Help Little Witch as she wanders through the forest gathering ingredients for her magical brews!
This is the first game I've ever made...let me know what you think :)
I just finished playing this, and overall I thought it was pretty good. However, there is some room for improvement. The Witch's abilities are nice, it's fun to fly on the broomstick and it feels like it can be useful during speedruns. However, the controls feel slightly irresponsive. There's a very small delay between when you press the button and the character actually performing the action, and this makes the game a lot more difficult than it really should be, which is a shame, because everything else generally feels good.
@PJBgamer thanks for the feedback. Are there specific actions that feel slow to respond? I'm wondering if the left/right acceleration is not set high enough, resulting in a sluggish feel. Currently it takes 0.2 seconds to get to full speed when walking which does seem a bit long.
Uploaded a new version bumping up acceleration, which definitely feels more responsive to me
The problem wasn't necessarily that the character didn't move fast enough, the problem is that when I press the jump button, there's a very small delay between me pressing the button, and the character actually jumping. And sometimes, it doesn't register that I pressed the jump button at all, causing me to walk straight off the platform I was trying to jump off of or not use the broomstick when I want to. It doesn't seem to be a bug with the web player, because I tested the game in Splore, and it seems to have the same problem there. You may want to ask for help on the PICO-8 discord server on how to fix this issue, it would make the game much more enjoyable.
@PJBgamer huh so strange. I believe you, but I double checked the physics and input handling, and don't see any delay. I also have not experienced the case where jump doesn't trigger at all.
I'm wondering if it's something that makes it feel delayed or feel like it doesn't trigger. One edge case I can think of is that the player's box for being on top of something is smaller than the sprite's drawing. So when you walk to the edge of a platform you can fall before the entire sprite is actually past the platform, like this:
spr ------- box --- plat ------ |
And then once you are falling, pressing x wouldn't cause a jump.
Another possibility is that the jump sfx sounds a bit sluggish which makes it feel delayed.
Do either of these seem like they could be the problem?
Nice job. The movement and physics feel good. Gameplay is fun and fair. The graphics are good, particularly the witch/broom and enemy animations.
I was actually a bit disappointed that it ended when it did. The difficulty curve felt like there might be another couple levels in store. But I see you're at the token limit.
My only critiques are pretty minor. Given the level of animation elsewhere, it felt a bit jarring that the springboard didn't animate when jumped on. Also, I feel like the end-of-game screen should have a small extra if all ingredients are collected (even something as small as the witch giving the thumbs-up). Of course, I realize both of these would require more tokens, so probably not possible.
Jumping seems perfectly responsive to me, in both Splore and the web player.
Thanks! I had the same idea RE the springboards but as you noticed I ran out of space for it. The end screen reward for collecting all ingredients is a good idea! Will keep that in mind for future games.
And yes, I wish there was more space for more levels as well :)
I love this, cute af. Fun mechanics and graphics. I like the song, too.
Oh shoot, I completely forgot to follow up on my posts. It turns out that I have a mushy "X" key. I played with different keys and the game felt fine. Sorry for the misunderstanding.
[Please log in to post a comment]
