lanterns & mooncakes by ty_
it's the mid-autumn festival, and the haul is looking good this year — surely it wouldn't make a dent if you sneaked by and got some ingredients so you could have some mooncake with your best friend?
use wasd or arrow keys to move and jump. (space and z also work for jump.)
this game was made for ludum dare 52, with the theme "harvest". i pulled at the theme, so harvest -> harvest festival -> mid-autumn festival -> lanterns & mooncakes!
hope you enjoy! feedback and criticisms welcome :)

Ratings
| Overall | 74th | 3.786⭐ | 23🧑⚖️ |
| Fun | 178th | 3.333⭐ | 23🧑⚖️ |
| Innovation | 243th | 3.048⭐ | 23🧑⚖️ |
| Theme | 249th | 3.262⭐ | 23🧑⚖️ |
| Graphics | 34th | 4.214⭐ | 23🧑⚖️ |
| Audio | 45th | 3.881⭐ | 23🧑⚖️ |
| Mood | 17th | 4.119⭐ | 23🧑⚖️ |
| Given | 17🗳️ | 30🗨️ |
The lantern mechanic was hard to understand at first, but after some time, everything was smooth.
Sometimes the double jump didn't work, but still, the game was very enjoyable.
Very cute graphics, and very good animations.
The music was magnificent! How did you made it?
The physics for the lanterns is a bit strange. The way you interact with them is as if they are seesaws, where they tilt downwards towards where the most weight is, but they are set up like they are swings, which should move more based on momentum. They also lack inertia which is a gameplay problem since you can't stand on one side then switch to the other side before they start to move back to the center. Physics problems might not be your thing but I find solving stuff like this interesting. Making swinging lanterns with believable physics would be a fun challenge imo.
good job.
A suggestion to fix the occasionally janky lanterns - it seems like the physics would sometimes act like the player wasn't on the lantern and so start resetting back to the default position. Instead of resetting straight away, if you added a brief delay before they reset, then it would fix some of the issues.
Having the reset happen less quickly, or as others have suggested, having some momentum would also help a bit I think.
But I still had fun despite that! The music was really nice :)
The graphics were very simple and cute and all worked nicely together giving a super cute vibe and chill mood with the relaxing music. The jump animation was super cute with the cap coming off and the parallax background was a nice touch meaning that it didn't fel to static. The game looks very nice and complete, especially given the compo time constraints! A little audio when jumping/landing might have been a nice addition just to give the player a bit of feedback but I didn't feel like it was overly missing anything since the visual feedback with the jump animation was really nice.
As people have mentioned before, the lantern physics don't quite work how you'd expect. They act a bit more like a see-saw rather than a swing so it was very confusing at first! Once I got used to how it worked, I did manage to complete it despite being awful at platformers. We did also make a platformer for one jam and didn't realise how difficult it was to get the movement down correctly so awesome job with the player movement feeling pretty smooth!
Overall, really love the atmosphere that the game creates and the story that comes with it. Amazing job, well done!