Just a Jumping Square

by

Steam Page: http://store.steampowered.com/app/800520/Just_a_Jumping_Square/

Just a Jumping Square is a challenging minimalist platformer game, the goal is simple, collect all the tokens from the level without die.

Get relaxed with the background music at the same time you get frustrated trying to complete a level.

Non-Linear progress, you can complete the levels in order or If you can't complete a level just skip it and go to the next, you can reach the final level without complete every previous levels.

If you want a harder challenge (even harder!?) try to get all the Steam achievements.


FEATURES:

-Jump between platforms to collect the tokens, don't touch the spikes please ;)

-Non-Linear gameplay, you can skip some levels if you want to.

-Jump in the air (not double jump).

-From easy to hard, start from easy levels ends with really hard levels.

-Increase the difficult with the steam achievements.

Roasts

Harvey 6 years ago

Controls Game Graphics
I played upto level 3 and I got too frustrated from level 4 onwards...feels like a Super Meat boy vibe only nowhere as violent or graphical as said game.

Pros:

1. Great controls for a game like this.
2. Getting four key items to complete a level gives a clear and a simple goal.
3. Nice music.

Cons:

1. Ok look..the visuals need some serious improvements. A lot of your platforms are just gradients that can easily be done using just the game engine's sprite editor(i'm going to assume that you are using game maker studio for this game?). This also applies to the enemies themselves. I understand that this is an early version and all but the problem is that the main player is well thought out but the other aspects aren't which made me head scratch a bit.

2. The level design while nice so far is not quite fleshed out. The third level has platforms that are way too high and you can't jump freely as you would normally on the lower platforms when it comes to those platforms. Some platforms are too thin making it difficult to jump on. If you must have those thin platforms, I suggest adding some floating mechanic inorder to land on such platforms much easily.

3. I hate that one hit kill start over mechanic. Its done to death and in this game, it needs to be balanced. Since you require four shapes to complete a level, why not add a checkpoint for each time you collect one shape? Or even better, how about spawning all the four shapes at once instead of spawning them one by one whenever you collect one? This will give the player the freedom to collect whichever one instead of the more linear approach.

This is all I can come up with so far from what I played.
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DaFluffyPotato 6 years ago

Tutorial/Learning Curve Game Graphics
My favorite part about this game is the music, which isn't in the "favorite aspect" selection for some reason. The first few levels seemed to teach you about different parts of the game. The first one taught you the basic controls, the second one taught you about midair jumping, and the third one is where the difficulty goes up to make you good at the game.

The graphics definitely need some work. The excessive amount of gradients was kind of hard to look at.

If you're doing a platformer like this, I recommend working on the controls to make them more use friendly. For example, in a lot of well made platformers, if you jump a little bit before you hit the ground, you'll jump as soon as you hit the ground. The whole jumping higher when you hold down space thing felt a bit weird. I'm not very experienced with that mechanic, so I'm not too sure why.

The difficulty of this game is also an issue. There's a pretty big difference between hard(which can be good) and punishing. This game feels punishing because a slight mistake can cause you to die(which isn't always bad) and because the levels are so drawn out. If the levels were a bit shorter, this type of difficulty would work a bit better. As was previously suggested, I'd recommend using checkpoints at some point in a level. Maybe not every triangle, but there definitely needs to be some.
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