It's very clearly an early prototype. The only thing I can really mention that you can work on or fix immediately is making it so if the player stops moving a split second before swinging the club, it doesn't mess up the body animation and make it look stiff. That broken animation made beating the enemy comedic because it looked like I spanked him to death.
I always enjoy your feedback, PHI! Thanks so much for playing!
I feel guilty having only put so much effort into this one demo. I spent a lot longer on a prior version which features a much smaller, intricate level with a lot more interactions and was more 'complete' vision of the game. This build was more or less just a way for me to mess around with camerawork, seeing what works and what doesn't. All this feedback i'm getting is actually super helpful and will help me find best practices to use when framing cameras and designing levels.
Deadzone is something I will check on. I think the values are probably too low.
I will look in to a framerate counter in build. I think in actuality it's the fog planes being animated out of sync with the camera rendering, making the entire game look like it's dropping frames, but there's a possibility that there is something else i'm not catching actually causing framerate issues.
Pausing was an indev feature, so it's not complete (it wasn't even meant to be pushed to this build lol)
There's a lot of difficult design decisions i'm going to make moving forward, like you were talking about with the combat needing to be simple but not too easy. It's turning out to be a pretty challenging project to manage but I am having fun and I hope you will check it out again in the future!
I must've somehow missed this game when I was doing playthroughs - I only realized my mistake when the Youtuber talked about this game and I had no idea it was available. I gave it a go, and here are my thoughts. For reference I played using KB+Mouse.
Some things are clearly WIP (pretty nice for one week's worth of effort) so I'll comment on important topics instead of obvious WIP parts
>Didn't encounter any combat, so I assume there aren't any enemies available or I missed them entirely
>The dramatic camera angles are very cool. The first big room has a very nice visual. For some large rooms, including the big one just mentioned, it feels as if the player is too far away. It would be annoying having to do something or fight enemies while the camera is super distant. For these situations I recommend splitting the rooms into several camera sections, but keeping the major dramatic angles.
>Recreated the Silent Hill / RE1&2 style cramped-hallway camera controls, with the camera following the player. I like it, very claustrophobic
>Some camera bug in the room immediately after this hallway room, when standing in a certain spot would make the camera start rapidly spinning
>Wide open areas with the trailing camera doesn't match with the dramatic camera angles form before. I'd pick one style and stick with it as much as possible
>Can't pause while attacking?
>Ingame menu buttons don't work?
Otherwise it's a nice start. I'm interested to see where this will lead
There is a combat section. It's actually required to beat the demo. I am not sure how far you got before stopping.
I definitely think I am going to limit my fixed camera angle distances in the future. I can still do wide shots, but they have to be done alongside cuts to closer ones near by. It's a bit more work but yes, it does make it hard to see when the camera can be so far away.
"Some camera bug in the room immediately after this hallway room, when standing in a certain spot would make the camera start rapidly spinning" I actually put a collider above the camera's allocated track specifically that this wouldn't happen. If you notice, you can't get close to the wall in that part of the level, because if you do, the camera would spin out of control. In my testing, I didn't run into it again after putting that collider. I probably need to make the collider wider then so it really has no chance of doing that behavior. Thank you.
Pausing was actually not intended to be in this build, as it's an indev feature, along with all other features and interactions relating to it. Sorry.
The character's feet move around during the idle animation. How does that happen? Is your skeleton hierarchy set up wrong?
I don't know what Unity calls it, but the running animation should be controlled by a 1D blend based on velocity so that the character doesn't run in place when moving against a wall.
The camera span around rapidly the first time I walked up to the scaffolding at the end of the narrow alley, but I couldn't replicate it.
Why is pausing on Space instead of Esc?
The first time I pressed Space, the game froze for several seconds.
You can't pause again for about a second after unpausing.
Inventory should not be on the pause menu like that. Saving/loading/options should either be accessible from the inventory, or entirely separate.
The camera sometimes suddenly jerks forward in the large open area.
I think you should use collision boxes for interactions instead of a line trace.
These fences aren't a very believable obstacle. You could easily just climb over them.
The character goes back to his idle pose when unpausing while moving.
Try using whatever Unity's equivalent to Unreal's DepthFade node is to get rid of the harsh intersections between the fog planes and other geometry.
I think you should avoid large, open spaces. They don't go well together wih the camera and limited view distance.
