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Fun game! There will be NO stopping my ant, thank you very much! ;)
It might be nice if the pit-falls that you can't climb out of would insta-kill you instead so you get back to your next run faster!

Great work!!!

Really neat theme and artwork! Could benefit from a better camera though and I got stuck a few times (like, the character was physically stuck)

Oh wow, you even made an introductory cutscene! The art is cute, and the ant is even cuter.
My first run ended tragically when I fell beneath the trail of spikes and died in a corner, but once I got a hold of the controls, it went significantly smoother.
Have you considered making a floaty camera that follows the ant and tries to keep him more or less in the center of the screen? I think that might've helped with tricky navigation in a few scenes. I'd understand if you DIDN'T want to make it easier though :D

Hello! This game is really fun I likes the jump sound effect. Just you should adjust the camera, it shouldn't be showing the sky while we need to see a bit what's below.

It's fun and cute, and quicker paced than I expected for a game about an ant but the fast pace suits it really well! The art style is both cool and cute. Sometimes the jumping sticks, and I do wish the spikes could insta kill you where it's hopeless to get out, but despite that I really had a lot of fun with this one!

High speed creates an atmosphere of inevitable! I like it!

And music + art are very good combo! Great job!

Really liked the artwork. The camera was a little too high up that I couldn't clearly see what I was jumping down to at times. Not sure if this was an issue with the screen size or not. Also the platforming was a bit buggy (pun intended). Was getting stuck on the geometry at times. Nice game overall.

Other than the inconsistent jumping controls, very solid game. I think the method of attack could have been more creative, but the art and atmosphere were well put together.

Fantastic game! so engaging and theres so much detail in the art world and the music fits perfectly! The mechanics were a bit a difficult to use, but the game is so fun that I continued playing through it, great job overall!!!

NOOO NOT THE MLP JAR!!

What a silly game, I liked it a lot!!
The platforming was a little clunky, but it was still really enjoyable.
I ended up getting stuck at the blocks right after ... the jar ...

for some reason those blocks wouldn't move

Charming style and intuitive design! Not too fond of the music, but all in all nice and smooth game!

I died next to the MLP... jar... giving 5 points for humor for that one lol.

Nice game! I enjoyed playing. :)

Great audio, good job =)

Great art and music. Tho controls are clunky, camera is not helping and everything seems to move too fast. Also i'm constantly getting stuck inside of objects and platforms

Love the build up of tension, a nice challenge!

Good action! :sunglasses: I liked the mechanics with dashing, but controls are not precise, and I stuck in the colliders few times.

Pixel graphics is so oldschool, I like it a lot in preview scene :thumbsup:

Thanks for game and have a great LDjam! :slight_smile:

Cool game. I like how brutally difficult it is. The music really adds to it. Would be nice to have the controls feel a *bit* more polished.

After the chill intro I was not expecting the gameplay. Nice bit of bait and switch there.

I like games with biological sence) It is really great game! Thanks for your job!

A great combination of music and game dynamics! The controls are a bit not intuitive, but having figured it out, I have gone far!

So we DO have some fixes for the movement **bugs** but we want to take our time to make sure it is perfect. Apologies to those who get frustrated with the current movement system. Thanks to everyone for the kind words so far! Happy LDJAM!

Loved the art, music, and theme, collision and controls were pretty bad though which cut the fun quite a bit, often when i jumped it would play the sound but i just wouldn't jump, seems like touching anything cancels other inputs? was REALLY hard to do the vertical climb even without any pressure of anything chasing you as the jumps seemed to just snap up quickly then right back down. I kept having weird problems too like the gray blocks getting stuck. Honestly I think this would be a pretty fun game if just the controls and collision were cleaned up a bit. (personally i'd ditch the physics and just do it mario style)

NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO THAT CHECKPOINT WHAT

Real talk. The concept is cool and the illustrations are cute. But the character controller kinda takes away from it. It's not that enjoyable to jump but you did make an interesting challenge and when you do a power move, it does feel satisfying. Perhaps just work on the jumping a bit more and make it so you instantly respawn when you fall into a put of spikes or spike things because at that point you're just waiting for your death. But overall, pretty well done.

Good job!

The artstyle is very nice and having an opening cutscene was neat. The jump and dash were difficult to use together as pressing ctrl too often would stop the game from running. Perhaps put dash on shift and make it toggle on for a few seconds?

Good music and art design just really struggling to control properly. The ant has a sliding effect after stopping which is fine but when I need to have precise jumps and said jumps can be unresponsive I tend to just fall to my death. I liked how with just a dash and jump you are able to make the platformer but those rocks that you can push with the dash ended up blocking me more often that I managed to get through them. If there is an ending I am sad that I wont be able to see as I made a lot of attempts to make it out of the underground. Still with some bug fixes to the collisions and jumping the game will improve drastically.

@mascoll @andrewoplis @shess @sagiii @raptor851 @pious @peebabubber @tentaclemax @tankou @griggy @manan @agent-peterson @mopifish @trexxak @tater-hater @tankou @msd @spaint @pureimprov @niklas-zhaga @daniel-username @bangkerpow @gandelianna @egor010121 @raptor851 @pious @alex-mulkerrin @kitkii

[https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/50/persist-ant/you-whined-we-listened]

Welp! We tried our best to fix the feel of the game. Let us know if we got any better! Or worse...

Thanks again for the incredibly helpful feedback.

There are so many talented people here and we are honored to learn from you all.

Cheers! :beers:

Oh I cant go pass this one but I am vibing with this soundtrack


**the secret is rather dashing** @velvetlobster

Also your games are fuck*n' amazing.

