Parasol - A platforming adventure!

Parasol is a game I've been working on for like, the past 3-4 weeks I think, mostly on like the 6 or so days I've had off, which is like half of them or something idk ANYWAYS.

The story is basically a witch has cursed the lands/causing chaos/being an overall big meanie or something to that effect and Lani the Parasol Girl must take up her trusty Parasol and go defeat this rather big meanie!

I just copied the rest of this post from another forum because it's easier then just retyping it out sorry v_v;

TEST LEVEL DEMO COMPLETE.
DOWNLOAD HERE: >DOWNLOAD<

After about a week of hard work, I have completed the test level! Featuring FOUR WHOLE ROOMS of INTENSE PARASOL ACTION, you play as LANI the PARASOL GIRL. Your current goal is to simply reach the end of the fourth room.

CONTROLS:
X, C, ARROW KEYS, SPACEBAR. You’ll have to figure out what they do on your own though. Try using the arrow keys in combination with C!

WINDOWS ONLY.

Note: Enemies on the ground don’t die. Flying enemies will respawn [hopefully, I’m pretty sure I got it to work, not a terribly big deal if they don’t though.]

Still trying to nail down a consistent level design but I think I'm getting there! Let me know what you think of everything! (I'm still working on the sky and clouds and stuff. Backgrounds are hard :C)

SCREENSHOTS

Show Content

Spoiler
 

Wow this is extremely impressive for just a week of work.

First of all, all the visuals are pretty cool, i love the single antenna like hair sticking out of the character and how it bounces with the character and the parasol. Everything has that cute and soft pixely style (like Momodora), nice color combinations, i dig it. If i had to nitpick though i'd say the animations could be improved, specially the umbrella swing, the animation is too slow for such a big smear.

The gameplay is really neat and the controls are tight, floating with the giant fans is awesome, however i feel like the difficulty is a little unfair in the vertical cave with fans and beanie-wearing ghosts (i loved those), specially if you're using a keyboard and i think this is because the parasol climbing is kinda awkward; the idea is good, but it's really hard to land the specific part of the swing to make it work. I think that could be improved by making the swing faster or pressing up to cling to the pipes or something. I also found the C button tricks to be completely useless. Edit: I didn't discover the air trick thingie on the penultimate screenshot up there.

Overall, i think it's amazing you did this in a single week and i can't wait to see more progress!

Oh I worded that badly, I had a previous demo done before this one a week ago, I've had most of the player graphics and tiles done like two weeks ago. But I've been mostly working on the weekends for like the past 3 weeks so... [But the level design and a good chunk of programming was done over the course of this past week/3 days...]

Yeah the hanging seems to be tripping people up! It used to be set to pressing up but people didn't like it much? I need to mess with collisions some more and see if I can make them better!

The C tricks are useless for the most part right now simply because I haven't made anything to really take advantage of them yet! The down+c reflects enemies and up+c keeps you safe from above. When I make the actual stages there'll be secrets and stuff that you'll need to be smart and use these tricks to get to and stuff!

In regards to the animations, I'll see what I can do! It used to not have the smears on the umbrella swing, but putting them in looked better, but it's only 4 frames so I need to touch up on it and stuff, along with adding frames to several of the single-frame sprites.

Last note in regards to difficulty, I made the level for testing everything I had so far basically and to get a feel for level design. It's good to know that it's rather difficult for people! Course I've done it enough times that I can get through it without stopping for the most part :I

Thank you for taking the time to play and comment! I'm going to work more on these things later this week/whenever I can. Working really sucks the energy out of you let me tell you. Wish I could quit it and just work on games solely for rest of my life. :[

This seems pretty spectacular for the amount of time put in. I can't wait to see what happens with it.

Yesss this was really great. Only gripe with the visuals is a little brown dot in the background which appears right at the bottom of the screen; there was some initial confusion as to whether that was a bit of secret ground I could land on safely or not.

Personally, I found the climbing mechanic manageable, although my instictive tapping of C didn't seem to quite line up with when I approached the bar. The level was pretty chaotic with ghosts every which way, but I cleared it without any dramas. The potion hidden at the top of the yellow blocks gave me grief though - first time I leapt over it I didn't realise I had to hit C to pick it up and drink it, and fell down the shaft again and hauled myself back up.

I did go right back to the start when I died in the second section, though. Not sure if bug or intentional.

Are the one-ups in stage two and the penultimate level meant to be reachable? I couldn't find a way to grab them.

Yep! The extra lives are reachable! Gotta use the flying beetles somehow~

Potions should automatically restore health, no hitting C to use it or anything... Hm.

Yeah sorry there's a checkpoint system but I hadn't made any sort of indicator for it. I think I'll change it to just starting at that room, it seems to be the most reasonable solution if I keep this pattern of rooms.

I'm still ironing out my general level design philosophy, but I think I am going to go for a more "use-enemies-to-solve-puzzles" and just little platforming challenges with a more slower pace. But there'll likely be a few segments that are faster paced ["athletic stages" so to speak] just keep moving forward style stages like the last room in this demo.

Only gripe with the visuals is a little brown dot in the background which appears right at the bottom of the screen; there was some initial confusion as to whether that was a bit of secret ground I could land on safely or not.

Do you have a screenshot or something of this brown dot? I might've just misplaced a tile or it's a general tile graphic I need to change or something.

Do you have a screenshot or something of this brown dot? I might've just misplaced a tile or it's a general tile graphic I need to change or something.

Yupyup!



That little brown majigger looked, for a second, like something worth backtracking onto after I'd crossed the gap and glanced back.

I've updated the demo a bit, messing with the physics and made the vertical section easier, as well as messing a bit with the hanging collisions. Hopefully I've nailed all the bugs that were present too!

Same link from above, but if you're feeling lazy: https://dl.dropbox.com/u/107566568/Demos...evelV1.zip

>DOWNLOAD DEMO HERE<

I apologize for double posting but I would like to inform everyone that I now have the first 3 levels ready for testing.

Controls are the same! Use CTRL to "unlock" levels! Just don't try to enter any levels past 3. It'll simply make you disappear and unable to continue unless you restart the game!

Let me know what you think so far!

[World Map drawn by KittenEater! Thank you!]

You're kidding me right. Is that one-up, that i desperately need, there to mock me?

Great game though. *thumbs up*

Finally got around to play this, it's looking pretty nice so far.
I still have a bit of a problem clinging with the parasol though, sometimes if you cling while you're in the middle of the swing, you'll be moved a parasol's length; i'm guessing it's because it registers the parasol's larger hitbox, it's really disorienting.

Jumping still feels floaty, it's like you jump more than necessary and you fall down really slow. Bouncing off the enemies is difficult and unintuitive (?), when you jump on an enemy you're immediately bounced up a very small distance, I instinctively press jump right after i hit an enemy but since i'm airbone i float with the parasol instead, this is specially annoying when i'm jumping forward confident in that a bounce jump will help me clear a distance but then it doesn't work and i die. I'm thinking Parasol Lady should take some lessons from Mario /smugvideogaemreviewerjoke.

Also, this is just personal preference but ascending levels without constant "checkpoints" or safe spots are obnoxious as hell, there's nothing more frustrating than falling off after jumping on a billion platforms then helplessly floating back somewhere safe to start climbing again.