The graphics are really nice and the voice of the ship is pretty rad. Fantastic job!

Loved the color scheme, enjoyed the art (particularly the clouds), and the teleport effect felt so satisfying! Nice work!

Right handed only keys made it very difficult for me to play and the voice was really annoying :(

I really love the art and the theme you had going here. Reminds me of Worlds Adrift almost. The teleport mechanic was very fun to use and I really love being able to pilot vehicles in 2D platformer type games.

I wasn't too sure where to go after a while since every group of islands all had a few crystals on it and nothing else. Given a bit more time I imagine you could end up with quite an interesting game. Good job

This game is beautiful, fun to explore, and the mechanics are awesome. It's impressive that this is a 72 hour project!

More please! I want Evelyn to have more adventures exploring different worlds.

I had a hard time understanding the voice. The jump didn't seem useful in the least. Falling between two platforms through what I assumed to be a wall was trolly. But I was able to fly around by throwing the ball and teleporting, so falling to my death was a defeated mechanic. It felt like I was in a real life 2D world where being underneath a platform was an effective wall stretching into infinity. I think I would have enjoyed exploring more with double the jump height, and if platforms were one way, preventing me from falling, but not limiting me from passing through them from below. There wasn't much in the way of an obstacle preventing me from completing the game. Negatives aside, it's solid. The non-stressful exploration didn't require any music. Sounds were good, floating between clouds was nice. I'd love to see future Jams adding further depth and twists to this great start to an adventure.

Wow, thank you everyone for the comments. I especially appreciate the more critical feedback.

I ran into quite a few issues with the one way platforms with the engine I used, pretty much forcing me to scrap it. This was the biggest problem with the stairs on the ship as well.

As far as the jump mechanic, It has very little use, I agree. Originally it was intended to be used more and you were supposed to feel pretty helpless off your ship, but the game evolved as I went and the helpless jump ended up being simply vestigial, essentially.

I'm really surprised no one complained about the stairs on the ship yet. Or the long tutorial. But I suppose that kind of became the best and most challenging part of the game.

On the bright side, I'm digging into Unity finally to remake the game and expand upon it, because I fell in love with it over the process and want to see what I can do with it over another month or two with a better engine and some much needed feedback.

Great telepod mechanic!! I really enjoyed playing around with it -- especially teleporting to a space in mid-air. Great mood/ambiance of the game. Your art is so nice, and to think that you did this in 72 hours. Awesome job.

The game was pretty relaxing (with some lovely graphics!), but I had a lot of trouble understanding the robot guy. Maybe some subtitles might help?

I couldn't find a way to repair the ship once I farmed 100 crystals, and ended up dying because the player's velocity isn't reset when they start mining (ouch!). The telepod was a good way to get around, I liked the mechanic. Still, I thought it was a nice and relaxing entry. Keep it up!

Thanks, Felix! Yeah, so the voiceovers were a last minute "Oh, I have time" feature and then it turned out I didn't have time and when I realized how hard to understand they were, it was a bit too late to add subtitles or to redo them. Ha ha. I'm definitely going to keep working on the game though, so that's near the top of my fixes list. And yeah, there's nothing left to do after 100 crystals. I need to make that more clear... Sorry about that. And man, that mining bug is still plaguing me! I've "fixed" it like 4 times now and it still keeps cropping up.

I'm planning on rewriting this in Unity (and learning to code as I do. lol) so I'll be fixing all of this stuff as I go about it as well as updating the assets, adding more variations, better animations, etc. Not to mention adding in all those feature creep ideas I had throughout the weekend.

Thanks for the feedback!

Would love to see this as a full game. I would happily play it. The telepod mechanic is one of the coolest 2D navigation ideas I've seen in a long time and very nicely executed. The theme of the jam is nicely handled with the mining to keep exploring. As mentioned by other players, the game needs something other than the crystals to explore for. If there were a layer of story, quests and some other systems to this game could be great. One of the nicest I've seen in the jam yet.

Thanks, Richard! I just graduated college for game art (primarily 3d stuff though, lol) and I didn't really know what my plan was, but I think all these reviews is evidence enough that I need to go further with the game concept. So that's the plan as of now. And yeah, I had so many other ideas that I just simply didn't have time to implement. I chose to do a tutorial instead of enemies, and that might have been a bad choice, but I felt like it will give me a chance to really polish combat better now so it didn't leave a bad taste in anyone's mouth in case it turned out bad.

The art is amazing, beautiful, top ten graphs this ludum dare, no question about that. I loved the good tutorial, I rather have good tutorial, than had I hard time to figure it out what to do, the mechanics could be a little bit better, and some sounds could be more clear, but the game has such a good concept and it is so well made that all those things dont matter.

