Infinite Potential

A little game in which powerups add together without any real limit to how absurdly overpowered you can get.

A little game in which powerups add together without any real limit to how absurdly overpowered you can get. (Spoilers: That part takes a good while.)

https://iris616.itch.io/infinite-potential

Arrow Keys - Move
Z - Change weapon
X - Attack

All assets (Sound, art, and code: Except fonts) were made during the game jam.

Extra Tip: Keep moving to get powerups! They'll only spawn off-screen!

Voting results

Overall
13th
41%
6.182
Graphics
14th
45%
5.818
Audio
10th
31%
6.000
Gameplay
12th
38%
5.864
Originality
16th
52%
5.727
Theme
22nd
72%
5.409

This game entered in the Solo competition (29 entries).

Comments (14)

Akselmo
 • 6 years ago • 

This gave me old-school DOS game vibes which I really much like! Too bad I'm just absolutely terrible at platformers.. :D

Fun game nonetheless, I could see a game like this running on some older DOS PC back in the day. You won my nostalgia points! Sometimes simple is more.

The AI was a bit weird sometimes, like they walked under you and you would be stuck walking on them.

I really liked playing it though! Something I could play again, definitely.

Iris
(@iris616)  • 6 years ago • 

Thank you! Regarding the enemies, have you tried finding a speed powerup to outrun them? ;) Hint hint nudge nudge.

I'm really glad you've enjoyed it!

jsagerdev
 • 6 years ago • 

Fun game, really hard but I love the sound effects and music especially. Definitely got some atari vibes from this one :)

Kleinzach
 • 6 years ago • 

Very cool entry. I really like the way the enemies behave and would love to see more variety there. I especially appreciated the hand enemies because its an elegant way to stop you from spamming fire all the time. Very fun. It did feel like some of the enemies weren't really that threatening. The spiders would jump sometimes, but when they got to something for them to jump over, they wouldn't which felt like it was a bug.

I wish that the growth theme would show through a little more as I played it for a good amount of time and it never really escalated how I would hope, but that could also have just been because of my play style.

As the commenter above mentioned, I too am getting an old PC kinda vibe. Reminds me of the original prince of persia.

By the way, when I first launched it on my 4K screen I could see the entire level and enemies would not spawn, presumably because there was no offscreen for them to spawn in. Just a heads up!

Iris
(@iris616)  • 6 years ago • 

I don't have such a setup myself, so I haven't tested it on really huge screens! I'm glad you could figure out that was the issue. Regarding the lack of a growing theme, jumping powerups can get pretty crazy. ;) But otherwise yes, I wanted to add more powerups, but I ran out of time!

Also, jumping is random. Makes for some fun moments in which you try to jump over a creature, but the creature jumps too and you end up hitting it instead. It makes the AI seem clever at times, and really dumb at other times (But really I just didn't have enough time for fancy decision making.)

Baconinvader
 • 6 years ago • 

Definitely lives up to the title! getting super-powerful is cathartic and fun, and I definitely had a blast. The problem is that the game gets stale after a while. I feel like it would have been a lot better with more enemy types and levels, I mean there is a powerup that increases your jump, why not use that to give the level a sense of progression?

TigerJ
 • 6 years ago • 

Thought this was a wonderful game. I mentioned in chat earlier that I was punished by trying to take down a hand with my sword, I realize now that was in error. for a moment I did not like having to switch weapons and would have preferred to just use 3 keys for each, however after several play throughs I appreciated the feel of having to change weapons even more. I do think this would be a cool game to port to the Arduboy or Pokitto handheld as it is fun, fast and uses minimal controls. Well done! I will stream this soon (wednesday or saturday)

hyperlinkyourheart
 • 6 years ago • 

That's a very interesting approach to the theme, and it is quite satisfying to become super fast and high-jumping. I do feel that having the enemies match the player's position really precisely initially was a mistake, it leads to a lot of frustrating situations. Even giving them a little delay in switching directions when you jump over them probably would have solved it. It's a fairly minor problem, just a bit surprising.

