Still don't bind to Y/Z, thank you. and even if, at least personally I find YXC/ZXC a pretty unfun Control Scheme. It also doesn't work well together with Q, E and Esc for Menues. And despite being a NES-Inspired Game you have no Controller support. And way too many Buttons, NES has Arrows, A/B for active ingame Actions, and Select/Start for less important Actions. You already locked Arrows and Start for Movement and menues, A/B for Attack and Heal, so you could bind interact on attack aswell and make it context sensitive Currently you'd be either interacting or healing on Select which is really odd and could be better used for swapping Swords which would be unbound elseway. Q/E for different menu screens would also not work on NES. If you're on Arrowkeys on Keyboard, you should maybe allow the use of Enter to trigger Buttons in Menues.
Your initial Forge Treehut has its exit too far South, you move way out of bounds before exiting. Your Transitions are also taking too long between Rooms.
Death Screen stays too long, should allow me to skip. Rockbiters can shoot through Walls and shoot while I histun them.
Attack should move me forward a pixel or two, so I can cover for accidentally stepping slightly too short in combat.
Your Interaction with NPC Area is below them, not on them, so I can't talk to them from the side very well.
You can push the big Oak in the "Labyrinth" Area out of the Screen on top and it disappears.
Theres no invincibility frames on getting hit, so certain Attacks just outright kill you. Enemies also don't necessarily stop movement, so you often trade hits instead of being able to hit and run of any kind. With you dealing less damage and having less health, it makes combat extremely hard.
Also not every enemy needs to shoot projectiles, just having slimes move around is enough.
Knockback and Invincibility Frames exist for a Reason. They should push me out of Harms way, so I don't get damagelocked into taking multiple Hits at once or just an entire Healthbars worth. If Tantrum jumps on you i.e., you get hit by it, since you're trying to move away, knocked back into it, and hit again, until you've been pushed through him entirely. At which Point you're dead, not even counting the Projectiles hitting you aswell. Just knock be away from the Enemy that hit me, not based on the Direction I'm facing, and further, so I end up outside of their Hitbox. Disable my Input during that, so I can't hit them or try to move back into them while being pushed out, and make me invincible, so I don't take multiple hits during the push.
Went everywhere I could as far as I know, defeated Orogon, Tantrum, Rocklord, the Reaper and got into the Tinmine.
Got Oaksword, Tinsword, Ironsword, Bonesword, Bloodthorn, Wandsword and Tonguesword, probably missed a bunch, couldn't be bothered to try out all the combinations for all the Items I got.
Also was too lazy to grind for Souls, and only got 2 Pearls.
Most of the Swords don't feel impactfull and could just be removed I think. Wood/Tin/Iron and Bloodthorn seem to be the same just different Sprites, and some shoot projectiles at full health. Bonesword as a boomerang is nice, but rather useless, compared to the speed of the other projectiles. You also got the Wandsword as dedicated projectile sword, so you don't need that many others with the same Type of attack I think. I'd probably cut them to starting sword, iron+projectile at full health, boomerang, wand and tongue from those.
The entire 2 Swords at once and swap between them feels useless. I used it once or twice to not have to go into the menu to swap, but never infight or anywhere where I wouldn't have the TIme. And I only avoided your Menues because navigating all of them except Options is pretty bad. I don't know how many super distinct Swords there are in the End, but it feels like you don't need an entire Screen for that. Your StatusScreen also has Tons of empty Space. You don't need to display the Log, or the giant Player Character in there, you could reduce the Inventory in size if you reduce the amount of drops aswell, and instead focus on making every combination of drops sword-able, instead of only specific Ones, or at least more of them, so you get more swords with less possible ingredients. Makes People not having to grind so much for ingredients that are rarer, encourages playing around and trying out combos more, makes for more interesting recipes then all the same Thing, and reduces space required for your Inventory.
With the freed up Space (also on the Map, assuming you don't have giant Dungeons later on) you could easily move the Swords into the same Screen, since theres nothing to interact with on that screen anyway. And since you don't really need an Optionscreen in a NES Game like this in game, you could just remove that, and only keep it in the title. Or have a return to title option to select in your now combined menu aswell. That way you can get rid of the submenues and the Q/E Controls for it.
You could also move the Map from your Menu onto a Map button, which can also act as pause/return to menu screen aswell, and display an overworld map when not in a dungeon, of the explored Areas ofcourse.
That Way you'd have A to Potion, B to Attack/Interact, Arrows to move, Start for menu with sword selection inside, and select for a Screen to return to title/adjust volume if you want, and show the map, making your Controlscheme conform to NES Inputs. Of course you'd loose out on 2 Swords and swapping, but again, that felt pretty useless either Way.
Interacting on Z instead of X was just annoying, I never saw a reason for that.
