SAGE 2023 - Demo Dono's Tale (SAGE '23 Demo)

This is really charming and really good!
The graphics are lovely (what a cutie the main character is!), the audio is great as well and the gameplay is quite effective.
Quite frankly, if the rest of the game follow these steps, it should be a great platformer with tons of fun and charm.

The difficulty curve does seem to be a bit stiff though, requiring you to pull off some Donkey Kong Country memory muscle on some parts

This is a great demo and even though I've not played with a controller I enjoyed myself regardless. The style is great, the moves are cool and it's overall charming.

However, to give some criticism the difficulty in the last levels is a bit steep with the fast-moving spike wall and Thunder challenge. Also even though Keyboread is not it still be nice to bind the controls to what I see fit since I'm not a fan of the default layout.

Speaking of I have a question, why are the utility moves on an ability cycle? Like I get that with the attack move but with the utility one why not map Thunder to down, Grab to shift, or holding jump next to a wall and Feather to a double jump plus the Super Jump to up? I feel like the cycle for them adds a bit too much to think about when in the moment. Maybe even making it possible to map them to an individual key in options or just keep it to the cycle.

The only other thing I'll throw out there is it be nice if the air flip gained a bit more height. I've been trying a no-ability challenge and have been having close calls with the flip barely missing platforms due to a lake of high. I'm just wondering if that be on the cards, okay that's it. Great job and I hope the project goes well. :)

Dono's Tale is like a love letter to SNES era platforming. Elements from some of the best platformers from that epoch have been drawn on here, to incredible success. Aesthetically speaking, Donno's Tale seems to be mostly inspired by Yoshi's Island and probably a touch of Super Mario World. The game play stands on it's own as being quite unique! The adorable Dono is quite versatile with his capabilities, that unlike the sources of inspiration the game draw upon, does not need power ups to utilize!
I've been a fan of this project since SAGE 22 and look forward to seeing what else this project has in store!

Very cute, the Yoshi's Island energy is strong and I very much love it, the platforming is pretty tight and rolls well!
Having aaall the different powers from the get go was kinda weird and at first overwhelming, I'm hoooping the final game gives them to you one by one, even if in quick succession within like the 3 first stages or something, giving proper time to get used to all of em seperately, it was a bit much trying to get used to aaaall of em at once. I did skip the tutorial tho so yeah sure yeah do take what I said with a grain of salt. Do dig all the powers and what they do though. The DONO letters must've been hidden veeery (too) well too, usually only found one per each stage.

A bit of a sharp difficulty curve with some of the stages tho, the wall in 1-4 moved waaay too fast concidering how reeelatively casual everything was before then, it was very trial and error and needing to memorize the right route and power usage to make it fast enough, died a gooood bunchful of times. Otherwise a veery nice visual for that stage though, though the lack of sound effects for the buttons and their gates was a bit weird. 1-5 was super fun to play, kinda hoping for more stuff like that, as optional bonus stages or whatever else.

Oh, Dono is also able to collect the fruits after dieing and doing his death bounce whatever, I'd say give that a fix!

Really looking forward to playing this again.