The background (the trees) feels a bit unfinished compared to the foreground. It doesn't need more detail, just a little more refining of the shapes, and maybe a tad more AA on the non-transparent parts.

Are the buried bones gameplay elements or just little details? Their contrast suggests that they're important to the gameplay. If they're not, make them less bright.

It took me a while to see that the player character is a human in a box, I thought it was an insect, thought the hat (?) was their real eyes+antennae, because the face is usually distorted beyond recognition because of the zoom-out and rotation.
(Non-crit, totally personal opinion time: I love pixel art too much to play pixel art games with auto-zoom like this, since it distorts the art (and at 2x+, the distortion is very noticeable). I can deal with rotation a bit better, but I'd still much prefer to see several hand-rotated frames that get interpolated rather than have auto-generated rotations for every angle.)

When money drops from you on death, I think the rotation animation should start on a random frame per coin, instead of all the coins being synchronised. It would look more natural and interesting. Having the coins that spawn with the level be synchronized is okay.

I like the camera shake when you die. Simple, but very effective.

The snapping flowers look good, but the way their stems seem to be hanging off a fixed point in mid-air looks weird. The ground they're attached to and the flower-head should be the only "fixed" points, there shouldn't be anything like that in the stem, I think.

The water and the splashy interactions with it look great! Maybe a subtle gradient to make the water darker the deeper it gets might look more interesting?

Hello Eishiya,

Thanks a lot for the feedback! Really useful! We'll fix the bones and make a stem for the Piraha plants(We already planned this before.)

We get the feedback about the character a lot, but we might make a intro animation where you see Max, the human jump into the box getting ready for lift off. This will clear up that it's a human and adds a little more character to the game :)

We have chosen to make the ship rotate like this because we are going to make about 30+ ships that you can buy in the shop. It saves a lot of time. Ofcourse we'd prefer to hand draw them all, but we have tight deadlines to finish every week to ensure the release for Q1 2016.

We have fixed the coins and made them non synchronised upon dead.



We also wanted to make it clear that you 'cash in' your coins and gems when you land on a checkpoint.



Please tell us what you think!( ͡^ ͜ʖ ͡^ )

The coins being cashed in looks great!
I realize it's probably not finished, but the checkpoint glow looks very bland now. Make it an off-white colour instead of white, and maybe add some sparkles rising up, not just a smooth gradient?

I think people are used to rotation like this being a common time-saving technique and won't question it. Key-frames might make a nice later update though, if there's the time/budget to polish the game further.

What size(s) of screen is the game meant to be played on? I only ask because the auto-zoom looks fine at 1x, but not so good at 2x+ where everything looks jittery. But again - this might just be me and my purism.

The rock-grass transitions look good. I think the solid-looking grass border around the "black" looks a bit unpolished though, since it looks like we see a lot of the solid "black" areas. I think there should be additional transition tiles, so the edge is smoother and wider. It would require more work to place the tiles, but I think it would look much better, and draw less attention to the blockiness of the world.

The piranha plants could use a little more animation while they're idle. Because the screen moves around so much, their slow, subtle movements don't really come across, so they look static. In addition to the procedural movement, it would be nice if the sepals (the green leaf-like parts) had some animation to them, especially when they're propelling forward (e.g. when the mouth is open).

I know it seems like I'm full of nitpicks about the polish level of the game, but the little details you already have are great! I just don't want to waste time on what you probably already know. I love the little smoke puffs from the "ship", the "poof" effect on the coins being picked up, the camera shakes from all the different impacts, etc. The fact that what's already there is often quite good is what makes me want to push you further.

Are the levels hand-made, or procedural? This seems like the sort of game people on sites like VGAtlas would love to map out, if the levels are hand-made. There would probably need to be a PC version for that though.

I'm assuming eishiya means you're going directly from green grass to blackness? Instead of transitioning to a dirt or rock design, however subtle? As much as I like the grass texture that's there it is completely repetitive. Perhaps an alternate tileset of variation tiles (with different shapes, little flowers, or whatever) that are used only 20% of the time or so might break up the regularity of the ground cover?

I like the new coins.

If you want to spice up the coin or gem turn-in it feels like you could have some particles coming from the kid as the coins burst out of him. And you could maybe give the crystal a more interesting flight path where it's spiraling around and giving off sparkles or something. *shrug*

Hey, Sorry for the late reply!

