PyWeek - Nerd Paradise - feedback

Nice Job!

This game disappoints. The potential is here, and I don't want to disparage your amazing
effort, but I think if you're going to try to conjure up memories of the best games of
yesteryear, you need to surpass them, and this just doesn't feel smooth enough. My
constructive criticism would be to animate the wizard dude a lot better. His running,
jumping, falling, stopping, casting, swimming etc would all feel more energetic with
exaggerated animations, and he ought to feel more weighty physically (I don't necessarily
mean just more inertia). I think that's part of what's missing. The other part is that there's
no reward for the player other than to get to the end of the level. Mario has coins, power-ups and
extra lives to collect.

too hard, probably me not being good at jump and run games

Thanks for this nearly perfect jump'n'run. The graphics are great, the sfx is above average and it was really fun to play. It lacks a little bit of innovation and i think your game design wasn't that much influenced by the theme but it impressive what you accoomplished in a week.

very nice game

I'm impressed with the amount of content. The graphics are great. The levels are well designed, but it's annoyingly hard at times. Part of the hardness is because the jumping is a bit poor for a platformer, especially on edges of slopes and on ropes (level 3-4 in particular was very annoying not because the level is hard, but because of the running slope jump and the final rope jump). A few notes: I didn't notice any gameplay difference between the wands (maybe it did more damage to the boss?); save should be autosave (had to modify my savegame to recover my data since the game crashed at a point); level 2-3 appears to have an unpassable water wall, nothing hints at having to go down, appears to be a bug at first because water is usually passable. Other than these things, I'm quite impressed by the game.

Can't get the hang of swimming under the platform in the River level.

great concept, really enjoyed playing this game. well done .

Interest story, I love it.

It's always nice when people put interesting background effects in.

Very nice graphics. I wish I didn't get that music every time I get hit. A bit frustrating levels but kept me playing for some time.

Why does Escape just exit the game? Spectacular otherwise.

First off, congratulations on the production of your game - everything was smooth throughout, the interface worked consistently and coherently and you had a solid graphical style for the whole game.

Your platform engine was also solid and responsive and worked exactly as I'd like, except for the handling when the player character is at the top of a ladder (which felt pretty unintuitive, and made a couple of sections very frustrating).

Unfortunately there were a handful of things which meant I didn't enjoy this game (although I will still try to finish it, out of respect for the obvious effort that's gone into it). The most vexing aspect was the frequency with which the player can get hit and have his soul fall off the bottom of the screen, rendering the level unwinnable, but not ending it straight away. Additionally, the levels were quite long, and since there are often tricky platforming sections where a mistake means death (either directly or for the reason just mentioned), I ended up replaying some sections far too many times.

I also didn't understand the point of the different wand modes - all of them seemed to do the exact same thing. The charge wand sounded like it should have some additional function, but I couldn't work out how to activate it.

Very very nice production - it almost felt like a complete game. Unfortunately while playing
it all I mostly felt was irritated. The control scheme seemed awful (I don't have a gamepad), so
I ended up fixing it to my liking in the code (unless I missed something and you can change it in
the controls screen). Almost every time I got hit was when I was near the bottom of the screen and
the life magic ball fell off the map so I couldn't save myself... start again. I realise that old
school platformers were always hard but this seemed pretty unfairly so.

The most complete game I've seen by far. Different levels, easy to learn to play, impeccable dialogs and plot... almost perfect :-D

Amazing effort.

The wobbling effect when you loose your soul was great. Unfortunately this game seems much too hard for me: I couldn't even get past the abyss at the beginning of level 1-2.

couldn't pass level 1-2

nice wobbling animation

Very impressive.

great game.. !!

Not innovative but very well done!

Love it! Had trouble jumping on the second level.

This is clearly well produced, excellent work!

I haven't given 100% to production because some level designs are incredibly irksome.

A simple platformer with barely any connection to the theme. What it lacks in innovation it
makes up in production values though with a huge number of levels and several hundred frames of
animation. A ton of work must have went into it and it is impressive how well the work must have
been organized.

polished and cute, but very BAD choice of movement keys

Very very good game, but in Level 1-3 I got stuck after getting the Ice wand by falling into the water basin below it - and not being able to get out except restarting the game - And after 3 tries with the same result I just gave up as the beginning of this level is quite hard ..

A great game! I was really enjoying it until I got to the level where I needed to run, jump and shoot at the same time (ie. level 2). I think the run key might have been a bit of a design flaw. Otherwise great stuff!