I just saw the test level and I like what I've seen so far. As for what I think what is important in a good platformer, that would be the environment/atmosphere. It's equally as important as the main character him or herself. If the world has subtle nuances in it, my eyes will be entertained as I move through the levels. Anything bright and colorful with moving things in like the 16-bit Sonic series or the shadowy world of Limbo with its marvelous lighting are a gold standard. The more organic the world the better. It should feel as though the levels have a life of their own.
These are things I'm aiming for but I'm limited a little by my lack of ability really. What I could do with is someone who was really good at sprite drawing and animation. Everything you see I've pretty much made myself (with the exception of a few paid for assets and the music). While I love adding more and more pretty things it eventually gets to the point where it becomes less a labour of love and more tedium. Hand drawing animated sprites on paper, scanning them in, converting them and then making sprite sheets takes a very very long time.
Nice to see somebody know what they are doing. After watching lets plays of that mess Mega man Unlimited it's quite refreshing actually.
I would say originality, variety and longevity. You probably need to answer that question yourself by listing a few top titles and picking them to pieces. What makes them special? What is different? What's a common factor? Take a look at Super Mario Bros. It's got good playability. The levels do tend to get harder as you go on, but it's not as if they're getting ridiculously hard. They are different (overworld, underworld, underwater etc.) but keeping to a basic premise. New characters are introduced in later levels that interact differently and require different tactics to be employed to get past those characters. It's got good music (important if you're going to be repeating a level lots!) and sound effects. There are interesting hidden features (fireworks, multi-coin blocks, warps, bonus levels etc.) which make it more than just run from A to B, jumping over holes and enemies. It's possible to get extra lives, but they're often hidden. There are bosses, but only at the end of each World. With regard to your video, there are definitely elements that I think are good, and others I think are not so good. There are some good looking graphics, including backgrounds, text and some of the characters. The sounds are decent, too. Overall, I think the whole look is a bit disjointed. You've got some cutesy cartoon animals, an Evil Edna television and some knights that look like they're straight out of Ghosts 'n Goblins. There's a bit of disparity between the nice Nineties arcade game rendering of the knights and the more simplistic cel shaded animals. Both are good, but you need to choose a style and stick with it - otherwise, you've got something that looks like Who Framed Roger Rabbit! Likewise, the bubbly menu text really suits the cutesy cartoon critters, but you then have a sci-fi font during the game for the timer and the scoring animation, and the timer and energy bar are quite square and sharp (whereas the pause icon top left is more rounded). Cutesy animals need cutesy fonts and bubbly bars! Plus the speech bubbles don't work - again, make them cartoony, maybe a colour (e.g. golden yellow) with a reflection highlight. And choose a more fitting font. The Leap instructions look like an Apple ad - I assume that's some kind of pre-made thing. Could it be cutesified somehow, to make it look like it's still part of the game? Even if it's just a background akin to the game and perhaps a less Appley font. One main issue for me is the look of the fox. If you look at the intro with the cutesy characters, the pig has nice highlights, making him look 3D. I'd go with something like that - more round with highlights/shading. It's good, it just needs a little polishing. Likewise, on the title screen it needs a bit of refinement. I agree that your sprite animation needs a little revision - the knight isn't bad, but the fox's shuffle is a little odd. Although that's kinda cute! Take a look at this: http://raptor.developpez.com/tutorial/rendering/celshading/ OK, the text is in French, but even just the Smurf pic is handy: There is going to be more than one enemy per level... right? Hmm... that might seem like a lot of criticism... but it's constructive criticism! And I think they're all fairly easy fixes. It's pretty much a case of choosing whether you're going for cutesy cel shading or Nineties "realistic" arcade sprites. You've got a solid foundation to work on, certainly. Keep up the good work!
Awesome advice, in the end I ditched the pixel art style sprites due to the clash. It was all fruitless anyway. Upon submitting the final game to Leap, they rejected it on the grounds that it was too difficult to control and confusing. They suggested I download a similar game from the Leap store to see how it's done. Well the game they suggested is a cluster-fuck of confusing controls and totally unplayable so what I think happened was that it wasn't what they're looking for right now. There has been a lot of talk surrounding Leap saying they're heavily vetting apps at the moment in order to engineer the way the device is presented at the moment, if true then they're screwing themselves over because people are crying out for software. With 10,000 devkits released over 6 months ago there are only 78 apps. Now that there are consumer kits and a public SDK release there's still not much coming through and their review team aren't overloaded either as unlike someone like Apple you get a response in an hour or so. Everyone who tried the game (including my GF who hasn't played a game since 1994) found it easy to control and fun so who knows. I'm not bitter, just disappointed after I spent a lot of time on it, thankfully something else has popped up in the meantime but I still plan to release it for Mac and iOS in the near future.
I completely understand you on that, anything to do with visuals or art in general is a balancing act between time and ability. I've only done animation and sprite work as a hobby, but I can see how much of a time suck it'll be in the long haul. Especially for someone making a game solo. I'm digging the new visual style you've switched too, I hope to see this game progress more over time. Keep on keeping on!
