I like the art. and variety of enemies
If you want to make it better I suggest.
when you dig at pig, you can restart at beginning of boss fight.
Afterwards it would be cool if there are different things I can do with the sword. So that I can like master it. That way I can find new tactics as I play and do things faster
Thank you!
Though, I will probably not update this game anymore and move on to another project.
But I'll try to make my future games better based on your suggestions. :D
Wow dude, this is really amazing for your first game if it is.
My first game was absolute poop. And still most are quite bad.
I liked the connection between the title and the game play: "taking the wrong turn can kill me. "This makes the game stand out among other games.
I also liked how there come new obstacles as you progress through the dungeon.
The alien, slime then the ant and the GOLEM! Although the game is about progressing through the dungeon, I actually found it more enjoyable to kill monsters.
Would have wished killing them made me stronger. Maybe you could add a leveling system to your character, where each kill provides stats to upgrade your hiker? e.g. speed, strength.
especially if you follow the suggestions to remove the turn waittime.
Also wanted to buy something with the coins. Perhaps you could make it so that you can buy armor/ weaponry with the coins?
From the description I get that you wanted to complete a full game.
Well nicely done, with the well polished art and music it truly seems like a fully finished product.
Wow, thank you so much! You have no idea how much that means to a beginning dev like myself! The game was originally planned to be done with after release, but from all the positive comments and great criticism, I am considering doing a re-release in the future with a much more fleshed out game!
Thank you for playing, and thank you for the great review!
Innovative: Asteroids + Repairing your ship while battle,
Wow that's such a cool idea mate.
In the fourth level I felt this experience really strongly ELPandito.
The laser shooting moving purple ship waves made it really fun
had to really focus and figure out how to aim the rocket launcher
on them before I could survive the level.
Constantly I had to switch between fighting then got hurt and had to fix
and then more fighting and got hurt again had to fix.
A couple times the ship even blew up that was so cool man!
I assume this is the feel you are going for with this game.
Based on that I shall give some improvement points.
In the first 3 levels I barely had any difficulty
with the ships. Everytime it got difficult I found this cheat.
I could hide in the ship and fix and when I came back
it was cleared up again. This prevented me from
getting amazing experience of level 4.
Perhaps you could make it so you can only repair your ship when you haven't been attacked
for a certain amount of time? This might add major excitement the kind that would benefit such a feel.
Other point. Right now I don't feel like the gas tanking platforming
adds much to the game.
I suggest removing it and focusing completely on the fighting / repairing part.
You could turn the gas part into like a shop, every time you visit a shop on a different planet
with different items. By destroying ships you would get some kind of space currency which you can then use
to buy grenade launcher rocket, upgrade your ship etc.. etc..
This would enable you to fully focus on the fighting / repairing part and getting that awesome
feel.
Keep up the good work dude.
Send me a pm if you going to continue to this game, I would like to follow.
This game got me so hyped, I want to make my own space game now.
And I don't have any passion for space games whatsoever ;)
So imagine how a space game enthousiast will like your game.
PS: I player your game with a mouse
and think the first 2 levels were way too easy, level 3 was good intro to weapons
and level 4 was perfectly challenging for me.
and I played with a mouse, that might have helped.
Hello Sabooo!
First of all, thanks so much for ... well, all this haha, having tried it and enjoyed it and put some thought into it! <3
I think you might enjoy playing the game at higher difficulty levels then (unless you already did and you're just super good?? :O) At the beginning of the game, you can hit the 'EASY' sign with your wrench, and it will adjust the difficulty. It affects the game pace, how much damage things deal to you, how fast you can repair parts etc.
Yeah this kind of crazy multitasking is what I'm going for! Haha.
"Perhaps you could make it so you can only repair your ship when you haven't been attacked for a certain amount of time?"
That's actually a pretty interesting idea! I'm not sure it will be necessary if the amount you repair for each hit is a lot lower, like on Hard difficulty (because then even if you keep repairing, if you take a couple of hits while you're tabbed in the ship you might just die.)
