Run !

Challenging game! I included it in my GM48: Countdown compilation video series, if you’d like to take a look. :) https://youtu.be/WM7q7yEUpUY

The difficulty seemed pretty steep, but I've never been great at Meat Boy type games. Adding a timer just seems to shoehorn the theme into the game, adding an unneeded additional level of difficulty. The graphics are well done. I was able to complete the tutorial level and got the key on the first "real" level.

Well, I think Baku and Fachewachewa summed it up pretty well, but if I had to choose what I personally found the most annoying:

• Starting up from the first level when you lose all life. As stated, this is a game jam :p It's never fun to restart from the beginning, especially when levels aren't proceduraly generated. In 2018 :p
• Waiting when you die seriously injures the fast pace imo. The wait is frustrating
• Short music loop.

So yeah, Baku summed up pretty well, but I'll add some other things. Overall, the game seem too punishing, and I'm not talking about difficulty here but about design. Of course all of this is made worse by the difficulty, but for that, refer to Baku's comment.

• First, the lives system, I think it should be scrapped entirely for a gamejam game. If I managed to beat a level, I shouldn't need to do it again, especially when there 100 other games to play. It also encourages suicides if you mess up on the first level for example (which - because of the things Baku listed - you will, no matter how good you are), because you're still trying to beat level two and want more time to experience level 3 before having to do it all over again. You have a score system (I didn't really notice this in-game but..), maybe put a "continue?" screen that reduces points or something like that if you want deaths to have an impact.
• There's too much waiting for obstacles to let you go. This isn't much fun in normal plateforming games, but here you have a timer. This means that is you mess up a little at the start, you could be doomed even if you're not yet dead. This is very frustrating, and it's like the game was telling you "you didn't do the exact perfect thing that was intended, so you lost".
• The death transition... It's cool to add effects like that, but it's just too slow. You feel like you have to wait to start again, and by the time the effect goes away you can already start running without knowing where you are.
• I know this is about "going fast", but the second level kills you almost instantly. A level shouldn't kill you if you're not moving at the start. You really shouldn't punish someone for taking the time to observe the level, there's already a timer for that!

Okay I think that's all. The music loop was too short, but other than that the game was well made overall. And I'll add that you DON'T NEED to have a new idea or a twist to make an interesting game.

A platformer like this that requires both precision and speed absolutely needs certain mechanics to not feel punishing as all hell.

• Ghost jumping / coyote time / jump buffer, whatever you wanna call it. Where you still have a couple hundred milliseconds to jump after running off a platform.
• Variable jump height, i.e. letting go of the jump key makes the upwards velocity reach 0 faster. If I can't control how my character moves, how to you expect me to jump around between fast moving projectiles?
• Give dangerous objects smaller collision masks. So whenever something just about touches the player, you let it slide rather than kill the player. I feel like I died on the spikes a lot even when I shouldn't have - although many of those situations could've also been due to the lack of a ghost jump (running off a platform and immediately dying on a spike, even though I totally pressed jump).

I would've also liked the ability to change window size or fullscreen the game.

This is probably the most generic game I have seen for a game jam. Lives, points, completely normal platformer with nothing special. I think that if you want to make good games, you will have to make something new. A special ability, a new way to play. Luckily the game wasn't bad or crappy, it just wasn't really fun.

This was pretty fun, but I found the lives system annoying (maybe because I still struggled with the early levels?)

Seconding the comment about a jump buffer, they make platformers feel so much better :)

Wow that was hard! Beating the whole game with 5 lives sure puts pressure on you but I managed to win and see the fireworks. Fun game and while the graphics are simple they fit well together. Level 4s spike trap made me die so much.

If I were to make a few suggestions, I would have liked some sort of jump buffer. (as in, when you run off a platform add a small allowance of time to be able to jump) or if it was there, maybe increase it a bit. The other suggestion would be a button to completely restart the game from the first level instead of losing just one life. as I found myself mashing the kill button when I lost too many lives early.

In any case good job on the game!