Thank you for that very thorough feedback. You're correct, you played the version I entered into the contest - some of that was dealt with soon after. The entry into the contest was... pretty bad; it scored poorly and for good reason. I'd like to think the fixes made it more playable, but aren't substantial enough to try again. I'm treating this entry as a learning experience. Onto the feedback...
It was exactly as fast as I could read it…which means it's too fast.
By far the most common piece of feedback I got. I halved it in the post-compo version and that helped. (Though now the music sounds worse, and I didn't compose a replacement, but... at least the story's readable)
There's no guard against shifting onto a ghost enemy in the final warp-level, and if you do, you just die without seeing what killed you, making me think a few times that enemy corpses gained "touch=kill" at that level, which they don't.
Yeah, I probably made those guys a little too fast. That combined with the blinking didn't go well. I never figured out a great solution to this one; it's in the final build. I do want to make them hard, but of course not unfair.
There's another place you can get trapped, by jumping to the right over some ice (somewhere in the mid-levels? ) but that one allows you to kill yourself, so I wasn't stuck. Tepples caught this.
[and]
There's a place where lava tiles are level with the ground surrounding it, and as a result, Waddles gets burned at a different location than "this is the last pixel I could jump from" when it's not lava.
Yeah, I had a lot of that type of issue in the original entry. I think I've gotten most of the level bugs taken care of by now. They were pretty bad though - a number of people I showed the entry to fell into that lava one. I fixed those pretty quick, at least.
Stacking the tree graphics is ugly; they're not drawn to be over nonground. Have you got spare CHR? There are even points where it wasn't necessary as the trees are under a solid wall…
You're actually the first to mention this - I had that thought myself and struggled with it a bit. The problem is, it isn't 1 tile; it's 5 (one per dimension)... and each of those are comprised of 4 chr tiles -- so each switchable tile ends up taking up 20 chr/256. I had a full row of switchables, and I didn't have room for much more.
I am using chr ram, so there were some options there, but I also was running very low on prg space in the rom. I compressed graphics where I could, but realistically I couldn't find a way to fit more tiles and the logic to show them into the space I had. Given more time I'm sure I could've gotten there.
Also, the trees under a solid wall were generally put there to block the way until you switched dimensions. They had function going for them, but certainly not form...
The 2.5 block standing jump is …I don't think I have succeeded on anything except "stomp snake or turtle" with it. Adding half a block to it and the walking jump might help a lot.
This is another piece of feedback I got a lot (alongside not having any acceleration in the character's movement) and sadly one I never fixed. The hangup here is that changing that would change how far Waddles can jump - which would require redesigning a lot of levels. I'm mainly thinking of the few fake-out jumps, but this would also likely create new places to get stuck.
I just didn't have the time post-contest to redo all of the levels... even though I wanted to. Plus, I just got tired of working in that codebase constantly after 6 months. I dropped most other personal projects too, which was a poor choice.
It's a bit more straightforward and less spooky than Eversion; there's no point where there's a forced transition and no point where taking a warp is the wrong move (though it might miss you one or two gems half a screen further).
That.. sucks. I didn't realize this until after the contest but it's really true. The first few levels had small almost-puzzles, but I never really grew those out - later levels focused entirely on platforming. This also really points to needing to redesign all of the levels.
Mid-level checkpoints might be nice; Eversion had those. It would mean you'd want to add "restart from beginning" as well as the "restart from checkpoint" as separate options in the pause menu, though.
Funnily enough I never seriously considered this. It was a fleeting thought at one point, but no more.
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All of that feedback is welcome - if nothing else I'll use it to do a better job next time. I don't know if I've actually mentioned it but this was my first full-scale game using assembly. I had a completely separate action/rpg/wishes-it-was-zelda engine going, but I hardly have all the kinks out of that. So... getting anything at all out there was a challenge. I don't think I prioritized the right things, and I'm generally kind of unhappy with the results - but I did get it to a playable state.
I understand a lot of what people suggested is simple, and in retrospect it should have been. The problem is I was still a complete noob when I wrote a lot of this code (let's be honest, I still am!
) and as a result the code is pretty hard to navigate. I also used resources very poorly, so in order to make changes now I have to find prg space often. This leads to doing weird bank switches and jumps to fit it in - completely going against the logic I had to separate things originally. Rewriting the whole thing would be great but there was very little time for that.
I might pick this back up for another contest where we revisit past entries - I'd actually like to do that. But for now, I really need a break from this codebase. My NES development isn't stopping though - I've still got plenty to learn and play with! (see: nesnet and Missing Lands)
Thanks again for the feedback!