EDIT: it's out! Can still play it from the same link below.
Hey all -- looking for some testers for my new game. Want to make sure it's bug-free and the critical path isn't too frustrating. Won't really describe it too much since I find blind testing is the best testing. It's called "Control the Body". Here is a screenshot:
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https://gate.itch.io/control-the-body
[“Control the Body - new game in made in pico8”,“Control the Body - new pico8 game”]
[upl-image-preview url=//i.imgur.com/PIewzpY.jpeg]
I managed to win. Very neat game. The critical path was challenging and I have no idea how to get some of the challange ones, but it was fun to see them and try to work them out even if I don't think I could manage playing on my phone. The ||wall jump one one screen under bad door|| was brutal on touch pad likely much less so on keyboard or controller.
@TracyDMcGrath oh wow, you won on a phone? super impressive!
yeah some of challenge collectibles are brutal. the red ones are pretty much impossible, even on a controller/keyboard.
Sorry I had to stop playing because ben told me a secret I wasn‘t supposed to know about and he said you didn’t want me to know, but I am now flush with forbidden knowledge and cannot look back… Sorry if you're mad
in all seriousness what I could get into rules and I am just too bunk at controlling the body. It's got a great sense of discovery and progression, I probably would have played much less than I did just from the thrill if figuring something out and then going to apply what I learned somewhere. Soft gating Metroid-likes with game knowledge or maneuvers is so cool. Reminds me of [pupy world ](http://wolfpupy.com/pupyworld/)
I wouldn't call the critical path frustrating but I did often feel like I could have used a little more direction on how to accomplish the intended movement
Wow this game is nuts. Hard to wrap my head around. Really good concept for a puzzle platformer.
I didn't get very far so I can't give you feedback about bugs and general gameplay loop lol. I'll check it out again later.
@Gaagaagiins ah, pupy world is a silvie game. should have guessed! yeah i‘ve definitely played some of sylvie’s stuff, but not that particular one. i'll try it out!
yeah it's real cool. luv the music and dialogue. for me personally it might be too challenging although generally i am not drawn to mechanics-intensive masocore types.
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i am stuck here...i know i'm meant to climb the walls with the stick shoes but i can't figure out how to do it
@tapevulture ah, yeah that room is probably more deceiving than i intended it to be. you actually have a lot of horizontal acceleration in this game so you can more or less jump from a higher platform to get that green one without any super fancy tricks.
the yellow one, on the other hand, is a lot harder to get.
ah i see now dog gonnit. this happens to me a lot in games where i get it in my head that there‘s one way to do something and i can’t see the obvious answer staring me right in the face lol
Not a platformer, but Outer Wilds is another recent game that comes to mind that does this extremely well (in a truly non-linear way, too.) Probably my favorite game of the last decade!
Borderline ashamed to admit I didn‘t care for it, lol. Perhaps for one of the reasons that I stuck with your game longer than I thought I would… my interest in anything fizzles out very quickly without enough feedback from the game that I’m doing something right, or perhaps more importantly, wrong. I “got” Outer Wilds, and I would never say anything so crass as to suggest there‘s something wrong with it, there’s just something about it that makes me feel very frustrated with getting through it.
If I had to explain it… maybe it‘s like… figuring out how to make progress doesn’t feel like making progress to me, it feels like a chore. And, in the worst cases of my experience with Outer Wilds, the feeling of making progress felt momentarily exciting but then that feeling would be fleeting, and often like I'd tripped over it rather than figured it out. As well it was deeply frustrating when I felt I knew what conclusion the game was expecting me to come to, because I could parse the abstract information coming at me, but repeatedly what I ran into was that the means by which the game expects one to play the little blue guy to make that result happen through manipulation of the game world would constantly escape me.
In other words, maybe you game is like that too… but also… you respawn several seconds away so at least to me it feels like experimentation has less downsides heheh
@Gaagaagiins Yeah the pacing and framing are entirely different. Could totally see not liking Outer Wilds but enjoying my game!
I really enjoyed the physics simulation and just the base exploration in Outer Wilds, so I spent like 10 hours just going "oh that looks cool, what's that?" and jumping around between whatever caught my eye without much need for feedback or validation. If it doesn't grab you like that, then yeah, I think you're going to have a worse time.
Some of it might be an expectation/communication problem, too. Very few games are paced like Outer Wilds, and when the exploration/mystery aren't the entire focus of the game, I can get very frustrated too.
Meanwhile I think in my first hour of play I shot out the probe camera thing and I think my first thought was “I hope I never have to use this for progression” lol.
Also I beat Control The Body… and… I gotta know… what those new shoes do
Haha, spoilers obviously but: They‘re just colored red; they’re functionally identical to your current shoes. A pretty mean trick if you were expecting some help on the red orbs after getting all the yellow ones.!
this is a good time and while I haven't gotten too far yet, I really like flipping the little guy around
I knew it....
I've been having a ton of fun with this game since yesterday and I will at least get all of the yellow thingys
made a couple small updates – updated a dialog to be more color blind friendly and fixed a bug where the turning cooldown wasn't ticking while you were stuck to a wall (helps with buffering turns sometimes, especially when attempting to get reds).
otherwise it's been pretty well-received by my testers so far and i'm happy w/ how it turned out!