Great job, I would love to see you work in this game after ludum dare, it has so much potential, and congratulation for the art you are extremely talented.

I really liked the game overall, definitely one of the best I've seen so far. I think it is a solid foundation to build upon (if you plan to) as moving around with the teleporting mechanic as well as steering the ship is already fun and obviously aesthetically the game is impressive. I say a foundation as the game currently lacks challenging things to do. Collecting crystals does not really put your skills to the test.

It would be great if in designing new challenges you could connect the two main mechanics of the game, teleporting and steering the ship, as currently they feel unrelated. Maybe something like boarding enemy ships using your teleportation device because getting too close otherwise would be dangerous (You can probably come up with better ideas for your game ;).

I think it is great you took the time to record a voiceover instead of doing only text but I would appreciate subtitles as the voice at times is too distorted to understand clearly.

You explored the theme only superficially as the ships energy is not really connected to anything but a win condition (well it also works as a resource but again the game lacks a challenge which makes resource management meaningful) but that does not matter too much as the main purpose of a theme is to inspire the creation of interesting games and Evelyn is definitely interesting!

I love this game! The art is obviously amazing. The idea is very original, you chose an original style, world and design rather than make a robot in a robot world that collects batteries to not die. The game didn't have much in terms of gameplay, but the mechanics are there and they're pretty solid and cool, too. Very creative game, overall.

Oh, it's amazing, I'm impressed with the graphics and the music. To play is also very pleasant, on the whole it is one of the best projects that I have seen here, congratulations on the excellent work done

Very atmospheric game, I liked it. The tutorial voice was a tad weird and could've used subtitles. The Telepad mechanic fit well with the environment. I found a bug where when you spam the left then right mouse button you just die. Which was unpleasant indeed xD. I'm not sure why but I didn't really get the goal of the game. I wandered a while collecting crystals. But overall solid entry.

Fun and chill game! I enjoyed it :)

Can't really say much beyond what everyone else is saying. I did notice the wonky stairs though, although the last time I climbed up them, they actually worked :) So it looks like it works sometimes, at least. I would have liked to have a power meter appear while piloting the ship (or maybe I just missed it?) But yeah, super relaxing, great visuals, fun mechanic. Nice job!

Wow all these fantastic reviews! Thanks everyone! I'm really looking forward to expanding on this game. I'm already rewriting a lot of it to be more efficient and fixing the two way platform issue, which will fix the stairs on the ship and getting stuck when leaving the ship

In case you haven't heard so far and you're reading this, there really isn't much of a goal other than to collect 100 crystals, which in itself is very lame. I had enemies and NPC's and upgrades in mind as well as some very light survival aspects as well, but like any game jam project, I didn't have the time.

I've also started a project page on Gamejolt and I'll be setting one up on Itch.io as well to start releasing updates on.

Thanks for all the encouragement, everyone! I wish I could fix some of those bugs right now.....

Amazing game with innovative gameplay. I'm really fascinated with 'floating islands' worlds (hence i also made my game in this world : D) and i like how you managed to translate this world to platformer mechanics with teleportation. There are some bugs (funky collisions etc) but that's understandable due to the time limitation. Graphics are really pretty and animations are smooth. In overall really cool game and there is a lot potential for expanding this project, can't wait for updates.

The macOS link is a 404 :(

edit: fixed now, thanks!

Oh no! I am SO sorry about the 404! Earlier I set up a Gamejolt page for this and I needed to update my game files to fit their upload conventions. Well I didn't even think about fixing the links here as well, so I removed most of those links and combined them together for that page.

I've now updated the links here to go straight to that gamejolt page. So sorry about that good chunk of time with no game to download.

This is actually really unique and very promising. I've never thought of making a platformer with a ship. Work with this and release it. Well done.

Beautiful game, only issue is a bit of a lack of direction and depth of gameplay, but that's obviously a time issue, what you achieved in the time is amazing!

I still couldn't play on macOS despite the fixed 404 because the window is twice as big as my screen and I can't resize it. Probably some retina bug...

Gelisam, that's simply because the engine I'm using doesn't account for different screen sizes. There's not really a way around that either. I made the mistake of building the game in 1080 and I should have done something smaller that could be scaled up in full screen.

This is being fixed for the next version, but I don't believe in fixing anything but game breaking bugs in LD games, and I didn't realize how serious the size issue was until after I'd fixed a lot of other things.

So sorry about this, Gelisam. Hope you stick around and test the next update after judging is over.

Really awesome game! I can imagine this turning into a full game with enough time! If you do do that (heh do do), then I'd recommend a couple of things!

