Thanks to everyone who played and rated my game during the jam. I’m really happy people enjoyed it.

Just posted a small gameplay update. If you’ve already played the game, it’s probably not worth playing again, as I haven’t added any new content. However, I changed a few things that should improve the gamefeel a little:

• Max fall speed reduced by 20%
• Gravity reduced by 25% when jumping (and by 35% when falling)
  • Jump speed etc have been updated to compensate for the above
• You can now queue a roll directly after an attack
• You can now cancel your ‘attack queue’ with a roll or direction change

Platforming is easier now

The fallspeed changes feel really good, I’m surprised I didn’t realize how fast the player fell until I changed the values to more reasonable values. Now all of the platforming challenges are much more forgiving since you don’t “fall like a rock”.

I tuned the values to be closer time-wise to Planet D4rk, and closer numerically to Celeste. For example, the max fall speed used to be 200 units per second. Now it’s 160, which is Celeste’s max fall speed (minus the fast-fall mechanic in that game).

Though, this game will still likely feel “heavier” than Celeste since the screen resolution of The Last Astronomer is smaller than Celeste, so you traverse more ‘screen space’ per unit time than in Celeste while falling.

The other numbers have been tweaked to avoid breaking the levels, but you still get about 1 extra tile of lateral movement (while jumping) from these changes, which is kinda neat.

The changes might not seem like a lot, but if you try the game again, I think it feels a lot better.

Attack cancelling (or lack thereof)

You could always mash the attack button and queue up 1 additional attack. However, prior to this update, once you queued up an attack, there was no cancelling it.

This led to a problem where you’d be mashing attack, you’d attack twice, see the enemy wind up for an attack and try to dodge but you mashed so much during your 2nd attack, that you queued up a 3rd one! (and you get hit!)

Now, with these changes, if you’re attacking and you mash roll, not only can you queue a roll for the frame your attack ends, but you can also cancel the previously-queued attack with a roll input (or direction-change).

The end result of this is just: If you’re mashing attack and you see the enemy start to wind up an attack of their own, mashing roll will feel more responsive because it’ll roll on the frame you finish your last attack (and cancel the next-queued attack).

I still don’t plan to allow cancelling attacks fully with a roll, because I want this game to be more “Dark Souls 1” than not.

Other thoughts

The superposition of an unfinished game

Releasing an unfinished game is kind of like making a super-sketchy piece of art. When you first start out drawing, your sketchy/hairy lines often look a lot better than your cleaner/inked lines.

This is because when you look at a really sketchy piece, your brain sees a ton of lines and fills in the ‘correct’ selection of these lines. However, as soon as you actually commit to the lines, it’s very easy to ruin your drawing. Oh no, I picked all the wrong lines!

When you commit to your lines, you collapse all possible futures of your drawing into one result that you have to live with.

I think The Last Astronomer did so well in the MVM jam partially because it’s unfinished. So, you see all of these little threads, these unanswered mysteries, and your brain fills in the gaps with all the cool stuff that you want to see.

And wow doesn’t it look neat? What’s going on with the stars? And what’s with the corruption? Are the stars bad? You decide! (literally, you decide! Because it’s not finished right now, you get to decide! and that feels really good, at least for now).

It’s the same reason why mystery shows like Lost have such good first acts: Setting up a mystery is really fun, but answering that mystery - collapsing all those futures - is really hard.

(source)

me creating a bunch of mysterious, unanswered questions: haha yeah! yes! This rocks!

me having to provide satisfying answers to said questions: what the fuck. This sucks.

I also think that this is the reason why leaving a game unfinished makes me so uncomfortable. It’s the tension between ‘limitless potential, thrown away’ and ‘fear of picking the wrong future’.

Anyway, I’m still working on this game! I did more than just tweak the platforming and combat these past few weeks (though not a ton more). I’m not sure if I’ll actually finish this game, but I’m gonna try for sure.

Been working on the new traversal mechanics you’ll unlock in Zone 2, as well as coming up with ideas for the next set of enemies and bosses.

The time will pass anyway

Whether or not I finish my grand vision for this game, the time is gonna pass anyway. I might as well spend it doing something I like. I was going to post my deadline for this game, but I’ll actually keep that to myself. When that deadline passes, you’ll know because either:

• The full game will be released
• The partial / unfinished game will be released
• I’ll post about how I’m giving up

Hopefully it’s not that last one, but we’ll see!

Abhi