Mandible Games

1. I couldn’t figure if there was a way to reset quickly after getting hurt very early on.
2. I couldn’t figure out how to get past the area with the flying things without getting hurt at least once.
3. The porcupine thingies on the steps at the final battle (caused by the difficulty in judging the jumps, but that wasn’t that big a problem the rest of the time).

There's no good way to reset besides dying. You can hit F12 to restart the game quickly, but then you get to sit through the intro sequence again, which isn't skippable. (This was a mistake, which I'll fix in future games.) Menus take a lot of work compared to their value and I'm trying to largely avoid them, but sometimes I think they're just necessary. It needs a "restart" option.

You can do get through the bird zone by going under them – there's a few dogs you have to lure into pits. You can get out of the underneath zone by using an elephant as a footstool, or, if you're confident with jumping, you can actually hurdle over the porcupine in the bottom-right and then jump back over it to the left to get back up. It's quite tricky, however, I've only managed it without damage once or twice.

The porcupines are meant to be a huge hazard if you're trying to not kill anything. Personally, it's always the dog that gets me, though :)

ps. the elephants (?) seem very cave story-ish :)

I may have modeled a significant amount of my art and physics off Cave Story. The explosion is *cough* somewhat reminiscent as well.

I didn't realize how incredibly weird the actual Cave Story "Behemoths" are until I looked at them closely, though. Seriously, look at those things. They're bricks on legs, and their faces are at a 45 degree angle.

Having played both this and your previous months game, this was definitely my favourite of the two. It was fairly entertaining all the way through, though it was your boss battle at the end that really had me.

It was a good ‘aha’ moment to realise that I could do it easier by just moving left away from the yellow beam, then back over to the right only firing if there was spare time – and saving the majority of my ’shooting time’ for when the big ground attack went off.

Writing it now it sounds silly, but it ’scared’ me that the dogs(?) moved towards me. Not consciously at first but after playing through my second time it struck me that I was triggering them to run forward before running back, turning, and then killing them.

The dogs actually ended up hugely nastier than I expected – I nerfed them twice before the release and they're still deadly. Homing effects are incredibly powerful.

I agree with your assessment of fun – No Such Thing just flat-out isn't all that fun. I need to make sure games are fun first, then worry about my gimmick.

Making boss fights is fun, and I'm mostly happy with how this one turned out. The ground attack looks kind of weird, and some people tried to shield themselves from the laser with the floating platforms, which just flat-out does not work. I suspect most people got killed by the end boss on the first try – I need to do a better job of telegraphing how his abilities behave.

He's a fun boss though, and I think he's the only part of the game that I didn't end up needing to tweak heavily after implementing. He just plain worked on the first try.

I like how the optional goal of saving everything provides an extra level of challenge for a good player while the game is still beatable by an average player.

I also like how you can jump on the elephants. It is nice to be able to use enemies to interact with the environment and to interact with enemies in more ways than shooting them.

I forget what else I had in the lost comment except that I joked that the game used to be called Bioshock and I also liked that there was so much blood and violence in a game called Fluffytown.

I'm very glad that the difficulty worked out. I've heard far too many horror stories about developers overtuning their game so only they can beat it – in fact, I've been guilty of the same thing with some of my ancient game designs. From what I can tell, most people need to take a few tries to beat it the normal way, then take a few more tries to beat it the hard way. That's pretty much what I was aiming for, and I really really like how it works.

I realized early on that I'd need something more interactive than "the enemy hurts you", otherwise the so-called difficult pacifist mode would just degenerate into "don't get hit by anything" and I'd have made No Such Thing 2.0. Not really my goal.

Midway through this thing I noticed I was drawing a truly incredible amount of gore and blood for a game called Fluffytown that is fundamentally about pacifism. Well . . . what can you do, I guess.

Someday I really need to play Bioshock.

Yeah, I ran into that bug while testing, then thought I squashed it. Naturally, it showed up again immediately after releasing version 1.0. Scaffold v2 fixes it, finally.

I'd love to make a more challenging game, but a lot of platformer challenge comes from new gimmicks, and I only had so much time ;)

If you want to check out an awesome retro horror series, start here – 5 Days A Stranger, 7 Days A Skeptic, Trilby's Notes, and 6 Days A Sacrifice, in that order. Great series.