I Wanna Be The Beaver v.91

[PlainZombie]

I started this game the evening of New Years Eve. It's my first fangame and only has 4 screens and a boss because I figured for a first game I should make something a bit more compact and focused to help myself understand Game Maker as well as good level/boss design. It should be noted that for super good fangame players, this probably will be kind of easy. I built the stages around my play level which is still not amazing. I'm happy with the difficulty as it is right now, but could possibly be persuaded to buff certain things ever so slightly. I'm not going for crazy hard needle game or anything. Feedback would be super welcome. I've already had a little help from Pandy and Tenshots, hence a lot of the changes I made for .91.

Here's the dropbox: https://www.dropbox.com/s/qwyuwfqotbbx7bh/I%20Wanna%20Be%20The%20Beaver.rar?dl=0

Some things that are still a little busted and I'm looking to correct:
-The music doesn't restart on death (which is great) but when it gets to the end it takes a little while to loop, which causes an uncomfortable period of silence.
-Boss doesn't have a healthbar
-Boss could still use some tuning to match difficulty of rest of the game maybe
-Some of the initial menu screens could use some touching up

Not implemented:
-Very Hard mode (Same 4 screens and boss, but buffed with more spikes and maybe harder moves)
-Maybe 1 secret comprised of 2 screens or something, I dunno. That might still not make the cut.

And yes, it is still Game Maker Lite. I'm looking for ways to change that, however.

[SmokeyCR]

I started this game the evening of New Years Eve. It's my first fangame and only has 4 screens and a boss because I figured for a first game I should make something a bit more compact and focused to help myself understand Game Maker as well as good level/boss design. It should be noted that for super good fangame players, this probably will be kind of easy. I built the stages around my play level which is still not amazing. I'm happy with the difficulty as it is right now, but could possibly be persuaded to buff certain things ever so slightly. I'm not going for crazy hard needle game or anything. Feedback would be super welcome. I've already had a little help from Pandy and Tenshots, hence a lot of the changes I made for .91.

I actually liked this game. I don't care much about graphics, so my suggestions will focus on the gameplay:
-> Boss might have more attacks. I found the fight to be somewhat repetitive, since the attacks always come from the same direction.
-> "Closing the game after ending screen (likely the easiest of the things here)". Please, don't do this. It would look like a bug, and I don't think that there is a reason to do it anyway. If you want to do something after the ending screen, you could add a clear screen like most games. Or credits.
Looking forward to see more of your games 

[PlainZombie]

I actually liked this game. I don't care much about graphics, so my suggestions will focus on the gameplay:
-> Boss might have more attacks. I found the fight to be somewhat repetitive, since the attacks always come from the same direction.
-> "Closing the game after ending screen (likely the easiest of the things here)". Please, don't do this. It would look like a bug, and I don't think that there is a reason to do it anyway. If you want to do something after the ending screen, you could add a clear screen like most games. Or credits.
Looking forward to see more of your games 

Alright, thanks for the suggestion for the closing thing, that's definitely good to know. Maybe I'll just make a "The End" appear too then.

Yeah the boss still needs some fine tuning. I'm still kind of working on him as a whole.

Also glad to hear you liked it in general! My current plan is to just get this game into a place where I'm happy with it and enough folks have looked at it then kind of release it to the wild. I'm not gonna go content crazy with it, I'll probably just keep it super contained and concentrated. I'm working on Very Hard now which is just tougher jumps and a tougher boss, and I'm still actively tuning the boss on Medium/Hard.

[pieceofcheese87]

the platforming is alright, you should change the background and make the spikes look less like diarrhea.

[PlainZombie]

the platforming is alright, you should change the background and make the spikes look less like diarrhea.

Noted, good sir. I will make the background different and the sprites less poopy looking.

Any thoughts on the boss? I feel like he needs the most work, but that might just be me.

[kilgour22]

After playing through this 4 or 5 times, I've decided to write up a review:

Screen 1: Upwards diagonal skip that is more than worth doing. Someone could do the easy jump after it, hit the save, then come back and do the skip with minimal cost of time on death. (Note: I realize the save isn't there on hard mode, but it's still worth it to do the skip on hard, thus making the second half of the segment pointless.) The last save before the portal is far harder than the rest of the screen, on any difficulty because of the two end jumps. (Note: Those jumps (or very similar jumps) appear quite often. They are present in two of the first three screens. Dying often to the same type of jump can feel very grindy and unmotivating, as well as lacking creativity. Any way you can spice up a couple of those jumps into something new and creative would be much appreciated amongst everyone.)

Screen 2: When I first played this, I went head first into the shit brown block with grass on it in the water because I didn't see it. I suggest using either a spike or changing the opacity of one of the object's. The corner skip is appropriate difficulty relative to the segment it skips. Other than that, I enjoyed this screen a lot and felt like there was a good variety of jumps, as well as consistent difficulty.

Screen 3: The difficulty spikes way up on this screen. You bring back the last two jumps from the first screen and put a carbon copy in this screen, as well as two very similar jumps to end this screen just like in screen 1. Did you want the minispikes to show inside the blocks on the final segment? If not, then make the depth of the spikes more than that of the blocks. This will cause the body of the spike to disappear, leaving just the tip. The last save is far harder than the rest because of the final jump.

