i have enjoyed my time inside Dr Phil-Induced Psychosis Simulator, but my head's spinning a bit lol
apart from the cool artstyle and the whole orb-pondering angle (though it's more like the orb itself is doing the pondering), i really enjoyed how tight the controls and the movement feels. very old-school, very Quake 1-like, it's buttery-smooth and it's almost sad that it's somewhat overshadowed by the more attention-grabbing elements of the game
The movement code is actually Quake-based. The calculation methods hold up pretty well to this day. But I feel like these are subtleties most people recognize on a subconscious level only. That's why we tried to make the art style scream at the player ;)
i'm slowly becoming somewhat of a movement-feel-in-3d-games nerd, so i'm kinda unreasonably proud i clocked the quake influence lol. imo it's one of those kinda-boring-but-actually-super-important topics in games that people miss behind the more fun stuff like mechanics and aesthetics, so it's cool you had that covered :)
awesome. one of my favorite games in the jam so far! great work, both of you.
seems like the 'bullets' and hit effects are a bit out of theme, but I'm sure you're aware already. getting devil daggers vibes. chess pieces are cool. palette is nice. balance feels good. need to play with the camera a bit more to develop an opinion on how it feels.
I got a around 2K on my second bootup here which I'm sure isn't amazing but I had fun! some more thoughts on the controller.
why not just go the full 360? I mean, I'm sure you tried it in dev but the more I play, the more I want it.
I often miss the chess pieces due to the distortion. this is basically fine and kinda sorta not really a feature--as a player I can (and did) certainly correct for it. might be useful to modulate the distance requirement for pickup based on the vector between the player and the item (to 'account' for distortion).
there's a weird sort of gap between seeing a cloud of heads at 3 o clock or whatever and not being able to shoot at it, because you're managing some other cloud at 10 o clock. again, the game is already fun and it's certainly conventional to aim and shoot in one direction, so it's OK. but I almost wish I could crowd control in such a way that I could manage multiple groups at once. perhaps this is due to the transience of the bullets--as artifacts they have a very short lifetime. if they did some kind of persistent damage, or took longer to reach their target, or something, it might work. but that would mess with the classic mob management shooter feel you have. the solution might be as simple as adding tons of pushback and/or sleep/freeze to enemy hits, to emphasize groups and how you control them in space. yeah.
I love the style, but I can't help but think this would work really well diegetically as a sort of hulking vehicle-on-a-soundstage huge map thing with the full english done on HUD ui and target tracking, and a compass spanning the full footer of the screen.
Thanks for your elaborate feedback! It's a real treasure trove!
It would be possible to go 360 but it probably would require another projection style to be useful (panoramic or equirectangular instead of fisheye), although that might take out a lot of the perceived speed. We initially had the player character hold an actual orb (as a 'weapon' view model) that showed what's behind the player. Kind of like a back mirror. But during playtesting we found that you'd never actually look into the orb since you'd be mostly focused on aiming and what's in front of you. So maybe having a 360 fov might defragment that information.
You're absolutely right about having more means of crowd control. That's a missed opportunity. We had pain responses and knockback in mind but as always, time was the ultimate constraint. We focused on creating different enemy behaviours instead and sadly at some point totally forgot about crowd control mechanism. There was also an idea for a secondary fire mode, like a charge attack of some sort with additional pushback or slowdown within an area.
I'm sure there's a lot potential for elaboration and we certainly didn't exhaust all interesting possibilities. Orbhead 2 maybe ;)
Wow! Nice sound, the Heads' death screams were great. I became Orbhead. The purple shooter heads and suicide heads... woah. I kept wondering if the potions were going to somehow change my field of vision.
Very awesome shader effect - I love camera experiments like these. I guess you use 3 cameras? Would be cool if they had a bit more "meaning" - for example, left click shoots to the left, right to the right, and both or middle click shoots forward...
Yeah, we've experimented with changing FOV based on gameplay situations or powerups, but the changes were so jarring, they often threw the player for a loop. So we stuck with a fixed angle. I haven't thought of different shooting directions, though. Sounds interesting.