Your Ores also shine up way too slow/late, so you either have to wait quite a while in each room to see if you can mine something, or try every rock, which I ended up doing.
Thank you for giving my game so much of your time, both playing and sharing your thoughts!
I think you made a lot of solid points. Most of all your control woes, I see you made a game in RPG Maker so you're probably familiar with how common ZXC control schemes are. I grew up on them and am super used to them, but obviously they're more strenuous for most people than I anticipated. I intend to implement controller support ASAP, and along with it rebindable controls.
I never considered the character advancing slightly on attack. At first, I thought this was a pretty clever idea, but enemies universally have contact damage and this is something I don't intend on changing. At the moment players are rewarded heavily for positioning, managing to pin an enemy to a wall can end in an easy defeat, and if the player advanced when they attacked they would waltz directly into the enemy's hurtbox. I agree that this works in many games, but I've never seen Link advance in any of the top down Zelda titles, and I imagine it was for the same reason.
I've had a few complaints on the death screen. I don't want the player to be able to instantly jump back into gameplay, I think some of the game's emotional weight can be damaged by treating a game over in too arcadey of a manner. That said, I am considering ways to mitigate the frustration of players being stuck on the screen. I was considering either letting players skip through loading screen tips, or adding an actual game over screen, with options to continue or exit. I think the ability to advance the screen quicker with player input would help a lot.
As for invincibility frames on getting hit; you do actually get some. some. The issue is that the player isn't the only one who's frail in this game. I could introduce giving the player a healthy second or so of invincibility frames, but it would have to come with additional draw backs. If the player is simply invincible for longer, they can rush enemies, ignoring damage, taking advantage of their invincibility and taking the enemy down with DPS alone. If it isn't clear, I'm more concerned about the game being too easy than too hard. This necessitates a solution, here's a few simple ones.
A: Not letting the player attack while invincible B: Stunning the player outright C: Increasing boss's HP, probably by a lot
I'm not saying I would never make these changes, but I like the way the game is now. Consequent to the current way player damage is handled, positioning is very important. Being in a bad position means you take damage, and being in a terrible position means you die instantly. And the main grievance of getting annihilated instantly by enemies wanes as the player's maximum health increases.
It's worth mentioning that some of the swords you described as useless, I was told by other players were overpowered. The bone sword in particular. This is exactly what I intend, for swords to be comparable in damage and application such that different swords lend themselves to different situations and playstyles. It's also worth mentioning many of these swords will be acquired in completely different orders for different players, meaning swords that seem redundant will sometimes be relied upon by players taking an unorthodox route :)
I think the complaint I most resonate with however is your obvious disdain for grinding. I agree with you. Grinding is awful. This is part of why the maximum number of materials you'll ever need for a sword is 8, often obtainable purely as a byproduct of progressing through the game. The grinding for the soul material is lame and bad! I wanted to include something else west of that bridge but unfortunately ran out of time for the demo and was forced to include several enemies that drop it at all. I promise in the full game I will work as hard as I can to disincentivize grinding for materials. It's lame and bad.
I don't want it to come off like I'm shrugging off your feedback. I consider everything, and the more I hear a complaint the more likely I am to address it in game. I immensely appreciate tear downs like this. Thank you again for your time.
My biggest Problem with ZXC comes from being on a German Keyboard, so Z is in the middle upper row, not neatly next to X/C. Its one of few regular Letters thats not the same on the Layout on 'most' used Keyboards. If you'd bind to keyboard Layout, not actual Letter it'd be better, or to something thats more same-y on 'most' Keyboards.
While i.e. Link doesn't advance, his Sprite looks a lot more active during swinging. And due to how the overlap works on enemy sizes, when you swing you essentially get 2 Tiles of hit with your regular Sword, since you can just hit something with the Tip, and that'd cause the enemy to be knocked back, while in Yancy, it doesn't feel that far, and more like you need to hit with your Swords Center, while also not really increasing enemy to player distance, since i.e. the Scorchwolfes or whatever they were named just keep running into you, even tho you are locked into the Attack animation, so attacking them from the side is basically impossible without getting damaged.
Not letting the Player attack during Invincibility would be fine I guess, I just think currently you don't get enough "protection" against being instantly hit multiple times in a row so to speak. It would also work fine if the knockback just moved the Player/Enemy out of Harms way after an attack. No Knockback on Bosses obviously, that'd look stupid, but if I'm getting stomped by Tantrum, 3 pixels into my backwards direction, which is his center, isn't going to prevent a second hit.
Keep in mind, even how it is I still beat it and didn't ragequit in between, and as said before, am not much of a Fan of the Controls, and am not good at Videogames, so it can't be too bad as it is right now.