Screen 4: Felt a lot easier than screen 3. Was the apple in the top right corner supposed to fly off when the trigger was touched? It didn't for me, when all the others did. I liked this screen because of the variance in platforming, as well as the incorporation of triggers in a way that didn't involve death. Probably my favourite screen in the game.

Boss: Felt like a grind, not only because of the long i-frames but because of the lack of a health bar. Might I suggest more health with no i-frames or a shorter length of i-frames? That way heavy mashers can go for quick kills and make the boss a bit more exciting. The boss difficulty-wise felt appropriate for the difficulty of the game, maybe a touch harder than it should be. A suggestion would be one more type of attack.

All in all, not a bad effort for a few days' worth of work and your first fangame. Keep it up, and make sure to listen to constructive criticism. If you don't have any testers, make sure in the future you have testers of varying skill levels to make sure the difficulty curve stays well-balanced. Good job!

[PlainZombie]

After playing through this 4 or 5 times, I've decided to write up a review:

Screen 1: Upwards diagonal skip that is more than worth doing. Someone could do the easy jump after it, hit the save, then come back and do the skip with minimal cost of time on death. (Note: I realize the save isn't there on hard mode, but it's still worth it to do the skip on hard, thus making the second half of the segment pointless.) The last save before the portal is far harder than the rest of the screen, on any difficulty because of the two end jumps. (Note: Those jumps (or very similar jumps) appear quite often. They are present in two of the first three screens. Dying often to the same type of jump can feel very grindy and unmotivating, as well as lacking creativity. Any way you can spice up a couple of those jumps into something new and creative would be much appreciated amongst everyone.)

Screen 2: When I first played this, I went head first into the shit brown block with grass on it in the water because I didn't see it. I suggest using either a spike or changing the opacity of one of the object's. The corner skip is appropriate difficulty relative to the segment it skips. Other than that, I enjoyed this screen a lot and felt like there was a good variety of jumps, as well as consistent difficulty.

Screen 3: The difficulty spikes way up on this screen. You bring back the last two jumps from the first screen and put a carbon copy in this screen, as well as two very similar jumps to end this screen just like in screen 1. Did you want the minispikes to show inside the blocks on the final segment? If not, then make the depth of the spikes more than that of the blocks. This will cause the body of the spike to disappear, leaving just the tip. The last save is far harder than the rest because of the final jump.

Screen 4: Felt a lot easier than screen 3. Was the apple in the top right corner supposed to fly off when the trigger was touched? It didn't for me, when all the others did. I liked this screen because of the variance in platforming, as well as the incorporation of triggers in a way that didn't involve death. Probably my favourite screen in the game.

Boss: Felt like a grind, not only because of the long i-frames but because of the lack of a health bar. Might I suggest more health with no i-frames or a shorter length of i-frames? That way heavy mashers can go for quick kills and make the boss a bit more exciting. The boss difficulty-wise felt appropriate for the difficulty of the game, maybe a touch harder than it should be. A suggestion would be one more type of attack.

All in all, not a bad effort for a few days' worth of work and your first fangame. Keep it up, and make sure to listen to constructive criticism. If you don't have any testers, make sure in the future you have testers of varying skill levels to make sure the difficulty curve stays well-balanced. Good job!

Thanks a bunch this is great. I'm trying to incorporate as much feedback as I can before I decide I've spent enough time tweaking and just release it into the wild as I don't want to get super hung up on it, and then also keep everything I learned in mind on the next game I do.

I don't have any testers, no. It's kind of just me at the moment. I figured I'd throw this up here because I felt if anyone would be able to provide good feedback and constructive criticism, it'd be you guys. Next time I might ask folks in private to take a look at it while making it, just because it might be a bit longer and I'd rather an even smaller subset look at it before putting up any kind of unfinished thing like this for everyone to look at.

[PlainZombie]

So I decided that instead of making any MAJOR changes, I was just going to go ahead and make some of the polish changes (I changed at least the spike sprites, and fixed the silence between BGM loops, and changed the boss music situation a little bit [don't worry it's still the same music!] and the water opacity so the kid and blocks/spikes are more visible) and then just put the game out. I'd rather focus what I learned on this project on the next one which will probably have much more effort put into it and hopefully still be just as dumb.

Thanks again for everyone who took a look at the game and provided feedback, whether it was telling me my sprites looked like shit (they did) or specific things about jump repetition and shortcut/difficulty balancing, I think I've got a lot to focus on during my next project.

The game has been uploaded to the wiki, and I am now officially the only fangame with Beaver in the title. We did it.

[Kyir]

For future reference, placing saves so that the player has to do a full double jump every time they restart is super annoying.

[PlainZombie]

For future reference, placing saves so that the player has to do a full double jump every time they restart is super annoying.

Good to know, thanks. I assume you're talking about the ones (which are a few) that are right under ledges? Probably also the one where you have to jump to the lone platform on the right of the wall over the large spike diamond. I'll keep that in mind for next time.