OVERVIEW

City of Dust aims to be a brutally difficult rage game inspired by the best indie platformers of the 2000s and early 2010s, with the charming graphical style of classic handheld consoles from the 80s and 90s. This game involves precision platforming with a heavy emphasis on speed running, so every millisecond counts.

Hope you enjoy, feel free to give me some feedback, and don’t rage too hard!

CREDITS

Creeply100 on Twitter/X for some assets.

Everybody who has played the game so far :).

WHAT’S NEW?

  • FULL controller support!
  • Coyote timing when jumping.
  • Sound effects when picking up collectibles.
  • Fixed collectible collision detection
  • Options to mute the in-game music and enable Fullscreen.
  • An additional grade for collecting orbs, as well as a ‘P’ rank when you get an S rank on both criteria.
  • Fixed jumping animations.
  • New victory screen, built for speed runners to screenshot their time.
  • Removal of the ‘This isn’t done yet :(’ tooltip, as I forgot to remove it in the previous build.

WHAT’S NEXT?

  • Further optimisation for browsers
  • More music
  • More levels

KNOWN ISSUES

  • The browser version may lag if you run it
  • the executable may flag as a false positive on Windows Defender
  • The screenshot button does not work on the browser version

Feel free to give me any feedback in the comments below if you discover other issues.

CONTROLS

KEYBOARD & MOUSE:

WASD = Movement/Navigate Menu Interface

SPACE = Jump

SHIFT = sprint

ESC = Pause

LMB/ENTER = Select

CONTROLLER:

LStick/DPad = Movement/Navigate Menu Interface

A = Jump/Select

RT = Sprint

START = Pause


Download

Download
City Of Dust DEMO 0.2.zip 35 MB

Development log

Comments

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(+1)

Very good for a first game. Kept me entertained over lunch and the end of the day. Visuals and music / sfx are all really good, though that might not sound like praise if you saw my artistic abilities.

The wall jumps all slightly increasing in pitch feels good.

I've only noticed a few minor bugs:

  • Momentum is kept through death (excluding your 3rd death where you fall over for a second or so). This is hardly likely to be abused, however, and doesn't negatively impact a normal playthrough.
  • Running into the sides of spikes seems to trigger a death twice (Two lives are lost and if you do this with 2 lives left you respawn dead and respawn again after a second).
  • Wall jumping while pressing the button away from the wall causes what I'm assuming is a wall jump into the wall which causes a small hop directly upwards. It takes a while to get it consistently but can be accidentally stumbled upon when doing successive wall jumps. (NB: This might be intentional on your part and feels like on level 2 it could be faster than the intended route but some visual / audio feedback would probably be needed to make it feel like a "move")

Each level feels well laid out and feels like it logically progresses from the last level, I like the camera movement in level 2. Level 3 feels a little short in comparison to level 2 but then this is only a prototype.

It'd be good to have something at the end of a level, say on the billboard to show you your best time. I'm frantically smacking print screen to try and get a screenshot of my best time at the end of a level. (I claim the current WR for level 1)


Only other gripe (I was playing on Keyboard because I couldn't be bothered to find my controller) was needing to use the mouse to restart the level instead of using arrows/WASD and space/enter to hit restart, though given you have "Partial" controller support I imagine this would come for free as part of full controller support.

Very good for a first game and a prototype.