Hit a Bit

After a quick playtest of the game, here are my two cents about what the game did well and what could have been improved (both within the scope of the 24 hour game jam and outside it).

The concept

I must admit I like the concept of the game: the idea of two graphic styles fighting to conquer the field is pretty nice. The game is also what's most likely my favourite genre ever , platform fighters, so I'm kind of biased towards it.

Either way, the game supplies two characters with really basic movements and two simple attacks (one is quick but weak while the other is slow but strong). As far as the attacks are concerned, I've only got praises for it: even though there's not much versatility with only two attacks, that still managed to characterize and differentiate the two playstyles.

The gameplay

One of my biggest problems with the game, though, is the movement: it seems that the out-of-the-box physics engine was used, with regular forces used for movement. While using unity's physics was definitely a good choice for such a small time window, I think that a little more focus on movement (making it snappier) would have made for a much better game (since movement is the basics for a platform fighter). Techinicalities incoming: it could have been a wise choice to manually change the Rigidbody2D.velocity vector for side movement (or, if you wanted to stick with forces, greatly increase them and use linear drag to limit max speed, tinkering with gravity if needed for vertical speeds).

I get that dashes are implemented to solve the problem of slow side movement, but either way they feel a bit too exaggerated (speed-wisely) to me. Also it feels kinda awkward performing them with the down button rather than double press of the direction you want to move into.

The user experience

Luckily Unity lets the user re-map input buttons, but I'm kind of iffy on the default choices. Either way, that's not too big a problem IF the user is used to Unity's player.

As far as the menu is concerned, it's a bit painful not being able to navigate it with buttons (since joypads are supported, too, although I did not test them). Not a big problem, either way.

Also, the post-win screen is a concept I like (and I also have implemented similar ones in my games) that lets you play around after winning, but, unless I missed it, there's no way to manually end it and have to wait a pretty long time just to move on. I think that a "press BUTTON to continue" would have been a reasonable addition within the time limits of building the game.

The in-game UI is really cute and intuitive, nice!

Small technicalities

These may seem like serious rants, but they are just small things I noticed that rubbed me the wrong way, nothing deal-breaking:

• I think that the choice of a rounded collider makes some interaction feel unnatural (e.g. standing on the edge of a platform or, worse, hitting it full-speed).
• The walls that limit the area are clearly invisible rigidbodies and the fact that they have friction feels too strange.
• Similarly, I think the ground has friction too, which is not great in my opinion: since you already have problems with side speed, it would have been better to remove friction to at least improve on-ground movement.
• Players can stand on top of each other. This, alone, makes me pretty uncomfortable, but I get that fixing  would have taken a bit more of time (it would have meant separately handling Player-Player collisions by using a different collider). However, not being able to jump while on the other player is strange enough and when it happens it wrecks the flow of the game. I don't know how you handled the grounded state, but usually it's not a hard problem to solve and most often than not involves simply adding a variable.
• The lack of linear drag makes some movements awkward (expecially dash-based ones).
• Discrete collisions are rarely a good thing in such simple games: it's easy to have the two characters bypass one another if they dash one against the other (and I think, but have not tested it, that it could be possible to break something else by speeding up that much). Rule of thumb: if the game is not resource-intensive, enable continuous collision detection on any rigidbody you can think of.

Overall

The game is definitely enjoyable and a great achievement for a group of beginners attempting their first ever game jam. Some points could have been fixed in the same time window, but it's easy to miss them when cramming through the development of a game.

I hope that everyone involved had fun with the project and will want to get better at it: I'm looking forward to see another project (perhaps at CPIT3?).