Ostark and Didi can lay an egg!

Yes, even Ostark! It's amazing. What's also amazing is that this ability was planned already during the game jam, more than six years ago. Most graphical assets for it were already created back then (that's why the transmission animation always had a green circle too!). It mainly took so long because of two game design questions: what should the ability do exactly? Secondly, I want this game to be playable with just six buttons (on arcade machines, etc.), so how could this ability be activated? Play the game to see how I answered these design questions, and let me know what you think.

By the way, if you want to skip ahead to the egg levels: in the first level, move both birds to the left, and jump with both birds simultaneously. Don't tell anyone I told you. :-)

There are of course some new levels to explore this ability and the interesting puzzles that can be created with it. There are also many small improvements (like sound and music levels can be set in the options menu), and one more music track, but the other major change is this:

The player controls are now faster, "snappier", and more modern. They are still not as fast as modern platformers such as Celeste or Hollow Knight, but this is also a very different game, being a puzzle game that is all about smart positioning and enemy manipulation. If the controls are too fast, the puzzles become trivial. This can be offset with faster enemy speeds, but that changes the rhythm and pacing of the game. Anyway, play the game to see which choices I made to balance it all, and let me know what you think.

So why did it take so long to change (hopefully improve) the player controls? In the past years I often thought: "Maybe I should change the controls, but I already made 10 / 20 / 30 / ... levels based on these controls. If I change the controls now, I need to thoroughly playtest and tweak all of those levels again." Well, I finally decided to go ahead and change them anyway, and playtested and tweaked all 70 levels accordingly!

The main lesson is this: when creating a game, especially a platformer: spend a lot of time perfecting and playtesting the player controls, before creating the content! This is a very obvious point, but still, it seems I fell into the trap of doing it wrong...

Have fun, and let me know what you think of these controls and this new ability in the comments!