The art and enemy designs are really good, as is the music.

automatonvx
 • 6 years ago • 

Liked the style, but would have liked more places to go, maybe a couple of levels where your powers get reset after you go to the new level or something. Just felt like I was missing a goal. Is there any way to destroy the hands? I tried fire, bombs and sword (which got me killed) but nothing seemed to do it.
Possibly gets the award for floatiest jump in a platformer, (especially after a few power ups :) ). The following you around enemy AI is a bit weird, interesting but would be better if it was not used for all creatures I think.
The art and music was the highlight for me. thanks

euske
 • 6 years ago • 

I probably missed something, but I didn't get to the point that the game is somewhat fun. There are just a few powerups and they're typically out of your reach. Soon this annoying enemy blocks your way, and when you touch it, it's instant kill. The graphics and audio was pretty solid.

TigerJ
 • 6 years ago • 

Full review and fun antics on the stream

I think forcing the player to always be in motion would be a way to avoid some of the cheesey ways to manipulate the AI and score high. I also feel the right half of the arena is much more enjoyable as it allows the player to move vertically and horizontally where the left side (until more powerups are aquired) forces the player to only have one axis of gameplay. Some moving platforms might be a nice touch too.

I really wanted to see totals on how many powerups I had of each. I also did not find a use for the melee, maybe an enemy that requires it or rethinking how it powers up (grows physically larger to a ridiculous point) might be fun.

Thinking about this more now it would (going against the theme) be interesting if over time all the attributes and powers were in constant decay and farming them efficiantly would be key to survival. Just an idea of an alternate mode/gameplay system to think about.

Here is a link to the video of your game. I will embed it on itch.io as well.

https://www.twitch.tv/videos/278430804?t=00h30m54s

smbe19
 • 6 years ago • 

The idea sounded very cool, but I found the game quite frustrating to play. One thing is that the spiders move at the exact same speed as the player, so you can't jump over them. Also at the start it seems like the melee weapon is pretty much useless and you can just go for fire balls. Also, I found the sounds quite annoying.

Antti Haavikko
(@anttihaavikko) • 6 years ago • 

First of all, trying to open the mac version full screen failed to start at all and had to force quit the game to try again. But starting windowed and using the osx default window full screen button worked just fine.

The controls were quite stiff and jumping was too floaty for my taste. The weapon balancing was a bit off. I think the only usable one was the fireball but yeah, it had the downside of quite often killing myself with it because of the bounces. The bomb was so slow to use and the damage was so bad that it was only usable few times when the enemies get stuck in a pile at some convenient position. But even then, the fireball would have probably done a better job. The sword seemed completely useless to me. It was just a key to getting myself killed. Well it was kinda decent against those hand enemies but you had to get so god damn close to them that you could easily just get insta gibbed by them. The huge delay in showing the weapon icon when changing was annoying.

The enemy AI was a bit too dumb. They pretty much just spawned and got stuck at the nearest ledge. And the abilty of the fireballs to go trough walls was bit too powerful so they were easy pickings. Probably adding more variance to enemy spawn points would have made it better. It wasn't quite clear at all what the different powerups did.

I found the sound effects to be pretty bad and vert loud compared to the music. Adding some variety, dropping the volume and making them overall a bit softer would be the way to go in my opinion. The music and pixel art were quite nice.

Good job!

HuvaaKoodia
 • 6 years ago • 

I like this! There are problems though, many of which have been pointed out already by others, so here's my take as quickly as possible:

  • The level design is annoying. Slowly moving around the place through the same, long corridor and the same few platforms gets old fast.

  • The sound effects are annoying, the music isn't. It cancels out.

  • Instant death is a constant possibility and a suprise most of the time.

  • The main theme is buried under the other issues. Infinite potential sounds cool, but I could not bother to get more than a handful of powerups. It just takes too long and too many restarts. Spawning powerups only outside of the screen doesn't help.

For some twisted reason I still like it, whatever that's worth.

Overall: Average (5)
Graphics: Average (5)
Audio: Average (5)
Gameplay: Bad (3)
Originality: Above average (6)
Theme: Good (7)

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iris616

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