JusTiCe8
First of all, thanks a lot for your support, it is much appreciated ! Hop! 2D is my dearest project so far (probably my only presentable one !) and except musics and some sounds, I did make the rest of the game myself.
You're right about the saving system, it's clearly a concession I made to the spirit of vintage video games but, due to the growth of the game from its very beginning, it became necessary to find a practical way to do it, with only a few "clicks" and nothing to type. In earlier versions, I did use 6 digit-codes, just like in Lemmings once you have completed a level, but at the end of each world in my case (series of 10 levels). But the more I used it, the more I felt most players would not like to note (or even remember !) these codes just to avoid restarting from scratch. I also had some feedback about players discouraged to have to restart a whole world after losing their last life near its end. So I came to the current system, where you can restart a game from the beginning of any unlocked world (kind of "automatic progression save") or choose when to save manually a game at the end of any level. 6-digit codes are still used in the game but only to access secret areas (have you tried at least the first one you can see in level 5 ?).
I'm also glad I'm not the only one here to know Crafton & Xunk ! To me, this game was a true masterpiece considering the memory of the Amstrad CPC, which was my first computer. I've completed the game and its sequel if you're interested (search "Asthalis", "Crafton & Xunk" and "Ange de cristal" on Youtube) and dedicated a whole part of my website (asthalis.free.fr) to video games (Arcade, CPC and PC) so you're likely to find (or re-discover) lots of hits of the 80s and 90s there. One of my favourite childhood video games was the CPC version of Ikari Warriors.
But back to my game... When you say Hop is hard to quit, you may be right too if you mean the number of needed steps is a bit too much. There is a quick way, though : switch to windowed mode (space bar) and... just close the window ! Jokes apart, do you think I should add a "quit" button in the pause menu and/or the main menu ?
To be honest, you're not the first one to mention the "unorthodox" layout of the menus. This was dictated from the start by my choice to keep controls consistent between the game itself and the navigation in menus (left and right directions only). Now that I've added (I hope) self-explanatory icons on each button, I'm pretty sure you won't notice it anymore after a few games.
Thanks for sharing this and good all memories (and sorry for being so wordy !), I'll add your name in the "thanks" section of Hop! 2D's next beta (27). By the way, Which level have you reached so far ?
