Huck n Hubble

I think this is one of the best looking games I played on this jam so far.

I recorded myself playing this game: https://youtu.be/9KECHOi_a48

Sorry if my commentary sounds a little bit too harsh. :D

I’ll copy some of my observations here as a set of my random thoughts about the game:

• The looks and sounds of this game are good. It’s something that I would assume to be a production-ready Steam game.

• The core idea and mechanic is cool. It was quite hard to get used to though. Partially because of the issues I had during that experience (read below). But I would say that if you master it, you can navigate MUCH faster than before. It’s rewarding. Or, at least, it could be rewarding is other things are not distracting you from enjoying that. :D

• I still prefer the “easy to learn, hard to master” mantra. This game fell “frustrating to learn, hard to master” for me. But again, it’s due to the things I’ll mention in a second.

• So, the first thing is running. A and D are supposed to make your character run left and right. Well, that’s what they’re doing, but it only works if the surface is flat. Perfectly flat. Like there is ~0 delta in the Y axis. :D More often than not, I ended up stuck in the terrain. Either it should be more useful, or it should be removed from the game in my opinion. But that’s up to you. :D

• The second thing would be the collision shape/area. Sometimes I can catch the hat using my legs. Sometimes I can almost phase right through it. The other time I know that it was 100% my fault, but I wish the game would let me go with that miss and gave me a victory. :D It’s not like being pixel-perfect precise is the most important thing in this game, at least in my opinion. Missing the hat makes you repeat the segment => not fun. It you’re bad at the game, the bad patterns of movement will make you go slow, not your inability to catch the hat in 10 pixels. If you’re more experienced, it feels like a rope racing in worms. Note that in worms you have to be precise too, but many times your rope will hit “something” so you’ll have another swing to fix your mistakes. In this game, one miss can lead to the repeated part of the game. This could ruin the fun for some players. I like this game and I want more people to enjoy it. Perhaps you need to collect some more feedback and decide whether this thing should be fixed in one way or another.

• The third thing would be something I still couldn’t figure out. You can see me struggling with it in the beginning and ending parts of the video. When you’re close to the left or right corner/border of the level, it looks like aiming the hat changes. Something is wrong about the angles. My cursor aims at ~45 degrees from the top, but the hat goes exactly above the character (0 degrees in this sense). Is that intended? It’s not obvious what I’m supposed to do with that mechanic.

• The fourth struggle is a control scheme. It’s quite painful to play this game on a small laptop. I would enjoy this game with my gamepad more I guess. Or maybe the jump could be bound to more than one key, so I could use a right mouse button to jump. That means I could use my left hand for A+D only and my right hand for LMB+RMB. I talked about this topic in more details in the video, but maybe those details are excessive, I don’t know. :)

I failed to complete the game due to the physical pain in my left hand. Plus the frustration at that point was pretty high. :D I really wish I could beat the game, since I do appreciate many things about it. But as it is right now, it may benefit from some gameplay and quality of life improvements.

I’m interested to hear more about this game in the future, if it will be released somewhere, someday.

Good luck!

A lovely little gem

I really liked the game !

Art, audio, and design are all great. Pretty fun!

Very fun game