Background looks very cool and it was fine and smooth platformer but I didn't really run in any power Issues or tried to manage my power and it didn't seemed very innovative after all.

Really interesting mechanic! Took a little while to get used to because the physics are little strange, but fun once you get the hang of it!

My game has recoil too! In fact a few of my games do at this point, so I can hardly point it out as a novel new mechanic. :smile:

Yours is a bit tricky to handle at first, however, as it's one hit death and with a high player max velocity. Sometimes it is easier to hold down the laser as that can make movement more constant - some of the game's timed landings/recoils are hard because gravity takes hold and the player falls a lot faster than they recoil. e.g. the first challenge on the first level is really hard, much harder than anything on level 2. Movement can also be tricky if you get stuck in a wall/corner on the side of the screen. (I get around this by making the player bounce off it.)

I played enough to get to the boss level - the change of wobbly background asset was a really nice touch - but at this point I was out of energy. I should have known not to take that shield/barrier path on the previous level! I'd gotten so far before that too but ran out of time. Arbitrary limits. Ah well.

Perhaps an improved design would have been to give the player a specific amount of recoil energy & time for each room, but maybe that would not have fit the theme as well.

Nice entry, but for me, overall too difficult. :thumbsup:

I clicked out side the window and died for a load of times.
My effort is meaning less. :(

I at first thought I didn't like this game, but after giving it another shot, trying to conserve energy, I think I underestimated it, because it is actually really challenging, especially toward the end. But it is kind of addictive! I was going to critique the momentum physics, but actually it works for this game. But yes, it is pretty tough!

Alas, I could never make it to the end. My endeavors were doom'd.... . . .
Solid, challenging game. If anyone is having trouble, I think playing full screen probably makes it much easier.

I also had the issue with clicking outside the screen for when the character was close to the edge, and adding a small border outside the room, where the player can still click, might help with this. Still, I really liked the art and overall atmosphere, as well as the interesting movement mechanic. I enjoyed playing it.

Cool entry, it has some amazingly done levels, like that one when you have to press against the block to stop moving and kill the wall all across the screen. The idea of energy and time being consumed why you play through many levels is a simple and effective theme interpretation. Thanks for the game, it is a blast!

Your game was played at our stream

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EuyTJ8KSXPM (33:30)

# Eval
## Gameplay
* At first, I was like, hmm I will probably leave this one. But when I found that I can hold it to go slower and better(I thought It was a glitch) it was fun

## Music/audio
* Audio level was too high for me, sounds were good enough.

## Graphics
* Simple graphics, does not hurt maybe add some effects.

## Summary
Cool game I liked it :)

Cool overall, but I found the controls very frustrating. It was too easy to make sharp turns.

I love the background and the sprites!

The game is way too harsh? Why would you have to reset to the start of the game? I can deal with the energy but why did you have to add a timer on top of it? The controls are way too frustrating and inconsistent to speedrun the game.

Really cool game. I like the graphics especially the background a lot. There were a lot of levels though the difficulty was a bit too high. Even the first level took me many attempts to beat for the first time and having 2 resources (energy and time) that can kill you when they run out seems really punishing (though having to choose which on to use up in the level before the boss is a great idea). Combat was hard by its very nature and giving all the enemies (except for the long-ish ones) a lot of HP didn't help. The hitbox of the projectiles that the boss fires at you seemed to be too big too. All that said I still *really* enjoyed playing the game (though I couldn't beat the boss) and had a lot of fun with it. Good job.

Thank you everyone for your comments, I'm sorry you had a lot of trouble because of the difficulty, I tried to make this one easier than my last entry but It seems that I failed in that regard.

I wanted to respond to some particular feedback by @Batheo3000 and @Junber that resumed the overall feeling with the game.

"The game is way too harsh"

As I developed the game I thought it wasn't too hard but the thing when you develop this kind of games is that because you're testing it you become better at it so it's hard to measure it's difficulty, I'm sorry about this I will try to make something more easier next time. If anyone is having too much trouble with this try to just use the beam in lower bursts than have it all the time.

"Why would you have to reset to the start of the game?"

As this is a small game I wanted to do things that you can't do on other games, like carry on these things. If I would have used the normal philosophy of design I would have removed the timer, and make a finite amount of energy for each level (as @gwinnell noted and it was considered when I was making this), but it would have make this even more generic and it would have removed something that made it different of the norm, it would become just another "hard platformer" without any interesting ideas. It appears that mixing these concepts with the controls was a bad idea so... I'm sorry about that.

"The controls are way too frustratung and inconsistent"

It comes to experimenting with new ways to control things. Some like it and others don't. I still need more experience to get the right balance, so... again, I'm sorry.

"Combat was hard by its very nature and giving all the enemies (except for the long-ish ones) a lot of HP didn’t help."

