Pixel Imperfect
This is a tiny game about being tiny, and huge and changing back and forth. Made in 48 hours for Miz Jam 1
All the pixels are from Kenny
Performance is poor on Firefox, better on Chrome and best native.
Instructions:
Arrow keys or AWD to move and jump. A to jump on a gamepad. Q to quit. Collect cards, drink potions
The source code for this is freely available: https://github.com/alec-deason/pixel-imperfect
I'll probably never clean it up to the point where it's worth reading, but feel free to take a look.
Download
Development log
- PostmortemAug 21, 2020
Comments
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the playscreen has scrollbars, this might be fixed if you make it, let's say, eight pixels less tall than what the tab reports as its height.
my fav game this jam
Really innovative game mechanics. I loved how player morphed to different attributes. Also innovative use of assets too!
Thanks. I'm glad you enjoyed the concept.
I like the idea of having to collect potions to alter your size and reach new locations, however I got softlocked very early on my collecting an expanding potion that stuck me in the wall. The game could be improved by a tutorial and perhaps some audio. Would be Awesome if the idea was expanded upon!
Thanks. The softlocking is a serious issue. If I do expand on that it's a thing I'll have to think carefully about. I want to do more with terrain destruction and scale based challenges but all that makes it harder to design levels that can't soft lock.
It would be good if you could provide basic instructions for the game at least in the descriptions, because I had no idea what I was doing for the half of the game :)
I guess the objective is to collect all the cards?
And I didn't understand how I became this big in the end :)
But overall this is an interesting idea, especially when you realise you can grab platforms with your pixels :)
Thanks for the feedback. I agree that there's a bunch of stuff in there that is unclear. I'm glad you liked the pixel-climbing. That's a thing I was unsure of but it seems to have worked pretty well.
Cool game, I like how the perspective shifts based on what size you are. It isn't super clear what is happening in the game though, I could sometimes break walls but sometimes not, and sometimes jump up walls but sometimes not. Also the texture seemed to stretch a lot when I grew. The jumps also felt a little weird how you just hovered at the apex of the jump for a long time. Overall though I think the concept has potential to be fun
Thanks for the feedback. I'm curious what you mean by the texture stretching? That sounds like a bug. Everything should scale uniformly as the player changes size. Would it be possible to post a screenshot of what you're seeing?
I agree that the floaty jumps are a bit odd. They actually emerged out of a rounding error bug in the way the physics scales with the player but I kind of liked the princess peach feel of it so I kept it. If I work on this post-jam I'll probably explore how the physics changes with scale and try to make the player more stompy and cumbersome when they're huge and more light and drifty when they're small, and work that into the level design somehow. For instance, I wanted to have the player able to smash through terrain by walking into it when they're very large but I ran out of time to make that work.
managed to reproduce the bug. I think the princess peach feel would be cool if it changed your air time based on how long you hold the button. I like the changing physics due to your size idea, that would really help sell the size changes
Thank you for taking the time to make a screenshot! That is actually not a bug but it's obviously not signaled well by the game. The tall potions make you tall and the wide potions make you wide. The non-uniform scaling is something I added late in development. I think it's interesting but I probably should have left it out in this version.
I agree about the air time, that's an excellent suggestion.
This should be called "Pixel Perfect" because it truly was top kek
Thanks. I was calling it Pixel Perfect until I couldn't come up with a way to keep all the sprites locked to the grid at their own scale. Without that I figured it didn't deserve the title.
I love the strange Alice in Wonderland quality this has, and your solution for allowing us to climb was brilliant.
I do wish there was a bit more strategy (blowing up the terrain was super satisfying and I want to do it more!) and clarity about what happens at the end (I think I won when I got super huge?)
Thanks. I'm glad you liked the climbing. It was an emergent side effect of the pixel level collision detection but it turned out to be useful. And who doesn't want to climb using grappling hook ponytails?
I wish I'd been able to do more with the terrain destruction too. Maybe I'll add some more post-jam but for the jam version I just ran out of time.