My ant has now got stuck in this block two times, no way to move and jumping and dashing doesn't do anything so I have to start the whole game again and watch the un-skippable intro. I wish you had a button to jump back to last save point.

That said, I love your presentation. Intro and almost all of the art was top notch. I'm a bit biased as I love ants and other insects (our ludum game shrink&destroy from last year featured some), but the ant animations were great! Music was also fitting to the fast action of the game.

What could have used a little more love were the controls and hitboxes. Controls felt sometimes slippery, sometimes sticky and sometimes dashing into a worm would just stop me. I got stuck in blocks and walls etc. as if you had just used a default movement from a game engine.

Anyways, I liked so much about this game. I would have loved it, but control/hitbox issues made it a rage game for the wrong reasons.

OST is sick. Gameplay is weird, unpolished, but fun. Great work!

I rage quit ! ^^ (the checkpoint just after the one in the previous com)
You should display the changelog on the game description, and maybe let the JAM version available somewhere
Good thing you didn't give up, their is still a lot fixes, this kind of game need to be very very precises, in physics and map pattern to be realy good, keep going, it's already a good game, not much to do before it will be a great one.

Decent entry, the splash screen and music are awesome. Dig the old school graphics in the intro :)
Sadly I wasn't able to finish this on my lunch break (I got past the first checkpoint though) so bear this in mind with my comment!

Some constructive crit:
- I found the controls a bit fiddly at times
- The motion of the camera (especially when jumping) is a bit harsh/jerky, would be nice if there was some smoothing (i.e. it didn't exactly follow your ants position
- I think the level design could use a bit of work.
- The hectic chase scene should maybe not be right at the start, this is the point where as a player I need some to get my bearings and get used to the controls. The chase would be cool a bit later on though.
- for some of the elements, it wasn't immediately clear if I should grab or avoid them. The "free life" ant head looked like it might be an enemy insect
- the placement of free lives seemed a bit random, they were in spots that didn't really make sense e.g. just after an insta-death obstacle

But all in all, a solid platformer with a cool theme! Well done.

Nice game, I love the overall theme of the game as well as the music and art! However I would say that the camera movement feels a bit too hectic when it follows the ant dead on, as it makes it harder to land jumps and such. Asides from that, a very fun game with a lot of character!

Good game. Love the theme (and title pun!). I'm terrible at sidescrollers however, so I didn't make it far. Good art and sound design though!

Probably the best music I've heard thus far out of the entries I've played! That's getting a *VERY* high score from me. The graphics may be somewhat simplistic, but they're pretty good as well. The gameplay wasn't that great. That's the cliffnotes version; here's a more detailed review:

## Gameplay

Quickly, I just wanna say that this was *completely* different from what I expected! I was thinking this would be a top-down game of some sort, so I wasn't prepared for it to suddenly become a fast-paced platformer!

Speaking of which, I liked how fast you move around in the beginning, but that speed doesn't lend well to the precision platforming you have to do in the second-half of the game. You pretty much **HAVE** to stop in your tracks to safely jump between each _crumbling block_ else you either hit the insta-kill blocks, or get smacked by the tractor. The player is basically expected to _slowly move fast,_ and that's where I flat out gave up on the original version.

Going to the updated version, I was glad to see that my jumps wouldn't just 'stop' for no good reason anymore, letting be get past the aforementioned platforming section. I do not like jumping on the ladybugs near the end, because quite a few attempts died there because *I slipped right off the ladybug onto an insta-kill block.* Yeah, you can still slip off platforms which just feels unfair. Also, sometimes you'll just get *stopped* when charging towards a worm, and later on in the game, that is a death sentence.

I feel the gameplay didn't get enough attention during the development, so unfortunately, this is getting a lower Fun rating.

## Audio

But you sure poured a LOT of heart into this music! It's some damn good stuff, again, *the* best I've heard thus far! Now I'm not too familiar with composing music, so I can't really go into any more detail about it, but this is something to be proud of for *SURE.* Uh, so yeah, that's it for the music; well, I guess I could say, even though you told us not to take sound effects into account when rating this entry, I think the sound effects are a bit *too* quiet compared to the music.

## Graphics

I do appreciate the inclusion of a beginning cutscene, and an ending screen. I'm not really a fan of the incredibly noticeable dithering going on with the sky background, but foreground elements look pretty good, if low resolution.

I guess you all were sponsored by Hostess, given how many Twinkies appear in this game! It also took me a bit to appreciate the albeit simple name of *Dr. Salt,* lovely. I looked at the game a few times writing this, and I like how there's an animated worm in the apple at the start.

Also:


Is that what I think you're referencing? Good lord you're all so *crude!* The name *Bootysmack Interactive* and then this! What in the heck!

It's great! The music creates a feeling of urgency and the graphics is very nice too, I like the dithering. Of course the intro is both well made and funny as hell. The post-jam vesrion is definately improved. Two thumbs up!

An ant game!! As a member of the already 1.8 Mio Facebook Group "A group where we all pretend to be ants in an ant colony" I just have to endorse this.

What a wilde ride! :D

I liked this! The graphics we're good to read! Music was fun and the way the run animation made the ant's but wobble up and down made me giggle.

Fun challenges, although I wasn't completely sure how the dash function works, but I just kept smashing it to get past the worm :D (I didn't manage the first worm at first and almost gave up after 10 tries, but then I somehow figured it out :))

The starting cutscene is nice but a bit long, at first I thought you have to watch it everytime you die which would have been tiresome, so good thing it isn't ^^ (s very fast paced version of it wouldn't have been bad though :))

The jumping was good in general, played the second version. Jumping up in that section with the blocks built like stairs (so from left to right, right to left etc.) felt a bit hard and I fell down a couple of times, but it was manageable :)

Good job guys! Nice game :)