11th April 2017

RSKGames (Rajasekaran Senthil Kumaran in the comments) has been posting these for the last few games, so I thought it only reasonable to "upgrade" his review comments into full posts, so that not only does everyone get to read them (some folk's systems don't appear to like the Disqus comment system) but I can also add my own replies in a neater thread-like way.

If you'd like to leave your own thoughts on my games, either use the comments, or get in touch via email.
Let's try to make this a weekly thing, maybe!?
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RSKGames / Rajasekaran Senthil Kumaran

Completed my first round of play and enjoyed the game. Good creativity making the "Samurai Plat" title design look like Japanese. Background music is catchy and gives a feel of Japanese music.

Yup, all got nice and Japanese'y for this game.
A typically lazy font selection from 1001Fonts.com (search for Japanese and it's the 4th one!) and the Choon came together much easier than I expected it to. In fact, the Choon was done well in advance of most of the gameplay, so things became super japanese'y once that had been added in!
I'm quite disappointed, though, that I didn't get time to add different world-themes to the game. That's been something I've done for the past few games, and I wanted to add it here, but after rushing to get the game even basically playable, there just wasn't the time.
Fiddlesticks!

Liked the ability to destroy the bullet. Accidentally tried it when there was no where to run and it worked but requires lot of precision.

I wasn't sure if people would figure that out. It's certainly something that I was going to add a tutorial mode to, but in the end I figured blind panic would probably make people realise that it's possible

Glad you found it.
Do note, however, that if you stand and hit bullet after bullet after bullet, the statues will shoot them at a faster and faster rate, so hopefully people won't be spamming that for highscores.

The work gone into connecting all the platforms using ladders is great, I had to go left and right to find the connecting ladders to seemingly unconnected platforms (First I thought some are not reachable). This makes things non trivial to reach certain platforms.

This is easily one of the most complex "Random-Platform-Layout" techniques that I've done, and I think it turned out rather well.
The game relies upon the player being transported to the ground floor upon death. Something I've not typically done. But with that in place, there's usually a nice flow to the levels.
The spheres, statues and flaming bushes all appear in positions that you can reach them, from the ground floor, so that nothing's ever impossible.
I might expand on this in future games. It's quite an interesting level layout.

Collision detection with ladders could have been made a bit wider as climbing up is sometimes tricky. Not able to get down the ladders make the game a bit harder.

Only going up ladders was an early decision based on two things.
First, the level generator ended up making much more complicated levels if you had to find alternative up and down paths. Having a single up/down point made it really simplistic, and all the levels were much more plain because of it.
Secondly, a long long long time ago, I uploaded Karl's Tiny Adventure for OUYA review, and they complained that the "No DPad is as good as Nintendo's" DPad would occasionally cause the player to run up and down ladders they didn't mean to.
For this reason I opted to have just up be used, so that if the player had a wonky DPad, they could instead hold towards the down control, whilst wanting to run along a platform.
.. If that makes sense!
I also added the

for Up button, so people could completely ignore the up on the dpad, if necessary.

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