One of the turns leading up to the picture on the wall with the camera angle, and the camera clips through the wall.
I know it's a prototype and all, but Dutch angles should be used sparingly and with purpose.
It should take you out of the "is attacking" state a couple frames before the animation ends.
Is the attack animation additive? Is that why it sometimes only plays on the right arms and why the legs jitter?
Like I said last time, there's no reason to despawn enemy bodies.
The camera transition in the middle of all the warning signs where you get the crowbar is a bit annoying since adjusting your direction to avoid the signs can make you hit the transition trigger again.
I don't think the quotation marks on prompts telling you what item you used are necessary when the item is already highligted in red.
Pausing is an indev feature and I wasn't meant to push it to this build. Oops. All associated features with it are also indev, and will not function properly.
All placeholder animation transitions and other stuff broke, but I didn't have time to fix before deadline.
I also noticed the camera jerking forward in the open area, I have zero idea what is causing this beside the camera collider script misbehaving, probably due to some flag not being checked properly.
And thank you for your input regarding the other camera functionality also. It is my #1 priority for this project right now.
I know you played the last demo; In the last one, movement across camera transitions remained until you your axis float became 0. In this demo, I used some maths to auto adjust the vector across transitions. Were you able to notice a difference? Did it feel smoother compared to last time?
>I know you played the last demo; In the last one, movement across camera transitions remained until you your axis float became 0. In this demo, I used some maths to auto adjust the vector across transitions. Were you able to notice a difference? Did it feel smoother compared to last time?
It's a lot smoother, although there were some specific transitions where the character would first snap in another direction (north?) before going where you wanted.
Also, I noticed I forgot some words in my first comment. I meant to say that this turn is a bit hard to spot.
Ah, yeah. I actually went through the level and did try to make sure all entrances were visible or had a direction in mind. That one does seem really hard to spot due to it being parallel with the wall. I should probably have put that exit on the opposite side, away from the camera instead of closer to it. Good catch. I also didn't really want to put the roll/dutch as you move to that side of the area, but I kept it in because I didn't mind it (I did noticed the clipping a bit though)
Also unrelated, I think I probably will switch from a raycast checker for interactions, to a 3D overlap check, like you suggested. It's something that was bugging me, because raycasts assume everything will have a collider, else the raycast clips in to the interaction zone. 3D Overlap check would help alleviate this.
Used controller. The most gameplay out of the super early prototypes this DD. The animations and models are not that great, but the fog looks good. Camera angles were nice, and the portrait at the end of the alley looked pretty creepy(yellow warning tape around it looked a bit silly though). Either the fog did wonders, or you used a creepier portrait at a distance and switched it to the lady up close. Looks like the perfect setup for some monster to come out and chase you down that long corridor. Only gripe was how big the open area was, probably could cut out a lot of empty space so there's less nothing while looking for the next destination.
Thanks for trying it out! I will admit that the art and level itself were absolutely rushed as hell, so thank you for understanding and playing ProjectSoS!
Comments
It's very clearly an early prototype. The only thing I can really mention that you can work on or fix immediately is making it so if the player stops moving a split second before swinging the club, it doesn't mess up the body animation and make it look stiff. That broken animation made beating the enemy comedic because it looked like I spanked him to death.
I always enjoy your feedback, PHI! Thanks so much for playing!
I feel guilty having only put so much effort into this one demo. I spent a lot longer on a prior version which features a much smaller, intricate level with a lot more interactions and was more 'complete' vision of the game. This build was more or less just a way for me to mess around with camerawork, seeing what works and what doesn't. All this feedback i'm getting is actually super helpful and will help me find best practices to use when framing cameras and designing levels.
Deadzone is something I will check on. I think the values are probably too low.
I will look in to a framerate counter in build. I think in actuality it's the fog planes being animated out of sync with the camera rendering, making the entire game look like it's dropping frames, but there's a possibility that there is something else i'm not catching actually causing framerate issues.
Pausing was an indev feature, so it's not complete (it wasn't even meant to be pushed to this build lol)
There's a lot of difficult design decisions i'm going to make moving forward, like you were talking about with the combat needing to be simple but not too easy. It's turning out to be a pretty challenging project to manage but I am having fun and I hope you will check it out again in the future!
I must've somehow missed this game when I was doing playthroughs - I only realized my mistake when the Youtuber talked about this game and I had no idea it was available. I gave it a go, and here are my thoughts. For reference I played using KB+Mouse.