About the exploration mode : I think you're totally right. The exploration mode was somewhat rushed and not very polished, but most of all, it's totally beside the point, as this isn't what the game is about now that I think about it. You know, when I read your comments about the exploration mode, I actually felt a lot of relief, thinking "Wow, I don't even need to fix that thing, much less even make it at all!", and truly it would have been a *LOT* of work to design proper enemies to fight in that mode.
About currency : I will add a form of currency! Woo! It will be called "scraps", and it will be basically scraps of metal you get from blowing up enemy ships, which you can then use to craft things, or trade for goods. (It makes average sense but ay, haha.)
Actually, I will PM you! I could really use some feedback! I haven't worked on Odessa for a while, but I just got back to it, and I plan to polish it and send a demo to publishers (!!!).
(It's not 100% certain I'll end up working on this though, I recently sent a build of an other project called Glitch; ... So I'll go with whatever the publishers want more, if ... well, if they're interested at all haha.)
Yeah the gamepad controls are totally broken anyway LOL. Fixing that right now.
Yo, again, thanks! It was good reading your comments!
Joseph
Pirate Star:
Unlike other similar games, I love the warp animation in this one.
It really gives the space traveling feel to the game!
Also the upgrade system for the ship and crew works well.
Spend a lot of time trying to upgrade my foes.
Fought the easy units and accumulated credits. Soon I found the pirate star
and noticed it was much harder. Here I decided to first upgrade to the max before going there again.
When players have expectations of a reward and you don't give it it is really frustrating
and stops them from playing.
The easy units gave little credits about 100 so I had to get more another way
because this would take ages. Once in a while I saw other units that kept beating me
and since they were stronger I expected if you killed them you would get a lot of credits (500 - 1000).
Which I could then use to upgrade to the max and go to a pirate star.
After losing about 5 times against this unit and having to start over all again.
I was like alright this is the last time I will do it again, because I don't like to keep dieing
and have to do everything all over again.
Then I upgrade to like 4 damage per ship (fighters too) and 8 health both (I believe)
And I fought the other units again, expecting way more credits.
After killing them I got none. That felt so frustrating I quit.
I suggest giving loads of credits when you defeat these units.
Another major frustration point for me:
I expected enemy placement to just be click some point in the area, but some areas were invalid
and it took me a long time before I understood why. It is so your fighters won't shoot eachother.
What you could do is add like a red area in a row once a fighter is placed, so it is clear no ships can be placed
there anymore. This way I would have understood way sooner.
A slight frustration point:
The warping is cool and all, but when I was traveling a lot trying to collect credits.
It is annoying to have to look at the warp all the time. Also when you overuse something cool
it loses it's awesomeness you know. Imagine someone you always expected to be just a regular guy
suddenly pops a backflip, you'll be like wow amazing dude! While if the same guy did it every class
you'd be like. Yeah alright showoff.
Perhaps only use the warp for special moments?
When you travel inbetween dots you are actually traveling a much farther distance then just 1 tile at a time.
Just like a warp travels a lot of distance. What if you only used the warp when traveling from dot to dot?
And used something like just a fire burst that lasts 0.5 second or so for the other travel?
All in all fun time waster. I believe your game has a lot more hidden potential to it
and by removing these frustration points and by removing these frustration points
you could get a step closer towards revealing this potential.
Thank you for the review! Those are excellent insights, several of which we hadn't really seen before. On the part about the powerful enemy that you randomly run into. That would be the end boss that appears randomly to taunt you. He should be in a red ship. You actually weren't defeating him. If you pay close attention to when you were "defeating " him you'll see that it's not an explosion but a warp rift that appears. Also, you'll notice that the fighters get left behind. In addition, if you find that you're losing a fight, there's nothing stopping you from warping away.
We're planning on making a sequel to pirate star and many of your suggestions will be implemented there. Thank you very much!
