Thanks, haha. I don't really know anything about music-making. The OST is actually all royalty free music I've found. The song with the vocals is this one.
Some issues I found (note I ran it under wine, I don't have a windows machine):
When entering the settings menu the resolution displayed was different than my current resolution, exiting after changing unrelated settings caused my window size to change.
When the game started, my mouse disappeared. The game also wouldn't respond to keyboard controls.
From the manual it seems like a fun game, but I wasn't able to play. If you're not targeting Linux users then I guess that's fine.
Thanks. I realize that I was being a little bit passive aggressive with the last sentence (and that it's a bit self-serving to apologize only after you did the thing).
The keyboard worked this time, though there was still no mouse (intended?). I like that the layout is efficient, even though I didn't really make that much use of q/w/e/r. Having keyboard controls in non-combat menus might improve the flow further since I won't have to move my hands to the mouse. Some kind of skip input like common in VNs would have been useful too, since my main computer crashed during the last prologue battle so I finished it (and the new storyline) on my laptop and I had to mash space to get through the dialogue. My main annoyance UI-wise was that the character portraits when taking combat actions would cover up the action bar and status effects of enemies on the right side of the screen.
I've played RPGs a little bit and found the combat system easy to get used to. Since I couldn't get hard mode to work (see bugs section), I found it easy to keep everyone buffed / the enemy debuffed and found combat a little bit boring. I imagine that with hard mode working it would be more challenging, and the fights would be over sooner anyway since I would have to learn to play faster. On the note of balance, I didn't seem to need to mess with polarity very much to win the prologue encounters, other than keeping it near 0 to avoid surprises. Increasing overall difficulty might make it more important, but it could also be cool to have some encounters designed specifically to exercise polarity manipulation (this would also teach the player to use it effectively in future encounters). In the final chapter of the prologue the crew became less useful in the middle of battle because everyone was buffed, I didn't need heals very often, and the crew has low attack power. Even when I did need heals, I ended up with an OT surplus since Nostradamus was not needed often. Also, I noticed some attacks delivered "high" damage, and others delivered "large" damage. I wasn't sure what the difference was.
I like horny designs so that's a plus.
Bugs I noticed:
First time I went to the settings I got a black screen and had to restart the game. Didn't happen again so don't know what caused it.
I still had the issue where the settings page resolution would be different from the initial resolution
I got a game over during the prologue and my mouse didn't come back like it usually does after an encounter.
You can change polarity even when in menus, regardless of whether hard mode is on. You could cheese the game by keeping attack high and then raising defense only before the enemy attacks, and it would make the polarity effects of moves redundant.
Hard mode setting didn't work (good thing for me because I spent a lot of time in the menus). The setting toggles but the meters still pause in menus.
Hard mode setting toggles either when you enter settings from new storyline base
At some point during the first demo battle I couldn't see Sparta's status effects anymore. They didn't actually go away and will display again sometimes when here status effects change.
When selecting a skill targeting enemies, the menu sound effect would interrupt the BGM. The sound is also louder than usual so maybe there are multiple instances of the sound playing. I only noticed it in the Alcor battle after some time had passed, and it seems like the sound was getting louder over time.
Sometimes bleed would be removed from enemies after attacks, not sure if this is because some enemies have faster recovery or something else.
Impenetrable would reduce polarity but wouldn't raise defense.
At the end of the prologue you can press space and the last line of dialogue would reappear and flash
In the bestiary, if your mouse is hovering over an item in the enemy list, scrolling with the wheel doesn't work (at least on touchpad).
Self-care didn't appear to distribute OT, at least not instantly
Only left shift works for cancel (Though with the key layout left shift is nicer anyway)
Dialogue doesn't appear after gaining 100% in the new storyline (but I guess that's probably just because there's no dialogue written for that part)
The same flickering status bug that was already reported
It's no problem. Thanks for taking the time to play the build and writing such lengthy feedback!
Currently there's no mouse control in combat, but for the next demo I'm planning to make battles playable with both/either. I'll try to make the other screens playable with both the mouse and keyboard as well. I'll try to think of a good way to remedy the portrait problem, whether it be moving the enemy UI further up or something else. I'll try to make it more challenging. There will be some enemies that can "lock" the polarity bar into certain ranges for a period of time. I'll try to think of some encounters that force you to use it as well. I'll also adjust the tooltips to be a little more descriptive/consistent in terms of damage.