Some things are clearly WIP (pretty nice for one week's worth of effort) so I'll comment on important topics instead of obvious WIP parts
>Didn't encounter any combat, so I assume there aren't any enemies available or I missed them entirely
>The dramatic camera angles are very cool. The first big room has a very nice visual. For some large rooms, including the big one just mentioned, it feels as if the player is too far away. It would be annoying having to do something or fight enemies while the camera is super distant. For these situations I recommend splitting the rooms into several camera sections, but keeping the major dramatic angles.
>Recreated the Silent Hill / RE1&2 style cramped-hallway camera controls, with the camera following the player. I like it, very claustrophobic
>Some camera bug in the room immediately after this hallway room, when standing in a certain spot would make the camera start rapidly spinning
>Wide open areas with the trailing camera doesn't match with the dramatic camera angles form before. I'd pick one style and stick with it as much as possible
>Can't pause while attacking?
>Ingame menu buttons don't work?
Otherwise it's a nice start. I'm interested to see where this will lead
There is a combat section. It's actually required to beat the demo. I am not sure how far you got before stopping.
I definitely think I am going to limit my fixed camera angle distances in the future. I can still do wide shots, but they have to be done alongside cuts to closer ones near by. It's a bit more work but yes, it does make it hard to see when the camera can be so far away.
"Some camera bug in the room immediately after this hallway room, when standing in a certain spot would make the camera start rapidly spinning" I actually put a collider above the camera's allocated track specifically that this wouldn't happen. If you notice, you can't get close to the wall in that part of the level, because if you do, the camera would spin out of control. In my testing, I didn't run into it again after putting that collider. I probably need to make the collider wider then so it really has no chance of doing that behavior. Thank you.
Pausing was actually not intended to be in this build, as it's an indev feature, along with all other features and interactions relating to it. Sorry.
Thanks for playing!
Hello again, Qwott!
Pausing is an indev feature and I wasn't meant to push it to this build. Oops. All associated features with it are also indev, and will not function properly.
All placeholder animation transitions and other stuff broke, but I didn't have time to fix before deadline.
I also noticed the camera jerking forward in the open area, I have zero idea what is causing this beside the camera collider script misbehaving, probably due to some flag not being checked properly.
And thank you for your input regarding the other camera functionality also. It is my #1 priority for this project right now.
I know you played the last demo; In the last one, movement across camera transitions remained until you your axis float became 0. In this demo, I used some maths to auto adjust the vector across transitions. Were you able to notice a difference? Did it feel smoother compared to last time?
Thanks again!
>I know you played the last demo; In the last one, movement across camera transitions remained until you your axis float became 0. In this demo, I used some maths to auto adjust the vector across transitions. Were you able to notice a difference? Did it feel smoother compared to last time?
It's a lot smoother, although there were some specific transitions where the character would first snap in another direction (north?) before going where you wanted.
Also, I noticed I forgot some words in my first comment. I meant to say that this turn is a bit hard to spot.
Ah, yeah. I actually went through the level and did try to make sure all entrances were visible or had a direction in mind. That one does seem really hard to spot due to it being parallel with the wall. I should probably have put that exit on the opposite side, away from the camera instead of closer to it. Good catch. I also didn't really want to put the roll/dutch as you move to that side of the area, but I kept it in because I didn't mind it (I did noticed the clipping a bit though)
Also unrelated, I think I probably will switch from a raycast checker for interactions, to a 3D overlap check, like you suggested. It's something that was bugging me, because raycasts assume everything will have a collider, else the raycast clips in to the interaction zone. 3D Overlap check would help alleviate this.
Thanks again!
Used controller. The most gameplay out of the super early prototypes this DD. The animations and models are not that great, but the fog looks good. Camera angles were nice, and the portrait at the end of the alley looked pretty creepy(yellow warning tape around it looked a bit silly though). Either the fog did wonders, or you used a creepier portrait at a distance and switched it to the lady up close. Looks like the perfect setup for some monster to come out and chase you down that long corridor. Only gripe was how big the open area was, probably could cut out a lot of empty space so there's less nothing while looking for the next destination.
Thanks for trying it out! I will admit that the art and level itself were absolutely rushed as hell, so thank you for understanding and playing ProjectSoS!
Some of my animator stuff broke so there's a high chance you run into animation bugs at some point. Thank you for your patience!