Thwimbly - Kepler's Platformer Dev Thread

[KeplerElectronics]

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Howdy everyone!

I've seen some gamedev threads here on the forum and really enjoyed reading through them as a hobbyist game dev myself. I've been toying with making one myself, and figured that, now that the demo is out, I should just go for it.

Thwimbly has been in development off and on since summer 2021 based on what's been going on with school and stuff. It's made in TIC-80, a fantasy console (similar to PICO-8), which aims to limit the developer on various metrics (number of colors on screen, number of sprites, music, map size), and I've been using every trick in the book to break past those limitations. I've really been trying to design the game so it doesn't feel like a tech demo or normal fantasy console game.

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The game itself is a pretty standard 2D platformer, but I've tried to optimize it for the kind of game I like to play: Fast paced, colorful, and fluid. I've had a lot of fun trying to optimize routes through each level to beat them as fast as possible. It's particularly inspired by Kaizo Mario World and Celeste, but with a simpler moveset on the player side.

Hopefully it lives up to that goal, but a lot of the reason for the demo release is to try and get an idea of what might need to be changed for a full release. This is only about 1/7th of the content in the full game, but I think it's enough to get the vibe across.

If you want to give it a try for yourself, you can play it in the browser, either at my website: https://keplerelectronics.com/Wiki/Thwimbly

or at Itch.io: https://kepler-softworks.itch.io/thwimbly

If you want to see some of what my development process has looked like, I have a bit of a devlog on my site as well (I need to update it soon -_-): https://keplerelectronics.com/Wiki/Thwimbly_Dev

Please let me know what you think, or if you run into any bugs! I'm open to constructive feedback, I want to make sure that all the time I've poured into this game is worth it.

 

[jadd]

This is really cool, although on my laptop the game slowed down gradually (including the music) when progressing through a level.

 

[kevin supermarket]

i got a similar slow down after dying a few times. the same thing corrected it, but it was still a little strange to have happened

 

[KeplerElectronics]

Huh, it's been fine on both my laptop and desktop but I guess I haven't done a full test of the web export. I'll start investigating that, thanks for the tips Kevin and Jadd!