Welcome!

Hello, it's me, Levi Ramirez, Game developer extraordinaire. This post is gonna be a bit different compared to past updates. This post will have no clips showing new game stuff, instead, we will be talking about the feedback I've received from the prototype demo that was released on Pixel day in January!

The Crowd's Reaction

So, on January 23rd, 2023 the prototype 'Gappy's Playground' was released to the public at Noon (est).

And soon after, many people got to see it for the first time ever, and people in the know were finally able to play it for themselves. Right off the bat, people REALLY seemed to like it. Like really like it! It was out of judgment and was on the front page within an hour or so of its release! And it was nestled very nicely between some other great Pixel Day games such as...

As pixel day came and went, the plays and reviews of Gappy went up and up! People were in love with the controls, music, and overall "feel" of the entire game, although there was still plenty of criticism about what the game did NOT do well and what could be improved. However, the game was getting glowing scores and some rewards from the moderation team :-)

However, one of the highlights of the whole last week of January was waiting for me on the morning of the 25th...

Yes! You're seeing this correctly, Gappy got bannered! Shortly after Pixel day no less! A large portion of the eyeballs that got put onto the demo came from this! So thank you so much Mr. Tom and everyone else who made this happen, very appreciative of this act of kindness for this little tech demo! It was bannered for about a day or two, and those two days many people paid attention to it! While it was bannered I decided to make a Discord Server for the game! Not just for the prototype but for the game's continued development, if you are interested in keeping up to date with this game then I highly recommend joining the server, there is already quite a bit of people in it already and it's pretty active as is. If you just want a simple way to keep up-to-date with where this game is going then join the server! :-D

If you want something a bit more lite, I'm doing a kinda weird way to promote the game. Since the game is made in the style of a late-era NES game, I wanted to take promotional photos that kinda play into that, so I've been taking THESE types of images below, on an actual CRT!

And with them, I have an Instagram Page where I will upload these types of pictures, along with posting updates on the page's story. If that's more your speed then consider giving it a follow, I won't upload there very often, just whenever I feel like taking these kinds of pics. Doing these photo shoots are really fun!

And to end off the month, Gappy's playground got nominated for 3rd place of the month! Eat your heart out Flander's Killer 8!!!

Overall, many people got to play this public prototype, and many people also left their thoughts on the experience. So now we will be looking at some of them!

The Good, the Bad, and the Gappy...

To make this more digestible and less text-heavy, I'll only be talking about a select few reviews for this. Although I do appreciate each review left on 'Gappy's Playground' and tried to interact with each comment, a lot of reviews brought up some of the same talking points so I'll just be looking at some of my favorite / most important reviews... so let's begin!

This review by @2Cfox stuck out to me for the fact that they were originally not interested in another 2D platformer... at first...

I think making a 2D retro-styled platformer in lord of our savior 2023 is kind of a dumb idea. However, my attempts to make interesting movements seemed to work on this person, which is very cool and exactly what I wanted! However, how many people will see the finished game on steam, with the price tag, and scoff it off? Probably many! Games like these are doomed to not do well, but I am not a man of wise decision and am guided mostly by passion and love. Although making this game is basically career suicide I have faith in this game. It's not for everyone, but I believe that maybe it can go far... but we will just have to see...

And also yes, there gripe about replaying big chunks of the level, although I don't personally agree with the prototype since most levels (in my opinion) are pretty short, I will do my best to make a good checkpoint system in the full game since I plan on making levels MUCH LONGER in the full game. Thanks for the review! <3

This review by @HatNHoodie brought up an interesting point. Air movements such as the double jump, charge jump, and dives make moving IN THE AIR interesting, but I seemed to have forgotten to make ground movement interesting outside of momentum and running. I've tossed around the idea of a slide you can do on the ground which can give you a big burst of speed and we will just have to see if it makes it into the game. Great review, thank you!

This review by @salad-wear was one of many to bring up the "stickiness" of the wall... This has been fixed! The walls are much less sticky and Gappy slides down them at a much faster speed. Along with this, he also brought up the wall jump and the weird key binds. The Wall-jump arch thing was brought up by a slight majority and I do hear what you are saying, yet I can't say I 100% agree. I think with some work on my end we can BOTH be happy but the 'set-in-stone-arch' is something that I deliberately WANT in the game because I WANT the kick off a wall to really feel like you're kicking off a wall and springing in the opposite direction. Some slight tweaks to Gappy's physics have made it less rigid but it's still there in spirit, some more work will have to be done to make it feel a bit better...

