Author Topic: jump3  (Read 102683 times)

aimaina

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Re: jump3
« Reply #75 on: October 12, 2017, 04:18:40 AM »
yeha i guess thats true.... i guess thats why super meat boy is popular too since meat man is really fast & can do cool wall jumps..... i dont really like that sort of fast inertial movement (e.g. j3, flail) as much as slower & more controllable movement (j2, aiwanas) or fast but very precise movement (j1, dim) so i made this game slow.....

this game doesnt really have cool movement at all..... i tried to make the movement feel very nice and easy to control but its not "cool", its just walks and jumps......

i guess the coolest thing is doing long jump chains with mini stars but my plan was to slowly build up to that instead of introducing it from the start...... maybe thats a bad idea & i should just make the whole game focus on mini stars and other jump-chaining mechanics (currently most of that stuff is set to show up in the latter half of normal course & all throughout expert course)

or maybe ill give up & just make a bunch of cool super-technical jumping levels..... thats all im really good at....
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juner

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Re: jump3
« Reply #76 on: October 12, 2017, 12:02:07 PM »
Do you know any people that play aiwanas? Feels like people who enjoy needle games would enjoy jump3

A few ideas for easier levels or accessibility:
-  Make some jumps a lil more forgiving by removing death as a conqequence? Like, keep that spike jump example below, but if they miss the double jump they probably fall onto safe ground? eg. this jump:

feels less like failing, and they can resume from where they've fallen from (getting more practice at the intermediate jumps) or just reload if they dropped a checkpoint closer.

- Flowers bloom wherever you hit a spike and you get to see a nice flowery meadow build up
- A light movement trail could feel good (the double jump effect is also v nice and pleasant btw)
- Get your testers to put on some of their fave tunes

---

Kinda tangentially related but i get the thing with easy levels=boring levels. A lot of rhythm games kinda feel the same way where easy difficulties have so few notes that you can't really get in the groove of the song. When you start increasing difficulty the number of notes increases and you start actually playing along to the song! But also mechanical complexity usually increases too at the same time. I've had a few friends play rhythm games with me and find it difficult to find the sweet spot between "this isn't boring" and "there's far too much going on at once". Kinda like, wanting to hit every note of a tune without having to play guitar hero with all five buttons sorta thing.

Stephen's sausage roll is a decent example of a game that does intro levels well imo. Rather than having simple boring 'you can't mess this up' levels to teach you mechanics, it just sets up a bunch of extremely tight, short puzzles at the start of the game that often feel impossible until you get a new insight into the mechanics, usually through experimentation. Compared to something like DROD which just loves to open with the dull non-puzzle of "swing your sword repeatedly to kill some roaches" or puzzles that veer more towards tedious than interesting.

dcco

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Re: jump3
« Reply #77 on: October 12, 2017, 03:49:33 PM »
i was reading an interesting breakdown of super mario world about how mario games achieve "fun while not too hard" (although marios are kinda easy still), and it basically works because mario is actually not just a platformer, but it's a fusion platformer-action game. there are levels focused on technical jumping, etc. but there are also levels more "action"-focused that deal more with fighting / dodging enemies.

a game with only one major mechanic cant do much other than linearly scale the difficulty, which is okay for arcade-type games, but in a long-form game, players either get fatigued, or adapt so it becomes monotonous. the idea with a fusion game is that the levels will constantly switch back and forth between focusing on the two different mechanics. this means that levels can be "challenging" even if they aren't technically becoming harder, because "switching gears" so to speak is difficult in and of itself. but the players will get greater senses of accomplishment / overcoming because when they do switch gears they'll be able to adapt to harder things a lot faster, because they technically already have most of those skills. basically you have two different difficulty curves which can go up and down and which interlock with each other which makes the game progression more interesting.

even in the context of a pure platformer, like jumper 2 has a good variety of different kinds of jumps (double jumpnig, wall-jumping, skid-jumping, etc). and there's enough variety where rarely do 2 levels in a sector feel overly similar to each other in terms of what they are testing out. meatboy has a lot of jumping hard stuff, but also a lot of avoidance / pathing hard stuff (moving blades, dodging rockets, etc). cuphead has shooting and jumping.

anyway idk if i explained that right and also if it's applicable to your game, cuz yeah you would probs just have to add a bunch of stuff. but yeha i think that's one way games can be somewhat "easier" / not ultra-technical, but still be interesting..... well i just read about it though *npc shrug*

dcco

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Re: jump3
« Reply #78 on: October 12, 2017, 03:51:28 PM »
speaking of indie game design, whenever i look at other peeps projects i get sad because they have such cute art styles, but i feel like i have a hard time coming up with my own that doesnt feel derivative / corny

SquareWheel

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Re: jump3
« Reply #79 on: October 12, 2017, 04:48:46 PM »
Good psot, duck

aimaina

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Re: jump3
« Reply #80 on: October 12, 2017, 05:20:24 PM »
lots of good psots in this thread..... thanx everyone....