I wanted to discourage killing the enemies as a safe way to win, if the enemies had smaller hp they would be dead in a breeze, but I wanted that you kill some select ones and the others are just for you to decide if it would be wise to kill them and advance or losing more time trying to clear the stage without killing them.

"Clicking outside the window"

...I'm really sorry.

I think that's all the negative points that people brought up. I'm really thankful for all of the comments and for your views on this game. For the positive points, I'm really happy if you enjoyed this game or if you found something good that you could enjoy, Thank you everyone for taking your time to play this and even more thanks to each of you that comment giving me your thoughts.

TL;DR: Game is too difficult because I wanted to experiment with mechanics, I'm thankful to you for taking your time to play/comment. (I should put another I'm sorry here, but it's getting old...)

I think my main issue is that the beam even when tapped can have a lot of knockback meaning precise navigation is difficult. If you lowered the rate at which the player moved

I think carrying energy with you was a good idea, the main thing you got wrong was the timer. You made this game all about precision platforming and finding the most efficient route to the exit which makes for a fairly slow and methodical style of play and you kind of ruin it with this punishment for not knowing the levels well enough and daring to try and conserve energy properly.

I get trying to be different, but don't try to go against the design of your own game! I don't even know many games that use this mechanic! Maybe, like, one from another game jam vaguely but it's definately not some generic platformer thing! I guess a timer is a quick thing to add that changes the game a lot, though you could do other changes just as large for just as little effort (eg have a low energy cap and when you land, you regain energy or mess with the gravity in some levels or something). I dunno, just please don't make me play the same levels again! It's frustrating and boring.

Aside from that, I really enjoyed this game!

Nice game! I had fun with this one and thought the movement mechanic was both fun and original. I also thought the visuals were attractive. I have a couple critiques though:

I think for this control method, fullscreen and locking the cursor to the window are both probably essential. You did include fullscreen, but I missed out on it on my first attempt because I skimmed past the key bindings and didn't realize it was so crucial. I want to say that you should have just have started the game in full screen because it's simply not playable without it, the player will click outside the window and focus something else by mistake, it's inevitable. Locking the cursor would have been an improvement too, because users like me who have multiple monitors will still have issues will still have issues defocusing the game if a secondary monitor is clicked. I'm not sure if Game Maker supports that though... hop to it, Mark Overmars!

My second comment is that I thought that the movement was too sensitive and was frustrating when trying to finely control your character. Please correct me if I'm wrong, but I believe that even the shortest click will send your character pretty much to terminal velocity in a given direction? I think it would have felt a lot better if there was more of an acceleration feeling to it. I also thought it was a little odd (although somewhat convenient at times) that your horizontal speed would quickly dampen if you weren't applying force, as if the air had some intense resistance.

I'd like to try a version of this game with tweaked controls, cheers!

For the Compo rules I'm not able to update the game, but I have been fixing a lot of stuff I'm planning to expand this to a small free game.

@willdata I lowered the speed a little and it works really well, so considered it done.

@mickeyg I'm going to explain what happened with the timer thing. When I played through the game, I could end it like in 2:30 ~ 3:00 minutes, so I thought that people could clear it on 5 minutes... That was a fatal mistake. And you're right. For the expansion to this I have already fixed the timer thing. I changed it a little so it's more like optional ranks more than a requisite. Thank you, I'm glad that you liked it!

@shru For the fullscreen/window thing I already solved it, but as I said before, because of the compo rules I can't update it... I'm sorry. But in the "expansion" It's already solved. And you're 100% correct on how this works, for the resistance stuff I tweeked it a little so it doesn't feel like it's an intense resistance. But the part of the acceleration feeling is something that I don't know if I'm completly sold on, I will try it anyway to see if you're correct with the feeling. Thank you for your comment!

If you're interested on the "expansion" please follow me on itch/twitter so you will be notified about it when it comes out. Thank you for playing!

Mechanic grew on me over time. I found the game frustratingly difficult, although I admit I was playing on a touchpad which may have put me at a disadvantage. Interestingly, I kept playing. Seems like the mechanic is fun enough to try one more time, even with the frustrating deaths. That in itself is a solid achievement for a jam game :)
The issue with clicking outside the window was very frustrating. Not sure how to fix this other than adding a padding around the game area of empty screen to click on. Additionally, the first level is a bit too hard, even more so than the second level.
All in all, nice game!

The difficulty in this is just right, speaking as someone who likes masochistically hard games :stuck_out_tongue:

On my first try I managed to make it to the level where you're required to beam down the enemy and on my second try I managed to make it to the level with two paths, the right one being just beaming down a lot of enemies (I ended up trying to make it through the left path). It's getting late but I'm going to try to beat it tomorrow.

I definitely think having the timer as a time trial mode would be a lot better. Or even time trialing specific levels as in Dustforce would be nice.

I'd also love to make some levels for They Are Watching You once I beat it. I feel like this mechanic could produce some really cool levels and could make for a game with a lot of depth!