I'm not saying Bonesword or something isn't strong, I'm saying a lot feel redundant. I don't need 3+ Swords with range 1 that shoot a projectile straight forward 6 tiles while I have full health, just because one deals 1 projectile 2 hit damage and the other 1/3 respectively. You don't have enough health on Enemies to make that too distinct. Just regular attacks, ranged on full health, boomerang return, always ranged, tile 2 etc. are fine, those are distinct, but once you basically reuse a sword with different Values, you might aswell skip it alltogether.
I never considered foreign keyboards. Yipes. That sounds painful. I'm glad you had the patience to play through regardless. I think if you beat everything in this demo you're probably better at video games than you're giving yourself credit :). Thank you again!
Wow, this was unexpectedly an amazing game. Would buy/10
The combat and level design are both really really good. So many clever twists everywhere. You've nailed the Zelda 1 system of tiles and no-diagonals dynamics that the later games discarded, which nobody but me seems to ever care about. Lots of original enemies too, and every screen is unique. You've added enough to it that the game does not play like a ripoff, even though it looks like it.
The forest area is incredible. Attacking the trees before they activate feels great. The bloodoaks are absurdly threatening but can easily be played directionally on open spaces, or by getting them stuck in closed ones, which fits the forest theme. The recipe screen there is clever, as is the cave entrance. You have captured the essence of how Zelda 1 communicates secrets without their questionable and inconsistent design language. I felt like I was playing The Witness there for a second. I love that one screen with a tree grid where you have a bloodoak, but you can bait and then run past it (unlike the previous one) or even awaken and kill it at range before it has a path to get to you.
Good job getting rid of pointless ammo resources, too. Those must be tempting as a money sink, but even without it, I never felt I had too much money at all. All items for sale are useful and feel like they are worth the price. The pickaxe is a great replacement for the bomb.
I don't like how close the graphics are to the Zelda 1 artstyle at all. I know the retro spritework itself might be due to artistic limitations, but copying the themes for zones themselves and many tile models 1:1 is soulless. That being said, it's at least nice that they are cohesive and reasonably accurate to the NES itself instead of going for a faux-retro frankenstein style.
The music is mediocre, but so is the original Zelda's. This is the sort of game I'd normally play with sound off, so this is a nonfactor.
The game does a great job of teaching the player without being overbearing about it. The trip for the sword is nice. It's there as a backup for players who don't realize it straight away. Please don't put the NPC in the same room, or you might as well just have it give you the sword.
I like how the tree at the start teaches you about the other ones in that direction the first time you see it, but also serves as a passive target dummy as you come to craft different swords.
The staff book was cool and made complete sense as a reveal within the game's mechanics. It visibly clearly looks like would make more sense to have the jewel at the bottom, though. And the weapon itself is useless. Maybe there could be a secret stronger variant with the gem at the bottom? That could double as a funny implication that the sorcerer got it wrong.
It's too easy to get stunlocked by repeated hits when you're not even up against a wall. Judging by that one loading tip, you seem to know that knockback should be used strategically. I don't think there's a single situation where I found that to be viable. It's an unexplored design space for the future. Maybe increase the knockback distance and speed for various enemy types. Not the trees, though. It's flavorful for that trapping that arises organically through the mechanics to be their defining feature.
Death tips take too long. If that's supposed to hide loading, then give the player a button to read through multiple tips in one go. Reloading every death adds up in a game where you die a lot. This game is lightweight enough that it shouldn't take that long to load. If anything, you should afford to respawn objects without reloading a scene at all, since the world barely has any state data in it.
Splitting vertical and horizontal behavior in enemy types is very clever. It makes me think it could be interesting to experiment with further direction limitations.
Some of the sword tier balancing seems off, like how you get tin and bone in the same area but the bone sword is strictly better. But nice job balancing ranged attacks vs melee with different damage. And at some point I thought using nothing but ranged with full heals was flat-out better. Then I got the ghost sword, and that made me switch back to full melee all the time. By the time I was done, I would pick between the two approaches depending on the enemy. So that dynamic between the two types seems balanced. The ghost room is one of the best memorable ones in the game and that sword is a nice reward for it. Since some of these swords have unique mechanics, it would be nice if there were some way to get them up to speed with higher-powered swords eventually. Weapon upgrades would work as long as it's designed as a catch-up, instead of forcing you to stick with a single weapon throughout the game (like in Dark Souls).
I like how you implemented attacking speed as swords unfolding. It adds more depth than a windup animation.
I like how the healing is instantaneous instead of embracing the estus flask meme. At least with how the game is right now, you don't have a lot of health, so pressing the button on time is still a challenge and you have to worry about panic-overhealing.
I don't like the UI overall. Zelda 1's UI was not good.
I like how I can peek into a room before being trapped. Bonus points that you can't cheese them with ranged attacks.
Skrek enemies are not in a swamp area. I think this might be a glitch.
