Thanks and congratulations for making this game! I was deeply impressed after reading this thread, the graphics & animations & colors & game engine are looking fantastic. Hmmm, well, and after playing the game... I wasn't soo impressed about the game flow.
For example, this simple task beats me, I've tried maybe 30 times, but passed through only 5-6 times, and everytime else I had to walk back towards right to climb up for retry (and re-fail) another time.
- wolfling.gif (10.35 KiB) Viewed 24463 times
The new keep-momentum-after-jumps feature does probably improve some of it (though I couldn't find that new version being released anywhere yet).
The slippy (or descending) floor is making things also difficult - I drop from the platform even after successfully landing on it. Using dpad-right to stop slipping doesn't seem to help either.
There seem to be various possible jump distances, depending on if or how long dpad was held before jump. That's kinda cool, but hard to control. For cases like very-short-jumps and vertical-up-down jumps... are there even cases where one needs that jumps for solving the game?
After some hours of not so successful jumps with wrong distance, I've figured out that one can also jump at different height depending on holding/tapping the jump button. I don't know yet if that's making things easier - or if it just offers me more ways to fail ; )
Difficulty
As you might have imagined, I think the jumps are difficult to manage. Maybe it's getting easier after learning the game controls, but for beginners it's a bit frustating. For the scene pictured above it, it's also a bit uncomfortable to learn by retries (walking all the way back right, don't get hurt by the spikes, and then climb back up does kinda delay the learning process).
Then in the next scene, there are those skulls throwing fire-balls. They aren't too challenging, but passing them does slow down the game flow. I would disable the fire-balls in most cases, to make the game faster, and add fire-balls more sparsingly, or only later in the game.
The nice thing about wolfling is the animation and scrolling that invites to run freely. After all, a wolf can run faster and farther than the guinea pig in Gruniożerca 2 - or I would have thought so. In practice, the obstacles in wolfling do require some careful planning & training on how to pass them, without allowing too much free running. Maybe you could make the game start with less obstacles, or insert some easy passages between obstacles. Maybe just insert a long corridor without obstacles here and there, if it's compressed then long corridor vs short corridor won't even take up more memory.
EDIT: I've meanwhile figured out that the game gets easier after the first some obstacles, not so much because of more training (I still fail on the above jumps), but because there are longer stretches that permit running, and options to explore different passages. Having such options more at the beginning would be nice: Ie. offer passages with difficult and easy tasks, and allow users to chose which one they want to solve first.
Attacks
Using different buttons for attacking as human or as wolf is a bit bewildering, can't you use the same button in both cases?
Is there much of a reason to delay human attack until releasing the buttton? And if it's done that way: It would be nice if one could still change direction before releasing the button.
Attack during human jump seems to do some air-kick, which is nice. But the side effect is that one can't attack after landing. If the attack button is still held down at landing time, then I would make it to invoke the attack-on-ground (as if the button would have been newly pressed at that time).
Attack during wolf jump seems to cause the wolf to shoot forwards a few steps after landing. I haven't figured out what that's good for yet. If there's no purpose for that feature: I would also change it go to the invoke the normal attack pattern when landing with attack button held down.
Music
I don't know how to say it, other than saying that I don't like it that much. To me, it's pretty chaotic (in my emulator at least). It sounds like slow paced middle-age bagpipes, that might match game theme, except I don't really like bagpipes (they are often too loud, and they lack rhythm). The music in the game does have some rhythm, but it feels as if it would randomly start and stop after a few beats. And then there are all those sound sweep effects, that sound more like collecting bonus items in super mario, but not so much like music intruments. It's unique, but I am a bit troubled to get familar with it.
On the nice part, there are different songs in different scenes, only the fade-over from one song to another is a bit abrupt. Maybe it would sound better when doing some fade-out on the old song before starting the new one.
Hearts
I can't make sense of the heart-symbols during the wolf-scenes. For a long time I've believed that it's a software glitch with vram corruption - but now I think that it's an intended feature for the wolf-scenes. But I could only guess if it's showing bleeding hearts? Or wolf claws? Or nine small hearts representing the cat's nine lifes?
Water
Do you have water in the game already? It might fit in nicely both outsides aund undergrounds. It could also act as one-way passage if the player gets carried away by the stream, and if you add a waterfall then one could chose to get carried to a basin downstreams, or to jump to a platform from the top of the waterfull.
Slopes
Since you have those nice stairs in there (without obeying to 16x16 pixel steps), couldn't you also add slopes that go up, or up and down? That could look nice outdoors. And castles could even have it indoors, I think back then there've been no strict legal requirements for having modern staircases in all rooms. On the oppsite: They might have avoided stairs on the main ways if they wanted them to be open for ox carts and the like.
PS. Holding button for morphing is fine to me. Somebody suggested using SELECT for it, but I don't like that idea (I would use SELECT for things like entering in-game options, but preferably not for actual game controls).