TODO: review game

Locoroco all the way down) Loved the music and sound!

I like the idea. Moving the level to get around is a cool mechanic. The sounds and music were very humorous :). I feel like the controls should be slightly more responsive. They felt almost sluggish sometimes. I also died and it reset me to the beginning. All in all good job!

Awesome work!! Very impressive that you coded all of this in a game jam! Very intuitive gameplay, excellent job!

@anthonyharmitage oh yeah, I definitely borrowed hands-full from Locoroco.. it was one of my fave games on the PSP!
@lehaine thanks and yes, the controls need more work but unfortunately it's super hard to polish 2d physics. There's a lot of tweaking to be done, but I guess I will keep working on this one and see how far I can get it :)
@bungalow thanks so much!!

Music is fantastic. Literally found myself bobbing my head while I was playing. The game idea is fantastic as well. Great job!

Great music, and game play, very loco-roco. Level design on some of the later levels is very good too. I would have liked a checkpoint system or something, starting over every time was a bummer. Great job, keep up the good work.

Oh, this game reminded me of an old game about a boy spinning the world in the same way. Cool idea and great sound

Nice idea! Had fun with this one! As others had said, the quirky music and graphics go well together, could definitely be developed further and agree that a checkpoint system would be good, it would probably have kept me playing for longer! If you do end up working on it some more, I'll come back for another go for sure :smile:

I like the concept, but I feel like the fact that the entire game restarts when you die and the long transitions between levels make it pretty frustrating to play. But I think the music is pretty good!

The music is fantastic and I love the sound when falling, only the jump sound felt a bit rushed :smile: It is hard to start all over again on game over and the camera is a bit weird sometimes, but I had fun playing it. Nice game!

Cool idea in principle, however, the difficulty of the levels combined with the fact that the whole game restarts on death really detracts from the potential fun that this game could have. The problem is compounded by the long wait at the end of each level, and at the start of level 3. After many attempts, I finally finished level 3, died almost immediately in level 4, and rage quit.

The quirky graphics and music work well.

Cool game, great soundtrack.

Took me a bit to master that jump, didn't realize it was a charge up jump. Some feedback on the jump charge could solve this, something like shaking the visual portion of the character with an intensity correlated to the amount of jump charge. Or a glow behind the character growing with the jump charge.

The camera could use some smoothing, it got pretty jittery at times.

I liked the separation mechanic, got to see all my little friends :)

The background fish where pleasant to look at, provided a bit of nice atmosphere.

The soundtrack was great, lighthearted, silly. And the character voices where just expressive enough, while also remaining silly silly silly.

Well done!

Best music in the Ludum Dare confirmed!

Great game, I think that it was very well designed, but fell down on the gameplay execution. However, the music and art were great (ESPECIALLY THE MUSIC)!

I love the sound effects lol. Some sort of inicator for how much you'll jump when holding would be nice. And it's overall just a little bit clunky. But it's cool! I like the splitting mechanic, it has a lot of potential. Gj!

Pretty neat idea even though not highly unique by any means. Mechanics wise there was already quite an interesting amount of stuff but the execution side would have needed some more polish. Everything was a bit rough around the edges.

Some of the biggest offenders were really just some slight design mishaps which could have been fixed in mere minutes. The wait amount on the start and end of the level was just bad. And the final straw was the full restart on deaths. I really don't want to keep playing the first two or three levels over and over again due to deaths and full game restarts due to clunky unresponsive controls and unfair hitboxes. Third level also had this blind drop straight to death star (if in a steep enough angle) which was umm, not fun. :anger:

This is where my progress was stumped every single time (if not earlier). Grabbing the baby before the death star just kills your momentum and then it's so damn difficult to jump over it.


So yeah, the controls were stiff. I think the rotating worked fine while in the starting position but got jumpier and weirder the further you got. So I guess there was something wrong with your maths. Also how was that implemented, it didn't quite seem physically accurate. I guess you actually rotate the world? Probably would have been easier to just rotate the gravity. Quite often you could rotate the world up till the limit before the ball started rolling at all. Then there is also the slowness issue with the rotating mechanic. You couldn't really do anything even remotely reaction based since rotating from one side to another took ages. Maybe mouse controls where you would map the mouse x coordinate to the rotation might work.

Jumping was another issue with the controls. That jump charge just added unnecessary complexity and unprecision to jumping. I don't see the reason for such as there was cases ever where the player would want to do a small jump. The split mechanic could also have been bound to just one button which turned it on and off instead of needing two separate ones.

Pretty nice amount of visual fluff like the background particles and fish and the character facial animations. Would have rather you used that time to fix the gameplay though. The music and sounds were nice and funny too but also got a bit annoying the longer I played. The audio side painted this childish and lighthearted mood accompanied smily faces too but the color palette was then dark and muddy and didn't really fit too well. All those dark blues and grays. Something brighter and more colorful would have been a better match overall in my opinion.

Good job! :thumbsup:

A fun little game, the goofy sounds and music goes very well with it :D Would've liked a checkpoint system so that every failure wouldn't lead to first level.