Wow, so this is what they call a meta game.
Man, I never thought so much before in order to complete a game.
It is crazy. My brain broke trying to reach level -1.
Didn't figure it out :(
Could you prove a hint please?
1 try to get the power of permanency
2 understand what it does
3 think of a place you can do something you couldn't do before
Wow thanks so much, you actually provided a full game for free
on newgrounds! It provided atleast 2 hours of entertainment.
Love the mechanic where you can shoot an arrow with your bow
and then teleport to the arrow location. It is something I haven't seen before.
You provide great puzzles to solve with arrow teleportation.
They truly required me to think and get the best out of my skills.
Often found myself trying again and again, discovering new surprising ways
to solve the puzzles. Nor did I find myself cluesless as to what to do
There is always something in sight which makes you think, hmmm what if I went there?
Whether it be an unreachable area, key, or a moving platform.
Also the signposts weren't pointless they actually helped a lot, but didn't
make me feel like they told me everything I had to do with nothing for me
to figure out. They gave hints, exactly the way it should be: just hints!
As for improvement points.
* Bossfight difficulty
This might surprise you, but the first boss fight was actually the hardest part in the game for me.
I spend atleast half an hour of those 2 hours here. I felt like in the first section your skills
are not adequately tested to be able to defeat that boss. After the first section I just got the basics
of arrow teleportation. Where the bossfight required me to have like pro skills with the bow.
I found myself getting killed often in the corner and second most by the boss bouncing off.
The second boss felt adequately challenging after completing the second section.
Felt my skills were tested, but not so much tested that it frustrated me.
The third boss was actually the easiest, felt like my skills were way higher than the boss.
You could basically camp in the right corner, pull lever, jump and shoot.
I would suggest switching the first and third boss.
Or atleast use system of the third boss for the first boss: use your basic problem solving skill with bow: moving
from place to place then add some difficulty to this a bit more than section 1. For example like third boss
you have to move through certain areas (the platforms here) before you can shoot at the boss.
Then for the third boss, you challenged me very well with the difficult puzzles in section 3.
Would have expected a much more difficult boss.
What made the first one really difficult for me is that I had to shoot very fast and controlled to left
and right to get passed the boss. And then also shoot to avoid its bounces.
You could have made a puzzle with this in mind: very fast and controlled shooting.
* Water puzzles. The Water puzzles felt a bit out of place in this game.
Other than providing variation to the constant non-water rooms. They
seemed pretty pointless to me. I played a chinese hacked mario game once
where mario could ride dinosaurs and had to fight aliens.
So in this 1 level there were constant water puzzles.
And in the end you had a boss fight in the water.
This gave the water puzzles meaning in the game.
Perhaps you could devide an entire section to the water puzzles and a boss
or something meaningful with water in the end too?
This would have been a great 4th section boss that would fit after the third section
where you unlock the extra tank and get the most challenging water puzzles (tank + laser).
* Major core improvement / Next level
This game reminded me a lot of Aground, also an RPG with similar music I believe.
While your game is much better as a mechanic mastery game.
Aground added something extra to it, you really got emotionally attached to the characters.
As your crew around the campfire got bigger and the island actually changed.
I think if you really wanna improve your game to the next level.
You should take a look at adding these "effecting your area majorly by your actions"
and "emotional attachment" to the game. Some ideas I could come up with:
- Give your bow more character. You made the bow seem special from the orb
introduction. Why not give the bow a voice? As you solve more puzzles, the bow
could start to like you and will help you with hints about the game.
The bow tells some about it's backstory, or the orb or the cave?
- The weird furry animal bosses in your game sure have character, you could do something more with that.
Unlock a furry pet after killing the boss? Some weird furry civilization inside your cave which is
bullied by the boss? After killing the boss the furry civilization will change, new areas / items are reachable.
Some of the furry civilization can become your pet or join you in battle?
- Make the orb from the beginning more present. After each boss fight, the orb could
come with some remark for example: Well done killing the first boss rookie, but this was just the beginning.
