[html5] Fly Trap

Valerien

In Fly Trap, you have to fly from wall to wall avoiding nasty insect-eating plants! Don't get eaten!
Play the game!

Hi everyone,
I recently teamed up with Sam Whillance, the creator of the JCHTML5 engine for Game Maker. Together, we made a short html5 game for both mobiles and desktop: Fly Trap. Sam took care of the design, development and sound design, while I worked on the visuals.

Credits
The game was created with the JCHTML5 framework for GameMaker: Studio. The tweening was made thanks to 8BitWarriors’ Tween GMS engine, which was extremely helpful!
You can find both Sam and I on twitter: SamWhillance and NathanLovatoArt

Comments are greatly appreciated! May they be good or bad .
Cheers, Nathan

amartinez

The music... played a huge part of why I wanted to keep playing.
How many levels are there?
- Nothing
- Drums beat hi-hat and snare.
- Then same beat more bass.

Max score I have got was 23 : p.

Shrike

The visuals are very nice, although the background dosnt really tell much of a story and I dont know how it relates, the rest is really nice tho (font and button oh yes)
There is a lot of focus on the traps visually but the fly is really the protagonist, for that the traps are very strongly in focus.

You got this flappy bird core mechanic, I see, it works fine, but the lack of goal is kind of disturbing. While in FB you do always the same task and fly towards the right > side scrolling, you dont know what may comes. Maybe there is another environment after a while or something happens, you move, you go other places. On your realization you always stay at a place, and your destiny is predefined. You fly around but there is no goal no end, the fly can not be saved. It is clear that you are just delaying the inevitable. You do the same on FB, but the representation makes it vastly different.

Also one thing, in side scrolling shooters, it is usual that the designers make the hitboxes of the enemies smaller than they visually are, to give more clutch looking moments, and take away some frustration but leave the user with a "oh damn that was close" moment. Your traps hitboxes are bigger than they visually are, the complete opposite, something I would really recommend to change.

Oh I also died 4 times before i knew what i had to do. A intro line "press to jump" would go a long way : P

Valerien

Thanks guys. Shrike, that's true. I'll be sure to keep all of your notes in mind for the next game! We've already sold a few licenses for Fly Trap, so it's kind of done at this point. I've only forwarded assets to the developer for the tutorial part, which has been added to the publisher builds.

Thanks again for the great critique !