Holospecter by theStoff
Deep underground lies a secret facility. An organization seeking to strengthen humanity in a world that is becoming ever increasingly harsh. Like many of the subjects, Samantha waits locked away and guarded. Tested on against her will.
However, a day comes when her cell door mysteriously unlocks. The lab is devoid of all life and its subjects have been left in solitude. The question is why? What lies in wait in these emptied halls?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uEQqp7q4DZs

Controls:
Move: WASD/Left Stick/Dpad
Jump: Space/South Button
Dash: Shift/West Button
Special: F/North Button
Reset Level: R/Select
Pause: Enter/Start
In-game rebinds available!
Credits:

| Link | https://thestoff.itch.io/holospecter |
| Link | https://thestoff.itch.io/holospecter |
| Original URL | https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/51/holospecter |
Ratings
| Overall | 58th | 4.165⭐ | 114🧑⚖️ |
| Fun | 73th | 4.098⭐ | 114🧑⚖️ |
| Innovation | 665th | 3.221⭐ | 113🧑⚖️ |
| Theme | 923th | 3.272⭐ | 114🧑⚖️ |
| Graphics | 72th | 4.442⭐ | 115🧑⚖️ |
| Audio | 63th | 4.126⭐ | 113🧑⚖️ |
| Humor | 710th | 2.598⭐ | 68🧑⚖️ |
| Mood | 179th | 3.928⭐ | 113🧑⚖️ |
| Given | 48🗳️ | 70🗨️ |
I liked that levels had multiple paths to completion.
Going to the end screen after every fail was a bit tedious tho.
(try our game plz!)
I think you nailed it overall, it felt really polished. Points to every corner of the team.
Few issues I noticed. The audio and text of the records isn't synced. You can basically listen to it all, and then you have to scroll the text as well. So maybe clipping the audio to match each line could be helpful.
Another thing was the laser lines. They blend quite well to the environment and at the beginning I had hard time seeing and reacting to them.
EDIT: The game could use some sound effects, naturally.
Great work, team!
Only quibble is, I got stuck in a wall while dashing (a common curse of platformers XD). ( See https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachments/392739131173896202/1026864721120460850/unknown.png ). I forgot restarting the level was an option so I lost my progress. But I want to come back to this game later.
Thank you for this experience :heart: 
The visuals sold me on trying it, but the quality of everything made me want to finish it. Definitely one of the best this jam. :heart:
The game was very well executed and gave me strong Stealth Bastard vibes (which is meant as a big compliment!), very good job! I'm going to go play it some more a bit later :smiley:
If you’d like to rewatch the playthrough, you can find it here: https://www.twitch.tv/videos/1609823066?t=5h59m45s
Good luck on your ratings, see you next LD! :D
💜 Elysia Griffin AKA Button Feedback Lady
https://www.twitch.tv/elysiagriffin
🦒
Really loved gameplay and graphics. Thank you for submition!!!
Regenerating air could be way faster than losing it (without violating the theme). This might help the pacing. ^^
I noticed there was some forgiveness for the player around platform edges, to either prevent you from falling off if you didn't mean to or to help you get onto the platform if you just barely made it. Much appreciate this! I still sucked at some of the areas, but honestly I should have hooked up a controller to play instead of on keyboard. That would make it a much better experience (I have to do the same when I play Celeste so should have known).
My favorite part was the puppers. I want one. LOL
I liked the dash mechanic a lot. There was also some clever level design with the stealth-disabling doors - I appreciated how sometimes you would go through the same area twice but be able to take a different route the second time.
I wish you could use the stealth in chunks, rather than having to wait for it to recover even if you had some left over when you canceled it - it was a little annoying to have to stand around and wait for it to recover, and adding a 'conserving stealth energy' aspect might be a cool extra dimension of gameplay.
I was surprised how long the game was! And that there was voice acting! Overall a very impressive level of polish and sophistication for a 72-hour jam game.
My minor gripe with the game is there's a lot of waiting, be it waiting for the 10 seconds to replenish for invincibility or for drones to go out of the way. The flow of the game often became like clear one area with invincibility -> find safe space and turn off invincibility and wait -> continue on (and similar with drones too when I don't have invincibility). I'm sure for speedrunning it's interesting since I would have to consider when and how to conserve my invincibility, but playing casually it disrupted the flow of platforming when I had to wait for invincibility to recharge.
But yea anyways I'm over explaining an issue that's not that serious and the solidness of everything else makes up for it!
Good job :thumbsup:
Stealth mechanics are fun, the platforming was a little iffy at some points with some you stopping against platforms, and I really want to jump for the robots :smile:
The 10 seconds recharge was pretty annoying and the restart button not being in the centre of the screen was also strangely annoying - no idea why!?
But these are minor, great game and fantastic entry!
The movement seems a bit clunky at times, especially at the edges of the platforms. The eye-dog would be more threatening if it chased the player if it saw him outside the guarding path, but still on the same level. Also I think that it was more of a `time as a resource` theme than `every 10 seconds`. All of those are really just minor nitpicks, the game is great and I'm really impressed that you even had time to put control rebinds there.

