Review won't post, so here's mine - Do not recommend.

[dalbozofgurth]

Every time I click post to post the review, it stalls out, and won't post. The button just disappears. So I am reviewing it on the board.

This is one of the worst platformers I've played in a long time. To explain why let me bullet point all the aspects of this game. These aren't bad points by themselves, but when you put them together they spell disaster:

1. Incredibly fast paced and hard (good point, I like a difficult game, I love Bunny Must Die, I love to play Kaizo Mario even though I lose constantly).
2. Flighty Controls (good for some games, but not for this one).
3. Random aspects of movement (you can never tell how high or how far you will jump)
4. Random Framerate Loading issues (certain visual features, mostly with explosions, will stutter the game as you get hit, or as something flashes and loads. I'm running a pretty fast machine, I can easily play games like the Arkham series, an 8 bit game should NOT DO THIS).
5. Pin Point Accuracy Required
6. Randomly stopping in mid air while jumping.
7. Enemies with randomized alert triggers
8. Enemies with randomized behavior - to a point where they are moving full speed then absolutely come to a halt for several seconds, before accelerating to full speed again without any sort of animated trigger or alert.
9. Randomized accepting of commands - you can press down to enter ball three times and you just stand there make a stutter animation movement and then NOT TRANSFORM INTO A BALL
10. YOU will stall out at random points, but the ENEMIES WILL NOT.
11. Alt Tabbing makes the window disappear on Windows 10, thankfully the game doesn't stop.
12. NO REAL DIRECTION in this game. What am I supposed to do?! Even METROID had a game guide. If you're going to copy old 8 and 16 bit games, try to copy their instruction guides as well. Most of us who grew up in the 80s actually spent hours reading guides nintendo power and game pro to learn about how to control a game before we were just dumped into it.
13. The death counter is worthless after dumping them face first into the deep end of the pool without any sort of practice or direction, a massive slap in the face because it has no comparative function that I can find. Why bother having it? Death counters should ONLY exist for those who want to practice and compare skill levels, permanent death counters from the start are more like "HAHA we made a game without telling you how to play and get to laugh at how many times you die!" I actually USE death counters to improve my play style in other games, when they are programmed to be useful. Just counting a player's death is NOT a useful death counter. It's only used to laugh at how many times you died.
It's funny in Mario Maker because I love to see how many times I killed that animal abusing nasty mario. But in this game, the master death counter reminds me HOW LONG it took before I could figure out wtf was going on. It has absolutely no purpose in analyzing my abilities, telling me which levels gave me the most difficulty, or comparing where I went wrong in a level.
What makes it even more worthless is the ease at which you can die... It's very very easy to rack up 300 deaths in under 16 minutes just from the glitchiness and randomness of the controls. How does death matter once you're up to 10 thousand or more deaths? IT DOESN'T!! IT doesn't matter AT ALL! You just know you died THOUSANDS of times. WHO CARES AT THAT POINT.
14. Hit Box Detection is trash. There are times I fire my weapon and it goes right through an enemy, I think it's due to the framerate and travel speed of the projectiles which means that the hitbox skips the enemy hitbox due to the speed. Easy way to solve this is to create a shadow hit box that extends further behind the projectile, overlapping the two positions to ensure that the enemy is hit to compensate for the framerate. But Noooooo none of that here.

Precise and difficult games are fine if there is some sort of method to your own controls and behavior which isn't interrupted by randomized EVERYTHING, from Stalling to Animation/Function Glitching.

[James]

Hey, thanks for the feedback and the detailed description of the problems that you have encountered.

A lot of the points you made seem to relate to a non-reactive input and performance. That is not intended behavior of the game.

I'm using a pretty lo-spec notebbook here and it runs fine when it's plugged in and is set to performance mode. I have encountered some performance issues that are processor/game engine specific. Some processors (especially notebooks) go into a 'sleep mode' for a few milliseconds if it doesn't have anything to do and that may screw up the framerate and can cause input delays. I can do some more research on this issue. If it is the so called 'sleep margin' then I can turn it up to make sure that the processor is always active, but that drains battery life (power consumption). Funny enough but if you open a chrome browser in the background sometimes that stops the processor from going to sleep. So in that case the issue is not that the game were to demanding, it's rather the opposite.

Please let me know if you are using a notebook and if it is set to performance mode and plugged in. I can try my best but some things are engine or processor related and I have no control over those things. Anyway, sorry if these performance issues ruined the experience for you.

I get the point you made on the death count, it was a feature I had to display some information and it doesn't have any reason beyond information like playtime. Was thinking about making achievements but then trashed that idea.

About point 12: I've said it a few times and it is in the description of the game: This is not a copy of old games. I was inspired by them, so it radiates the 'feel or vibe' of those games but the gameplay was intended to be experimental and 'far-out'. I tried a lot of concepts to see what works and what doesn't. I am still learning and I have no team of 'professional' testers. I'm a single person so the only feedback I get is when things don't work.

I'm doing my best to improve and am working on an remastered version that uses a newer game engine and has a lot of changes (is basically a whole new game).

Kind regards,
James

[dalbozofgurth]

Nope. I have used both a Surface 4 Pro and my newest tower which never sleeps.

The AI behavior is extremely erratic.

I appreciate your polite response. I was more than a little heated after a lot of what I was experiencing. I know from experience what it's like to get a hot headed review. I sometimes get abrasive when I experience some of these issues.

I highly suggest you revamp the death counter, because it comes off more as a slap in the face than something useful. Unless you want to get into a real death count table, so people can do actual comparisons, saving certain playthroughs while abandoning others. One of the earliest versions of a death counter I can remember is Dungeon Hack on DOS, and that one was a little bit more expansive than the one you have in this game. By that I mean death counters should serve some actionable purpose, and even Dungeon Hack had a serviceable counter.

I understand you're just copying a style, but there's a reason a standard developed in that era. Instructions exist for some fundamental reasons. Today, instructions take place more as tutorials than as guides. Hell, back in Super Metroid and Mega Man X you had language neutral tutorials in terms of the Attraction Screens/Demos that would often not just tell you how to explore but also what was important to consider in that exploration.

If you are actually interested in a report and suggested changes/approaches, I can privately prepare a document to that effect and send it to you. I actually design and analyze games. Depending on how serious and indepth you want the report we could work something out :)