Settings: Thanks for reporting those. I will check them out. I wonder if it happens on Windows but I never noticed because I hadn't wiped a certain player pref or something on my machine.
Battle: I'll check out those issues with hard mode and bar-manipulating in menus. Thanks!
Bleed: Was Bleed removed from the enemy after you attack it or after the Bleeding enemy attacks? When Bleeding enemies are attacked with a physical attack (either basic or skill), the attack does more damage and the status is consumed.
Since OT's textbox only displays the number as an int, if Jean gives each character a <1 amount of OT, it will still pass, but will not change what is displayed. I decided on that to stop too many flashing numbers from appearing.
There's no party member dialogue after defeating Mizar - maybe I should've added some to thank/congratulate the players though!
Regarding the sound effect when selecting skills... Thanks for pointing that out. It seems like each time you select a skill it plays the sound effect n+1 times... Very weird.
Thanks again for all your feedback! I'm glad the Linux build seems to work as well as the Windows one.
All the cases of bleed removal was on the enemy being attacked, so I guess that's working as expected. When I was trying self-care though I did it when Jean had high enough OT built up that I should be able to see the change (like 12 or so). I didn't choose actions very efficiently so it was common to get some OT buildup.
EDIT: Also I forgot to mention, I think Kamui and Avicenna's headshots have different OT gates and effects, which was unexpected for me. Another thing is that OT is consumed even if I use a skill when below the OT gate (the manual says it is subtracted if you use it when above the gate)
Yeah, I have to figure out why that's happening. I'm not sure if it's because the characters are drawn at a high resolution or some other reason when I'm setting up the sprites in Unity.
I'm so surprised but I love your game so much! I didn't think it would be bad at all (your post in the thread were always about such cool and intricate feature), but It did like a game that I wouldn't be interested in. However, after playing it for a while, BOY WAS I WRONG. The energy is so exciting and infectious that its hard not to get into it. I was doubtful about the characters specifically, but now that I'm using the characters within the context of battle, I really like these dudes! They look great and have so much personality with such cool abilities. I love your artstyle so much and I find your decisions so inspiring. I just wanted to mention a few things I took note of when playing ...
When using Bio Seeker, the enemy's health should jump out a little more. With the movement and colours on the screen, it's hard to initially notice that information when it pops up.
When selecting the skill you want to use, it's not super clear that you have more than 4 skills. The scroll bar doesn't really draw any attention to itself. Maybe make that look more clear or make the menu 4x2.
I'm not really sure why but Headshot was doing more than Avicenna Beam for me. The descriptions felt a little misleading in terms of their damage they did but then again, I have no grasp on the mechanics of the game yet and whether its the enemy's defences that are causing their misleading nature, I don't know. Just felt I should mention it.
I also experienced a glitch when Sparta had more than 4 statuses on her at once. It would flicker between displaying just the first 4 and then just the 5th every frame. Maybe they could queue across the bottom too.
I think I'll leave it at that, I've already talked your ear off. Overall, your game was stunning! I really loved playing this and it felt so snappy and high-energy the whole time. Jean is my favourite character. Keep up this brilliant work!
First of all, thanks so much for such incredible feedback. Waking up to this has really made my day. I'm glad you like the characters, art style, and found it fun to play. I always feel weird posting progress in the threads because the game is mostly UI.
I wonder if I can change the appearance of the scroll bar to indicate you have more skills below, or have an arrow that appears in the top/bottom right corner when there are further possibilities. What do you mean by 4x2 though?
I'll try to think of ways to make the Bio Seeker health peek stand out. Whether it be some change to the panel or an additional animation in the screen center. For skills to do their max damage, you have to be at the proper OT limit for that skill. Avicenna Beam's is 40 while Headshot's is 3, so it takes a while for ABeam to do max damage. You can pass OT with Isaac's Believe and distribute OT with Jean's Self-Care, so that can help mitigate the waiting. Each enemy does have their own weaknesses/resistances to Bash/Slash/Magnet/Digital/Nano, but it doesn't show up in the Bestiary yet. Generally a full powered ABeam will do a lot of damage(10k-20k) if it's been charged up.
I'll fix that status glitch. What it should be doing is displaying 4 at once, but rotating through them slowly to show every status a character has when it exceeds 4.
Jean is my favorite too! I'm glad you like her. Thank you again for playing and taking the time to leave such a large comment.
