Comments on: fl11630: Nimble and Heavy Feel in Platformer Movement

By: aa71

aa71 — Mon, 16 Sep 2013 14:00:12 +0000

The first thing that you notice when playing this is the impressive amount of polish. When playing as the elf, the dust that is produced when you run, or land looks great. Also, it seems like you are using the skybox as the texture for the elf, and moving it around depending on the elf’s position? That gives a pretty cool effect.

The feel for the robot mode is much clunkier (this is a good thing). The robot is more unwieldy to use, but at the same time not frustrating to use. The camera shake and the dust fit well as polish effects. There is one thing that bothers me about robot mode. If you hold left or right, then repeatedly jump you will we eventually get a very long diagonal jump. I’m not sure if this is intended or not, but I don’t think that it fits well. I’m not sure why jumping diagonally should allow you to go farther than a purely vertical jump.

Overall, awesome job!

By: Aruvinn Porcupine

Aruvinn Porcupine — Mon, 16 Sep 2013 04:04:49 +0000

First impression: great job on the polish effects! I had fun jumping around as the nimble elf. However, I had similar problem with the machine feel as fep145 — the scraping sound, even though is suitable given the scenario you’re aiming for, makes me really uncomfortable. I really love the dust & booster effect that you added to the elf and machine. The camera shaking is really awesome as well!

Two things that I feel slightly off though:
Firstly, there’s no camera shake or any bumping effect when the avatar hits the wall. While it’s not really noticeable on the nimble elf, it feels weird whenever I play as the heavy machine.

Secondly, sometimes the control on the elf feels unresponsive, especially when I already running around for a while. For example, the jump command didn’t register to the avatar, and the collision with some invisible wall before hitting the platform above the avatar.

Overall, I totally get the game feel that you try to deliver. Love it!

By: Vander Onasi

Vander Onasi — Mon, 16 Sep 2013 03:45:35 +0000

I love the smoke effects on running/jumping/landing/the stage. I also like how you placed instructions onscreen. The avatar himself feels behind the polish of the rest of the game. Maybe apply a texture to the avatar? The feel is perfect–great job with the sound effects and in-air motion. The background images are well chosen. The interaction feels good, except it feels weird to not be able to jump just by pressing the space bar.

By: fep145

fep145 — Sat, 14 Sep 2013 21:57:00 +0000

What struck me immediately was the amount of polish that you put into each state of the avatars. It looks like every possible permutation was thought out and addressed. I especially enjoyed the rocket jump and the platform dust while playing as the robot. Unfortunately, the scraping sound during the robot’s movement got annoying quite quickly, enough so that I would turn off my sound to continue playing.

As for the control, you obviously put a lot of thought into how each character would move. The robot’s lateral movement definitely makes it feel clunky and massive. The elf’s speed also feels appropriate in comparison. And being able to hold the jump key for height control lends a great feel to the game overall.

All in all, I feel like you’ve definitely nailed the feel of the assignment. Awesome work!

By: asuna

asuna — Sat, 14 Sep 2013 15:45:34 +0000

First off, I really liked some of your polish effects, though in some cases you might have gone a little over board. The dust kicked up by the elf when walking is PERFECT. The fact that you have walking/jumping/landing sound effects for the elf really pulled together all of the motions, though the landing effect seemed to create a discrepancy with the perceived weight of the avatar (sounded to heavy). The way the body and head tilted during jumps was very convincing.

When switching to the machine style, I really liked how all of the platforms shook and put of dust. Though, that same effect got really annoying (besides not terribly realistic) when it was used in conjunction with every jump. It would have been better to confine the effects to a single platform when using with jumps. The fire effects when jumping were really well done, but the scraping effects/sounds did not really add much to the feel of heaviness. I know it was suppose to seem like the avatar was dragging on the ground, but it just did not feel very convincing to me. I also would have liked to see the tilting motion that was also present for the elf be modified a bit more.It makes the machine look a little too nimble.