It would be surprising if you didn't beat this boss. A huge plot twist: final boss is the orb???
I actually checked out every room of every section of this game as far as I know.
With the hope of finding new items to make me more powerful.
Also enjoying completing new puzzles when I found them.
It was hard for me to think of improvement points for this
as it was already such a great game.
Hope this was useful and you will try to go next level with your next game.
Looking forward!
Thanks. This is probably the longest comment I have ever recieved. You have good suggestions.
Some other people also complained about unbalanced boss difficulties. This is the first game I added boss fight, I hope I will make it better in my future games. Also after testing the game numerous of times, the developer becomes really good at it and it gets harder to know which part of the game is hard, which is easy. Actually I can easily beat first boss :) and first boss is the boss I tested most. So at some point it seemed really easy to me and I kept making it difficult during the development :)
About water levels, actually I wasn't thinking about adding water to the game when I first started. It was something like a last time thing. After most of the coding, some of the level designs finished I thought about adding more to the game and added a few things. Water was one of them. So it was kind of unplanned. But adding a water boss is a very good idea.
I don't know how many people worked on aground but I developed this game alone. Developing a detailed game alone is really difficult. There are lots of things to work on. And I doubt I can add such an emotion to the game. But I will try it in my next game if I make another game in this genre.
Thanks again for your effort.
Wow dude, great game!
I loved the music and soundeffects.
Did you make those yourself, or can I get them somewhere for potential future games?
Usually I quit a game after a couple minutes, but completed this one, because of the elegant way in which you scale up the difficulty for each mechanic: jumping, hooks, balloons, ray man.
And also in the timing between introducing new mechanics.
Especially liked the hook mechanic, it's really cool.
In some levels you could take an easier path but not collecting the hourglasses.
I always took the hourglass path. And at some point there wasn't even an hourglass there but I still took the more difficult route, because I got so accustomed to : difficult route = hour glass. Loved that surprise when I realized , wait why am I going here?
Some improvement points: why am I collecting hourglasses? Didn't read all the help messages, but this was something important that I needed to know, would have made the experience feel a lot more meaningful to me. Nonetheless I did collect all of them blindly.
Controls: sometimes I wanted to jump and hold movement key at same time, and it wouldn't jump this is a minor thing but gets really frustrating.
Also add in aswd controls.
Nice game, looking forward to your next
Needs highscores!
Hi Sabooo! Thanks for playing, and for the detailed feedback! :)
Yes, I made the music and sound effects myself, though the music is based on the Hat in Time OST - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nVPdg2CLduM - if you're looking to make games with similar sound effects, you can make music in PICO-8 (the program I used to make this game), and export the music as WAV files for use in different engines!
Collecting hourglasses isn't really explained - I just assumed that because there's a floating object that adds to a counter, that seasoned platformer players would naturally go and grab 'em all (which it sounds like you did)! I'll remember to explain the reason for collecting a little more clearly in the future. :P
I'm really glad you enjoyed the game, and thanks again for playing! :)
Liked the multiple endings.
Felt like the ending didn't match the title.
Because it seemed like he went up to heaven when you made him happy and he realized he could only make himself happy.
Then shouldn't the title be: Help Jack go to heaven or something?
By release his soul
I’ll take your suggestion into due consideration
nothing too new or interesting
I guess that depends your idea of new and interesting.
Liked the push back mechanic the ball has when bouncing against the wall, this made it harder for me to control the paddle and made it feel different from pong.
Yay thank you for the positive feedback now just to see if I should make a 3rd one!
Pupa
Age 28
Game Designer
University of Utrecht
Netherlands
Joined on 3/27/17
Evil Plant Kingdom 
Wrong Turn 
O D E S S A 
Pirate Star 
ThePowerOfWhat 
Rookie Bowman 
A Hat on Time 
Make Jack Happy 
Big City Escape 
Basket Bounce 2 