This is Niche, a little platformer I wrote because a) I like platformers, b) I wanted to try doing my own graphics and c) I needed some motivation to keep me going on a bigger project. It's done as a 7 day mash up with the hope it didn't distract too much from my main project.

The story and graphics are both my creations for which I can only apologise



Play Niche

Instructions in game (cursors to move, ctrl to jump, space to activate stuff), progress is saved as you play.

Feedback and thoughts are appreciated since I think I'd quite like to do something like it as a full game at some point.

Kev

Interesting on the darkness thing, what graphics card do you have?

Kev

Nice!

I like the non-linear feeling of having a big area with a generic "gather x McGuffin"-task. It breaks up what otherwise would be a very linear experience. That's not necessarily a bad thing, but I prefer more open gameplay.

The music is awesome! Sounds effects are rare (just the walk and death sounds?), but adequate. The graphics are usually very clear and cute, although the first time I stepped on spikes, I thought it was a powerup. The jelly-fish enemy would do with some animation.

I wish there was more gameplay elements than just moving, jumping and flipping switches. Some way of dealing with the enemies and/or some powerups would really help the experience. Right now the enemies are almost purely a negative experience for the player, with no rewarding way of dealing with them.
That coupled with them sometimes having too hard to dodge patterns (is it even possible to avoid getting hurt when jumping over a jelly fish traveling the same direction as you are?) and a generous health bar that refills on death led to me just ignoring the enemies and running straight through them.


Bugs:

If you're walking when you die or start a conversation, the walk sound keeps playing.
Some areas seem to respawn all pickups when you enter/leave certain doors, leading to the ability to farm for score.

Could you make the character have a circle bounding box instead of a square? It can be really annoying to jump out when you have a ledge above your head, because the very corner gets stuck.

At the risk of both changing the subject and showing off my noobness -- you can have circle bounding areas?   

I've only ever used rectangles for that....

Even better, because computers are so fast these days, unless you need to squeeze every bit of juice out of your system (which you won't need to), you don't even need to worry about how expensive square root is.

Uh, yeah, I was never saying that you will not be able to slow down your computer, I was saying that using square root 1,000 times per frame is not going to really do anything - worrying about it is basically a thing of the past. Unless you're working on a AAA or you're working for a limited resource system, bothering to avoid the square root is pointless.

Also, I have made 20,000 sprites fly around on my screen with 60 fps, using OpenGL, a texture atlas, and no expensive operations like lighting. I couldn't think of any time I would ever need that much, or even close to that much. In Java2D you could break that right quick, though...

True true. If you have that many objects colliding, you absolutely want to save yourself a square root call. TBH, I avoid calls to sqrt as much as I can, even though I was propping up not needing to use it. I'm kind of biased because someone I work with started storing "rotCos" and "rotSin" variables all over the place in my code, which drove me crazy because he was saving maybe 50 sqrt calls per frame, which is negligible, even on the iPhone. As a result, he made the code much harder to read, and there's some memory wasted instantiating objects with unnecessary variables.

Either way, do what seems best in the moment.