Great concept, and it was well implemented it, but there seemed to be so many instances where the levels seemed excessively and unnecessarily challenging! From PUSH onwards... damn. Why were some time limits required? Why so many collectibles? So many copies of yourself to avoid? Did the creator actually playtest this, or did he just program the levels and say, "Yeah, a twenty second time limit sounds about right." or "This concept is pretty innovative, but I want my player to needlessly SWEAT through it, so I'll just toss in thirty or so unnecessary collectibles to pad it out."

I'm sorry, I guess just wanted to like it so much... Perhaps some of this will be only subjective; I guess I'm too much of an opponent to myself. However, by creating goals in previous levels, the creator is setting up the difficulty in subsequent levels. If some of the unnecessary goals were removed, the difficulty would be reduced across the board for all players.

Difficult games have their place, but it didn't seem as if that's what this game was aiming for. Thus, maybe some few changes should be made.

I really liked the concept, though.

Fwiw, jon blow is just listed as a tester ... the blame and credit should still go to the developer; it's their job to decide how much to listen to testers.

Well, perhaps I just want someone to blame. :)

However, like I said above, it seems like in some levels the developer just pushed it too far: why the need to collect SO many pellets, why the need to avoid SO many incarnations of yourself, why the need to accomplish the goal on such a short time limit? These choices were made by the developer, and they contributed to the unnecessary difficulty. I think a bit more playtesting would've revealed that most players have the same frustrating experiences on the same levels, despite their own subjective contributions to the difficulty.

well i was just wondering, why the level "save" is over after 3 seconds. I dont even have a chance to save 3 or 4 of the pellets before i die

I just finished this ... it's a neat high level concept, but the asteroids-style controls make shooting levels in particular rather frustrating. I'd love to see the high-level concept here revisited with a stronger thematic concept and a non-asteroids base for the gameplay.

@Zombilla: it's because of how you played the level before ...

This seems pretty well thought out from a design perspective. The juxtapositions of the different levels seem to be pretty solid.

In terms of feedback, I think one of the biggest problems is that the mechanic is not made intuitive enough. I don't think it's an unintuitive idea, but the way it's presented doesn't naturally cause the player to figure it out immediately. If I were playing this without paying much attention, I could easily play through the first few levels without understanding the idea, thinking I was just playing a game with very eccentric AI.

I also confess I found myself turned off by the esthetics of the game (or was it just the music?) I think a bit of lightweight esthetic work could yield pretty good returns.

This is a really neat idea- I got stuck after "protect," but I'll definitely give it another go tomorrow. Thanks for making this.

This game is a dream and a nightmare. Holy sh!t.

That's the kind of games I want for breakfast, a beautiful wtf?! moment :'D

Can you imagine the creator could have let us choose between A and B at level 1, then at level 30, your "ghost" decide if you win or lose ? so you'll have to "P" (previous level) all the way to level 1 ? crazy system :D

ps : had to "P" the "save" level, too freaking hard.

=> just put some multiplayer and time portal in it (with the curved gravity thing), and it will be complete ;D

(post n°2)

this game reminds me the excellent 10*self-coop game " cursor*10 " :)

About the difficulty level, I still don't understand why MOST indie mini-games (you know, these nearly-impossible 8 bits platform games) are extremely hard :x

imo "we" (indie games players/devs, the community) are not that elitist, where's the open-mindness ?

=> Why adding one more obstacle on the indie barricade ?
Is it really necessary to protect indies from "mainstream" and average-regular video-game consumer like that ?

And to be honest, I prefer spending 10 min playing an easily enjoyable indie game rather than spending an hour trying again and again and again...
=> There's enough frustration out there (irl) or on your computer (fixing bugs, random crashes), we don't need yet-another-IWBTG.

Zap

+ ps : there's no coins on the internet, you don't need to make "arcade games".

Thanks for the comments, folks.

I agree it is kind of too hard, although that was necessary to make the gimmick interesting, because otherwise people would never replay the previous level. The difficulty was discussed a lot by the playtesters, but I couldn't really think of a good way to fix without starting over and making a totally different game.

Because, yeah, I agree that the asteroids gameplay is probably not the best thing for the gimmick, but since I did the game indie-game-jam style, that's the game I ended up making, and I didn't want to sit on it for years trying to figure out a better way to use the gimmick.

And, yes, I mention Cursor*10 in the in credits.

(The main contribution of the playtesters is that I put in a bunch of things at the beginning to make it easier to notice the gimmick, and I made the game a lot easier--several levels were even harder in the original!)