The first time you see coins, the caption reads "coins are good, take them." Then at the end of the first level, it says "collect all coins to finish the level." I'm not sure how he could be more clear than that, and even if someone misses the captions, it's immediately clear after one failure.
I agree with your other recommendations.
put that in place of:
> "coins are good, take them."
As stated, coins are often optional in other platformers.
It's weird though, because I mostly write CoffeeScript instead of JavaScript, which uses "!=" and desugars to "!==".
Let's just leave it at "some people were confused". Because honestly, in terms of user experience, that's all that matters.
"Coins are good, take them all"
That said, I thought the goal was pretty obvious as well.
About input lag, I'm a bit surprised. On my computer the input is super responsive. Maybe it depends on the OS/browser? I'll have to look into this.
Gravity could definitely be better. I'll look at Cave Story then.
I have only 5 short levels, so adding checkpoint will make the game too easy I think.
I guess depending on what you want out of the game mechanics, you could leave it as is or extend the "range" of a valid jump to slightly beyond the edge (perhaps half the width of the character). I guess some good questions that you could ask are: - Is it a faster paced game where jumping from platform to platform quickly matters? - Do you want to focus more on fluid movement and the ability of the player to think about their moves ahead of time? - Are there any gaps in any level where the jump is nigh impossible without performing a "perfect" jump. If so, is that a feature? (maybe it's supposed to be that difficult?)
EDIT: I've been looking at the source and I'm pretty sure it has to do with how Phaser checks whether the character is on solid ground or not (body.blocked.down). I'm not too sure how it calculates it (I couldn't understand the SAT.testPolygonPolygon function[1]. If anyone wants to help me with that, I'd appreciate it). I think the tilt of the character when it's running potentially makes it worse too.
[1]http://docs.phaser.io/SAT.js.html line 605
Input lag not noticed here. Win 8, Chrome.
Yes checkpoints would be overkill in this size of level. I enjoyed the challenge of completing the last level, having to start again many times!
Well designed levels and fun graphics, sound and text. Make bigger games and I think they could be really popular!
That being said, solid game.
I have plans to make a faster 2D paced game this year and I'll go back to desktop and SDL for it. Especially since the SDL author joined Valve in 2012 and development pace has picked up again. Looking forward to run in on my Linux Desktop, Windows, Mac and a Steam Machine. I'm not sure I want to go any more cross-platform than that. Especially since mobile devices are polluted with low quality nickel-and-diming games.
I like your efforts though, keep it up.
Google Chrome Version 33.0.1750.149 Linux Mint 16 Cinnamon
EDIT: Update- It does work, at least sometimes. I guess it's just my clumsiness.
He made this in a week. It's a demo of what you can do in a week. You're reviewing it like it was a serious game.
> giving critique has sometimes been discouraged on HN
Bad critiques are. Yours is not a bad critique, I just think you're critiquing the wrong thing.
*Input lag is something Carmack et al. keep hammering home for game developers.
Making HTML 5 a serious gamedev competitor is one of the most important tasks facing the future gamedev industry, which means lessmilk is doing important work. It's important to call out the roadblocks so that the roadblocks get solved. It would be extremely valuable if someone were to do an analysis as to why the input is laggy so that future gamedevs can avoid that pitfall or that Mozilla/Chrome can fix their issue.
I'm impressed by what I've seen on lessmilk up to now by the way. Not in terms of coding (all of these games are almost trivial to implement), but all the more by the thoughtful game design that went in of them. Literally all of the 9 games so far have been fun to play, if only for a few minutes. I think it's much harder to come up with a new game concept every week, no matter how simple it is, and executing on it, than it is to actually do the coding to implement it. So thumbs up for that!
It's pretty good for a week of work. Though there's a difference between being challenging and being annoying. Many of the level design elements could be classified as a "dick move." An example would be not making it clear the goal is to collect all the coins until after the player has bypassed some of them and reached the end.
In general the controls are too sluggish. It's as if triple buffering is enabled, or maybe quad buffering. If you're at a university, you should try to borrow a high speed camera and measure the time difference between when someone presses the spacebar vs when the character starts to jump. I don't know if it's a Chrome thing or what, but I fell off cliffs several times due to the input delay.
The gravity could be better. I'd recommend spending some time with Cave Story to get a feel for how to make gravity really work in the player's favor, rather than against them. In general it's a bad idea to make velocity strictly linear. Some acceleration adds to the experience and precision.
A checkpointing system would be good. I can see how most players will give up after getting mostly to the end and then dying. I think you should just restart players from the last point that they were on the ground without dying, that is, the most recent ledge that they were standing on.
It shows promise. If you're looking for feedback about how to advance as a game developer, one step would be to make sure you're not rewriting your entire game engine from scratch for each game. It's excellent that you're writing your own engines rather than trying to use other people's, so be sure to keep doing that. It's important for gamedevs to have an idea of the underlying principles and limitations, and the best way to do that is to write your own engines. I got the feeling that most of the week was spent on the engine rather than iterating on the gameplay or level design though. Teaming up with an artist or a level designer might be a good match.