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Cart #toad_a1-0 | 2025-02-02 | Code ▽ | Embed ▽ | License: CC4-BY-NC-SA
4


A special toad with a love for precious metals embarks on a dungeon adventure, collecting gems along the way.

The more gems the toad gathers, the stronger it becomes, allowing it to reach new areas.

Help the toad overcome various obstacles and explore deeper into the dungeon!

4

Thank you that was fun ! Got the jewels :D

Great job, Fun little game!
2

I like this a lot!

Here's my polish feedback:

  • The toad's animations are probably too slow. I barely noticed it was animated, and at first it felt like, I donno, a statue sliding around maybe.
  • The wall slide particles heavily imply that you can double jump. I'd leave them out until you get that power up. Maybe even disable the slide state entirely.
  • Many of critters you need to avoid/deal with seem too small to harm you. Wouldn't a toad that big just crush a wood louse that small?
  • You should probably disable key-repeat -- right now, holding jump triggers the double jump after a bit. See https://www.lexaloffle.com/dl/docs/pico-8_manual.html#BTNP
  • Using up and down to select abilities works on a keyboard but is not so good on a controller -- too easy to press up or down accidentally.
  • There's a screen shortly after you get the double jump where you can jump offscreen and spend just a frame or two up there before you (I think) hit the ceiling and come back down. That's awkward, especially since the enemies respawn when you do it.
  • There's a screen near the end of the game where if you go up a vertical tunnel you end up near the beginning of the game. This would be a cool shortcut for people who want to check if they missed anything, if there was a way to go back down! "Door you can open from one side" is a classic Search Action trope, and you could build one out of gates and switches without adding any new code.
  • I don't think I ended up needing the extended tongue range for anything.
  • Continuing exactly where you left off after you die makes it feel like player health is meaningless. Typically a game will boot you back to a checkpoint. You could use the place the player entered the screen, that'd probably be fine.
  • The game over menu is awkward. I didn't even know what'd happened the first time it opened, because my input trying to control the game immediately selected "continue." Putting a short death effect here to delay the menu's appearance would work.
  • The "you win" screen is similarly abrupt -- a short animation would be nice here.
  • Now I'm getting into guessing your intentions, but: this game felt like it was trying to be a Metroid, but it progresses too linearly to feel like a Metroid IMO. Having to pass unavailable powerups and come back for them later helps, but probably not enough. I suspect you're a bit hemmed in here by the scale of the toad combined with the limitations of the Pico-8 map. Since the scale of the avatar demands the world be built at a certain scale to accomodate it, shrinking the toad to 8x8 would give you much more room to do interesting level design digressions/branches/secret areas.

I sincerely appreciate your great feedback. I agree with most of your points, and you accurately understood my intentions and situation. This is my first solo development project, and I’ve learned a lot thanks to you



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