Comments
Camera style on top of everything else feels like I’m in some kind of fever dream. Nice head giblets.
i have enjoyed my time inside Dr Phil-Induced Psychosis Simulator, but my head's spinning a bit lol
apart from the cool artstyle and the whole orb-pondering angle (though it's more like the orb itself is doing the pondering), i really enjoyed how tight the controls and the movement feels. very old-school, very Quake 1-like, it's buttery-smooth and it's almost sad that it's somewhat overshadowed by the more attention-grabbing elements of the game
Haha, I'm glad you liked it! Thanks for playing!
The movement code is actually Quake-based. The calculation methods hold up pretty well to this day. But I feel like these are subtleties most people recognize on a subconscious level only. That's why we tried to make the art style scream at the player ;)
i'm slowly becoming somewhat of a movement-feel-in-3d-games nerd, so i'm kinda unreasonably proud i clocked the quake influence lol. imo it's one of those kinda-boring-but-actually-super-important topics in games that people miss behind the more fun stuff like mechanics and aesthetics, so it's cool you had that covered :)
awesome. one of my favorite games in the jam so far! great work, both of you.
seems like the 'bullets' and hit effects are a bit out of theme, but I'm sure you're aware already. getting devil daggers vibes. chess pieces are cool. palette is nice. balance feels good. need to play with the camera a bit more to develop an opinion on how it feels.
I got a around 2K on my second bootup here which I'm sure isn't amazing but I had fun! some more thoughts on the controller.
why not just go the full 360? I mean, I'm sure you tried it in dev but the more I play, the more I want it.
I often miss the chess pieces due to the distortion. this is basically fine and kinda sorta not really a feature--as a player I can (and did) certainly correct for it. might be useful to modulate the distance requirement for pickup based on the vector between the player and the item (to 'account' for distortion).
there's a weird sort of gap between seeing a cloud of heads at 3 o clock or whatever and not being able to shoot at it, because you're managing some other cloud at 10 o clock. again, the game is already fun and it's certainly conventional to aim and shoot in one direction, so it's OK. but I almost wish I could crowd control in such a way that I could manage multiple groups at once. perhaps this is due to the transience of the bullets--as artifacts they have a very short lifetime. if they did some kind of persistent damage, or took longer to reach their target, or something, it might work. but that would mess with the classic mob management shooter feel you have. the solution might be as simple as adding tons of pushback and/or sleep/freeze to enemy hits, to emphasize groups and how you control them in space. yeah.
I love the style, but I can't help but think this would work really well diegetically as a sort of hulking vehicle-on-a-soundstage huge map thing with the full english done on HUD ui and target tracking, and a compass spanning the full footer of the screen.
Thanks for your elaborate feedback! It's a real treasure trove!
It would be possible to go 360 but it probably would require another projection style to be useful (panoramic or equirectangular instead of fisheye), although that might take out a lot of the perceived speed. We initially had the player character hold an actual orb (as a 'weapon' view model) that showed what's behind the player. Kind of like a back mirror. But during playtesting we found that you'd never actually look into the orb since you'd be mostly focused on aiming and what's in front of you. So maybe having a 360 fov might defragment that information.
You're absolutely right about having more means of crowd control. That's a missed opportunity. We had pain responses and knockback in mind but as always, time was the ultimate constraint. We focused on creating different enemy behaviours instead and sadly at some point totally forgot about crowd control mechanism. There was also an idea for a secondary fire mode, like a charge attack of some sort with additional pushback or slowdown within an area.
I'm sure there's a lot potential for elaboration and we certainly didn't exhaust all interesting possibilities. Orbhead 2 maybe ;)
Thanks for playing and for the nice words!
Wow! Nice sound, the Heads' death screams were great. I became Orbhead. The purple shooter heads and suicide heads... woah. I kept wondering if the potions were going to somehow change my field of vision.
Very awesome shader effect - I love camera experiments like these. I guess you use 3 cameras? Would be cool if they had a bit more "meaning" - for example, left click shoots to the left, right to the right, and both or middle click shoots forward...
Thanks!
Yeah, we've experimented with changing FOV based on gameplay situations or powerups, but the changes were so jarring, they often threw the player for a loop. So we stuck with a fixed angle. I haven't thought of different shooting directions, though. Sounds interesting.
It's 5 cameras projected onto a distorted cube ;)
Is.. is that.. Dr Phil? This is disturbing hahaha. Very polished nice job!
Haha! That's a rather unintentional Dr Phil reference :D
Thanks for playing! <3