Hey everyone, we just finished our game Dragon Plunder. It's kind of like the Metroid escape sequence combined with Super Meat Boy style platforming and a fantasy theme.
OK level 3 is far too difficult. I reached 2nd check point. I played that level about 100 times and couldn't pass it. A normal player encountering your game will not have that much patience.
I do like however that you have unlimited lives, and that the checkpoint loads quickly after a death. How else would I have tried 100 times? But loosen up. As the game creator you probably can do it in a few tries, but remember how a normal person will feel. If they become frustrated, they'll move on.
The graphics and sound mesh really well. I think the comparison to Super Meat Boy is apt – both because the die/respawn loop is really fast and because I died a lot.
I really dug the pan-down-intro-text stuff. It'd be nice if pressing the X key skipped it instead of making it play very quickly, but maybe I'm impatient.
Totally my opinion: the jumps were too floaty and the ground movement too slippery. I never saw a jump that didn't take the maximum jump I had to get there, usually barely.
I'd love to see a post about your checkpoint system, e.g. how you restore the gold pile entities after the character respawns. ( = Are you storing them in an array until the user checkpoints, at which you empty the array... but if they die, you iterate through sticking them back in? Something like that?
Yeah level 3 could use some tweaks. I will be tweaking it soon. Level 2 received a lot of tweaks as well from user feedback (it was previously much harder). Only recently have people been getting to level 3. I have stats on all checkpoints and death locations, so I can tweak the levels pretty accurately.
yeah the jumps are floaty and I purposely made the each jump require the max because when a jump doesn't it's pretty frustrating and kills the momentum waiting for the player to land. The game isn't perfect, but by making it I learned just how hard it is to make a good platformer. Even using impact which is so platformer oriented, good platformer feel is not easy to accomplish.
I will probably make a blog post on how I made the game, but you pretty much got it on the checkpoints. I basically have two collections, secured treasure and pending treasure. Whenever you reach a checkpoint, pending treasure moves into secured.
The other thing I learned is I don't think I like the solid platforms (the thick ones you can't jump through). They are frustrating when you bump up against the side of them. next time I'd probably go with all thin platforms.
Awesome. Good job, seriously. Finishing a project is itself an accomplishment let alone one that is fun to play like this one.
I know what you mean about the solid platforms, but after a bit I enjoyed the "oh fuck" moments of hitting the platform and realizing it's a solid one and then having to memorize where it was for the next one.
Might be worth adding a "Retry?" at the end of a level to lower the death count?
Found the game a bit too hard for me. Still, a really nice job. Great attention to detail, a decent backstory, interesting mechanics. Release-worthy but oh how I wish there had been a mobile version with accelerometer controls. Very impressed, again.
Thanks alexandre, glad you like it! Accelerometer controls? You think the game is hard now? :)
I definitely want it to be a hard game. I just pushed out a new version that has a more balanced level 3, added the "retry level" option and fixed some tiny bugs.
Good point. Asking for mobile was a reflex. Nowadays, everything I do -- apart from bill payments and programming -- takes place on mobile, play included.