Cool dialog system. Unique art style. Characters are still a bit hard to distinguish from background and UI. In the combat system, it would be nice if you were returned to your attack / skill selection from the previous round so you don't have to select your target each turn if it isn't the default target. The frequent zooming makes the combat feel like more is going on, which is good!
Thank you so much for playing it! Is it difficult to make out the characters from the background in both the novel and battle scenes or just one? I think I’ll try placing thicker lines on the outside of the characters
I’m gonna play around more with the battle UI in the future to make it playable with a mouse so I’ll keep those skill and enemy memory options in mind!
Mostly the battle scenes I feel. Thicker outlines would do nicely. Some bigger text too, particularly in the skill section of the battle UI. I'm looking forward to more improvements!
Comments
WOW!! the music is RAD
i thought i paused cocteau twins playing in the background!
is it a real singer or a vox sample???
Thanks, haha. I don't really know anything about music-making. The OST is actually all royalty free music I've found. The song with the vocals is this one.
Some issues I found (note I ran it under wine, I don't have a windows machine):
From the manual it seems like a fun game, but I wasn't able to play. If you're not targeting Linux users then I guess that's fine.
I uploaded a Linux build. Let me know if that works better. Otherwise, I can't really target it since I only have a Windows machine. I'm sorry.
Thanks. I realize that I was being a little bit passive aggressive with the last sentence (and that it's a bit self-serving to apologize only after you did the thing).
The keyboard worked this time, though there was still no mouse (intended?). I like that the layout is efficient, even though I didn't really make that much use of q/w/e/r. Having keyboard controls in non-combat menus might improve the flow further since I won't have to move my hands to the mouse. Some kind of skip input like common in VNs would have been useful too, since my main computer crashed during the last prologue battle so I finished it (and the new storyline) on my laptop and I had to mash space to get through the dialogue. My main annoyance UI-wise was that the character portraits when taking combat actions would cover up the action bar and status effects of enemies on the right side of the screen.
I've played RPGs a little bit and found the combat system easy to get used to. Since I couldn't get hard mode to work (see bugs section), I found it easy to keep everyone buffed / the enemy debuffed and found combat a little bit boring. I imagine that with hard mode working it would be more challenging, and the fights would be over sooner anyway since I would have to learn to play faster. On the note of balance, I didn't seem to need to mess with polarity very much to win the prologue encounters, other than keeping it near 0 to avoid surprises. Increasing overall difficulty might make it more important, but it could also be cool to have some encounters designed specifically to exercise polarity manipulation (this would also teach the player to use it effectively in future encounters). In the final chapter of the prologue the crew became less useful in the middle of battle because everyone was buffed, I didn't need heals very often, and the crew has low attack power. Even when I did need heals, I ended up with an OT surplus since Nostradamus was not needed often. Also, I noticed some attacks delivered "high" damage, and others delivered "large" damage. I wasn't sure what the difference was.
I like horny designs so that's a plus.
Bugs I noticed:
It's no problem. Thanks for taking the time to play the build and writing such lengthy feedback!
Currently there's no mouse control in combat, but for the next demo I'm planning to make battles playable with both/either. I'll try to make the other screens playable with both the mouse and keyboard as well. I'll try to think of a good way to remedy the portrait problem, whether it be moving the enemy UI further up or something else. I'll try to make it more challenging. There will be some enemies that can "lock" the polarity bar into certain ranges for a period of time. I'll try to think of some encounters that force you to use it as well. I'll also adjust the tooltips to be a little more descriptive/consistent in terms of damage.
Settings: Thanks for reporting those. I will check them out. I wonder if it happens on Windows but I never noticed because I hadn't wiped a certain player pref or something on my machine.
Battle: I'll check out those issues with hard mode and bar-manipulating in menus. Thanks!
Bleed: Was Bleed removed from the enemy after you attack it or after the Bleeding enemy attacks? When Bleeding enemies are attacked with a physical attack (either basic or skill), the attack does more damage and the status is consumed.
Since OT's textbox only displays the number as an int, if Jean gives each character a <1 amount of OT, it will still pass, but will not change what is displayed. I decided on that to stop too many flashing numbers from appearing.
There's no party member dialogue after defeating Mizar - maybe I should've added some to thank/congratulate the players though!
Regarding the sound effect when selecting skills... Thanks for pointing that out. It seems like each time you select a skill it plays the sound effect n+1 times... Very weird.