I want to be able to inspect item names on the forge and item screens. The icons are too simple to be self-explanatory. Also on the topic of items, the coin icon looks more like a log than a coin, which got me confused on the two at the start.
Hitbox size sometimes feels inconsistent across enemies, mostly with questionable accounting of the 3-dimensional space behind characters.
I guess that goes with the UI, but weapon selection is needlessly cumbersome. If you want weapons to have multiple uses in the future, that should be redone entirely IMO. The Zelda model for item selection is just bad. We have more buttons and computer memory to work with now. But, if you just want the player to swap between a melee and ranged sword, it should be a hold/release selection rather than a switch trigger, so that you don't have to look anywhere to avoid the risk of mixing them up. However, I myself already ran against the limitations of that, as I would often want the bonesword for ranged at full health and another one for when I'm hurt.
The seemingly useless coin debris on enemy death is distracting for a game with a simplistic visual style. Maybe get them to go into the player and quickly disappear.
Healing points being single-use is a great idea. It makes resource acquisition less stale. I don't like the death punishment mechanic of losing money, though. Shops are so sparse (I think there's only one so far) that you'll just end up not caring about money at all ever, and then mindlessly grinding to get items when you find one. Overall, I don't see what behavior you're trying to incentivize with that design decision, as it discourages exploration away from shops until you've toppled them. Letting the player cache money at save points and then losing a much higher % on death feels like a better solution. That would also help by letting players freely suicide in dungeons to start the gauntlet over, as that's one situation where the current one-use checkpoint is detrimental.
The optimal strategy in dungeons is to go in with full health and then use the start checkpoint midway through to recharge. This might be an oversight, where you meant to reset the dungeon such that it always starts on the save point.
It feels wrong that you get penalized for dying in situations where you could not have won or even deduced that a victory was impossible, by which I mean going into the seasnek ambush without access to a ranged attack. I think that fight would be better if there were a secondary (if hard enough to be implausible for a first-time player) way to hit it as well. If that's already in then I got filtered, sorry.
There should be some sort of signaling that indicates whether an enemy respawns or not.
Options are not saved when reopening the game
The difficulty is fine, honestly. You have so many zeldalikes out there with amazing art and mediocre gameplay that I feel if you're going to make one with art like this, the people who are going to play it are the ones who want tighter gameplay in the first place, and you clearly know how to deliver on that. The difficulty is what makes exploration viable as a playstyle. If you ever want to make it more accessible, it would be prudent to try first just being more direct in clarifying to the player that you're supposed to explore around, as most players have been conditioned to try to play these sorts of games the wrong way.
This is all I've found to do so far. If there's more please do give a hint or two, as I seem to have hit the dev roadblock on every front.
Waking up this morning to see this enormous and detailed run down of my game was exactly what I needed after going to bed horrified I’d forgotten some game breaking bug. This kind of in depth tear down is exactly what I need. Seeing someone recognize a lot of my intentional design choices feels fantastic. Thank you. Also, based on your screenshot I believe you found everything :)
I agree with you that I’m too close to Zelda 1 aesthetically and I intend to make later zones more visually unique. That said I think the simplicity of the art style lends itself well to the difficult gameplay so it’ll likely be small things like different tile sets (you caught me. I’m artistically limited.)
You’re not the first person to think the wand would have the gem on the bottom so there’s definitely a type of player who expects it. I may reword the journal to make it more clear it goes on top, the wandblade is intended to look kind of dopey.
Skipping through death tips is an excellent idea, no notes.
It only occurs to me now that I didn’t tell players they can equip two swords at a time using Z and X on the menu screen and swap between them with the shift key. So that should definitely go in the controls. I don’t intend for players to switch which swords they have equipped during combat, only between the two they have on.
I agree items and swords should at least have inspectable names, maybe descriptions.
Hitboxes used to be more representative of 3D space but they were actually far more confusing. They function better when I put them where players “feel” they should be, but if it felt wrong to you I should go back and look at some of them closer.
I was thinking that coins should fly to the player as well. The coins were one of the first things I added a long long time ago.
I could respond in detail to every single thing you’ve said but I’ll spare you. I agree with a lot of it.
Thank you so much for playing and sharing feedback!
More sounds! The ones that are there are great though, as is the music.
Would be nice to be able to see controls ingame/change them.
Graphics are great.
Difficulty is pretty brutal though, I feel like the game could benefit a lot by slowing down the overall gamespeed a bit, it gets pretty finicky when you move around so fast yourself for example. Maybe if not all monsters did contact damage too.
I have no idea what the things are that drop from enemies sometimes, can't pick them up it seems.
Some more effects when you hit enemies/get hit could be nice, like flashing the sprite maybe.
Being able to change controls is a must I know. One of my friends couldn’t play because he doesn’t have arrow keys. I’ll get around to it for sure.
