Lief's Ascent

Excellent spritework! Animations are a bit rough but the static pixel artwork is top notch, I'd love to see the artists continue! Both the backgrounds and character art is really fantastic!

Really good presentation on the itch page; great use of title and background, good colors, good partial transparent gray central backing, lots of diverse screenshots with a variety of setting and color, has a trailer, good simple description—nice work! Only improvements I could really see being made is to change the default itch.io salmon pink-red for the link text color, use something less gaudy that fits better with your color scheme, and to change the background image from repeating with scroll to static in settings. But it's truly a very nice itch page, which is a criminally overlooked and underrated portion of a game, presentation is vital and you've done very well.

Having the game playable as in-browser WebGL is a huge deal, another underrated and overlooked part of a game. It runs great, it's formatted within the iframe perfectly, goes fullscreen perfectly, 5 stars there.

The game itself is interesting, certainly not a pinnacle of game design, but very well-fleshed out for a student game (as I understand this is a UNLV student game but I could be mistaken). The tactics gameplay was certainly unexpected! I didn't watch the trailer or look through the screenshots before starting (due to the ease-of-use of WebGL!), and while platforming around it was a quite a surprise when that screen popped up when I tried to slash an enemy!

Both the platforming and tactics gameplay seem to be rather thought-through—both have their elements of bugginess and unpolish as to be expected of a student game (or an itch game in general), but they are certainly playable and serve as a good proof-of-concept. The tactics element already carries a bit of complexity, which is a testament to its systems. The platforming is a bit too simple and dull, however the inclusion of both a double jump and a satisfying dash helps the feel of moving through the vast levels.

The SFX for the dash and jump are unexpectedly polished and satisfying, and overall the audio is quite good. The music is rather great, and while some SFX ring to me as unoriginal (I swear the tactics menu is the Pokemon SFX, but it could just be a generic fill-in), none of the audio struck me as poor, which is a rarity.

Overall, really nice work from the team. Congratulations of the success of a project of this scale, and I hope we can see many more games from you all in the future!

-Sincerely, Gunnar Clovis

Nice job!

Very nice! Good job!

pretty cool! well done.

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frist