The only minor bugs were the usual collision hiccups when hitting a platform in a 45° angle (rounded collision shape?) and a strange joystick drift (maybe increase the deadzone a bit?).
if I'm to give a bit of criticism I would say waiting for the ability to recharge feels like a flow breaker, sometimes I'm dashing arround running as fast as I can parkouring non stop whitch feels badass but then I have to stop and wait for the ability to recharge in order to move on, I wish that wasn't the case, also encountered a bug where lazer still detected me even when I was invisible, but that's not really a game breaker, I mean what jam game doesn't have its fair share of bugs lol.
anyway I think this game is great, hope to see it in the top 10 for the art category
On a positive note! I can assure you that the speedrun strats have basically no waiting periods, besides the power-off-gateway levels where you have to hide from the drones :D
The character movement felt very good and the theme use was great. I only wished there were controls in game, I had to go back to the main menu to look at them when faced against having to do a special to cross a laser :P
Nice work!!!
-Controls felt a bit awkward, id prefer Arrows/F/R/Shift or WASD/J/K/L/etc.. to utilize both of my hands while playing
-I noticed that if I stopped pressing the right direction while dashing, my dash would cut right out which felt weird, imo a little air deceleration would have helped here
-Obstacle art seemed too similar to environment art at times- Lasers & Floor, Eyes were hard to notice.
a bright outline or different coloring could have helped a bit here :)
-I wish I could reuse my ability if I still had more energy left, Seemed logical to allow further gameplay options
That's about it tho, as I said had tons of funs with this one! Good job
I also would have liked if the stealth power recharged faster while not in use (so 10s to run out, and 2s to refill).
There is one level part where you need to fall through a small gap and then dash before landing, and I failed a couple time before I realized that the dash button only works if I provide a horizontal input.
Anyways, those complaints aside, I quite liked the game. I think the art style is great, and I like that you have a bunch of background art decoration while still having very high contrast and clarity for interactive elements. The invisible visual effect is pretty cool. I enjoyed the platforming and did manage to beat the game in the end.
That was a disaster. Yeah the art is good, but the gameplay is even worse than Labyrinth of Darkness (https://ldj.am/$302184).
- There is not arrow keys control.
- There is not any control indication in the game. PuzzleScript automatically shows the control keys in the main menu for the new players, but yes "it makes the game too easy"
- You have to be walking in a direction to dash. Why ?
- The second guards level is the most unbalanced level in the game. There is a part where you have so little time to not get hit by the spore, then make a jump not too low to get hit by the guard, but not too high to touch the laser.
the art is lovely and coherent, excellent job on all points!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hmi_24DRxE4
If I can be constructive, I would point out a few problems. What bothered me the most were some yellow walls that I could only run through as invisible. Why are they the same color as the floor I'm walking on? I killed myself about three times before I realized that they were going to kill me and that it wasn't a bug. Danger and Hazard should be visible and recognizable at first glance. in addition, you already have the color for danger. What about the orange light from the cameras... I believe it would serve much better.
When I used invisibility for maybe only 4 seconds I had to wait for it to recharge before I could use it again. I thought that was a shame because it was holding me back from progressing through the game.
The controls weren't terrible, but they could use some fine-tuning. I missed a tutorial on how to control it. When the game tells me to use "special" or "dash", I didn't know which button to use. I had to go back to your LD page and find the controls.
Oh, and in one level I somehow mysteriously jumped over the gate that was supposed to take away my invisibility and thus I got to the goal very early ;)
Look, these are such little things. Even though I've written a lot about them, it's still true that you made a great and fun e with an interesting story, great artwork and nice music. Good work :)
The art, music, sound design, controls, level design, and mechanics design are all top notch, really no notes there. :ok_hand:
I actually wasn't a big fan at first of the fact that I had to wait for a full recharge of my invisibility before I was able to use it again, but now I can really appreciate the reason you implemented it this way (ie: to encourage risk-taking for speedrunners), so now I think it's a super clever decision!
Although, since it's clear that this game was designed to be speedrun, I do have a coooouuuple of tiny niggles that I wanted to mention:
- The "Game Over" sequence/animation kind of takes a little too long when you fail, making me feel a little frustrated/annoyed when it happens. The pace of this game reminds me a *lot* of Celeste, which I think is why it feels noticeable when there isn't a fast "immediately restart level" flow when I get caught (at least not in the base game). EDIT: I actually just opened it up again, and noticed you have a "quick restart" button. That's super nice :thumbsup: Although I do still think the default behavior should prolly happen faster.
- The "Back" button on your credits screen doesn't do anything (at least on WebGL) :stuck_out_tongue:
- This last jump is mean. :slight_frown: I dun like it...Especially since it's one of the last platforming challenges the player needs to do after a pretty long level.

Hopefully all my tiny criticisms don't bother you too much. At the end of the day, this is easily one of the best , most solidly put together LD entries out there, imo. :heart: So none of these complaints actually bother me all that much. Y'all just seem like you've got an eye for quality, so I wanted to do my part to facilitate that. :thumbsup: :thumbsup: :thumbsup:
I'm terribly sorry about the last jump, though! It's those little moments where I, as the level designer, am aware of all ins and outs of the game and sometimes tend to forget that other players might not see things the same way as I do haha. The eyes have a smaller hitbox than its visuals, so when I was playtesting it I would basically just walk into them slightly, then jump - rather easy.... if you're aware of the hitbox. Oops. Definitely something I need to improve on, but will take that, and your other pointers, with me to future jams!
Unfortunately I couldn't find the time to read a lengthy review on your game this time around due to an injury, but I'm def looking forward to your next LD entry (you guys better be joining again!)