@antti-haavikko thanks for the thorough review, I really appreciate it. Yes, there are quite some issues with the physics and I spent a fair amount of time trying different approaches: rotating the world, applying torque to the center of mass of the world, increasing and decreasing the acceleration of the rotation. The real issue was that the more responsive the controls (and quickly accelerating), the easier it was for the player to fall through the world. It all boils down to my inexperience with Unity's physics tbh. I believe there must be a way to keep the physics active and avoid the player just falling through because of the acceleration. Your idea of playing around with gravity seems a good one. I could try that together with a simple camera rotation and see how it feels. It's something worth investigating that didn't really came to my mind.

And yes, I screwed up with the timings of the end scenes but again it's due to issues with physics. I needed to make sure to bring the world back to the original rotation, but I couldn't just rotate it back all of a sudden, I had to do it slowly and that's why the animation takes so long (and if you're already near to the original orientation, it really feels slow and unneeded).

I guess I'll keep working on this and see if I can make it better, taking all your suggestions into consideration.

hahaha this is peak sound design! Love it, i want more, now!

The game is fun, but the sounds effects ans music are amazing
Love it <3

Clever platformer! Splitting up and recombining your party was really cool.

The level tilting mechanic made me quite dizzy, so I wasn't able to play for too long. One suggestion for feedback would be to have a little progress bar showing how "charged" the characters jump would be.

Good work!

You can go really far with a clever game mechanic like that. And your soundtrack is unforgettable! Definitely got a 2D Katamari Damacy vibe.

this game idea is very great ， I like the turn world conpect :smile:
may be you need some time in details and this game will be awsome !!

I like the mood :)

Maybe it would be better to jump perpendicular to the ground instead of upward relative to the camera.

The game was overall pretty fun, and it fits the theme very well. I personally don't really like the graphics of the game, but the sound design was hilarious. Great job!

Great concept, fun and challenging. I love the sound / music, so funny! The only two things that deterred me from playing more were having to start all the way from the very beginning when dying and the fact that I got some motion sickness from the camera movement. Overall great entry, I hope you keep working on the game as this has great potential and it's very innovative. Loved it!

Very interesting game. I loved the scatting you did

Gameplay is very smooth and challenging, i like your game

In this video I played your game and five other games. Soon I will make a detailed analysis via comment. :)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kAQ0odowKTg

**Analysis...**

1 - Mechanics, Learning and Flow:
The mechanics consists of moving the stage so that the ball (player's character, henceforth PC) can advance to the lowest part of the stage. This proposal is quite interesting and it looks promising. I found it interesting that by rotating the stage, it is possible to keep the character still for a while (making the game a little less slippery, which ensures a little more control for the player).
Learning how to play with the basic elements is simple and is facilitated by the presence of textual explanations on the screen (my suggestion would be to make this as iconographic as possible, so that no one knows how to speak English, increasing the possibility that the game can be easily understood by more people. ). After the initial elements, the game presents new elements, which would not be too complicated to learn, were it not for the obligation to return to the game zero whenever it gets lost (I missed check-points) and the fact that, take a long time to start an internship (I'm not sure what happens, but sometimes you keep repeating the initial cry before starting the internship).
The game flow is hampered by the punishment of having to return to the beginning, which makes the player give up knowing all the content because of that. I suggest that, for broader tests, allow skipping stages, but the ideal would be to add check-points anyway.
The game is very interesting and fun for the event time.

2 - Graphics, Audio and Narrative:
The graphics are very simple and are able to show exactly all the elements of the game, allowing to have good clarity of what is happening. I missed something that would mark the end of the stage (or perhaps some element of HUD that will help reduce anxiety about whether or not I am close to the end of the stage).
The audio has an interesting style and fits the game well for the event time, some people feel very comfortable, others may find it a bit repetitive (I say that because I showed it to someone else, in addition to the experience with games). So it may be interesting to have different filters for each stage (changing the voice a little) among other possible solutions (keeping the style delivered). All this after the time of the event (because they have already delivered a lot, congratulations). In addition, when I played recording for YouTube, I had the feeling that the sound doubled or tripled at some point, generating a great deal of dislike. But it doesn't seem to have been repeated when I went back to playing for a while longer before writing this review.
I do not believe that the narrative was focused on this version of the game, although it fits a simple narrative. Despite this, the game broadcasts a journey through what it already shows.

3 - Culture:
I believe that a narrative coating would be necessary for the game to have greater cultural connections (which would allow it to find niches to publish the game directly).
Despite this, the game seems to be an example of games that can use the gyroscope to find the way, so it is an example of this "genre" of mechanics, which already allows us to perceive and enjoy cultural connections.

4 - Monetization:
I have difficulty with games with this camera movement, but this is something particular. I suppose that for smartphones, due polishment and expansion of content, the game can sell with advertisements.

Nice touch on a game mechanic not often used!

Cute game! This has some good ideas.

A couple little things could make this feel much better.

-Checkpoints :sweat_smile:

-Holding space to jump is fine, but I think players need visual feedback to know that its working; I'd suggest squishing the sprite down, shaking it, flashing it, changing its color, or changing it's facial expression (or a combination of all of them).

-It's hard to understand that the level has ended. Control is taken from the play in a way that makes them feel like they should still be able to move, especially because they can still jump, and nothing else is happening. Some kind of goal post or flag would be nice, I guess "Saved X/X" is the marker, but maybe saying **"Level Complete! Saved X/X! Press C to Continue!"** would feel better. Especially because the transition time is pretty long right now.

Visually, I like the blue character's look, and the blinky eyes is a nice touch. The idea of splitting from your buddies and regrouping is cool idea that can be expanded on.

Good job!