ROOD

Huzzah, I finally made a game! After months of starting and subsequently not finishing projects I figured it was time for a change, so I banged out something in an afternoon.

Featuring minimalist graphics blown up 4 x, gameplay designed around the options (and limitations) Stencyl offers, a soundtrack at 18BPM (which I've never done before as it just seems... weird), and also yelling birds. Oh, and some secret areas though I don't know if anyone's going to get invested enough in the game to look them up.

Play it here:

http://www.stencyl.com/game/play/10205

I mainly made this to have made something, and to see how it works with uploading swf's to portals and all that, but secretly my evil plan is to one day dethrone Matt Thorson as the best level designer, so I'd love to hear any and all feedback on this thing

Very playable....i like

Wow, that was a great game. I love the simple pixel graphics, and the level design was amazing. I love how the levels go from easy to hard well, unlike in most games, where it usually stays the same then leaps. The levels are really hard though, but don't change that, that's good
There's only one problem-The controls are a little fidgety. It's hard to move well, because if I press right, let's say, it moves too much to the right, so I quickly have to press left in order not to fall down into spikes.
Other than that, though, great game. Keep it up.

Thank you and thank you!

@thegenericbanana: First of, thanks for the kind words I can get through the game in like 5 minutes without deaths but I still fear the difficulty is pretty high. I agree that the controls are too fidgety (too responsive maybe?), I've tried tweaking the gravity and player speed but I can't seem to get anything tighter than what it is now. I have a feeling it also stems from being blown up 4 times, ie moving one pixel to the right translates to moving FOUR pixels to the right.

Also, since I don't really think anyone is going to figure this out on their own: On the starting screen you can walljump to a hidden screen to the left, where there's 3 bonus levels. On the seventh screen you can get up to the platforms above and hop into another secret area with a bonus level. On the 15th screen there's a tiny block on the lower left that takes you to another hidden area with bonus level, and on the 21st screen there's a small area where there are some spikes missing from the row of spikes, and that's where the final hidden level is. 

I played through the whole game, well except the bonus levels I didn't find.  I like the level design, and the difficulty isn't too hard or too easy.  I still don't quite understand how those bouncing blocks work though.  I just ran at them at different angles and directions until something worked.

I played through the whole game, well except the bonus levels I didn't find.  I like the level design, and the difficulty isn't too hard or too easy.  I still don't quite understand how those bouncing blocks work though.  I just ran at them at different angles and directions until something worked.

Just found the quote function, go me.

Thanks for playing all the way through! The bouncing blocks work best when you run into them from the side, that's why most of them (at least the starting ones if there's multiple ones on screen) are placed into a little strip of regular tiles. That's how I playtested them, and it wasn't until one of my final testing playthroughs that I realized you could also jump on them / press the jump button while landing on them / approach them from different angles. I have no idea how to make that behaviour consistent, I admit. I messed around with the collision detection but no matter what, it's very unpredictable what they'll do.

I do think they're FUN, it's my favorite part of the game to go through a series of bounces on a couple of the levels, but ultimately I think it qualifies as bad game design and I probably wouldn't use them again unless I could figure out how to make them do exactly what I wanted.

   

To move the character the same way every time you would probably have to set the initial position of the actor just before the bounce, set the exact angles and speed you need for each bounce, and disable movement until the player is stopped (so from the initial bounce until velocity = 0).

To move the character the same way every time you would probably have to set the initial position of the actor just before the bounce, set the exact angles and speed you need for each bounce, and disable movement until the player is stopped (so from the initial bounce until velocity = 0).

That's a good way to go about it! I might try and incorporate this.

Oh and if anyone has any thoughts on how to make the controls feel less finicky I'd love to hear them.

Nice graphics and level design is darn awesome. It is a fun game to play.