About This Game Marble Skies is a fast paced 3D-platformer where you control your marble through various levels and try to get the best time for each one. Complete all the levels in your own time, or challenge your friends to get on top of the leaderboards! Inspired by nostalgia, Marble Madness and Marble Blast, we intend to create much more features in the future over the traditional marble rolling/platforming style of game-play. After release, along with the game, and 60 levels of various difficulty, we plan to have weekly updates with new levels, and features.Features -60 Base levels! + 52 Bonus, Community levels & 9 GOLF LEVELS!Arcade style physicsQuick and responsive controls, using your keyboard and mouse, or even a controller mean that every input you make will be accurate! Platforming obstacles and powerupsEach new level presents exciting obstacles, and powerups for your marble! Blast your way around with a Rocket, become a gaint with the Super Marble, float like Mary Poppins with an Umbrella, and more! Great soundtrackWith 56 amazing different tracks by Stevia Sphere, you will be humming along with them in no time! Preview or buy the soundtrack here! https://steviasphere.bandcamp.com/LeaderboardsGet to the top of the leaderboards, and show off to your friends! Can you get the fastest time?Controller supportSupport for all different types of controllers! 7aa9394dea Title: Marble SkiesGenre: Action, Adventure, Casual, Indie, Racing, Simulation, Strategy, Early AccessDeveloper:Birdwall GamesPublisher:Birdwall GamesRelease Date: 16 Dec, 2017 Marble Skies Ativador Download [full Version] First, thanks for the Linux version, it made choosing between this and Marble It Up very easy!I played WAY too much Marble Blast Gold\/Ultra when I was younger, so a lot of this review might come from my muscle memory rather than a totally fresh assessment of the game. But, I think there's some stuff worth thinking about anyway...Marble Control: For the most part it feels okay, but if I could change\/add four things it would be these:1. Marble weight. The marble is pretty floaty, which can lead to some unintentional leaps past (or even before?) your intended target. This is an absolutely ridiculous way to describe it, but: If I were to guess, I'd say when standing still the game currently jumps at about 65-70bpm, while in my head I'm expecting it to be closer to 80bpm. Like I said, totally ridiculous, but when bunnyhopping around I've definitely hesitated since the jump arcs I'm expecting are different from what actually happens in-game. If the ball fell faster it might help make the whole rest of the game feel faster even if the horizontal speed didn't change at all (though you probably _would_ have to change that too if you didn't want to redo every single level, which kinda sucks).2. Marble grip. The default floor is slippery! Argh! One thing that would make the game's control feel MUCH tighter is if the default floor had really aggressive friction; for example, when rolling one direction and then going the exact opposite direction, it should slow the ball down without the ball drifting whatsoever. In addition to just feeling tighter, it makes life easier when trying to slow down or going up hills (or worse, falling down hills), and it'll probably let jump rolls be way more effective than they currently are (especially the very first one when the level starts).3. Boost jump. There are some occasional spots where you get stuck because you need to get a running jump to make it over a corner, but if there's not enough space to get that running start, you'll be stuck until you get lucky with a corner jump. One fix could be to lower certain floors, but the boost jump from MB Ultra would be a quick band-aid while also checking off a feature from previous marble roller games.4. Resetting. In addition to the death triggers being pretty far away from the level (so you can't lazily mash A to reset as soon as it calls out-of-bounds) restarting is more work than it could be, especially with a controller. In Dustforce, for example, you can hit a button and it pops up the menu directly on the restart level button, so resetting is a quick 2-button action on a keyboard\/controller. Turns out it's mapped to the Y button! Having this info displayed in the options menu would be helpful.Visuals: Oddly enough all of my concerns here cover visuals in pretty wildly different ways:1. Contrast. Something I had a lot of trouble with was the variety of colors on the map, what those colors meant, and how the renderer affected those colors. For the default floor, pick a super-high-contrast color that very clearly separates from special surfaces (ice, grippy, etc.) as well as the background color. Even better, pick colors that can survive the color temperature adjustment from the sky and post-processing effects; there are lots of colors but they get pretty washed out by the sun\/bloom effects, making the whole game look orangey-yellow (especially with all the white border blocks that end up blending too much with the background). Most importantly, _just pick one color_! Pick one color for beginner, intermediate, hard, etc. Mixing colors for the default surface just makes the level feel like disconnected level editor chunks glued together, and it also makes it confusing as to whether or not each color has some kind of special behavior attached when they (probably?) don't.2. Visual elements for gems\/exits. The two ways MB Ultra does this is by having very subtle, infinitely-long vertical light beams where gems\/exits are, and drawing pointers to where gems\/exits are relative to the camera (and puts the cursor directly on a gem if it's within view). They even have a fun thing where the triangular cursor folds over if the angle relative to the camera is >180 degrees. This might feel like spelling the level out, but it actually gives you a lot more freedom to put them in fun places since you don't have to worry about the player running right past them and getting completely lost with 1 gem left. Plus, even when the player knows where they are, they still have to actually _get_ them, which can still be a challenge. UPDATE: Turns out they have indicators, but as a toggle that's off by default (it's Back on a controller). The icons don't function quite the same, and they're also pretty large and opaque, so it obscures your view more than it should.3. Skip as much cosmetic geometry as possible. Some of it is cool, but other parts can be distracting and make you think there's some part of a level when in reality it's just some random rocks or an extraneous platform that you may not actually be able to reach in the first place. Hopefully this one's not too annoying to fix, since _not_ adding extra geometry should be less work, right...? :P4. Rotate the camera when flipping instead of doing a hard cut to the new angle. Without blatant markers telling you where to go it completely disorients the player, which can get ugly if the level's not super linear.5. Default marble color. Behold, the most tedious criticism of all time! Since you have to unlock skins, it'd be cool to pick the first skin based on your favorite color or something. What if I wanted red instead of blue?User Interface: I won't harp on this too much since I'm guessing the menus are mostly placeholder while the more important stuff gets done, but I'll bring it up because it's important to be reminded of these things... be sure your menus work as a ten-foot user interface! I've been playing this on a Steam Machine and two things I've run across a couple times are hard-to-read menus and flaky controller support. Be sure your text is nice and big (you could probably get away with just having big text on the desktop all the time) and that controller input makes sense everywhere (some menus are keyboard\/mouse only or don't have a highlighted menu item until the user does something first).Audio: The standard rolling\/bouncing sound is fine, the rest of the audio (including the music volume) could be more aggressive. Have some fun with the various surfaces and states that the marble can be in! It doesn't have to be overblown but it'll breathe a lot of life into the game without having to do a whole lot more than grabbing some stock sound effects and wiring them to certain materials\/events.This is all from a couple days of goofing around, so apologies if it's not very thorough or clear, but I thought you might like a mildly technical first impression from someone who put an unholy number of hours into MB Gold\/Ultra. As much as I've complained in this review I still really like the game! I hope development goes well and the game reaches the audience that's totally out there waiting for this genre to get revived properly.
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