The Adventure of Malvin by NOFUEL

Your Mission:
Save your girl and fight against the evil ant king.
2D platformer
Controls:
- left and right - move
- down - slide
- A - jump
- S - run
- hold S + A - wall run
- R - restart game
- N - next level
Windows:
https://nofuel.itch.io/the-adventure-of-malvin
Source:
https://www.dropbox.com/s/0kzsopikmtapsm2/LD38_ks.gmx.rar?dl=0

v1.0.1: * corrected spelling mistake in the intro * selected checkbox in Game Maker Settings so that Single Runtime Executable is running on 60 FPS while Game Maker is closed
v1.0.0: * original release
Ratings
| Overall | 71th | 3.875⭐ | 58🧑⚖️ |
| Fun | 89th | 3.696⭐ | 58🧑⚖️ |
| Innovation | 466th | 2.5⭐ | 58🧑⚖️ |
| Theme | 220th | 3.536⭐ | 58🧑⚖️ |
| Graphics | 20th | 4.379⭐ | 60🧑⚖️ |
| Audio | 95th | 3.537⭐ | 56🧑⚖️ |
| Humor | 168th | 2.979⭐ | 50🧑⚖️ |
| Mood | 87th | 3.673⭐ | 57🧑⚖️ |
| Given | 72🗳️ | 67🗨️ |
Great graphics!
It was a bit frustrating that the whole "world" restarted upon losing all hearts.
It would be nice, if you took the time to judge our game ;)
https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/38/42-mikronikus
[Graphics] - The highlight, the graphics and colors(!) are super cute and high polished. Looks like a game that could be on steam, maybe just a bit more details would be nice but hey.. game jam! Also the animations are superduper cute.
[Music & SFX] - Also very well done! The music is fun and kind of pushing/uplifting. The sound effects are very on point.
[Gameplay] - The game is not super easy. There is a skill/learning curve you have to master but after that I was able to play the game very well. What I "discovered", it is possible to wall jump a wall up to the top. (Keep the direction to the wall pressed and then just press jumpjumpjump). Needs some time but I was able to skip a part of the level, not sure if that was on purpose. The gameplay is a lot of fun, I have to say! Jumping on enemies is very satisfying :)
Really good job, there is a lot of potential for this game to become a very fun platformer!
Very impressive art style.
The wall jump is a little awkward tho (just a little)
And the level design is a bit repetitive.
Nice game! :upside_down:
But this Time it worked! (:
The game felt great. Good polish. Couldn't find any bugs or anything.
Very cute sounds and graphics. like that style (:
Cool that you made all that stuff in 48 hours.
Good work!
The music is good, albeit a bit repetitive, and for my taste you should really consider creating a closed loop. This very nice talk gives some insight on the matter:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4WoepccKGSI
The section about loops is at the 19:00 mark.
With respect to the controls, I think the wall-jump could have been a bit tighter, I kept sliding off a lot.
As for gameplay in general, not much to criticize, as I said above, but one thing put me off a bit, and that is your design choice of lives and checkpoints. So hitting an enemy reduces a life, but falling down a hole doesn't, that's a bit inconsistent but nothing I haven't seen before. Now falling into a hole resets you to the last checkpoint with the current amount of lives left, but losing the lives resets you to the start of the game? That was a bit confusing. The classic approach would have worked better I think: Fall in a hole and be reset in front of the hole with one life lost, hit by an enemy loses one life. All lives lost resets you to the last checkpoint.
All in all it was a very atmospheric little game that I enjoyed to play despite minor nitpicks.
The wall jump is a bit tricky though, the required orientation of the character in direction of the wall created for us a difficult timing to learn and was a slightly infuriating pattern. Allowing to wall jump when you just flipped and have the wall in your back would be appreciable.
Just rated, much love, bravo !
My favorite game so far.
My hand hurt after so many wall jump...
also, I get stuck in a slide and the "r" button restart from the beginning, I was hoping I came back to the last checkpoint...
I felt like the levels were a little bit too broad, is impressive that you manage to design so much in so little time, but I would argue that a more condensed layout, with more focus in the mechanics and less in plain platforming, would have really hit the sweet spot.
The boss battle was a nice little touch!
I encountered a bug (no pun intended) in the ant/termite hill, a couple of times I fell close to the bottom of a wall but managed to catch myself, however the screen stopped scrolling and when I managed to claw my way back to the top edge of the screen using wall jumping, it reset at the nearest checkpoint as if I had died. Anyway, that's a really minor thing. Great work, fantastic platformer.
Congratulations
The spiders in the 2nd level were the hardest obstacle for me. The spacing was at a distance that wasn't the usual dash jump distance, and hitting them and losing a heart was pretty painful. Though it was doable so maybe just more of a rampup with easier spider placement first perhaps (like one with more natural jump distance spacing or just having one over a large hole)?
Also story and boss wise I guess was a homage/ref to Mario?
Anyway overall nice quick platformer game!
great job!
The clean pixel art style is realy cool.
I mostly liked the mechanics of jumping on the walls and roling, feels like sonic + megamen xD
Great job!
I made a game in pixelart too, thas my Compo entry :D
https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/38/space-honey-the-adventure-of-little-bee
I got stuck! (/。\)゚。 I'm glad the scene change button was left in.
The wall run and slide animations are cute as heck.
Art style is great, you've done so much with so few pixels and colours, really makes me question why I went for fulling rigged 60fps 3D models XD. BGs are great, loving little credit scene at the end too. Wall jumps could do with a little delay, so you can just a fraction of a second after you've changed directions. Feels counter-intuitive to jump into the wall and then change direction. Otherwise the controls felt great! I played on gamepad as suggested.
Great game dude!
If you'd like to check out ours it's over here https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/38/e-at
Thanks!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6dPr-ubTa3k
* The character should stick to the wall for a while, so holding toward the opposite direction (before a wall jump) wouldn't make you fall
* Sliding seemed really fun and cute, but made you lose speed too quickly. Therefore, I avoided using it as much as possible. :slight_frown:
* The camera takes too long to move behind the player, sometimes.
The wall run mechanic was quite fun, though!
Music is super catchy (even if it's a bit simple), controls are really tight, and it's suuuuper fun to play!
I wish the wall run would last longer; the level of polish and details is really good, and that dumb little boss at the end was a fun thing.
Overall, man, I'm amazed you did all this over a weekend. Congratulations!
It seems like you might have some kind of game loop issue, because in the gifs, the game seems to be appropriately fast.
All in all a fantastic entry! Well done :)