I’ve noticed items dropping into unobtainable spots happens more than I expected, I think I’ll make items drift towards the player when you get close :)
If you’re referring to the little puddles dropped by the wolves or the skreks, those are liquids so you need a bottle to collect them (not available in the demo)
We definitely do need more music, my musician / sound guy gives this game a LOT of its atmosphere.
"Thanks for playing my game even though it's really hard" You're welcome, I killed a tree, I died to a tree, circle of life and I love to see a tree. I fought some red monsters and got a rock, I had used my wood to make a sword like the kid tells you t jam them all together, so that's a good in game tip, but I did it on accident before I talked to him. He provided context, but honestly I'd expect the tip to be in the same room as the task. Is the game locked at the default resolution? It's very small as I'm sure you are aware and I'm wondering how you can even test this game when it's
the size of a postage stamp. Don't get me wrong either, I like the size, it looks nice at this resolution, I'm just curious if I missed that. Got across the bridge, signs saying to ignore something, not sure if that's literally from the dev in game, or if it's internal so I'm going to go this way. Well I died, not sure which reason still but I find that funny if it's not because of some development reason (I only bring it up because this is ostensibly a demo, so it could go either way)
Can't kill the reaper with a wooden sword, so I went back past the red guys to the cave where Otto is. Music in the cave is nice, especially the intro which I think is good because you hear it a lot. I got through a few rooms on the left, then three rooms on the right after a bunch of tries, I found myself saying 'alright one more try' more than once which is a good sign, it's not just hard it's also engaging. Thank you for submitting, better late than never.
Comments
Still don't bind to Y/Z, thank you. and even if, at least personally I find YXC/ZXC a pretty unfun Control Scheme. It also doesn't work well together with Q, E and Esc for Menues. And despite being a NES-Inspired Game you have no Controller support. And way too many Buttons, NES has Arrows, A/B for active ingame Actions, and Select/Start for less important Actions. You already locked Arrows and Start for Movement and menues, A/B for Attack and Heal, so you could bind interact on attack aswell and make it context sensitive Currently you'd be either interacting or healing on Select which is really odd and could be better used for swapping Swords which would be unbound elseway. Q/E for different menu screens would also not work on NES. If you're on Arrowkeys on Keyboard, you should maybe allow the use of Enter to trigger Buttons in Menues.
Your initial Forge Treehut has its exit too far South, you move way out of bounds before exiting. Your Transitions are also taking too long between Rooms.
Death Screen stays too long, should allow me to skip. Rockbiters can shoot through Walls and shoot while I histun them.
Attack should move me forward a pixel or two, so I can cover for accidentally stepping slightly too short in combat.
Your Interaction with NPC Area is below them, not on them, so I can't talk to them from the side very well.
You can push the big Oak in the "Labyrinth" Area out of the Screen on top and it disappears.
Theres no invincibility frames on getting hit, so certain Attacks just outright kill you. Enemies also don't necessarily stop movement, so you often trade hits instead of being able to hit and run of any kind. With you dealing less damage and having less health, it makes combat extremely hard.
Also not every enemy needs to shoot projectiles, just having slimes move around is enough.
Knockback and Invincibility Frames exist for a Reason. They should push me out of Harms way, so I don't get damagelocked into taking multiple Hits at once or just an entire Healthbars worth. If Tantrum jumps on you i.e., you get hit by it, since you're trying to move away, knocked back into it, and hit again, until you've been pushed through him entirely. At which Point you're dead, not even counting the Projectiles hitting you aswell. Just knock be away from the Enemy that hit me, not based on the Direction I'm facing, and further, so I end up outside of their Hitbox. Disable my Input during that, so I can't hit them or try to move back into them while being pushed out, and make me invincible, so I don't take multiple hits during the push.
Went everywhere I could as far as I know, defeated Orogon, Tantrum, Rocklord, the Reaper and got into the Tinmine.
Got Oaksword, Tinsword, Ironsword, Bonesword, Bloodthorn, Wandsword and Tonguesword, probably missed a bunch, couldn't be bothered to try out all the combinations for all the Items I got.
Also was too lazy to grind for Souls, and only got 2 Pearls.
Most of the Swords don't feel impactfull and could just be removed I think. Wood/Tin/Iron and Bloodthorn seem to be the same just different Sprites, and some shoot projectiles at full health. Bonesword as a boomerang is nice, but rather useless, compared to the speed of the other projectiles. You also got the Wandsword as dedicated projectile sword, so you don't need that many others with the same Type of attack I think. I'd probably cut them to starting sword, iron+projectile at full health, boomerang, wand and tongue from those.
