Ive been watching this game for a while, I was reletivly anxious to play it.

I have some mixed reactions about the demo.

1. GRAPHICS

So far the hud seems more like a flight simulator, small tiny numbers and statistics all over the screen, all of them tickling away whenever you move. Unfortunatly, I ended up watching them more than I was my character and environment, as you need to know how many jumps are left, and when exactly to perfom another mid-air jump. It seemed I was piloting an aircraft, and had to monitor numbers, instead of a dream-like sense of freedom not cluttered with numbers. For example, if you've ever looked at the game Black and White 2, there are an unbeleivable amount of statistics being run in the background, viliger numbers, grain stock, temperatures, rain, pregnancy stage, creature speed, etc. All these things are kept in the black box, because they arent needed for the player (the player can access them at will however). Im not asking you to play the game but take a look at it. There are undeniably more statistics being kept track of and more functions running than your game, and there are little to zero amounts of on onscreen panels. Your game relies too heavily on watching numbers and states of the character.


The graphics are pretty awful.

Trust me when I say that I am no Picasso, or can make anything half decent in photoshop or whatever shop, but its pretty plain to see that these graphics are simplistic in the most non-attractive way possible. Im sure 90% of customers who buy games arent artistically inclined or programming prodigies, but they can tell when graphics are bad. Your character's head is so deformed and annoying to look at. The character animation is awful also, from what I can tell there are no more than 2 frames of animation for the running, and the 2 frames are pretty drastic looking from each other which causes blinking. The speed right before he starts to glide causes the .2 frame animation to play so fast that he becomes partially transparent. Ths buildings show no sign of forethought in my opinion, as they are just blocks of color with the same window repeated. Pure green grass with no sign of color variance for texture, pure grey for the floor surrounding the buildings, this was obviously done in MS paint, and it seems you didnt even try putting detail. You can say that at the billion mph speeds you can go that detail wont matter, its the same as saying project gotham racing or any racing game on the market to have single color textureless objects because of the speeds the cars in the game will go. Knowing from as many posts that I have read from you, I am sure there are MANY technical accuracys you have in place, like the amount of pixels between each window, how many floors each building has, but unfortunatly these hold no water in enjoying the graphics.

Many will think I am a jerk for saying this about his graphics, and I stress again that Im no real artist, but this is a videogame, and graphics generally are THE important, or 50% important part of the game. No one's asking you to make each sprite a picasso, but there are easily a billion small managable things you can do to make the sprites attractive.

I was hoping to zoom past various buildings, maybe a monument, park, hell anything. But Ive only been flying past a lifeless grid of buildings meticulously placed in a straight line. I know how much you stress of what an accomplishment it is to make the background soley from panels, but if only using panels causes a repetitive yet mathematically accurate model of movement and scales, you'd be better off using ANY of the other countless tools GS has to realize an environment.


2. GAMEPLAY

The feeling of speed is somewhat enjoyable when you are moving past buildings, as these are visual aids to see how fast you are moving. But when you get to the clouds, the only visual clue is how fast your vertical distance number is changing and increasing (other than the slowly moving clouds). Technically knowing you are breaking the sound barrier is totally different than experiencing the visual cues and effects of that amount speed. You may think this is another jab at his graphics, but the feeling of speed and the visuals of speed are a large part of the gameplay.

But the amount of movement and freedom from gravity and restraints is one of the best aspects of your game. Running at that amount of speed was pretty cool, then multiple jumping in the air was pretty fun. Though I find it odd that I was gaining more height by bouncing back into the ground and ascending higher than my last peak. I found the bouncing was hard to time, and the majority of my tries ended up me just standing still on the floor after many successful bounces. Yes this can be improved by practice, but I thought it was a little counter intuitive in reaching higher heights. I assumed there was a way to chain flash attacks and multi-jump in mid air to continuously gain height without returning to earth, which ended up making me play a bouncing ball game. Maybe you can implement air currents and up drafts and ride the character into them to gain height in the first stages of earth's atmosphere.

The challenges were pretty boring, as all I was doing was number watching. Making sure I did X speed within a certain amount of time or maintaining X speed during some time. As you can tell I only did 2 of the challenges, and these certainly did not make me want to continue with the others. Maybe collecting objects in the air, or on the ground would be a much better option for challenges (for the beginning at least). You should code in an A.I to challenge against you, or even better, a whole team of A.I controlled players to compete against each other, performing collision detection for some competetive roughness. This would add a much more interesting factor in an OLYMPIC event, seeing it was a lonely, synthetic world harboring only you, and statistics.

Im a little disappointed in the demo, and I am sure you wont change anything in your game for anybody now since you are selling the full game distributable at the moment.

From what I see, is that you put the demo out at the same time you did the full game. This is pretty risky, and this assumes that customers like the demo that you have now. This demo should be out to the public say for a month before you actually sell the full game. As perfect as you think your game is, not everyone else has that understanding of your game, and I honestly think there is a small niche of people who would buy this game as it is now.