OMG, I'm so glad this game happened! I was actually thinking that a game called "Master Debaters" would be perfect at this point in the elections featuring Hillary and the Don in a contest of masturbating, with the game description saying "More informational than the actual presidential debates..." would be perfect right now.
4/5 stars because I reserve 5/5 for games that rival commercial stuff with like a year of blood sweat and tears poured into it, but rest assured that I enjoyed this one!
Needs an opening screen saying "Not for pussies who whine about controls instead of gittin' gud".
After that weird bug that kinda jacked up my first save file I came back and started over again, and it was definitely worth it. Platforming was a challenge, and a legitimate challenge IMO. There were also enough parts where stopping to think and come up with a good strategy was key, and an ever increasing amount of secrets to find as the game progressed, that it made the game a well rounded package and not simply a pure action platformer. I'd put this game up there with the likes of Phoenotopia and am really disappointed that people even at Newgrounds are rating it low just because it feels floaty. (Are we starting to turn into the babies at "Klickers/idles Only, Not Games" who expect games to practically beat themselves for them?) I guess if you ever decide to try to make a game that caters to everyone then the lesson is that you need option toggles for "turn off horizontal momentum", "make chain twice as long", "make chain deploy instantly", "give player a bazooka", and "make game beat itself while player is off at school". Maybe that'll make you a rich and happy programmer instead of, well, whatever that was.
A game can be appealing for various reasons, like if it has a new game mechanic or is challenging or tells an engaging story. This game's main appeal is the storytelling (I wouldn't call it a new game mechanic since the underlying platforming is fairly standard), so if you'd like to continue developing games along this concept my biggest recommendation would be to focus on developing as epic and engaging of a story as possible. People are loving the interactivity with the character's ability to change the storyline, so that should also be included. One natural extension of those two put together would be to have the story behind the game initially be somewhat mysterious and obfuscated but gradually revealed as puzzles are solved, although I'm sure there are many other good approaches you could take.
Aside from the storytelling, the other basic aspects of making an enjoyable platformer would still apply - making sure that the pace of the game is appropriate (in this case make the story unfold at an appropriate pace given the average person's playthrough speed, and if there's any backtracking involved then don't let it get too tedious), that all the physics and collision detection is sound (another reviewer already commented on being able to climb walls), and that the art and music/sound is as nice as you can manage. If you do feel ambitious enough to make the gameplay itself challenging or add crazy new mechanics like a ricocheting clone teleportation mechanism or smth then go for it, but it doesn't seem like that sort of stuff would be necessary if you've got a great story to tell.
Of course if you're doing one game a week for a while, then a big extension of this idea might have to be put on hold or take the back burner as a side project for the time being.
It's almost impossible for me to rate a detective game like this after this first episode. A good detective game (at least in my mind) should challenge a player to pay attention to details and draw appropriate conclusions based on everything they see. Since there isn't really any sort of wrap-up in this episode, I'll have to wait until the others to decide if it meets that criteria and how good of a detective game this is. But it did accomplish one mission: it made me interested enough in the series that I'll play episode 2 when it does come out.
If this game is played in a web browser with a mouse: if you click inside the flash player viewport and drag up or down beyond the edge of the browser's window, then the browser will scroll the page up or down which severely interferes with the game. (At least with Chrome, I haven't tested other browsers.) One workaround for that is to have the browser in fullscreen mode while you play so you can't click-and-drag outside the browser's window, but that doesn't seem like an ideal way to handle things from a programmer's point of view.
Hello! I have additioned the fullscreen mode in pause menu and main menu in this new version. Thanks for your feedback!
Almost gets five stars because it takes a fairly simple concept of world switching on jumping (not sure if it's totally new or just something that hasn't been done notably well before) and makes some ball-bustingly difficult levels with it from both a logic and a pure platforming skill standpoing. This is just one of many reasons why Newgrounds > some other site that's overrun with idle games that literally beat themselves with no skill from the player.
Would've been five stars if it weren't for that troll of an ending when you get deep enough into the secret area on the replay.