The entire 2 Swords at once and swap between them feels useless. I used it once or twice to not have to go into the menu to swap, but never infight or anywhere where I wouldn't have the TIme. And I only avoided your Menues because navigating all of them except Options is pretty bad. I don't know how many super distinct Swords there are in the End, but it feels like you don't need an entire Screen for that. Your StatusScreen also has Tons of empty Space. You don't need to display the Log, or the giant Player Character in there, you could reduce the Inventory in size if you reduce the amount of drops aswell, and instead focus on making every combination of drops sword-able, instead of only specific Ones, or at least more of them, so you get more swords with less possible ingredients. Makes People not having to grind so much for ingredients that are rarer, encourages playing around and trying out combos more, makes for more interesting recipes then all the same Thing, and reduces space required for your Inventory.
With the freed up Space (also on the Map, assuming you don't have giant Dungeons later on) you could easily move the Swords into the same Screen, since theres nothing to interact with on that screen anyway. And since you don't really need an Optionscreen in a NES Game like this in game, you could just remove that, and only keep it in the title. Or have a return to title option to select in your now combined menu aswell. That way you can get rid of the submenues and the Q/E Controls for it.
You could also move the Map from your Menu onto a Map button, which can also act as pause/return to menu screen aswell, and display an overworld map when not in a dungeon, of the explored Areas ofcourse.
That Way you'd have A to Potion, B to Attack/Interact, Arrows to move, Start for menu with sword selection inside, and select for a Screen to return to title/adjust volume if you want, and show the map, making your Controlscheme conform to NES Inputs. Of course you'd loose out on 2 Swords and swapping, but again, that felt pretty useless either Way.
Interacting on Z instead of X was just annoying, I never saw a reason for that.
Your Ores also shine up way too slow/late, so you either have to wait quite a while in each room to see if you can mine something, or try every rock, which I ended up doing.
No Overworld Music, no Bugs.
Thank you for giving my game so much of your time, both playing and sharing your thoughts!
I think you made a lot of solid points. Most of all your control woes, I see you made a game in RPG Maker so you're probably familiar with how common ZXC control schemes are. I grew up on them and am super used to them, but obviously they're more strenuous for most people than I anticipated. I intend to implement controller support ASAP, and along with it rebindable controls.
I never considered the character advancing slightly on attack. At first, I thought this was a pretty clever idea, but enemies universally have contact damage and this is something I don't intend on changing. At the moment players are rewarded heavily for positioning, managing to pin an enemy to a wall can end in an easy defeat, and if the player advanced when they attacked they would waltz directly into the enemy's hurtbox. I agree that this works in many games, but I've never seen Link advance in any of the top down Zelda titles, and I imagine it was for the same reason.
I've had a few complaints on the death screen. I don't want the player to be able to instantly jump back into gameplay, I think some of the game's emotional weight can be damaged by treating a game over in too arcadey of a manner. That said, I am considering ways to mitigate the frustration of players being stuck on the screen. I was considering either letting players skip through loading screen tips, or adding an actual game over screen, with options to continue or exit. I think the ability to advance the screen quicker with player input would help a lot.
As for invincibility frames on getting hit; you do actually get some. some. The issue is that the player isn't the only one who's frail in this game. I could introduce giving the player a healthy second or so of invincibility frames, but it would have to come with additional draw backs. If the player is simply invincible for longer, they can rush enemies, ignoring damage, taking advantage of their invincibility and taking the enemy down with DPS alone. If it isn't clear, I'm more concerned about the game being too easy than too hard. This necessitates a solution, here's a few simple ones.
A: Not letting the player attack while invincible
B: Stunning the player outright
C: Increasing boss's HP, probably by a lot
I'm not saying I would never make these changes, but I like the way the game is now. Consequent to the current way player damage is handled, positioning is very important. Being in a bad position means you take damage, and being in a terrible position means you die instantly. And the main grievance of getting annihilated instantly by enemies wanes as the player's maximum health increases.
It's worth mentioning that some of the swords you described as useless, I was told by other players were overpowered. The bone sword in particular. This is exactly what I intend, for swords to be comparable in damage and application such that different swords lend themselves to different situations and playstyles. It's also worth mentioning many of these swords will be acquired in completely different orders for different players, meaning swords that seem redundant will sometimes be relied upon by players taking an unorthodox route :)
I think the complaint I most resonate with however is your obvious disdain for grinding. I agree with you. Grinding is awful. This is part of why the maximum number of materials you'll ever need for a sword is 8, often obtainable purely as a byproduct of progressing through the game. The grinding for the soul material is lame and bad! I wanted to include something else west of that bridge but unfortunately ran out of time for the demo and was forced to include several enemies that drop it at all. I promise in the full game I will work as hard as I can to disincentivize grinding for materials. It's lame and bad.