We're going to look into this in the future. Currently we have made a slight transtion from the grass to purple.

Right now we are revising the gameplay a bit. We're going to introduce more obstacles and enemies. I'll keep you guys updated!

In the meantime, have this gif with new enemies and obstacles:





And also, a teaser trailer :)

Teaser Trailer

The middle one reads the best to me.
Because of the auto-zoom, you should avoid any important features that are only 1px wide because they're at risk of disappearing, so the 2px eyes are the most likely to stay readable.

It might still not read well against the background, because the background is full of midtones, and these enemies are also midtones.

Definitely better!

Something about the game environment feels a little washed out overall. Maybe a tad more saturation in the foreground tiles, and a darker "black" in the dirt? I'm not even sure! Looking at the screenshots, they look good, but somehow "pale". The screenshot with the water looks great because there's that big bright, not-pastelly area of water, but the rest feel dull. Maybe it's not even the values, but the hues - the hues of the foreground are about the same as the background, instead of being shifted cooler/warmer.
I'm sorry that I can't give more specific feedback this time. This isn't even necessarily a crit, just something I don't like the look of. It might be intentional and good in the context of the game, e.g. if you want a pastel world full of bright enemies.

Something I forgot to mention last time: The energy/HP bar looks good! Reads well, and the blinking bolt is great, it's informative but not distracting.

I'm bad at crits, so here are suggestions: Simple game mechanics as pressure plates and gear-like doors, air vents and stuff are real nice in these games. I reccomend you play Nitrome's Hot air games, may be useful :)
Also please do bosses, everyone loves bosses (I guess?)
I wish you lots of energy and courage for your development (and also for reading our endless flow of crits) ;)

Got you covered! This crate can SHOOT and kill enemies, but you'll have to get rid of it to open up a pressure plate activated door ;)

We've made a new obstacle that quite literally.. gives a swing to your movement.

SORRY FOR 2X SCALE

If it's 100% scale, the rotation wont look like it will in the final game. This looks better!

What do the sharp rocks look like?
Does the wind affect your flight? In the second gif it looks like it should.

In the third gif, it looks like the bee is being pushed but not hurt by the spiked log. Is that intentional? Feels unfair xP

I like what I've seen of the level design so far. Do you use any sort of tool to help with the timing of enemies, or is it hand-tweaked? Or are they all designed to work on the same "beat", so it's just a matter of synchronizing their start positions?


What are the system requirements for this game (CPU/RAM/storage)?

The rocks don't read as "PAIN DO NOT TOUCH" to me, they're too similar to the harmless rocks in world 1. The only immediately obvious difference is these rocks are actually forming the gameplay boundary instead of being in otherwise solid non-playable areas.
I would have each spike be larger (2-3 spikes per tile instead of the bunch you have) and longer (taking up most of the tile in length) and more dangerous-coloured. Common spike themes are metal or ice spikes - both light-coloured, but anything that reads as being different from the usual rocks and looks sharp (shiny) would work.


Not all smart phones are created equal xP Mine's old and creaky. But, it is comparable to the iPhone 4, so as long as I have the space, I should be able to play it. Space has been an issue with games in the past, which is why I asked about the storage requirements.

The corner spikes look spikier, but could probably stand to be thinner - it looks like a sharp rock, but still a harmless rock because it doesn't look sharp enough to pierce/hurt. The other ones still look read as an overall flat (=safe) surface. Have the spikes vary in length, e.g. have one dominant spike that goes all the way across the tile, and the rest be shorter. You need the silhouette to read as spiked. At present, it just reads like slightly pointy rocks. If spikes look too even (same direction, or the same height, or the same width), they don't look "jagged" and thus don't look dangerous.

Edit: Here's an edit of two of your tiles. I don't know where exactly your tile boundaries are so these might not tile well with your other tiles, but hopefully you get the idea. (Also I flipped my corner tiles instead of rotating them, so the lighting is wrong.)

I made the spikes thinner, more varied in width and height, and they're not all pointing in perfect angles. I left a decent chunk of empty space between some of them to emphasize the jaggedness. I made the little ones on the bottom also a bit more varied, contributing to the "jagged" look.

Brilliant stuff in there!

game has an appealing style