SAP by Mikronaut
SAP is a simple metroidvania with a battery-powered character. Something has gone amiss in the world, and the unnamed robot protagonist can sense its power draining far more quickly than usual. It must discover the cause and make things right before the strange force destroys the world's entire robot population. Feel free to use your OP laser weapons on your quest, but bear in mind that they will drain your energy more quickly.
Windows: https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B4X8Sla_k2TiUkhTSmNqd3NBYUk/view?usp=sharing
Source: https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B4X8Sla_k2TibTZIVmU0cnhjd1k/view?usp=sharing

| Original URL | https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/39/sap |
Ratings
| Overall | 440th | 3.111⭐ | 20🧑⚖️ |
| Fun | 358th | 3.111⭐ | 20🧑⚖️ |
| Innovation | 605th | 2.333⭐ | 20🧑⚖️ |
| Theme | 570th | 2.889⭐ | 20🧑⚖️ |
| Graphics | 433th | 2.944⭐ | 20🧑⚖️ |
| Audio | 133th | 3.444⭐ | 20🧑⚖️ |
| Mood | 433th | 2.722⭐ | 20🧑⚖️ |
| Given | 16🗳️ | 15🗨️ |
I liked you game, gave it quite a good rating :)
Just a few thoughts :
- There are a lot of good things. The movement is dynamic and responsive, the sound effects are cool and give good feedback, overall the game feels very fun to play. However, the battery bar doesn't feel very important. I never died from it, and I didn't even notice the guns were draining my energy. You could add distance between checkpoints or add enemies and drain more energy ! Or drain chunks of energy for each jump, or when falling from high ! Here, it just looks like a small addition because it was the theme.
- Jumping on a single square, combined with the character's high speed, is more about luck than skill. :(
- There's a small bug when you land on the corner of a square, I had it very often, and it was a real problem in small passages. Fix these kinda things first, even during jams, players will really get annoyed very fast on these details !
- When playing in windowed, it was much too small. When playing in fullscreen, the camera movements was much too fast and making me dizzy.
Once again, that's some real good work, just giving some remarks on what I think could be better !
The mains problems are precision jumps which are very difficult to do.
I felt lost sometimes haha, but it was fun!
The graphics are okay and the gameplay is fine from what I've seen so far. Without shooting it's a bit bare-bones of course. I really did like the song though.
A few bugs I noticed:
- The energy meter seems buggy. It's jumping around and it feels weird to have a square for something like a meter.
- When you enter and re-enter screens mutliple times the BGM keeps stacking.
- You can see some debug text at the top left corner of the first screen.
The game feel of the platforming, I had two minds on... one thought was that it felt fun that it was fast and powerful and a bit loose. But I noticed early that I was slipping and sliding around a lot. But, well, I got through a good chunk of the game and thought, you know what this slipperiness isn't really holding the game back. However, then I got further into the game with all of the precision single-block jumping challenges and I could not do them. I fell into the pit many many times, and eventually lost heart.
But it was great that there were frequent checkpoints!
I think I maybe did something wrong, because I never got the shooting to work. In the second area I wasn't sure about going right vs up so I went up, and I came to a room where the sign said space to shoot. I hit space, but nothing. I tried going forward there but there were enemies, so I retreated and tried going right in the second room. I found a purple powerup thing, but I wasn't sure what it did. I got a little lost and went back to the first room by accident, at which point the background music started playing two songs at once which never went away.
Anyway, not being able to shoot made a few sections tougher as I had to dodge my way past the enemies - a time when the very quick responsive control came is extremely handy!!
You've got a nice all-around entry here, despite a couple of nitpicks.
Took me a while to understand why there is a sign with "Press SPACE to fire" when space didn't work.
It seems that later on I found the same sign with the text "Press TAB to change weapon".
Of course you still need a weapon but by then i had some.
Some jumping part is hard but it's fine. and i got to the TBC screen.