Moving Forward
I released the first playable demo for Project Petunia on September 12th. Despite the relative lack of advertising I managed to get more people to play it and leave feedback than I expected, so all things considered the first demo was a great success. It has given me an incredible boost of confidence and some solid feedback that has already been used to start improving the game.
The Feedback
So that would be a good place to start. Almost all the feedback I received on the gameplay was positive, people were receptive to the controls of the player, and the variety of platforming gimmicks was also noted.
As for negatives I had people point out the really long load times after the player dies, some confusion on keeping powerups after levels, and some gimmicks were noted as being slow.
While the positives will just be things that get reinforced even more as the game develops, there is some info to glean from the negatives, including things that weren't directly noted but likely noticed by players.
Fixing The Negatives
So why don't we go down the list?
Starting with the load times, it turns out this was due to me not coding the fade to black that happens before loads properly. Because of how I had programmed it the game was waiting for several seconds after the fade to black before beginning to load in levels. As the entire level is reloaded when a player bites it this means that every death came with around 10 seconds of loading, before you even have a chance to move again. Thankfully the fix for this was easy and every level loads in about a second now.
The confusion on keeping powerups between levels came from someone who admitted they were inexperienced with platformers. For anyone who hasn't played a lot of platformers, it is actually unusual when a game has a powerup system, but doesn't let you take them to other levels. Of course it's important to note that most platformers will show that you still have your powerup between levels. There was no indication of this in the first demo, so a very easy change to make was to add some new HUD elements to the world map showing what powerup the player currently has.
There is something else that I noticed with the feedback, that being the lack of feedback for some things. The powerups didn't receive a ton of mention despite their importance to the game. Besides the comment on keeping powerups, the only other feedback I received on them was someone disliking how the Blast Jump from the Bomb powerup is activated. This is a problem that I assume come from the lack of an ingame tutorial of any kind. Other than a controls list on the pause menu nothing tells you about how exactly powerups work. A significant improvement could be made to future demos with the addition of a tutorial that actually tells players what powerups do. I don't have the grace of a manual to go with my game after all.
Finally, the criticism of some platforming gimmicks being slow was mostly related to the level River Liver, which had a significant chunk of it dedicated to rotating wheels with platforms on them. At some points the player is forced to wait for the platforms to align to jump between them. This is more something that's forced to happen because the nature of the gimmick, however it is worth mentioning that good use of the Glide and Bomb powerups can skip a lot of this waiting. Which would have been more obvious if once again, I had put more info on how the powerups work in the first demo.
My Own Notes
I am an avid playtester of my own games. I recognize that at some point you do need external feedback (That's why the first demo exists), but I've been developing games and such long enough to be able to make some observations on my own.
My notes for the first demo are that level design could use a lot more thought and work and a disparity in the complexity of powerups. The first of these points is something that will be solved with more work put into level designs, and figuring out how exactly I want this game to play.
As for the other point that is something that will require more thought on my end. There are three powerups in Petunia currently. Those being Glide, Helix, and Bomb. Glide and Helix are both simple, with each giving the player one new ability. Bomb is also technically like this, but the player can also jump into their bomb's explosion to perform a Blast Jump. This essentially means that while Glide and Helix are only given one new ability Bomb gets two.
Now it can be argued that the Blast Jump is unintuitive and limited in use, but this argument only holds true in the first demo. For the second demo, I took the feedback I mentioned earlier about the Blast Jump being disliked by a player and refactored how the Blast Jump works. In the current version of Petunia the Blast Jump feels much more natural. This has the side effect of making it much more practical to use. This leaves us at the problem of Bomb being the one powerup in the game that gets advanced functionality while the other two are kept simple.
The best solution is to increase the options players have by giving Glide and Helix something else to do. My plan for Glide is the easiest. It's meant to be a powerup that trades away all the offensive options given by other powerups for the ability to well.... Glide. Gliding is a very strong ability to have in platformers, that alone justifies its use. I don't want to give Glide a new attack as this would easily push it into being the de facto best powerup, but I can allow it to augment another move of the player's, the Pounce.
Helix is the more open ended powerup to design for. Currently what it gives the player is an extremely powerful projectile. I think the best way to work with Helix is to give it an ability that encourages speedy, aggressive play. My first idea for this is a ground dash that darts the player forward very quickly. This would give the player unmatched ground speed, and could even be converted into a sort of long horizontal jump if the player leaves the ground during it. Though I am still considering other options incase something even more interesting comes up.
The Future
Those are the main takeaways I have currently gotten from the first demo. Project Petunia is in a very good place currently. I have a solid foundation on which to build this game up into something great. I am still looking for more feedback on the first demo currently, even as I move on so if this wall of text gets you interested in the game, please check it out on Itch.Io.