A special toad with a love for precious metals embarks on a dungeon adventure, collecting gems along the way.
The more gems the toad gathers, the stronger it becomes, allowing it to reach new areas.
Help the toad overcome various obstacles and explore deeper into the dungeon!



I like this a lot!
Here's my polish feedback:
- The toad's animations are probably too slow. I barely noticed it was animated, and at first it felt like, I donno, a statue sliding around maybe.
- The wall slide particles heavily imply that you can double jump. I'd leave them out until you get that power up. Maybe even disable the slide state entirely.
- Many of critters you need to avoid/deal with seem too small to harm you. Wouldn't a toad that big just crush a wood louse that small?
- You should probably disable key-repeat -- right now, holding jump triggers the double jump after a bit. See https://www.lexaloffle.com/dl/docs/pico-8_manual.html#BTNP
- Using up and down to select abilities works on a keyboard but is not so good on a controller -- too easy to press up or down accidentally.
- There's a screen shortly after you get the double jump where you can jump offscreen and spend just a frame or two up there before you (I think) hit the ceiling and come back down. That's awkward, especially since the enemies respawn when you do it.
- There's a screen near the end of the game where if you go up a vertical tunnel you end up near the beginning of the game. This would be a cool shortcut for people who want to check if they missed anything, if there was a way to go back down! "Door you can open from one side" is a classic Search Action trope, and you could build one out of gates and switches without adding any new code.
- I don't think I ended up needing the extended tongue range for anything.
- Continuing exactly where you left off after you die makes it feel like player health is meaningless. Typically a game will boot you back to a checkpoint. You could use the place the player entered the screen, that'd probably be fine.
- The game over menu is awkward. I didn't even know what'd happened the first time it opened, because my input trying to control the game immediately selected "continue." Putting a short death effect here to delay the menu's appearance would work.
- The "you win" screen is similarly abrupt -- a short animation would be nice here.
- Now I'm getting into guessing your intentions, but: this game felt like it was trying to be a Metroid, but it progresses too linearly to feel like a Metroid IMO. Having to pass unavailable powerups and come back for them later helps, but probably not enough. I suspect you're a bit hemmed in here by the scale of the toad combined with the limitations of the Pico-8 map. Since the scale of the avatar demands the world be built at a certain scale to accomodate it, shrinking the toad to 8x8 would give you much more room to do interesting level design digressions/branches/secret areas.



I sincerely appreciate your great feedback. I agree with most of your points, and you accurately understood my intentions and situation. This is my first solo development project, and I’ve learned a lot thanks to you



@asreanet, I agree with everything mogwaipoet said.
Game play wise, overall pretty solid, with the rare exception that you can enter blocks with enemy collision knock back, but no big deal, don't think you can get soft locked because of it. Still something that might be worth fixing if you make a "great toad quest 2" with a bigger map.
Metroidvania games usually have big maps, and fitting that genre in the cramped space of the 128 columns and 64 lines (4 screens tall and 8 screens wide) of the standard "big" pico-8 map is no small feat.
I think it's interesting to study how others did it :
You could focus on the platforming aspect. That's what was done with frog king, where the path is linear and the only power up is a double jump. Super fun, but not really a metroidvania any more.
https://www.lexaloffle.com/bbs/?tid=31417
You can reuse rooms so they present different path and challenges depending on the abilities acquired. This was masterfully done in Mea's castle :
https://www.lexaloffle.com/bbs/?tid=39467
You can quadruple the number of rooms by reducing the screen resolution to 64px times 64px. This requires very good low res pixel drawing skills and good map design.
Best example of this is Ascent :
https://www.lexaloffle.com/bbs/?tid=49177
To have a rich and varied environment, that game uses 256 graphic tiles and only a half map (32 lines and 128 columns), but the low res makes it twice the standard big map number in screen : 4 screens tall and 16 screens wide.
By having the player be 16 x 16 pixels, you'll need 4 times the map space to be the same size relative to the standard map.
This is actually completely doable in pico-8 :
You can draw your big map one quarter at a time in four carts.
After that you can compress the map data (zep wrote tools for that), put the compressed data of the quadruple map inside the map space, and decompress the quadruple map in the 32K of high memory of pico-8. Poke a few magic addresses to specify that the map is in high memory, and that the width is 256 columns (that's the maximum map() supports) and the rest of your code could stay mostly untouched.
There are also other ways to save map space :
A lot of map surface is used all around the map borders. By implementing map wraparound, you can save a lot of that space, and also make the world feel much bigger because the max horizontal and vertical distance you can walk is larger than the width and height than the actual map rectangle.
I've also seen another approach, where the map is drawn instead of stored :
in resurface
https://www.lexaloffle.com/bbs/?pid=155121
For a wooping 8 times 8 fullscreen map.
You can pause the game in the few first frames where the map is drawn to visualize the whole map. Pretty wild hack.
Another way to increase the map's perceived size is to reduce the player's size. That's the approach taken in Lil red
https://www.lexaloffle.com/bbs/?pid=127819
and CRATER
https://www.lexaloffle.com/bbs/?pid=46528
You can use intricate map design and limit the abilities that can be used at the same time for great puzzle metroidvania. The zelda-like "quest for the book of truth" does a great job with this approach. Despite the map being 4 times 4 screens and two floors, the items combinations system makes it a great puzzlevania.
The top down approach also helps pack more content in a small surface.
https://www.lexaloffle.com/bbs/?tid=32727
I think a "great toads quest 2" with quadruple map side could be made into a non cramped metroidvania, but there's a lot of other ways. You could also change game genre altogether for your next game...



Thank you for your thoughtful feedback. The elements from the games you shared also inspired me.
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