Slinger by Bungalow
Start with nothing in this fast paced action platformer. Collect new incredible artifacts such as arms and legs to get ready on your journey to defeat the Tribal Boss.
Controls shown in-game.

Ratings
| Overall | 134th | 3.945⭐ | 66🧑⚖️ |
| Fun | 120th | 3.883⭐ | 66🧑⚖️ |
| Innovation | 291th | 3.565⭐ | 64🧑⚖️ |
| Theme | 324th | 3.661⭐ | 64🧑⚖️ |
| Graphics | 328th | 3.867⭐ | 66🧑⚖️ |
| Audio | 215th | 3.648⭐ | 66🧑⚖️ |
| Humor | 495th | 2.857⭐ | 58🧑⚖️ |
| Mood | 343th | 3.607⭐ | 63🧑⚖️ |
| Given | 73🗳️ | 87🗨️ |
I found the controls a little dificult initially. Maybe you could use the same key for jump and sling? Unless you plan a double jump then this would help a lot I think.
Also, the `K` key didn't work for me in the boss fight :cry: I was using WASD + Space + K as my control scheme but had to use Tab in the boss fight. I thought I was doing something wrong!
The Music and SFX are spot on. Overall, very good! :thumbsup:
The flinging mechanic is really cool, but it's unfortunately really hard to use properly, which can be frustrating. The mechanic reminded me a bit of the mechanic in Ori and the Blind Forest, but the way they did it, is when you want to fling, it slows down time so you have time to aim.
Overall, it's still a fun game that makes good use of the theme.
I agree with others, when they say that the sling and jump could be at same button, I think that would facilitate the gameplay.
Art and Fx are cool ...
Really liked this game. I think that you could keep working on it, and maybe turn it into a more complete game... =)
The gameplay is good but controls are hard :
inputs seem to be hard be cause when you're on a wall and you press ub, you go right or left(because you jump of the wall). So I failed many times because I just wanted to go up.
Maybe black portals need also to clarify your direction with an arrow be cause the line don't help so much (it's help at the beginning but when you need to make it multiple times in hard locations , it's not your problem anymore.
Nice experience which can be improve! you made good platformer, thanks !
I couldn't "win" the game :<
The music was good but repetitive and I like the art style.
If I had one complaint, it'd be about the sling controls. They worked, and I was able to complete the game, but they didn't really "feel" correct; in particular, while they always sent me in the direction the indicator showed, that often didn't feel like the direction they _should_ have been sending me. I think this may be because the reference point for the player's position used by the slings appears to be his head, but it feels more natural that it would be his body or feet. This was especially notable during this section:

Here, I often felt like the sling didn't send me on the trajectory I expected, because it's opinion of my initial position was different from my own.
The other aspect of the sling that's slightly problematic is the window for activating it. Sometimes, particularly in the first section after you get the wall jump (which has very long jumps to make), you'll approach close enough to activate the sling, react by pressing the button, but by the time your button press is registered (most consisting of your own reaction time rather the actual input processing), you're out of range again. One option to _consider_ in cases like this is to have either a grace period or a grace zone; with a grace period, on leaving the sling's range you have a few frames where pressing the button still sets it off anyway; and a grace zone, if the sling doesn't activate until you're within (say) 30 pixels, it doesn't _deactivate_ once active until you're more than (say) 33 pixels away. This means the player still has to get to the sling, but as long as they're able to clip its active zone they still have a _chance_ of using it successfully.
Anyway, other than that, good job! The boss fight was especially well done, you don't see a lot of LD entries with both platforming and a real boss fight.
The boss was a very nice touch especially for a jam game!
The only thing that was confusing was, as many people already commented, the sling controls. You don't end where you expect to end causing you to spend to much time on otherwise trivial actions.
In fact I almost gave up at the starting location where you have to "double jump" to climb the cliff which would have been a real shame :cry: .
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- The game has nice graphics. The forest looks lush and pleasant, and the overall style is quite consistent. I would consider changing the color of the slings in the boss-fight though. Perhaps to white? They were a bit hard to see against the dark background.
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- The audio was otherwise nice, but I found the forest-level's theme annoingly repetitive, mainly because it was just a short loop with not much structure. The boss-theme was more enjoyable to me.
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- I think the controls and the whole platformer-experience works otherwise, but there's one problem: The sling-mechanic. I'm not saying it's completely flawed, but needs a major overhaul to work. As many have said here, it would be wise to change the sling to function with the same button you use to jump. @philomory here has made a great job explaining (one way) how you would go about improving the sling-controls. I had exactly the same experience about the trajectories and reference points in the same part of the game. Another example: The boss fight was a blast, up until it featured those pesky slings :D I was _very frustrated,_ but managed to complete the game.
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I would conclude that if you find a way to improve the sling-mechanics to a degree that the controls feel "more correct" to the player, you'll have a very nice game in your hands!
Good job :slight_smile:
I liked that the boss level felt like almost a new game. Impressive.
I really like the backgrounds and the audio! The music of the platforming level was somehwat too repetitive for my taste, and didn't completely fit the hectic jumping around. I really enjoyed the music in the boss level.
At the beginning of the game, when the player is still without limbs, switching between going to left and right sometimes results in an unexpected behaviour of the rotation of the sprite.
Furthermore, when standing on an edge and jumping would sometimes result in sliding off the edge after landing, while I expected to just come in a standing position again.

Congrats on your fantastic game!
The boss fight at the end was really great, if perhaps a sudden shift from the original tone. But again, based on my game I can't complain about that too much aha. The sling again though in that last section was a little hard.
But overall, love the direction and execution and hope you continue it further :slight_smile:
One thing I have to give kudos for is the difficulty curve. At least for the non-boss screens, it works very well. I can't imagine how hard it is to get that right as I usually become so good at my Ludum Dare games that it would all seem too easy... In fact, after I beat the game, I played through up until the boss again and it was substantially easier. So just getting the difficulty curve right was very cool.
There are a couple small points of friction in the platforming:
- Jumping off of edges can be difficult. I'm guessing you don't have 'grace frames' / 'coyote frames' implemented as those generally fix that problem.
- Getting the sling to register was not always easy. In particular during the screen with all the slings in the boss fight, I repeatedly would miss the sling I wanted and then would accidentally shoot myself down.
- There was some sort of glitch (?) where I would suddenly have a ton of speed when running up a wall (like 2x more than normal). This happened multiple times and killed me each time.
I think the camera controller worked pretty well, although the way it's implemented does mean you don't see as far in the direction of your movement.
As far as graphics goes, I think a lot of the graphics look good, but the parallax layers look a little strange with the low detail + blur.
Overall though great game.