Armel

kimardamina

Good day All,
I hope your Monday is going well and you 're making progress on your projects. I am sharing with you guys the very first downloadable link of our Kimard Studio game. The game is called Armel ( there is a long story behind the name which I can explain later ) and it is probably the less exciting if you are looking at great physics in this 2D platformer. As a business, we work on various projects and one of our major one which is this game has reached a stage where we invested lots of time since June 2016 trying to get things right. The game is mainly a graphical exploration with limited mechanics but with a musical ambiance which we would like you to experience and give your feedback.
From its initial concept, everything happens in a music sheet, and the main character Armel was cursed and made small to experience the meaning of what each music composition if they were brought to life. He has been exiled and needs to go through this journey to reunite with his family.
I would like you to test it, try and enjoy its simplicity and give feedback. We have the demo available on Itch.io for you and here are some screenshots.

mattbenic

Hey, thanks for sharing :)

I just had a quick play until about halfway through the third level. From what I saw, overall I quite liked the look of the game. Some visual feedback:
-Some of your background textures look like they've been scaled and are aliasing quite badly, and this is particularly obvious in the style you've chosen. Make sure you're creating your source assets large enough for at least your default resolution.
-Maybe it's just me, but the main character's head design is such that it looks like it's looking backwards when moving.
-Some of the "enemy" colour choices don't seem to quite match with the rest of your palette. The flames felt this way, and so do the red spikey things in the gif above. It's good to have hazards stand out, but they ideally shouldn't stand out so much that they just don't match the rest of the game.
-On the other hand some of the hazards don't stand out enough from the background. The black falling rocks all but disappear into some of the darker blues and greens.

Generally the gameplay (which you acknowledged above is quite simple) felt fine but I do have some feedback on how that ties to your theme:
Your story and imagery does suggest that music is important to the game, and this was helped by the little touches like collecting "keys" (why not just call them notes?) adding depth to the music, and the music playing in reverse when you run to the left. It feels though like there's a lot more you can do here: rather than the persistent basic beat always playing, why not scale it to the player's horizontal movement? You could potentially also alter the tone based on the line the player is moving along (tying it more closely to the idea of a music sheet). Also, and I'd say more importantly the player's jump should rather have a sound that feels like part of the composition and that should really change tone based on the line you're on. Overall I really felt like I wanted to have more of an influence on the music, or the music on me.

I look forward to the next build :)