Its our first “large” game and we learnt A LOT while making this and the development time has been around a year total. We are 2 guys doing this and it’s been a little rough but also a lot of fun. Theres things we like a lot in the game, and a few minor things we would have done differently, but like i read in a game developer blog somewhere, “save it for the next game”.
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Still working on getting Staying Together out the door. After that I’m not sure what’s next. Didn’t get a chance to play Sky Jumper a ton yet but so far I’m loving the visual style and animations
Ok yeah polish the **** out of that thing because its a great game. We have decided that we’re gonna do an online flying racing game next,with gore(sorry kids), and a ridicolous amount of unlocks, we know SKy Jumper isnt gonna bring alot of money but we had fun making it and learnt ALOOOOOOOOOOT. Online is the thing if u wanna earn atleast enough to pay a few bills, so here we go:P
Let me know when Staying Toghtere starts finishing, really wanna try it out!
hehe yes, thats pretty much the correct description actually! Ive been playing alot of Fun Run 2 and Race Day and we wanna add something to those kinda games. right now im just writing stuff and making sure the whole thing works on paper befoe i even draw anything.
Ok so here’s my feedback so far for SkyJumper. I have completed the first 11 (0-1 to 0-11) levels and the first 2 races.
Visuals
The art looks really great and I have absolutely nothing bad to say about it! The level art feels varied and every scene is nice and rich with little details and touches so well done.
Gameplay
I’m enjoying the gameplay and you guys definitely have hit the spot where I’m playing levels over and over trying to get all the “achievements” or whatever you call them. It’s keeping me nicely between needing to complete everything but not quite getting frustrated.
I feel like the grappling mechanic could use a bit of tweaking. I understand the mechanics of it but it seems a little harder than it should be to get my skyjumper to go where I want. I get that the character maintains tangential velocity and all that but my brain keeps wanting him to fly straight out from the loop. Maybe even something like an indicator would helpful. At the end of the day it’s minor and would be fine left as is but if there was any source of frustration for me this was it.
Another criticism involves the unlockables. I feel like I’ve put a decent amount of time into it so far and still only have half the gems I need to unlock the first character (not including the Facebook one). It might be good to have the first couple unlocks happen a bit quicker so the player feels like they have achieved something early on.
My last and very minor issue. I wish there was a way to go straight to the next level without going back to the map every time.
Anyway I’m gonna keep playing and I’ll post here if I run into anything else. Also you can expect a purchase from me in the near future Nice work!
EDIT:
Almost forgot, I personally feel like the game might “feel” a little better if you had to hold down the “grapple button” to keep swinging rather than tapping to grapple and tapping again to release. I may be wrong though
Yeah most of these we are aware of, the hooking mechanics were touched upon very early actually and we talked about giving it a better feel. We simply got to a point where we felt there was nothing we could do due to all the other things we needed to improve on.
The “next level” button were in an earlier build, but the problem was that if u unlocked 20 levels by doing so, the map would unlock all the levels at once and making the game crawl due to the amount of particle systems beeing fired off at the same time. Really wanna keep that in tho, so agreed there.
Unlockables could be toned down for sure yes, should be an easy fix.
We did also have a build with holding the hook button and releasing it, and it certainly wasnt bad. right now it can be held to grab onto a hook, but realesing it wont result in jumping off it.
It was out first game and it pretty much grew out of control, but we learnt ALOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOT! Several things we wanna fix, but im also getting told constanbtly to “save it for the next game”, or u go insane and would need therapy. I can totally see that.
right now is fixing the bugs and getting onto the aerial online game, wich will be planned ALOT better.
I know what you mean about growing out of control and learning better ways to do things lol. In my first big project I implemented jumping through a HOTween animation, don’t know what I was thinking lol.
Yeah as u progress learning Unity, u make alot of choices that makes u question ur sanity later on. This game used Smooth Moves for animations wich made the whole thing horrible for Adrien to program.
Now i only use Unity animation with no additional assets, theres simply no point because it just works!
Ok I’ve now gotten through all the dessert levels and done all the challenges so here are my updated impressions.
My previous gripes about the grapple mechanic have kinda gone away now that I’ve gotten more used to it and I feel like I have much better control.
Once you get into the forest levels and beyond there is some really cool level design stuff going on! I love the moments where you get trampolined through those narrow windy passages and nailing the perfect grapple combos makes me feel like a ninja.
Definitely getting hooked and I can’t stop playing a level until I get all the medals for it! Really good job guys I am loving it!
A couple bug reports:
-The text for the tutorial challenges is a bit too long and the last character or so is getting cut off.
-When I re-open the app it does not maintain the character I had previously selected. I think that should be saved in the playerprefs and be persistant since better characters do affect gameplay
-We really spent time Level designing ,and I know that I really liked doing the level design ( it’s a nice break from coding ^^)
-Can you estimate how many times did you spent on the game? Does the ads annoy you ? We tried to not annoy the player with them.
I forgot to save your character… We designed the game so you can finish it with the first character , so I’m always playing the game with it, it goes on my todo-list ^^
Thanks for all your reports.
What bother me right now it’s promoting the app, I’m trying to post where I can ,but the game doesn’t seem to be noticed at all…
Its good to hear that the hook stuff feels better as u progress, in the beginning i really didnt mind it, then i hated it, now i like it again. Its very skillbased on how much time u spend playing it. Yes i also feel like a ninja if i cna pull off every jump and do some great times on levels:P
Do you mean how much time did I spend playing? It seemed like a long time but it was probably 2-3 hours tops. Ads are always annoying to a certain extent but I thought your implementation was fine and i end up doing the purchase so i dont see them anymore. Can’t say I have any advice on promotion, haven’t had a ton of luck there myself. The standard wisdom seems to be either pay a bunch of money or send an email to everyone on the earth and hope to get lucky lol. For my current game I am using a publisher which may help with this. Publishers generally are established and are more likely to get attention from whoever decides what apps get featured on the stores so we’ll see how that works out
