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Aztec's itch.io pageResults
| Criteria | Rank | Score* | Raw Score |
| Graphics | #5 | 4.641 | 4.641 |
| Overall | #11 | 4.353 | 4.353 |
| Audio | #15 | 4.185 | 4.185 |
| Authenticity (use of resolution) | #35 | 4.728 | 4.728 |
| Gameplay | #43 | 3.859 | 3.859 |
Ranked from 92 ratings. Score is adjusted from raw score by the median number of ratings per game in the jam.
Did you work in a team?
2 Members, @SlainteES handing gfx code and some SFX and @vavmusicmagic who worked in the music tracks and SFX as well. It was fun, but stressful... this was a very ambitiuous project.
Was the resolution a challenge?
Animating fluently in a "realistic" way a sprite of 10x13 proved a big challenge, but the extra time and effort put into it paid off... Guatemoc is a pleasure to control and watch while he traverses the temple
What did you learn?
From the coding perspective the learnings are Platformers are incredibly harder than expected (and the big refactor required by this code is proof of it), from the music/sfx perspective... first time for @vavmusicmagic on pico8 sound so it was a brand new experience.
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Comments
I loved the art and gameplay! Nice game!
Thanks for playing! glad you liked it
This was super cool - very polished and professional.
I love the really heavy feeling jump, though getting the timing/distance right on those one tile platforms felt too hard.
Other than that it was just all round pretty fantastic so no complaints.
Thank you for playing and the feedback. Jumping needs a bit of easing, let’s see if I can polish things out post-jam ;)
Beautiful art and very nostalgic gameplay. Would be waiting post-jam release )
Thank you for playing! It’s gonna take a bit… I pushed the limits of the cart on this one and it really needs a heavy clean-up and refactor to make space for changes, but I am already on it :)
Awesome design and nice gameplay, great game in rare setting!
Thank you for playing and the feedback, glad you liked it!
Well done guys! The game looked pretty, and was fun to play. My only issue was with the accuracy of the jumping. It was a little hard to gauge exactly how far you were going to jump, especially because there isn't any in-air correction (as far as I could tell). Thank god for the checkpoints!
Also, the music/SFX were excellent, so props to @vavmusicmagic!
Thank you for playing and the feedback. There is no air-control, and probably there won’t be :P that’s one of my “hard-limits” as this was a core decision in the mechanics… but there will be some easing around jumping post-jam (working on making the room for all that needs fixing).
thanks, i'm so glad you liked my contributions, slainte helped a lot with SFX too and implemented everything, so a lot of credit goes to him for that too. hope to squeeze more pico-8 fun in between my other projects
Amazing, simply amazing. The animation, the sounds almost everything is on point. Only thing I didn't really like was the jumping mechanics, but that's minor compared to how well the rest of the game is. This is probably the most polished and complete game I've seen so far on this game jam. Good job.
Thank you for playing and the feedback… seems opinions are quite polarized: you either love it or ditch it in terms of jump mechanics :P
This game is one of the most polished and visually impressive out of any I have played this jam. The various items obstacles are incredibly detailed for such a low resolution. The main character is animated very well. I'm impressed with how you made them actually look and move like a person with so few pixels. The text explaining the story and controls is a very nice addition. I also enjoy how the world is decently large and allows some non-linear exploration.
Unfortunately, I cannot stand the old school Castlevania style fixed jumping. It turns what could be a fun little platformer into an exercise in frustration. Those jumps onto single width platforms a very specific distance apart are particularly bad. The way the checkpoints work is also questionable. You shouldn't have to re-activate them after dying. I had to restart the game over twice because I forgot to activate them. I still managed to reach the end eventually though.
Thank you for playing and the feedback. I agree with most of the complains… fixed jump is probably going to stay, because it was one of the core design choices I made… it will be eased a bit, but the cinematic approach is something I was particularly looking for. The checkpoints got wrapped up in a hurry and some bad choices were taken there, so those will have a full redesign post-jam. I hope it was just not that bad an experience alltogether.
Congrats, I loved everything! Really sent me back to the past with that kind of player movement. Art & music are awesome. Excellent game! Great job :)
Thank you for playing and leaving some feedback. Glad you found the game to your liking and “retro enough”.
I like the design and the sound effects, and the animations while running and jumping and awesome. However, I think the stop time after jump is not smooth and when you jump few times slows down the gameplay.
It's a really good game for a jam and your pixerl art style is amazing. Congrats!
Thank you for playing and the feedback. Jumping mechanics and controls are to be fine-tuned, there’s been quite some falming around them :P Let’s see if I can fix things post-jam (already working on it, but needing quite some big refactor as cart space limitation for pico-8 gives me no berth for changing that many things)
Good luck! I am convinced that you will achieve it, the base is very good :)
Very cool game and art
Platforming is a bit hard, controls feel a bit sloppy
Thank you for playing and the feedback. There’s a few issues with controls I need to fine-tune, the most relevant is that now it requires a strict & precise button press order for jumping, I need to give it a bit more berth around that so it feels more responsive.
Very polished game. Great stuff!
Thank you for playging!