I don't want it to come off like I'm shrugging off your feedback. I consider everything, and the more I hear a complaint the more likely I am to address it in game. I immensely appreciate tear downs like this. Thank you again for your time.
My biggest Problem with ZXC comes from being on a German Keyboard, so Z is in the middle upper row, not neatly next to X/C. Its one of few regular Letters thats not the same on the Layout on 'most' used Keyboards. If you'd bind to keyboard Layout, not actual Letter it'd be better, or to something thats more same-y on 'most' Keyboards.
While i.e. Link doesn't advance, his Sprite looks a lot more active during swinging. And due to how the overlap works on enemy sizes, when you swing you essentially get 2 Tiles of hit with your regular Sword, since you can just hit something with the Tip, and that'd cause the enemy to be knocked back, while in Yancy, it doesn't feel that far, and more like you need to hit with your Swords Center, while also not really increasing enemy to player distance, since i.e. the Scorchwolfes or whatever they were named just keep running into you, even tho you are locked into the Attack animation, so attacking them from the side is basically impossible without getting damaged.
Not letting the Player attack during Invincibility would be fine I guess, I just think currently you don't get enough "protection" against being instantly hit multiple times in a row so to speak. It would also work fine if the knockback just moved the Player/Enemy out of Harms way after an attack. No Knockback on Bosses obviously, that'd look stupid, but if I'm getting stomped by Tantrum, 3 pixels into my backwards direction, which is his center, isn't going to prevent a second hit.
Keep in mind, even how it is I still beat it and didn't ragequit in between, and as said before, am not much of a Fan of the Controls, and am not good at Videogames, so it can't be too bad as it is right now.
I'm not saying Bonesword or something isn't strong, I'm saying a lot feel redundant. I don't need 3+ Swords with range 1 that shoot a projectile straight forward 6 tiles while I have full health, just because one deals 1 projectile 2 hit damage and the other 1/3 respectively. You don't have enough health on Enemies to make that too distinct. Just regular attacks, ranged on full health, boomerang return, always ranged, tile 2 etc. are fine, those are distinct, but once you basically reuse a sword with different Values, you might aswell skip it alltogether.
I never considered foreign keyboards. Yipes. That sounds painful. I'm glad you had the patience to play through regardless.
I think if you beat everything in this demo you're probably better at video games than you're giving yourself credit :). Thank you again!
Wow, this was unexpectedly an amazing game. Would buy/10
The combat and level design are both really really good. So many clever twists everywhere. You've nailed the Zelda 1 system of tiles and no-diagonals dynamics that the later games discarded, which nobody but me seems to ever care about. Lots of original enemies too, and every screen is unique. You've added enough to it that the game does not play like a ripoff, even though it looks like it.
The forest area is incredible. Attacking the trees before they activate feels great. The bloodoaks are absurdly threatening but can easily be played directionally on open spaces, or by getting them stuck in closed ones, which fits the forest theme. The recipe screen there is clever, as is the cave entrance. You have captured the essence of how Zelda 1 communicates secrets without their questionable and inconsistent design language. I felt like I was playing The Witness there for a second. I love that one screen with a tree grid where you have a bloodoak, but you can bait and then run past it (unlike the previous one) or even awaken and kill it at range before it has a path to get to you.
Good job getting rid of pointless ammo resources, too. Those must be tempting as a money sink, but even without it, I never felt I had too much money at all. All items for sale are useful and feel like they are worth the price. The pickaxe is a great replacement for the bomb.
I don't like how close the graphics are to the Zelda 1 artstyle at all. I know the retro spritework itself might be due to artistic limitations, but copying the themes for zones themselves and many tile models 1:1 is soulless. That being said, it's at least nice that they are cohesive and reasonably accurate to the NES itself instead of going for a faux-retro frankenstein style.
The music is mediocre, but so is the original Zelda's. This is the sort of game I'd normally play with sound off, so this is a nonfactor.
The game does a great job of teaching the player without being overbearing about it. The trip for the sword is nice. It's there as a backup for players who don't realize it straight away. Please don't put the NPC in the same room, or you might as well just have it give you the sword.
I like how the tree at the start teaches you about the other ones in that direction the first time you see it, but also serves as a passive target dummy as you come to craft different swords.
The staff book was cool and made complete sense as a reveal within the game's mechanics. It visibly clearly looks like would make more sense to have the jewel at the bottom, though. And the weapon itself is useless. Maybe there could be a secret stronger variant with the gem at the bottom? That could double as a funny implication that the sorcerer got it wrong.
It's too easy to get stunlocked by repeated hits when you're not even up against a wall. Judging by that one loading tip, you seem to know that knockback should be used strategically. I don't think there's a single situation where I found that to be viable. It's an unexplored design space for the future. Maybe increase the knockback distance and speed for various enemy types. Not the trees, though. It's flavorful for that trapping that arises organically through the mechanics to be their defining feature.
