4&1/2 Lives by Tristian Tee
A procedurally generated platformer where you try to escape from THE GOO!
Death is inevitable but at least you might be able to delay it a while.

Playable on Web or downloadable for Linux and windows
This is my first ever game jam and indeed my first game to be downloadable. First time doing art and music too. A lot of firsts... hmm... let's move on before I make this awkward.
Unfortunately I still have a busy work schedule. So I am submitting a bit earlier than I would like.
If I had more time I would probably do the following: - Better music - More animations - Fix the performance issues from the procedural generation - Make the procedural generation a little more intelligent - Add obstacles or interactable objects to make the gameplay more complex
Things I learnt from this: - How to write shaders! I am super happy with how THE GOO! turned out. - Pixel art is surprisingly fun. I look forward to being able to spend time on some. - Music is HAAAARD. I can hear the tune I want to play in my head but I just can't get it out into reality.
Please be brutal but useful with your feedback, I NEED TO LEARN!
| Link | https://tristian-tee.itch.io/412-lives |
| Link | https://github.com/TristianTee/LD50 |
| Original URL | https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/50/412-lives |
Ratings
| Overall | 449th | 3.208⭐ | 26🧑⚖️ |
| Fun | 415th | 3.104⭐ | 26🧑⚖️ |
| Innovation | 586th | 2.333⭐ | 26🧑⚖️ |
| Theme | 421th | 3.375⭐ | 26🧑⚖️ |
| Graphics | 481th | 3.021⭐ | 26🧑⚖️ |
| Audio | 213th | 3.438⭐ | 26🧑⚖️ |
| Mood | 339th | 3.174⭐ | 25🧑⚖️ |
| Given | 43🗳️ | 28🗨️ |
I'll try to be brutal for you :P
I agree with other posters the movement was pretty clunky, very slow. A couple tips for that: one is of course having a higher acceleration factor, you can set it up to calculate the acceleration based on top-speed and time-to-accelerate which I find useful. Another HUGE thing is when you turn around either instantly set the speed to 0, or have a way faster turn-around-acceleration, up to you, but that really helps things feel snappy.
Another thing is the jump, a secret about platformers is you really want the falling gravity to be higher than the rising gravity, really helps give it weight. (An exception I can think of is Kingdom Hearts which takes the opposite approach, it has a very low falling gravity) Here is a GDC talk about it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hG9SzQxaCm8
Other things, I'd say try to prevent the platforms from intersecting, it looks pretty gross when they do I think. And there were times when the next platform was simply too high up, at least I couldn't make the jump.
But yeah, good showing! As I like to say, if people are criticizing that means your work is worth criticizing :)
The main piece of feedback is that the player movement just needs to be a bit more responsive (more acceleration?) and less physics-y to feel fun i think. It would be good to feel like you have more control over the player.
To bo honest, I think it takes courage to go with procedural generation, I tried in the past with, lets say, mixed results. I don't know if many of us play each game enough to really matter (I played a couple of runs) and I got into a couple of really weird situations with the placement of the platforms.
However, if I had to pick something to spend time refining it would be the controls. It's really hard to make platform controls that feel responsive and refined. I would say that the initial acceleration is a bit high but then the character feels a bit floaty (maybe?) and the movement side to side feels a bit "heavy".
Think I liked:
- Great work with the shaders. I personally could not write those shaders
- Cool music
- Cool mechanic that the world wraps left and right.
Some points that I think should be changed:
- You should be able to double jump immediately after your first jump and not after the top of your first jump.
- The procedural placement sometimes is really unfair.
- It is unclear when you die (how deep you can enter the acid)
- It's not explained what the different platforms do.
Oh, I just read a comment that the world wraps. That might have helped! Maybe a way to make that clear to the player would help.
I intended the wrapping to be a kind of suprise/reward for the user after the leave the building. I tried to hint at it by having platforms spawn closer to the edge from that height onwards but as you probably noticed it's not exactly obvious. Maybe some kind of hint animation would have worked.
Nice job overall!

Can anyone beat it?
For a first game and first time artist/producer, you should be very proud. This is better than the average game I've played from this year's compo and that includes games from people who've competed dozens of times.