Mantra by Haotian Chen
A platformer jump game play as princess Gyamoza and her great power. Jump twice to double jump, press J or Left Mouse Button to dash, pressing left or right than jump against wall to climb wall. but beware, her power will not always work, there are some SPACE the LIMIT her power!
| Original URL | https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/54/mantra |
Ratings
| Overall | 353th | 3.793⭐ | 31🧑⚖️ |
| Fun | 225th | 3.862⭐ | 31🧑⚖️ |
| Innovation | 705th | 3.19⭐ | 31🧑⚖️ |
| Theme | 923th | 3.071⭐ | 30🧑⚖️ |
| Graphics | 274th | 4.103⭐ | 31🧑⚖️ |
| Humor | 643th | 2.74⭐ | 27🧑⚖️ |
| Mood | 256th | 3.889⭐ | 29🧑⚖️ |
| Given | 33🗳️ | 33🗨️ |
This is an awesome platformer, and genuinely hard :)
The level design was very good.
One thing is that the green/turquoise spikes confused me for a while because I thought they were grass.
idk if im allowed to change the file though...
If I could add one constructive piece of feedback; when the breaking platforms fall out from beneath the character, it would ***feel*** a lot better if you allowed the character to still jump for a short moment. Its another one of those invisible details makes a big difference.
anyway ,thank you for like my game!
I was not able to beat it.
Last time I did ludem dare, I also made a super difficult platformer. So I understand.
GREAT job on the pixel environment art.
The overlapping de-buff zones are an interesting idea, but overload my brain. I just brute-forced each area until I figured out what was intended for me, I couldn't tell you which colors debuffed what ability, it wasn't very "read-able" for me, even with the HUD.
I had some trouble with the wall jumping, which seemed to just fail sometimes.
Good job overall! Fun game!
@vanillz @mao that's odd, i didnt meet significant wall climbing problem when i test it, hmmmm.
The graphics are excellent; I like the color scheme and the windy mountain vibes. The way the main character's hair flows in the wind is a nice touch. The spikes in a couple places are a little hard to see while the game is moving, and I wish there was a little more feedback to show that I hit them (like, stopping movement, a sound effect, and a quick animation other than the screen fading out): there were times I was confused as to how I had died, because I was looking ahead to the next thing and didn't realize I had touched them.
In terms of game design it feels very closely following after Celeste. Nice take on "limited space" meaning "spaces in which you are limited" but in practice it feels like a lesson in why this sort of design is difficult. It's hard to keep track which of three different jump abilities corresponds to which color, especially with all 3 being introduced around the same time and pretty soon having them mix and match.
Also, it seems like there is very little coyote time, if any, which feels extra hard in this day and age where the concept is so well understood. (The "Movement 2" Godot demo even implements it, though the timing in that demo might be _too_ generous by default.)
Still, a nice little game, pretty slick and complete for something made in a time crunch.
i've thought about most of those problem when i make the game and it's really nice when someone point it out that those problems are real, so i know where i should improve next time.
I set coyote time to 0.1s which i think was normal though, seems Celeste-like game do need a little more of coyote time?
i actually plan to make it work with controller at first, but i didnt have time to do it since i never try that before. pretty sure ill do it on next jam though.
The wall jumping was a bit wonky for me, it just didn't work sometimes. which hindered some of the enjoyment. But overall it was great Had a blast playing your game!
can you guys describe what happened? sometime nothing happened when you press SPACE on the wall?
oh, btw you have to keep pressing move key to do that. like, if the wall is on your right, you have to keep pressing D and than press jump to do wall climb. i dont know if that's what happened but that's the only thing i can think of.
seems i have to work more on control logic.
and i shouldnt show the sliding animation while player is not actually sliding.
more improvement, nice.
But nice Job, i love the music and the Pixelart.
I'm not a huge platformer player, but it felt to me like the difficulty was - for the most part - just right: not too difficult, yet still challenging. The save / checkpoints are pretty well placed, so you don't have to repeat a huge part of the level if you fail a jump. The only part I found a bit too difficult was the final quadruple-dash jump to the end of the game. In the end, I couldn't complete it this way, but after several tries, when I was about to give up, I found that you can also do it in another way, which proved much simpler.

I haven't found any problem with the wall jumping or climbing, everything seemed to work as intended. There seemed to be some occasional issues with the double jump, as it sometimes looked like it didn't register the second space press (and I wasn't in the white zone), though I didn't manage to figure out the exact occurrence conditions. Other than that, everything handled pretty well and the controls in general felt very smooth.
The idea of having "spaces of limit" is a pretty good interpretation of the theme. The UI showing you which of your abilities are disabled was also a good idea, as it's pretty easy to forget which zone you're in once you move past its border.
The game looks simply beautiful. Everything looks amazing, and while all the sprites are really high quality pixelart, I don't think there's any doubt the main character is the best of them all, especially with all her animations on all the moves.
All in all, it's a very impressive work for such a short jam. Well done!
the double jump problem might have something doing with those falling platform, they fall faster than i thought, so probably when you press jump you are already on air, not sure though.
Great game, wallkick, dash feel great.
I had trouble climbing the walls at the beginning of the second level. Every time I jumped the character would speed up and fall, which prevented me from continuing the game.
From the first level this is going to be a really great game.
I'll come back when you fix the bug.
here‘s a sad faputa

the wall climb problem almost drives me crazy, i dont know what is actually going wrong!
i have to ask again did you press direction key (A or D) during wall climbing? if no, try do it, and if that work ill feel better because it just some control logic problem. but if yes you did, i, just dont know what to start with. i never met this problem myself, not even my platformer noob cousin. it just so weird