Also, many people have talked about the weird key binds! If you haven't played it then this won't make sense but many people had issues with the default WASD controls, this was my bad 100%! I don't play many PC games so I tried to mimic the key binds to that of a controller and made you put both hands on the keyboard, which is comfortable for me. MANY people did not like this and in the full game you will be able to set up the keyboard controls in any way you'd like, along with having pre-sets for easy control swaps. I believe by default I will make it the 'One-handed WASD controls' which I was told about where you move with WASD, Jump with Space, and dive with the shift key... But again, sorry about the weird controls, the decision to make them like that was just a general lack of knowledge. Thank you for the review!

Tiny suggestion/review from @Leroysei. Just wanted to say yes, something very similar to this will appear in the final game most likely, something along the line where each level has a "time to beat" which will increase a rank or something for each level in the game! Thanks for the review and suggestion! :-)

Another tiny review by @aniano711 was a really sweet little review, I like it mostly because it's comparing Gappy to Celeste, and Gappy WILL be better than Celeste by a landslide!!! #gappysweep !!! Thank you for the review. <3

Overview

So yeah, this is really all I wanted to talk about this month. This game is now out of the prototype phase and in full swing into development!

I think with that, the Levi Posts may be a bit barer in the coming months, it's kind of a mix of not wanting to show off TOO much stuff and also kinda wanting to just focus on game development. I think I will keep writing these posts, but they will show off much less stuff and more just be quick updates about how the game is doing, what I've been up to, and some random highlights of the months.

Speaking of Highlights, I believe the Levi Post Highlights videos will either be changed or shelved, the highlights videos are the most daunting for me, and I might change them to be more rapid-fire, opting for 2-3 minute videos instead of something like 5-10. I think in general, I think I'll go up to 'Levi Post #5' doing basically what I'm doing now and assess what I want to do, I know people look forward to this and I do too, but I want these to be a bit more "graceful" to work on / publish.

A chunk of this post regarding some fun irl stuff I did this month had to be cut from this one due to my over-abundant use of pictures. I wrote all of this on Tumblr first and then copy-pasted it over here, if you are only interested in the game development stuff then your journey more or less ends here, if you wanna read just a little bit more about your favorite Newgrounds dev. (which is me, just to remind you) then you can check out the Tumblr version here! I'll probably make a habit of keeping the IRL stuff over on that post, just so that the Newgrounds one is more focused on the actual meat n' potatoes of the post. If you wanna see the entire post without any cuts than I would greatly encourage you to follow me on Tumblr as well, they will be posted both here and there at around the same time! :-)

however...

Working on Gappy Plushies!!!

January was not a very eventful month, but one of the coolest undertakings we undertook was the making of Gappy Plushies!

This was our first wack at it, and he came out a bit... big... and awkward... but it was a great first step! On our second attempt, we learned what we could do better and made our first REAL Gappy plushie, and it couldn't be better in my (humble) opinion...

And this isn't just a couple of pieces of fabric thrown together with some stuffing in the center, no sir! These got little weird elongated button eyes sewn in, lots of stuffing, fluffy fabric, and little beanies in the feet, arms, and butt! He's got a good weight to him and he's insanely cute if you couldn't tell! Our goal right now is to make 10 of these guys (counting the prototype) and see if we want to make more. At the moment our only plan is to sell them to a "select few" people since these take about 4 hours to make (we hand-sew these guys) but who knows... maybe in the future we can have a shop of these little guys for everyone to have! At the time of writing this we've only completed 3 and are moving on to our first actual "order" of one, so wish us luck! Probably gonna start working on it sometime this weekend or next week :-) 

Final Thoughts

That's all I have to talk about this time, next post will actually show off some game stuff, but for right now I got some #gamedev to attend to...

(also shoutout to @jack @heyopc @pollyanoid @jevel @tombdude @ProscuittoMan @Chupabara @Dry @Stepford @Andyl4and @Graeme and @milkypossum for the work they've done the pixel day games mentioned prior!!!)

(and also a super, triple, ultra shoutout to @teravex !!! He will be the man behind the music for the game going forward! Send some love his way! and listen to the full OST below!)

Peace!

-Levi Ramirez