Thanks again for all your feedback! I'm glad the Linux build seems to work as well as the Windows one.
All the cases of bleed removal was on the enemy being attacked, so I guess that's working as expected. When I was trying self-care though I did it when Jean had high enough OT built up that I should be able to see the change (like 12 or so). I didn't choose actions very efficiently so it was common to get some OT buildup.
EDIT: Also I forgot to mention, I think Kamui and Avicenna's headshots have different OT gates and effects, which was unexpected for me. Another thing is that OT is consumed even if I use a skill when below the OT gate (the manual says it is subtracted if you use it when above the gate)
Oh, I see. I'll look into that. Thanks again!
good soundtrack, dont really got much to say
the only thing i didnt like about this is this weird aliasing all over the art
Yeah, I have to figure out why that's happening. I'm not sure if it's because the characters are drawn at a high resolution or some other reason when I'm setting up the sprites in Unity.
Thanks for playing!
I'm so surprised but I love your game so much! I didn't think it would be bad at all (your post in the thread were always about such cool and intricate feature), but It did like a game that I wouldn't be interested in. However, after playing it for a while, BOY WAS I WRONG. The energy is so exciting and infectious that its hard not to get into it. I was doubtful about the characters specifically, but now that I'm using the characters within the context of battle, I really like these dudes! They look great and have so much personality with such cool abilities. I love your artstyle so much and I find your decisions so inspiring. I just wanted to mention a few things I took note of when playing ...
When using Bio Seeker, the enemy's health should jump out a little more. With the movement and colours on the screen, it's hard to initially notice that information when it pops up.
When selecting the skill you want to use, it's not super clear that you have more than 4 skills. The scroll bar doesn't really draw any attention to itself. Maybe make that look more clear or make the menu 4x2.
I'm not really sure why but Headshot was doing more than Avicenna Beam for me. The descriptions felt a little misleading in terms of their damage they did but then again, I have no grasp on the mechanics of the game yet and whether its the enemy's defences that are causing their misleading nature, I don't know. Just felt I should mention it.
I also experienced a glitch when Sparta had more than 4 statuses on her at once. It would flicker between displaying just the first 4 and then just the 5th every frame. Maybe they could queue across the bottom too.
I think I'll leave it at that, I've already talked your ear off. Overall, your game was stunning! I really loved playing this and it felt so snappy and high-energy the whole time. Jean is my favourite character. Keep up this brilliant work!
First of all, thanks so much for such incredible feedback. Waking up to this has really made my day. I'm glad you like the characters, art style, and found it fun to play. I always feel weird posting progress in the threads because the game is mostly UI.
I wonder if I can change the appearance of the scroll bar to indicate you have more skills below, or have an arrow that appears in the top/bottom right corner when there are further possibilities. What do you mean by 4x2 though?
I'll try to think of ways to make the Bio Seeker health peek stand out. Whether it be some change to the panel or an additional animation in the screen center. For skills to do their max damage, you have to be at the proper OT limit for that skill. Avicenna Beam's is 40 while Headshot's is 3, so it takes a while for ABeam to do max damage. You can pass OT with Isaac's Believe and distribute OT with Jean's Self-Care, so that can help mitigate the waiting. Each enemy does have their own weaknesses/resistances to Bash/Slash/Magnet/Digital/Nano, but it doesn't show up in the Bestiary yet. Generally a full powered ABeam will do a lot of damage(10k-20k) if it's been charged up.
I'll fix that status glitch. What it should be doing is displaying 4 at once, but rotating through them slowly to show every status a character has when it exceeds 4.
Jean is my favorite too! I'm glad you like her. Thank you again for playing and taking the time to leave such a large comment.
Cool dialog system. Unique art style. Characters are still a bit hard to distinguish from background and UI. In the combat system, it would be nice if you were returned to your attack / skill selection from the previous round so you don't have to select your target each turn if it isn't the default target. The frequent zooming makes the combat feel like more is going on, which is good!
Thank you so much for playing it! Is it difficult to make out the characters from the background in both the novel and battle scenes or just one? I think I’ll try placing thicker lines on the outside of the characters
I’m gonna play around more with the battle UI in the future to make it playable with a mouse so I’ll keep those skill and enemy memory options in mind!
Mostly the battle scenes I feel. Thicker outlines would do nicely. Some bigger text too, particularly in the skill section of the battle UI. I'm looking forward to more improvements!