Retro Platformer: Midget Mager - Jonas Plays Your Game! #008

hey this is Jonas making games with you and today I want to play another fewer game called matcha pretty sure I didn't pronounce that correctly but who cares we're gonna stick to the new formula which means I'm just gonna talk about the things we can learn from this project so sure ask em developers you want to see as much gameplay as possible unfortunately that's a little boring for everybody to watch so let's just focus on some super quick tips we can get out of this it's not with the outside because that's the first thing you see it looks pretty decent look at these designs right here aren't they gorgeous in my opinion it's a common misconception that pixel art automatically makes the game look cool in this case it kind of works though because it's good to go out look at the background look at the color scheme clearly some effort went into this so the main takeaway or what I want to stress here is don't just pick pixel art because you think it's easier to make it's still pretty damn hard to make a good one the first couple of levels play really nicely they're really fun they have exactly the correct difficulty they're not easy not too hard they get

to difficulty just right they introduce enough stuff to keep your interest that you see a lot of different content right away for example this book that lets you shoot fireballs elevators different kinds of enemies and you see all of that within pretty much your first minute of play because I guess that's one point you can take away for your own games don't hold back in the first minutes of playtime because they're literally the most important ones if you can engage your players in the first one or two minutes they'll definitely keep playing for way longer and they'll have a lot more fun and this definitely happened for me in this game it engaged me it got me interested it showed me that there's a lot of content to discover and that kept me going what I really liked is that there's a lot of content and it gets introduced to you at exactly the correct pace which is quite frequently using new stuff pretty much all the time and that pretty much keeps you interested because you're always wondering what's next it also makes every level feel kind of unique every level feels kind of different because there are different kinds of enemies different backgrounds different pickups

different gimmicks whatever it just has a lot of different ideas and the game's not scared to fire them out one after another so yeah they take away constantly mixing up your game with new stuff with new content keeps the player engage it actually works who would have thought there seemed to be quite a couple of Secrets in this game and what I like about that is that they kind of kiss you in this game because you can see them they're not just invisible rules that only appear when you discover them no you can see that there's an area up there and it taunts you yeah you can't reach me I'm a secret but you don't know how to get here and I think that's a really cool thing because if your secrets are completely invisible that most people are just gonna walk past them but if you do it like this a lot of people will stop and start wondering how do I get up there how can I solve this which is obviously a lot more engaging than just walking past it who would have thought one thing that's definitely really positive about this game is just the level design in general for example gems and collectibles are used to guide

you to tell you where to jump where to go enemies are often introduced in a somewhat safe spot with a couple of walls that protect you or something like that every level in every zone has a different feel to it all feels kind of different and unique and special you never have the feeling that content gets reused in a boring way it always feels fresh and the reason for that is just simply good level design and if you have a simple platformer like this level design is what makes or breaks your game period let's dive into the negatives and the one thing that really pissed me off the most is the difficulty combined with checkpoint placement yes I know this game is inspired by old retro games and it's probably supposed to be hard but for me it feels kind of frustrating and if you get inspired by old games why not just keep the good cards and drop what's annoying about it which is the really bad checkpoint placement I know I'm talking from my personal tastes right now I know there are people who enjoy the sort of stuff but I think the majority of people would agree to me

it's not fun to replay the same part of the level again and again if I fail I just want to play that part again where I failed and not the entire world and all the levels before it just feels frustrating if it takes me longer than one minute to get back to the point where I failed last time I just feel like so yes you're getting a spot for outreach programs fine using they are knowing checkpoint and annoying life systems just as me for me sorry about that then what kind of played into my frustration years well are the unpredictable movement patterns of the enemies sometimes they do this sometimes they do that sometimes they jumpy and sometimes they shoot there they just do whatever they want and just so you get to right here I'm not complaining about the difficulty that's what I did in the last point I'm really just talking about the unpredictability because unpredictability makes a few kind of unfair it doesn't feel like you can overcome a situation with your skill it feels like the game screwed you over or the game treated you kind of unfairly and that's obviously not what you want

so how can you fix that in my opinion there are two ways the first one just makes the movement pattern of the enemy more predictable so every time you play it pretty much moves in the same way or it reacts to your actions in the same way or the second one which I like even better is just give me some indicators what the enemy is gonna do next for example if an enemy is gonna jump out of the water please have some sort of bubbles on the water or something like that that shows me that an enemy is gonna come out of that soon otherwise how the hell am I supposed to know and you can do the same thing with enemies if they shoot if they change direction have some sort of indicator that shows me half a second before they do something that they are about to do it yes I know that makes it easier so if you don't want it to be easier than just compensate for that by adding more enemies or whatever you want but at the very least make it predictable so it doesn't feel unfair point number three please work on the jump animation a little bit for a game that is purely about jumping I think the jump animation could use some love then point number four is also just a small one please show me the controls of your game in

game I know in games like these is not that big of a deal because most people know how they work and how they are played but still it's a nice thing to have and it makes sure people stick around then even though the level design in general is pretty good I don't always agree with how new elements are introduced for example these waterfalls right here because what you want to do if you introduce a new element is you want to give the player a safe zone where he can experiment with the mechanics without actually being in danger this is not the case here the first time I meet this waterfall I'm already in danger I can't fall in that gap down there it took me quite a while to figure out that it actually impacts my movement I thought it was just a cosmetic thing to make the level look nice or something like that so what I would like to see instead is a little platforming section we're not in any danger where I can just experiment with the water and where I can feel that it actually impacts my movement so I can learn how to mechanic works if you want to try the game yourself if you want to play yourself you can actually do so on Newgrounds just search for major or mega whatever you can play it

there and you can D if you get further than me I got to this point I couldn't get past the bees the bees are too strong and they're also kind of unpredictable they're flying wobbly lines and drop bullets at random positions what the hell all that hope this was informative and interesting have an amazing day and make the world your playground view in the next one peace out yeah