itch.io

Thanks for your feedback! Glad you enjoyed it.

Hey, thanks for playing! I really appreciate your detailed feedback.

Good to know about wanting faster input. I've been brainstorming ways on how to implement this; it's doable, but I just need to figure out how to incorporate it into my current code while keeping everything else running.

Ah, you mean for the reset, you'd like to be able to trigger it at any time, even between turns, or during an attack animation—is that right?

Yes, the death animation is something I'd like to refine. The explosion is mostly a temporary animation. Open to ideas and suggestions!

Glad you had fun! Haha yes, I really wanted to surprised the player with level 20. Thanks for checking out the bonus levels too!

Hey, thanks for playing Nymble 2! Glad you enjoyed it. Was there something specific you wanted to chat about?

Sweet, I'll give this a spin on the weekend!

Thanks, glad you’re enjoying it so far! Be sure to check out level 20 if you get a chance. 😉 It’s a special one.

Thanks for the feedback! I’d love to explore what might give it that “wow” factor—whether it’s the gameplay loop, art, audio, or something else entirely. Feel free to drop a comment if anything comes to mind.

Haha, I'm glad to hear that! It's a great site to uncover new indie games.

Hey, fyi I've uploaded a patch to address the lag/freezing issues, mainly targeting Firefox but it may improve performance in other browsers as well.

Feel free to try it again if you have time. Thanks

Thanks for the information. Fyi I've uploaded a patch to address the lag issues.

Not sure if this fix affects issues in Brave, as it was mainly to stop the game from crashing in Firefox. But let me know if you get around to giving it another try.

Hey, fyi I've uploaded a patch to address the lag/freezing issues. Feel free to try it again.

Thanks so much. What did you like most about it?

No worries, appreciate the details! I think it should be fixed now, I posted a devlog update.

Hey, glad you’re enjoying it!

Android release isn’t decided yet. If it happens, it would likely start as a demo first.

Android comes with a lot some unique distribution regulations and overhead, so I need to think carefully about whether it makes sense for this project.

I’ll post updates if anything changes. 👍

Thanks! What were some things that you enjoyed?

Yeah, I really do want level 20 to be a continuous long level, since it gives you a bit of variety in the pacing. That's very strange though, that the Newgrounds version didn't freeze. Especially if it's the same build version.

FYI, I've been able to reproduce the game crashing/freezing. Seems to happen when you let the game run for a while. Will post an update when I find a fix. Keep you posted.

So I've been able to reproduce the game crashing/freezing. Seems to happen when you let the game run for a while. Will post an update when I find a fix.

For now, try playing in a different browser. It should be fine in Chrome or Brave.

Hey sorry to hear that. Appreciate for the detailed report—will investigate.

Hey thanks so much for reporting the lag and freezing issues. Do you remember around when the lag started to happen? Trying to investigate this the best I can, as I am developing on Mac.

Hey thanks, glad to hear it—hope you go back and try the other levels too!

Hey thanks for letting me know. Just wanted to know more info so I can look into it:

1. Can you tell me which browser (and version) you're using? And what OS (Mac, Windows, etc.)
2. Was it laggy right at the start? Or did it get laggy once you reached a certain point?

Thanks.

Thanks for your suggestion. The future iOS build shouldn't have this problem, since it will be a native app (instead of web). But I'll keep that in mind as an alternative input method.

Hey thanks for playing! I'm glad to hear that the jumping mechanic and clearing the level were so satisfying.

Thanks for catching the crash. That's never happened to me before so I'll definitely be looking into that. What happened when it crashed? Did you get a black screen? Game stopped responding to your input? Any additional details would be helpful, thanks.

EDIT: For now, try playing in a different browser. It should be fine in Chrome or Brave.

Glad you had fun playing this! Thanks for your feedback. Yeah, unfortunately web builds are tricky to optimize for. Lag issues should be resolved in the production build. Planned for iOS in 2027, but also considering PC and Mac on steam.

Ah yeah, it seems the gate did not open.

But I did notice the quick camera pan to show where to go. That was a nice touch.

