Beautiful artwork, but I have to confess that between the loose controls and the long, boring tutorial, it made me ragequit.

I had hoped that after SteamShovel Harry came out, these tutorials would be finished for good. Don't developers realise that:

1) if you make the controls discoverable and simple, and
2) if there are people who still don't understand them, that
3) they aren't the kind of people who will play through the tutorial?

I strongly agree, Bennett. I had the same experience. Beautiful artwork, but with controls and level design that feels awkward, lacking flow, and a terribly annoying tutorial that attempts to teach you that fact. I seriously never, ever want to "play" another tutorial that thinks it's alright to specifically teach me how to walk unless it uses some crazy experimental method of walking.

Not all gamers want a condescending and time wasting experience. If you don't want to design levels themselves well enough to teach these things, at LEAST make the tutorial optional. Even Super Mario Galaxy, with its 3D movement, spherical level design, and object-based-gravity didn't spell things out this much, and Nintendo is VERY concerned with accessibility. Treat the player with some respect! Remember that we create half of the experience, and we have brains. If we wanted the experience to be dictated to us in such detail, we would go to more passive entertainment.

Sorry, my last post was too negative. The tutorial and pacing of the game really frustrated me, and I kinda let that frustration out here.

I have to again say that the art looks really good. Lots of little touches and nice color choices. This is a good effort, and I'm sure lots of people will keep playing just to see more of the visuals that the game has to offer. Good luck!

The tutorial is excessively long, I agree, but I'd still recommend giving this a shot. It's well-designed on the whole, and it gets quite enjoyable.

Great, bought it and after it the Site went down -_-

is it just me or is the site not loading

Site's dead for me too.

"500 Internal Server Error"
At least I get the site's icon on the address bar... I think.

I love the style, I prefer the backdrop to the characters though, there's something missing in the backgrounds.. maybe a lighter background, i found it was a bit distracting.

and I've gotta agree with what everyone said about the tutorial

Hi everyone, I'm the creator of 'Finwick'

My webhost did indeed go down overnight. You can't imagine how frustrating that was for me, the day after I launch the game onto the public, the site going down. Apologies to anyone who was affected by that.

It's interesting to hear feedback about the length of the tutorial at the start of the game. I was looking at it only partly as a tutorial, but also as an excuse to set the scene, start the story and get the player jumping around a bit. I guess it's a little wordy, but I figured any player who didn't want to read all the text could just bang space a few times and move on. I suppose it's easy to underestimate how frustrating elements like that can be to a player, especially in a Flash game where you're often looking for instant gratification.

Apologies again for the server outage. If you missed out on trying the game, please have another go. :)

The gameplay is way too tedious for me, but I do tend to play a lot of quicker platformers. As soon as I got to the switching mechanic a had to stop playing. Seriously now, that's one of the worst mechanics I've ever seen! It forces you to go through a subset of the level twice without anything new. I really hope the level after I quit introduced a way to set one of the characters to automatically follow the other one, or something of that nature.

I played through the 26 level demo and... not bad. $6 good? Maybe, but certainly an excellent effort.

In foremost, more than the majority of Flash games, the polish of the game and interface are exceptional. I didn't find any bugs or weirdness anywhere -- the whole engine is excellent.

The game's flavor is established more through graphics than anything else. I didn't feel the graphics had any particular style despite being technically excellent, and the writing began to flesh out a world...

Finwick seems to be trying to create an adventure somewhere between Knytt and Mario, only it lacks the intensity of a real adventure and the excitement of a classically styled game. It walks a line in story and world building where the environment is explained just enough to sate our curiosity, but not enough to provoke further inquiry. The mechanical nature of the game is simplistic, where the most difficulty I experienced came from the steady loss of patience for trundling timed puzzles that required neither skill nor cleverness.

Additionally, later on you're joined by a second character who is uninteresting identical to the first. She adds no observable interest in terms of dialog or interaction. She's only there to allow for a new series of relay puzzles, which like other puzzles are mostly trivial.

The experience of traveling through the world in Finwick isn't unpleasant -- on the contrary, it's reasonably good -- it's just... unremarkable. I don't feel like I progressed meaningfully, or that the plot being slowly laid at my feet was interesting enough to want to explore. It's a straight forward, 2D action-puzzler that features no new mechanics and no innovative uses of the traditional ones it applies. It doles out a story that presumably has no forks and that the player couldn't possibly influence. Besides some neat visual effects, Finwick doesn't seem to provide anything we haven't already seen at least 10 years prior to now.

Does that make Finwick bad? No, not at all. I maintain that it's polished and professional. It abides by a technical standard I'd be happy to hold up as gold for the flash-dev community. Despite that, it just doesn't have the innovation to push itself beyond 'just another game'.