Firstly a map, or definately some kind of reference to get an idea of where you are and generally what you're traveling towards. Also, I'm not sure why the jump is so small, you might as well not have it because the teleportation stones get you further. The jump would definatly be more conviniant than the teleportation stones if it was high enough to actually get up some of the small ledges though! Adding a big slow ship turning animation would also be nice to emphasise this massive ship you're riding!

Also, not sure if this was intended or not but I fell off a ledge and was panicking but started working my way back up to the ledge by throwing and teleporting to the teleportation stones. That was really fun and added a quick shot of addrenaline and panick to the gameplay, if you could manage to maybe script a scene where you fall off and maybe did a button prompt to show the player that (even though it's tricky) they can do that it would be really cool.

One last thing, the game is a little large in terms of file size, fine for a game normally but I could have probs played a couple of other Ludum Dare games in that time so you possibly risked potential players on here skipping your game due to it's size. Probs unlikely though, it's just a thought.

Other than that, really top game man! It did feel like I was on a proper adventure!

@Mickey,

First off thanks for the top notch feedback, man!

Most everything you listed are things I've considered or already have planned and am working on for the full release. A world map of some sort and a minimap is definitely on the radar. I've nearly tripled the jump height and even added a second, double jump feature which really makes getting around feel more convenient and allows me to hide the telepod behind a crafting menu or something later on since it's not a necessity anymore.

While I'd love to add the ship turn animation, I'm just not seeing it in the cards. I've already started work on creating modular ship parts that can be randomized and spawned in so players can discover new ship types at all times and run into hostile pirates aboard them as well. Because of this, adding a big fancy, complex turn animation probably just isn't going to happen. Instead, I plan on building more clever sails that rotate and tilt based on the direction you're flying to give the ships a unique bidirectional function to them that just makes sense in the world.

I think the file size is so large due to how Gamejolt wants me to pack both Mac and Windows builds together and of course all the art (png's) and the audio. I have two nearly full length tracks in the game already and plan on doing a lot more for the full release. I was a little worried about the file size, and maybe I'm alone in this, but I never look at the file sizes when downloading at least LD games because I just know that they're going to be tiny. And I think once someone's already clicked download, they're probably not going to cancel it after that. Though they might leave it to download and forget while they play another game or two.

But thanks again for the great review. I'm hoping you follow the game on Game Jolt and get to play the full thing in a few months when it's ready.

Pretty cool entry.
I guess most relevant points of critique have already been mentioned.
I really enjoyed the atmosphere. The only thing that annoyed me was that I coulnd't shoot the Telepod upwards through ledges. And maybe some sort of sensor that at least tells you if you are getting nearer (some sort of echolot like in submarines to match the ship theme perhaps?) would smooth the gameplay a bit more I think.

So I have managed to find a Windows machine on which to play this, and this time the window was much smaller than my screen, so much that I could barely read the text. So I tried to reduce the screen resolution, but strangely the window didn't seem any bigger. At the smallest resolution each letter was only made of a few pixels each, so clearly your engine does resize in order to account for different resolutions, by making sure the window is too small regardless of the screen resolution :(

But, I did not give up! I dusted up my older, non-retina mac and finally, the game window was just the right size. So finally, here's my review!

The graphics are amazing. I had a really hard time understanding what the robotic voice was saying, subtitles would have helped a lot, but I see you know that already. One thing I did not see mentioned: there is a transparent island straight right from the teleporter! I thought it was a secret, but there was nothing on it, so I guess it was a bug instead?

I liked the idea of exploring a large unknown world in search of crystal fuel, but that got boring quickly. If you want to expand the game, here are a few low-effort changes which I think have some potential to make the endgame more engaging:

* keep track of the total number of different crystal locations found, win once we find them all
* an object which shows a map indicating where the remaining crystal locations are, but prevents them from respawning, so you have to find an efficient route through all the points on the map. Maybe a faster-flying, faster-draining, palette-swapped version of the ship??

@gelisam

I sincerely appreciate you going through all that trouble just to test my game! I definitely didn't expect it!

I actually just implemented a hunger and farming system last night and today I'm polishing it up along with starting work on an equipment bar. I have a feeling there's going to be plenty of stuff to keep the player busy once the game's closer to release in a few months. : )

But where is this invisible island you're talking about? Right of the crate the teleporter comes in? I haven't come across this yet so I'll go look into it. What I think you're referring to is actually a layering issue where one of the island platforms ended up behind a larger island, but the collisions are still effective, so it looks like an invisible island. If that's the case, yeah, more of a bug. But I've been thinking about turning something like that into a feature eventually if I get that far. Maybe some Indiana Jones style temple traps/puzzles eventually.

Thanks again for the review! You went through a lot of trouble to give it, and that's really kind of you.