I generally like programming games like this, and it reminds me a lot of lightbot which is a good thing. I agree with other comments on minor things that could be improved: either give a clearer explanation about how to use the keys instead of mouse to enter commands (especially about the fact that you have to press space to select a track before any keys work, even if there's only one track), or make it so the first track is automatically selected to receive keyboard commands. I'm also not a fan of the kids cheering sound at the end of the levels.
More importantly, this seems like a nice game engine, but it really needs more difficult levels. Maybe looking back at other games like lightbot could help spark ideas on how to make more challenging levels. Or if you changed the mechanics slightly so that bulldozers can push other bulldozers around instead of having the level stop if they collide, maybe that could allow you to design more challenging levels where people need to use that mechanic.
Semi-autobiographical?
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Hope you feel better soon (although I don't even know myself exactly what that wish entails in this context).
Two suggestions: many video game players might not notice that there's a time limit for each day as the sun moves across the screen, so the faster you finish interactions the more people you'll have a chance to sell to and the more profit you stand to make. If you take all day reading everything and asking questions to everybody then the game will be tough to beat, but that will be most people's instinct if they don't realize there's a time limit, and is probably the source of the negative comments about the game being super hard. Just making it clear there's a time limit will probably clue people in and boost the ratings a bit if those people aren't left thinking this is impossibly hard.
The other thing is that there are occasionally gold clouds that float across the screen that you can click on for cash. That's fine during the day when time is moving since it gives people more things to focus on at once, especially if there's a time limit on the day, but I noticed that the gold clouds will still come out when the anvil makes the last comment of the day saying that the day is over if you just wait at that screen without continuing and you can just hang out and click a few gold clouds before ending the day. I'm not sure how I feel about that -- it's cheating, but also would give weaker players a way to make it through the game easily if they don't mind cheating a little and would therefore boost ratings because there are definitely people out there who downrate stuff purely because they can't beat it. So it's up to you if you want limit when the gold clouds can come out.
I had one run where a bug appeared, and this is what I can remember of it. Either day #2 or day #3 (can't remember for sure which) began with no clues about what item people are going to buy a lot of that day, but they seemed to end up mostly wanting swords. I offered to protect the guy who was hiding from the bounty hunter, and on the next day he went through both the dialog thanking me and giving me a bonus for doing so, and I also got a message right after that about needing to watch my back for turning the guy in to the bounty hunter. And on that same day, there were a few times when people finished talking and I had to click the continue button multiple times before it would advance.
The sun also didn't make it all the way across the screen before the day ended on days when I accepted a bonus to have more time during the day -- it made it most of the way across, but not all the way.
Thank you so much for the detailed feedback -
We were hoping the sun would clue enough players in to the time limit, but it sounds like we need to be more explicit about it. My only concern there is that if players aren't looking closely enough to where they would see the sun, I'm not sure what I can do that they WILL notice.
That's actually a bug - we wanted to make it so they didn't pop when the timer is paused, but it doesn't seem to be working. However, you make a good point that it could act as a crutch for weaker players, and it isn't like some players "cheating" will affect anyone else - there isn't a leaderboard or anything - so we may just never fix this bug.
Do you happen to remember the clues for the hero that you had on the day that the nasty glitch happened? That might help me narrow down the issue, since the crisis clues are tied to individual heroes. (EDIT: I just pushed what I think is a fix to this glitch. Thanks again for pointing it out!)
When you say the sun didn't make it all the way across - do you mean it stopped like 3/4 of the way through the sky, or where about half of it was off the screen? If it's the first, that's a nasty bug and I'll take a look. If it's the second, that's just a side-effect of the modifications that I made to try to smooth the sun's movement.
Again, thank you so much for the good review, and the helpful feedback!
This is a really good concept that seems like it hasn't really explored a lot of its potential. There's some degree of puzzling based on the mechanic of switching from top-down to side-scrolling and the accompanying change in gravity (or lack thereof), but it's sort of basic in this form. I'm not faulting you for that because I know this was done for a gamejam with a very limited amount of time so there's not really a chance to sit down and design super intricate puzzles. But if the purpose of a gamejam is to get you to explore an idea quickly and potentially find something that's worth fleshing out with more time, then you've mosdef accomplished that mission.
If you like hard games try my Daxolissian System series
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