Central Skies (working Title)
A downloadable game for Windows
Central Skies is a Pikmin-Inspired Metroidvania game where you command an army of moons to fight, carry, and build. The game is in early development but will be updated (the game currently has 1 map, the next map will be finished soon.)
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This was fantastic.
Am surprised how well the... moonies (?) work. Especially with them grabbing onto you during the jump. If the ground group following you looked as majestic as it does in Pikmin then it would be the perfect mixture between the army of Pikmin following you and the cute mass of Pikmin on Oatchi.
Maybe have some of the moonies folow on a bigger delay so that it spreads out more? Though hard to give advice as I don't even know how I'd implement that.
However, as is they do sometimes stack up a bit too much by default, that includeswhen just standing around. You can kind of cram as many into a small minimal space so its hard to gauge how many you got somewhere, could be 1 or 50.
That out of the way, gotta mention again I love the moonies. They look super adorable, really good job on the animations there. Generally the designs are well done. The player character looks great and so far the UI is very cute. I really like that Tileset for the cavern with the moons and stars inside (though it looks like you gotta patch up some missing tiles or fix a few placements).
The weird walljump is not much of an issue as of right now, but I feel as it gets bigger it might become a problem.
To walljump you really wanna hug the wall as a player, and having to let go to walljump makes that wallhugging kinda hard.
Maybe you have an issue with the player input overriding the walljump. If that's the case you should be able to just skip the player input for something like 0.2 seconds. Not sure how well that would work, haven't implemented a walljump yet myself.
Also it's hard to distinguish whether moonies are fighting, sitting around, or following you, a little color change of the sprite or its outline could help.
I'm sounding way too nitpicky here, don't take that the wrong way.
I am really really really really loving the concept of the project, it made me super happy to see this pop up. And I already had a fantastic time playing through this early version.
Really excited to see where this is going
Ayyy thank you. im happy you enjoyed the game thus far. Sorry for taking an eternity to respond. But I took note of all of your suggestions and criticisms and spent the past few weeks adding your suggestions, to the game. and don't worry youre not being nitpicky. youre being critical and thats never a bad thing. again im happy you enjoyed the game. I hope youre looking forward to the next upcoming update
No problem, take your time, there's no need to rush.
Happy to hear that the "criticisms" are helping.
I'm not really fond of the term "criticism" in general. To me it has become kind of a symbol of someone being negative, just to make themselves sound smarter than the other people who they think are just blindly liking things.
Under no circumstances I wanna pride myself in saying negative things about a game. The exact opposite is true, I absolutely love video games. I wanna pride myself in being able to say good things about the worst games I played.
So whenever I say negative things about a game I feel I gotta be as respectful with it as possible. And I might do that a little too intensensively.
Anyways I'm excited for the next update! Am happy to know the project is able to move forward!
oh sorry I didnt think the word "criticism" was a negative term. I tend to see it in a positive really. I mean the whole purpose of critcism is to help improve. Nonetheless I hope I didnt upset you, and again im happy you enjoyed the game so far
Nah nah, it's not a negative term to most people. There's definitions ranging from booth "judgement about booth negative and positive qualities" and "the act of judgement usually negative". The first one feels like the more common usage currently, and also what you used.
Me disliking the term is mostly because the word has been used for "insanely long opinion pieces that are surprisingly negative". Imagine a book called "Critique of Pikmin 4's Artstyle" spending 500 whole pages explaining why the Author dislikes the Artstyle, with a mere 10 Sentences saying very small positives, and 30 pages saying it is objectively bad.
I've kinda seen too much of that recently to like that word... But that's just me personally and I understand that. So you did not upset me in the slightest.
I also think praising positive things without giving any improvements wanted is one of the most helpful kinds of feedback.
Of course there's always endless lists of improvements people can give you. But those lists will differ from person to person. You will then have to decide which part of the "list of improvements" actually fits what you're wanting to do.
Recently I showed off a Boss-Battle-Project on a local Convention. And I did have such a situation.
Many people had an issue with their depth perception on a specific attack. But one of the people, which was more in my target audience, did not. And they also said that was kinda the point of the attack (which is 100% true). My reaction to that was slightly cleaning up the attacks visuals. It wasn't to take one extreme side, but to just see what fits the type of game I wanna make. Which is a Boss fight that has some pretty patterns where you gotta look closely what is happening, while not being "figure out which of these 20000 bullets is going to hit you in .5 seconds - THE GAME".
In contrast those "lists of things that are great" are things people already liked. You don't need to do any complex weighting of your options, different opinions people had and the goal of your project. You just got the thing that people liked, which you (probably) already know how to do, and now you can do more stuff like that. And if you didn't notice that aspect and don't know how exactly it got in: GREAT! YOU JUST FOUND A NEW WAY TO ENJOY YOUR OWN THING!!!
This also reminded me to ask more directly what people liked about my projects. I kinda didn't do that on the convention because I wanted to focus on ironing out mistakes and stuff. But I do wanna have a focus on what people liked when I am reviewing gameplay and opinions.
So writing this overly lengthy comment helped me get those thoughts sorted out. So thanks for that, hopefully it can help ya too and didn't take too long to read.