Loved the demo. The tutorial was a little wordy but nothing you couldn't bang the space bar to skip ahead. I really enjoy platformers that "unlock" new abilities as you play them (Knytt comes to mind). Examples here would be the standard tutorial that is later followed by the lever/dial mechanic, then the underwater part, and finally the double character mechanic.

Someone mentioned that the double character mechanic was a negative thing. In some cases I would agree, but not once did it force me to go through a level twice. Each character had their own path and the levels didn't feel drawn out at all.

Is it groundbreaking? No, and honestly as a college student I find it hard to pay more than the cost of lunch (or most iPhone apps) for a game I anticipate completing within the night. That being said, I enjoyed the demo for it's simple but fun style, and at a more reasonable price (I'm guessing you would easily pick up 3x the number of purchases at $2) or with a few more features (user designed levels? randomly matched co-op with others?) I would definitely be more inclined to support the project further.

I was a bit frusterated with the site going down and the tutorial did go on a bit further than was needed. Some of the time-based puzzles were a bit annoyingly difficult, while others were just fine.

Other than a couple of things that just didn't make sense (like why would there be those powerful electric lines deep in the forest?), I thought the game was nice with it getting kind of interesting just before the tutorial stopped (intentional, I know).

One thing I wish was added was the ability to move both characters at the same time... like, if you're close enough to each other, to press a button (like holding down z?) to be able to control/move both.

I would agree with the comments saying that the sense of exploration is removed by very narrow and linear paths to follow... I hope in the later levels this changes! It would have been nice to have a couple levels early on to exhibit this. Maybe even some secrets that aren't hinted at but let you try to get creative with?

I may buy this, but I am not sure yet. If money wasn't tight for me, I probably would go right ahead. I commend you on making this game, I can tell you put a lot of time into it.

Jackson Lewis: "I suppose it's easy to underestimate how frustrating elements like that can be to a player, especially in a Flash game where you're often looking for instant gratification."

I mentioned Mario Galaxy in my example, which isn't a Flash game, but respected the player's mind and time more. It's not just about wanting instant gratification. It wasn't just about how much text there was. It might be that it shoved down your throat a million times that you have to press DOWN to stomp. Or maybe it's that even if you did skip the text, you still had to perform the completely uninteresting and unrewarding task.

It just felt like going to a theme park roller coaster, and being given a 5 minute lesson on how to sit down before riding the coaster. The fact is, I wouldn't mind waiting in line for half an hour up to that point nearly as much as being given a lesson on how to sit down because it's condescending and disrespectful to basic mental faculties. Taking time to set the mood is fine, but not only do some games manage to do it in a more integrated way, but the tasks between the mood setting chunks of text didn't contribute to the experience at all. I don't know, it could have been because some of the collision rules you use (like walking directly through what looks like walls on platforms above the ground, and on long jumps, falling through the end platform a little before being glitched back up onto it), or the loose controls that required a "stop" button of sorts in the design because the player wouldn't have the jump precision otherwise. I'll have to play again to get to the source of my frustration, but I know the tutorial didn't help.

There are certain techniques that successful designers have learned to use in order to teach the player in a more subtle and enjoyable way, and to communicate graphically what is foreground and what is background. And I think that some polish of controls could help as well. All these things would go a very long way to get people to play long into the game with no ill feelings.

Sorry if you don't want this critique at all. I just care enough to say these things because I feel like you're so close, and could see you do much better in sales and player enjoyment with some adjustments. Unfortunately, the things I mentioned are more difficult to do than the basic game, and are how great designers differ from others. Polish is one of the most time consuming tasks in game development. Good luck.

Anyone know how many levels are in the full game? I can't believe it's not mentioned on the site to show how much you get for your money. ???

I think it's a cool little game. I'm stuck on level 10. :/

The beautiful scenery is all the instant gratification I need from a casual game, and I'm an inexperienced gamer, so the tutorial didn't annoy me - on the contrary, I enjoyed it because it allowed me to practice without the risk of being killed. I really enjoyed the 26 free levels, and when I find a job will consider paying for the other 50 levels. (Maybe I should try to get a job as a postman now? I mean, I'm qualified now, am I not?! *g*)

I have negative (as in LESS than ZERO) interest in "purchasing" a flash game on a website.

Make a game that's downloadable, and runs as an executable in windows, and I'll consider it.

Other than that, not a bad game.

The website is down again; actually, it has been suspended. I purchased the game and now can't play it.

The website has been "suspended." I purchased the game and can no longer play it. Thoughts?

you can still play the game at this site!

http://www.smallgreenhill.com/games/finwick/