Beat it! Very cool art and nice thoughtful level design. I appreciate the mirrors keeping my progress or I would have rage quit a while ago. Great work y'all!
Thnx for playing and glad you liked and beat the game!
This was one of my favorites that I've played so far! I really enjoyed the level design and was really happy when I got all the skulls in place. The art and music worked really well too. I think I had similar problems with the other commenters where I found the jumping difficult and the checkpoint system frustrating, but I'm happy to see that you are working on it post-jam! :)
This was one of my favorites that I've played so far! I really enjoyed the level design and was really happy when I got all the skulls in place. The art and music worked really well too. I think I had similar problems with the other commenters where I found the jumping difficult and the checkpoint system frustrating, but I'm happy to see that you are working on it post-jam! :)
Thank you very much for playing and the feedback. The Jump needs fine tunning, the button ordering requires easing to feel more responsive and that’s one of the things I have in the to-do list for post-jam fixes.
Checkpoints… I rushed some probably wrong decisions on them in the last minute, those require a full redesign.
Glad you liked the game and that it was a rewarding experience.
Superb presentation, spritework and level design! I’m very impressed. I’m a fan of Prince of Persia-esque games like this so I enjoyed playing through your game. Great entry!
Please allow me to give you some feedback on what I believe could help take the “game feel” from great to flawless.
I don’t understand why checkpoints aren’t automatically re-triggered when respawning. It can be a bit frustrating when the game ends just because I forgot to re-trigger the checkpoint last time I respawned. If I have to make the conscious decision to re-trigger a checkpoint or not, there should be some kind of incentive for me NOT to trigger it. Think e.g. Shovel Knight that awards you extra points for destroying a checkpoint instead of using it.
I found the jump controls to be slightly clunky. I think it’s because the game expects me to hold down an arrow key BEFORE I hit the jump key; if I press an arrow key after the jump, the game won’t register the direction I want to go in. But I’m the kind of person that jumps first, and then decides a couple milliseconds later where to go :) Because of this, timing precise jumps takes some getting used to as well – when I don’t want to jump too far, intuitively I don’t hold an arrow key until after I’ve started the jump. Fortunately the checkpoints are smartly distributed so that wasn’t insurmountable.
Overall I’m astounded by the polish and mood of the game. Great work!!
Thank you for playing and the comments… about your suggestions (and by all means, comment, suggest and rant on anything… that’s the full point of having feedback from ppl actually playing the game!):
The recharging was a last minute idea that I expected to add to the challenge but I think it ended up not bringing in that much (and bugged as hell in some of the mirrors without an apparent reason :/) It’s something I need to revisit for post-jam version
Jump needs some easing, you are totally right in button pressing sequencing… i need to give it some berth for a few frames so you can actually revert order if it’s close enough so responsiveness feels much better. Also a mid-level soft-landing is in my to-do list of jump finetunnings
And I will add to the list of things to fix the blasted ladders, that are the biggest nest of bugs in the game :P
Let’s see if I can fix all that in the following weeks
great presentation, glad you were able to finish this even though you cut it close (judging by what you said in the Discord). i'm not sure i'm a fan of the way the jump works, it makes platforming quite difficult.
Thank you for playing and the feedback. Jumping needs some fine-tunning to ease things a bit, it was a close call and had not that much time for refining things before the deadline. Working on a post-jam build (that will take a bit, requires a big rework of some core code in the game…), let’s see if I can make things better then ;)
Was looking forward to this entry after seeing some of the early screenshots. :) Fun gameplay, and love the graphics and music! Great job!
Thank you very much for playing and for the feedback!
Really enjoyed the game. Music and overall game gave me C64 vibes :)
Player animation at that size was exceptional.
Well done on a very polished entry!
Thank you for playing the game and nice feedback. I wish it had a better level of polishment… still plenty of bugs and fine-tunnings to do.
Amazing job! My biggest critiques are: I found it really confusing to control how far you move horizontally when jumping, if that could've be explained better that would've been really nice (I died a bunch jumping over the lava pits between the stone columns). I was okay with not being able to move in mid-air though. Also I wish I could respawn faster with how often I die :)
I'm glad that you could reuse the respawn points, but I thought it was weird that you had to reset them after each death, and that there was a several second cooldown, it felt like it just added even more time to how long it took to respawn. Also I found a bug where I died and as I was respawning I think I was still holding down the movement key and something happened where I walked over and fell in a lava pit, so once my body came back to life I just instantly died and lost 😆
All that said, what you've managed to make is super impressive, you deserve to be proud
Thank you for playing and the detailed feedback… There’s a lot to fine-tune after all the comments… jumping for a start needs a bit more key/button press tolerance added, now it is too strict and a minor sync flaw your jump does not end up doing whtt you expect. The mechanics with the mirrors as well (and there seems to be still some bug in there about putting the player at full stop when respawning)
It was a very ambitious project and the time to test and balance was too scarce :P Already working on a post-jam build, rewriting a lot of the player’s code so let’s see if I can push things to a more enjoyable level soon.
This game is good D: I don't have any critiques! Good job :D
Thank you so much for playing and the unexpected “no critiques” :P