Good catch! I wanted to fix that for quite some time now, but I was a bit reluctant because I needed to slightly change the movement pattern of these platforms. The shortly visible sliding animation is there because when the platform abruptly stops, the hero still has some horizontal velocity from before and needs a few frames to come to a halt himself. It should be fixed now and be visible once I push out the next update. Thanks!

Heh... I was genuinely interested if you had the need for that because I was thinking about adding it. The problem is, on smaller screens, these buttons would take up a lot of screen space. Space I'd like to fill with more interesting stuff.
Furthermore, every Android device I know of has hardware volume controls... so decided against it.

Umm, it's whatever resolution the android device has. The screenshots have 800x480 because it's a very widespread resolution...
Maybe I was unclear. When I said in game menu I mean the menu you can bring up during a level. It also pauses the game. 

YES! This is exactly how it should be.
IMHO, games platformers can suffer hugely from a bad camera. It's actually quite hard to get right, even though it seems like an easy task at first.
You don't want too sudden changes in positioning. If you follow the player too tightly, the game becomes too "nervous" in a way. Especially when the player is jumping up and down.
On the other hand, you want the camera to show enough of the player's surrounding (and ideally the important things!). If you don't, the player gets too cautious and starts noticing the camera, which is just as bad.

No way around that...

You mean in game? Because you can reach the options menu from the main menu where you can set that...

The in game menu is not good enough? Why would you need a dedicated pause function?

I played neither minecraft nor starbound very much, let alone be active in the communities... and I don't even know what you mean by AMAs... so I guess I'm somebody else...  

The main music theme is made by a musician called Bunnymajs. I can't put into words how awesome his music is! Check him out at http://bunnymajs.newgrounds.com/ it's just epic!

The more diamonds you leave behind and not collect throughout each world, the more health rico (the boss at the end of each world) has. If you collect all coins in a world, he has only 3 hearts/hitpoints when you face him. I might need to make that mechanic clearer, but I'm not sure yet how.

BTW, I'm glad for every 5 star rating i get in the Android store!  

Thanks!  

I plan to release a desktop version for Windows, Mac and Linux. But as it's much harder to push out updates than for Android, I want to increase the game content-wise before I do that.

But you can download the lite-version for the desktop here:
http://planet-wars.net/rico/RicoLite.jar.zip
Please note that it's still mostly optimized for Android, so some things might feel off, like bringing up the ingame menu. But you can test the game just as well!
Controls are:
Left/Right: Arrow keys
Jump: X, space
Attack: Y, Z, left control
Menu: Escape

Have fun!

It *should* work, as I added support for the Xperia Play recently (and the PhoneJoy docs even tell they use the same keycodes). But I had to "develop in the dark", because I don't own one and can't test if it actually works. If you find the time, could you test with your PhoneJoy and tell me? That would be awesome!  

Hey there!

I recently released my newest game "Rico - A Tale Of Two Brothers". It's a retro-inspired platformer, that mixes elements from many great classics like Super Mario, Castlevania or Metroid with my own humble ideas. I've also received comments about its resemblance to VVVVVV.
Bottom line: I wanted to create a game I would have loved to play as a child and still love to play now!

I know, I know, … a platformer on a mobile device, where on-screen controls normally don't work very well. But I can assure you that I've put much work into making the controls as tight and responsive as possible… and I've had numerous people telling me that the controls do work really well for them! So why not give it a try?

You can try out the lite version for free here:
https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=rico.lite.app
The full version is available here:
https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=rico.app
And you can watch a gameplay video here:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1RIJTNdGW1w







Rico currently features 19 levels (more to come soon), 4 difficulty levels, boss battles, collectible crystals, numerous different enemies and traps and a lovely retro-soundtrack!

Thanks for checking it out!