Hey—so I gave it another shot and got a bit further.

I got stuck after using the dynamite — rocks blocked the entryway and I couldn’t find a way out. Looked around the room a bunch but didn’t see anything obvious, so might need a bit more of a clue there. Any chance you could give a small hint? 😬

Other feedback:

• On my first playthrough I also wasn’t sure where to place the dynamite, so I felt kinda lost. Only on the second run did I notice one wall looked different.
• So far I feel like there could be more enemy encounters to keep the suspense up. There’s a lot of wandering + light puzzles, but the “fear” factor started to drop off a bit.

Possible bug:

In an earlier session I wandered into another cave area where the camera zooms out when you leave the starting zone. After that, when I dashed, my character started moving like 4x speed and clipping through walls lol. Not sure if that’s intended or something broke. (Screenshot below for reference of which room I'm talking about.)

Haha, I'm glad you felt motivated to keep trying. Really helpful to hear this feedback.

> how about the actual path finding?

Yes, all the motions are basically deterministic. The pathfinding uses the mp_grid_* functions in GML (I read it uses the A* algorithm). Basically, you construct a grid that matches the movement resolution of your game, then set which squares are not walkable. I use mp_grid_path to generate a shortest rectilinear path, where only right angles are allowed, from the enemy to the player. And from the path, you can extract some interesting variables to use in other calculations: the starting direction, the length, whether a path exists, etc.

> I mean, to they look for the nearest free cell to move to?

Yeah, so to determine where to place an enemy's reservation—for example, the space suggested by the mp_grid_path, or where the player was previously standing—I check a bunch of different conditions, like where the enemy is in relation to the player's previous spaces, whether there's an unobstructed straight orthogonal path to the player. If you get an enemy to trail you, you might notice some predictable movement patterns start to emerge. 😎

The algorithm itself took several iterations to perfect, and some manual regression testing to make sure the puzzles are all still solvable. I'd often change one thing, and see another thing break haha. But I think I've accounted for most of the edge cases now (hopefully!).

> I also loved how you played with the double jump: that was game changer.

Could you elaborate on that one? Curious to know what was meant by "double jump".

> Also liked how jumping to a leaf keeps all enemies stuck where they are.

Haha yup! A core mechanic of the game is that every move has potential to change the board, so that not all solutions are clear just by looking at the starting state.

Glad you found the gameplay so captivating!

Thanks, I'll try it out in the next few days!

Hey, thanks for playing the game! Yeah, it's meant to be a sort of "pocket-sized" puzzle that you can play on the go since it's ultimately intended for mobile. But I figured a web demo would have the most reach, to gather feedback and UX data.

I'm glad that it was easy to learn. Also glad to hear the animations are fun! I spent a little too much time on some of them haha...

Congrats on beating the demo! Were you able to get all the stars?

Ah... the pathfinding algorithm. It was a lot of fun coming up with it. Essentially, I give each enemy a priority based on a number of parameters. Then the enemies will, in order, take turns trying to place a reservation for what spot to move to; this loops until all enemies have successfully placed a reservation, or the max iteration count has been reached. Then the enemies all move at once. Happy to go into more detail if you're curious.

Thanks so much for the donation! 🙏

I'm hoping to release this for iOS some time next year. Stay tuned for updates. 😎

Hey there! Thanks for the update. The build appears to be the same without the latest changes though. Would you mind checking the correct build was uploaded? (I'm playing the Mac version.) Thanks!

No prob — it was honestly exciting getting to try a fresh demo from a fellow indie dev.

I work in UX, so I know how hard it can be to get real player feedback sometimes, happy to help. Obviously just one perspective though, so take whatever’s useful and ignore the rest.

But yeah, aside from the points of friction I mentioned, the atmosphere is communicated really well — sound, music, even little things like the birds flying past all add a lot.

Looking forward to trying the updated version when it drops. Cheers!

Hey there! Overall this has a really strong atmosphere, I was into the vibe pretty much immediately. The foundation is solid, I stayed curious most of the time, just a few UX / pacing / clarity things that added up. (Played on Mac by the way. Installation instructions were clear.)

