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How experienced were you before you started? Have you coded before? Any reason you're not open sourcing your code? Seems like it'd be a great idea considering you're still learning and could use some feedback from others. Great job btw. Never heard of Phaser but now looking into it.
And I'm considering going open source.
Here's an article with lots of interesting background info from the same author (lessmilk), "What I learned while doing my 'one game per week' challenge": http://gamasutra.com/blogs/ThomasPalef/20140225/211663/What_... Worth it especially for the following superb link: http://www.gamasutra.com/view/feature/130848/how_to_prototyp...
If you subscribe to my newsletter, you'll get an updated version of the gamasutra article that you linked.
In any case, I hope you keep up the great work, I'll certainly be following!
It's pretty good for a week of work. Though there's a difference between being challenging and being annoying. Many of the level design elements could be classified as a "dick move." An example would be not making it clear the goal is to collect all the coins until after the player has bypassed some of them and reached the end.
In general the controls are too sluggish. It's as if triple buffering is enabled, or maybe quad buffering. If you're at a university, you should try to borrow a high speed camera and measure the time difference between when someone presses the spacebar vs when the character starts to jump. I don't know if it's a Chrome thing or what, but I fell off cliffs several times due to the input delay.
The gravity could be better. I'd recommend spending some time with Cave Story to get a feel for how to make gravity really work in the player's favor, rather than against them. In general it's a bad idea to make velocity strictly linear. Some acceleration adds to the experience and precision.
A checkpointing system would be good. I can see how most players will give up after getting mostly to the end and then dying. I think you should just restart players from the last point that they were on the ground without dying, that is, the most recent ledge that they were standing on.
It shows promise. If you're looking for feedback about how to advance as a game developer, one step would be to make sure you're not rewriting your entire game engine from scratch for each game. It's excellent that you're writing your own engines rather than trying to use other people's, so be sure to keep doing that. It's important for gamedevs to have an idea of the underlying principles and limitations, and the best way to do that is to write your own engines. I got the feeling that most of the week was spent on the engine rather than iterating on the gameplay or level design though. Teaming up with an artist or a level designer might be a good match.
A significant number of devices on the web don't have keyboards . They use touch as their primary interface. Please support touch devices.
That said, this one is frustrating. I feel the keys are off. I like to run before I jump and in some areas, it's not possible because the responsiveness of the keys just isn't there. It takes too long for my guy to jump after I press up. Also, it seems like you're possibly doing your left/right code in a way that gives left priority. If I press both left and right, my guy goes left. I feel like he should stay stationary in that situation.
Other than that, I like the gameplay, tutorial text that's part of the scene, the sounds and music. I really like the cube slanting to show motion, too. Clever.
Keep it up!
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Any chance you release these on mobile?
You mean releasing native iOS/Android games? Yes, I'm thinking about it.
My current plan is to make a bite-sized game comparable to this at least once a month (it'd be a little stressful to force myself to come up with something fresh every single week) and maybe just experiment with small projects with no plans for completion in between. I also have a long-term project that I'm expecting will take ~2 years, and honestly, sometimes I feel like I've run out of ideas. Taking time away from my main project to work on these little "distractions" actually ends up helping with my main work. I spend less time idly waiting around for a good idea or solution to a persisting problem, and more time solving new, smaller problems that can later be applied somewhere else. Hell, I actually find myself actively switching between tasks every 10 minutes and ending up even more productive than I would be focusing on just one project. Also, I had no real experience with Unity before this game, and just taking a couple of days to force myself to learn it opened some doors for future big projects.
In short, work on tiny projects whenever you find yourself doing nothing. You might end up more productive or just happier knowing what you're capable of.
Not sure if you're looking for critique, and giving critique has sometimes been discouraged on HN, but: It's pretty good for a week of work. Though there's a difference between being challenging and being annoying. Many of the level design elements could be classified as a "dick move." An example would be not making it clear the goal is to collect all the coins until after the player has bypassed some of them and rea…
He made this in a week. It's a demo of what you can do in a week. You're reviewing it like it was a serious game.
> giving critique has sometimes been discouraged on HN
Bad critiques are. Yours is not a bad critique, I just think you're critiquing the wrong thing.