetitive, but fitting enough. Like a mouse version of shinobi with only the melee attack. Good job

A very interesting game.

The way the controls worked... normally I wouldn't like it, but in this game it works.

Inputs were a large commitment and you had to get it right. At first and for a while I felt like the feel was too stiff, but over time I came into the spirit of the game, which is not a fluid flow but rather short punchy high-stakes do or die moments with a breather in between. It does not tolerate button mashing! Every time I got loose I died, except very rare instances where I surfed chaos for an instant.

Specifically, the way the sword stopped forward movement, the short jumps, and the way most enemies would be dangerous immediately upon entering the screen all contributed to the feel I'm talking about.

The "commitment-heavy" controls created a puzzle feel to the game which I found really effective and enjoyed. For example the candles... they were really hard. At first. Or actually really easy once you figured out the appropriate way to approach them: one hop over the first flame, pause, swing, you've got time. But then it was candles on stairs. And that candle on a platform you had to jump to near the end of a tough run.

I died many many times, but in the end I made it to my hole I call home.

Difficulty-wise I think it was on the high end of okay - tough but fair once I learned the brutality of the game. Especially brutal, and maybe going too far, was the way enemies would respawn just barely off the edge of the screen if you backtracked even a tiny bit; that one caught me hard a bunch of times.

I think this was really well put together, including the nice art and sound/music too, of course. While normally my own taste goes more for a fluid flow to the controls, I felt like there was a deliberate synergy here between the design of the challenge and the nature of the controls. The game smartly took advantage of what it was, and made a very enjoyable experience.

Very well done!


EDIT: two other things I should mention. First the checkpoints were huge, no way I'm playing this game without them, and they were well placed. Second, with my keyboard, pressing right then jump, and while holding both of those, if I press sword I do not get a swing. Doing the same going left works, but not going right. I assume this is about the key groups on my specific keyboard but I figured I'd mention it.

Wow that game is much harder than it looks. The graphics are absolutely adorable. I also liked the level design, sometimes dangling a checkpoint in front of the player's nose just out of reach.

The music was very good, but unfortunately it was so short that it outstayed its welcome a bit.

On the technical side, I think the hit animation should have been a bit faster and interruptible. I made the same mistake with my LD37 entry. I think for this sort of attack mechanic it is important that the player can push the buttons at a steady, fast beat and the game does not miss a single one. Otherwise the attack doesn't feel responsive enough.

I made it all the way through, but it was a challenge. Great job overall!

Edit: One more comment: I'm playing on a German keyboard, which has Z and Y exchanged. Maybe S and D for attack and jump would work better internationally.

Edit2: After reading @pkenney's comment, I may have been mistaken and the controls were done that way on purpose and I just wasn't getting into the spirit of the game. So if you were deliberate in your choice of controls, ignore what I wrote :)

Great job! I loved the graphics and music, the enemy designs were diverse and fun! I liked the simplicity of the game, because it allowed the depth to inhabit the world. My only complaint is that I had a hard time with "x" being jump and "z" being attack. This is probably because my game used "x" as an interact button, but I feel like they should have been reversed. This gave me a really hard time with the game, because I could never remember which button was which. Besides that (which was probably my fault), you made a fantastic game!

This is a fabulous entry, I absolute love the cute art.

Big thank you for giving me this very detailed comment.
You have talk from my heart and recognized all my ideas I have put in this game. This was a huge boost for me.

Keep up the great work!

A fun and beautiful game. I really like those graphics. Also the sounds and music are good choices, except for the jump sound. I think it doesn't fit the game that well.

The controls are a bit hard on a QWERTZ keyboard. :D The difficulty overall is good, not too hard and not too easy. But, my god, I hate those candles! :candle:

Well done!
The gameplay is classical and solid, everything works fine, discovering new enemies and platform pattern as we progress make the game a bit less linear, and it's a great thing.

Really loved the SFX, not because they are original but because they fit really well with the game.
The music was maybe a bit to repetitive for me, after 5 minutes that loop was killing my mind haha!
But that's not a problem, it fits well with the game too!

Awesome entry anyway, really solid!

Oh my, wasn't expecting that. A really solid, oldschool platformer!

In the beginning I was just about to complain about controls, but then I noticed, that they're really what I remember from oldies on Amiga and 386-era PC's. Stiff, but solid and tight, so in the end you really have control of your actions, none of the 'floaty' physics controls (which I couldn't get right in my game btw :P ).

Graphics and sound very fitting, learning curve is just right, difficulty ups with every checkpoint (good checkpoint system).

Well, what can I say - very good take on the theme, and a solid job on capturing the oldschool platformers spirit. From visual/audio to mechanics, this really plays like and oldie, and quite a solid and difficult one at that. You have to know what's next, you have to learn the patterns, you have to react quickly.

Well done! Cheers!