First impressions / presentation

• Title screen looks and sounds great! Really strong mood.
• Cursor SFX gave me Silent Hill vibes which was a nice touch.

Onboarding / readability

• Disclaimer + intro text came and went too fast for me to read fully.
• Centered expanding text looks cool but is hard to follow while animating — left-aligned would be way easier to read.
• Some onboarding icons / prompts could be a bit clearer / bigger.

Also felt like narrative clarity suffered a bit here — mostly because the text is centered + moving while trying to read it, so it’s harder to actually take it in properly.

Controls / feel

• Shift as dodge felt a bit off for me (I usually expect Shift = sprint). Space feels more natural for dodge/action in WASD + mouse setups.
• I was using my pinkie for Shift and it’s fine ergonomically, but since it’s a repeated input (dodge timing), it ended up causing some fatigue over time — more just from repeated use than hand position itself.

Gameplay clarity / feedback

• In the mines, heartbeat SFX when approaching the enemy is great atmosphere-wise, but I wasn’t sure what I was looking at since it didn’t react (this was before activating the first lever).
• Then it suddenly becomes an active enemy in combat, which felt a bit unclear without earlier setup.
• Even a small player reaction would help, like:
  • “Hello…?”
  • “He doesn’t seem to notice me… weird…”

Right now it reads a bit like a bug rather than intent.

Pacing

• Took ~20 minutes to reach first combat. Atmosphere holds it up, but I expected something earlier (maybe ~5 mins) to establish interaction/tension.
• For a demo, the build-up felt a bit long.

Interaction / UX

• Some signposts are single-read only — I accidentally skipped one by pressing interact too fast. Would be nice to re-read them.
• I think the ESC key still actively pauses the game when dismissing a document with the same key. Was that a bug?
• Switches/levers could use a quick camera pan toward what changed to reinforce progression.

Navigation

• A few moments where I wasn’t totally sure where to go next. Not necessarily bad, but a bit more directional feedback would help smooth it out.

Overall, really strong first impression! Atmosphere is doing a lot of heavy lifting and I was still interested to keep going.

Main friction points were early pacing, readability during transitions, and control feel (Shift dodge especially).

I stopped mainly due to input fatigue over time rather than lack of interest — I was still curious what comes next. With a few tweaks this could land really well as a demo!

(I’m the guy who commented via LinkedIn btw; thanks for sharing your game)

None that I know of off the top of my head, but I'm sure someone has written something on the matter. Bear in mind that GameMaker Studio isn't made for point and clicks out of the box, so everything needs to be custom coded.

This was one of my first projects so it wasn't very refined. But it was still a fun learning process figuring out how to build things from scratch. Stuff like: collision detection, pathfinding, clickable regions, text boxes, cut scenes, etc.

Yes, I did.

I'll keep my eye out for that! :)

I checked out itch.io again on a whim and saw some major updates to your game! Thanks for providing hours of fun. I just donated :) Best of luck with your Steam release!

Hey Fluffy! So excited to play your new prototype!

I had some first-time experience feedback which you may find helpful:

The music is great!

The lighting and dust particle effects are delightful.

So When I left the house the first time, I tried pressing down, but didn't understand why I wasn't moving. Then I realized there was a fence there. (Didn't see it at first.)

Similarly, when I started exploring the caves, when I went up/down the stairs, I sometimes wasn't sure where to move my eyes to find where the player was on the screen.

So it might be a matter of making it obvious where the player ends up on the screen after transitioning to a new map.

The checkpoint sprite felt a bit out of place, maybe because its texture was so grainy and sharp. Maybe if it were like softer balls of light floating up, it would fit in more. I felt like there needed to be some feedback to the player that something happened when you stepped on it (like a sound effect, or a flash).

The rocks blocking the path are a nice touch, but I felt they needed a reason for why they disappeared after a story event.

It wasn't immediately obvious that the mom and dad sprites are the player's parents. Perhaps they can be taller, or the player shorter or more childlike.

All in all, I started playing and was instantly hooked!