im currently trying to design some "easy but fun" levs....
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LOC

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Re: jump3
« Reply #81 on: October 14, 2017, 05:04:12 AM »
i adoured it! very groovy challenge, made my fingers so mushy by the end they looked like this :carrot: :carrot: :carrot: :carrot: :carrot:!!!!! i wanna drop of one of the gameboys off at the cutey forums, its called "The Glitchtastic Leafboi," but i dunno where to drop him off... :dancedog: oh wellers

aimaina

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Re: jump3
« Reply #82 on: October 14, 2017, 05:43:55 AM »
thanx :apple: you can drop your boy off wherever u want its ok
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aimaina

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Re: jump3
« Reply #83 on: October 15, 2017, 08:06:52 AM »
heres the new shit..... love-game.net/jump3/005/

its a 15 levels demo..... the first 10 levels constitute the new "training course"..... the idea is for the game to start significantly easier but introduce fun new mechanics much faster.....

the last 5 levels i dont really know about, theyre sort of an attempt to bridge the gap between the training levels and actually hard levels but i dont really know how to do that

you can also open level select with ctrl+L, theres a couple of additional old-style levels i made before changing directions
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vgperson

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Re: jump3
« Reply #84 on: October 15, 2017, 09:55:42 AM »


Child’s play…

Good intro levels and cool gimmicks, though! Not sure if it leads straight into the other level groups, but it feels like a good start to an approachable difficulty curve.

The other levels are significantly less Child. Not sure if you need stats for those, but...

Launchers: 8 deaths, 72s
Fall And Bounce: 23 deaths, 250s
Mushroom Halls: 89 deaths, 591s
Triple Jumper: 80 deaths, 584s (with checkpoint in midde-right-ish pit between spikes)
Winding Path: 54 deaths, 412s (with checkpoint in top-left)
Mini Stars: 14 deaths, 95s
Spikey Halls X: 147 deaths, 562s (with checkpoint after bottom row)

The shorthop is sort of hard to get used to, and it seemed pretty essential for Spikey Halls X. The fact that it basically has its own levels of jump makes it complicated to keep track of, so I just planned around doing "full height" shorthops. I feel like it'd be more useful to the player being non-variable as was suggested.

aimaina

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Re: jump3
« Reply #85 on: October 15, 2017, 10:54:49 AM »
tbh i didnt really do any testing with the shorthop button since i can do shorthops without it.... i imagine having two jump buttons makes the platforming more complicated and memorizey..... i guess i should try it out & see if a constant jump height feels better (it seems weird to have one jump variable and one constant though....)

the shorthop shouldnt be necessary for anything with your keyboard tho, its only strictly needed if you cannot do 5-frame inputs or less (but certainly some levels are harder if you are right at the 4-5 frame threshold).... spikey halls x is a hard lev but u should be able to do it just fine with the regular jump key if you can do 2 or 3-frame inputs

not sure how much balancing i want to do around the shorthop button since its kinda just there to make the game actually possible if you have a slow keyboard or slow fingers.... i would rather people play the game without it if possible
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dcco

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Re: jump3
« Reply #86 on: October 15, 2017, 10:43:37 PM »
V A R I A B L E S H O R T H O P P I N G

aimaina

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Re: jump3
« Reply #87 on: October 18, 2017, 01:41:28 AM »
today someone had a huge amount of trouble with the level "crystals" (100+ deaths) because they kept trying to do blue route instead of red route.....

by contrast vg beat that level with 1 death so she must have figured it out really quickly.....  i think there are some things about double jump refreshers that are easy or obvious if you have experience with them but are mysterious to newcomers......

two testers who described themselves as "bad at platformers" had trouble just maximizing their height when doing multiple midair jumps..... the trick is to hold the jump button until you reach the peak of your jump, release it, very quickly press and hold it again, and repeat. this seemed like a trivial thing to me but its actually a skill that takes time to develop.... when you mix the hold/release jump timing thing with left and right movement it gets even more difficult for beginners

i wonder if i need to make an even easier set of intro levels just to teach people how to properly chain jumps together for maximum height and distance..... its the main mechanic of the game after all but i dont want to completely bore people who are good @ jump's
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SquareWheel

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Re: jump3
« Reply #88 on: October 18, 2017, 02:12:15 AM »
If they're good at jumps they'd probably beat those levels really quickly.

But I mean, I've seen people get stuck on the first level of Jumper 2 because they didn't understand skid jumping.  Ya gotta teach them the mechanic, but it's probably not possible to make it accessible to everyone.

dcco

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Re: jump3
« Reply #89 on: October 20, 2017, 07:53:24 PM »
hey who made that biss game frm the news

also tbh the first couple of times i dealt with those red / yellow things from an untitlted they were super hard + unituitive.