Death tips take too long. If that's supposed to hide loading, then give the player a button to read through multiple tips in one go. Reloading every death adds up in a game where you die a lot. This game is lightweight enough that it shouldn't take that long to load. If anything, you should afford to respawn objects without reloading a scene at all, since the world barely has any state data in it.
Splitting vertical and horizontal behavior in enemy types is very clever. It makes me think it could be interesting to experiment with further direction limitations.
Some of the sword tier balancing seems off, like how you get tin and bone in the same area but the bone sword is strictly better. But nice job balancing ranged attacks vs melee with different damage. And at some point I thought using nothing but ranged with full heals was flat-out better. Then I got the ghost sword, and that made me switch back to full melee all the time. By the time I was done, I would pick between the two approaches depending on the enemy. So that dynamic between the two types seems balanced. The ghost room is one of the best memorable ones in the game and that sword is a nice reward for it. Since some of these swords have unique mechanics, it would be nice if there were some way to get them up to speed with higher-powered swords eventually. Weapon upgrades would work as long as it's designed as a catch-up, instead of forcing you to stick with a single weapon throughout the game (like in Dark Souls).
I like how you implemented attacking speed as swords unfolding. It adds more depth than a windup animation.
I like how the healing is instantaneous instead of embracing the estus flask meme. At least with how the game is right now, you don't have a lot of health, so pressing the button on time is still a challenge and you have to worry about panic-overhealing.
I don't like the UI overall. Zelda 1's UI was not good.
I like how I can peek into a room before being trapped. Bonus points that you can't cheese them with ranged attacks.
Skrek enemies are not in a swamp area. I think this might be a glitch.
I want to be able to inspect item names on the forge and item screens. The icons are too simple to be self-explanatory. Also on the topic of items, the coin icon looks more like a log than a coin, which got me confused on the two at the start.
Hitbox size sometimes feels inconsistent across enemies, mostly with questionable accounting of the 3-dimensional space behind characters.
I guess that goes with the UI, but weapon selection is needlessly cumbersome. If you want weapons to have multiple uses in the future, that should be redone entirely IMO. The Zelda model for item selection is just bad. We have more buttons and computer memory to work with now. But, if you just want the player to swap between a melee and ranged sword, it should be a hold/release selection rather than a switch trigger, so that you don't have to look anywhere to avoid the risk of mixing them up. However, I myself already ran against the limitations of that, as I would often want the bonesword for ranged at full health and another one for when I'm hurt.
The seemingly useless coin debris on enemy death is distracting for a game with a simplistic visual style. Maybe get them to go into the player and quickly disappear.
Healing points being single-use is a great idea. It makes resource acquisition less stale. I don't like the death punishment mechanic of losing money, though. Shops are so sparse (I think there's only one so far) that you'll just end up not caring about money at all ever, and then mindlessly grinding to get items when you find one. Overall, I don't see what behavior you're trying to incentivize with that design decision, as it discourages exploration away from shops until you've toppled them. Letting the player cache money at save points and then losing a much higher % on death feels like a better solution. That would also help by letting players freely suicide in dungeons to start the gauntlet over, as that's one situation where the current one-use checkpoint is detrimental.
The optimal strategy in dungeons is to go in with full health and then use the start checkpoint midway through to recharge. This might be an oversight, where you meant to reset the dungeon such that it always starts on the save point.
It feels wrong that you get penalized for dying in situations where you could not have won or even deduced that a victory was impossible, by which I mean going into the seasnek ambush without access to a ranged attack. I think that fight would be better if there were a secondary (if hard enough to be implausible for a first-time player) way to hit it as well. If that's already in then I got filtered, sorry.
There should be some sort of signaling that indicates whether an enemy respawns or not.
Options are not saved when reopening the game
The difficulty is fine, honestly. You have so many zeldalikes out there with amazing art and mediocre gameplay that I feel if you're going to make one with art like this, the people who are going to play it are the ones who want tighter gameplay in the first place, and you clearly know how to deliver on that. The difficulty is what makes exploration viable as a playstyle. If you ever want to make it more accessible, it would be prudent to try first just being more direct in clarifying to the player that you're supposed to explore around, as most players have been conditioned to try to play these sorts of games the wrong way.
This is all I've found to do so far. If there's more please do give a hint or two, as I seem to have hit the dev roadblock on every front.
Waking up this morning to see this enormous and detailed run down of my game was exactly what I needed after going to bed horrified I’d forgotten some game breaking bug. This kind of in depth tear down is exactly what I need. Seeing someone recognize a lot of my intentional design choices feels fantastic. Thank you. Also, based on your screenshot I believe you found everything :)
I agree with you that I’m too close to Zelda 1 aesthetically and I intend to make later zones more visually unique. That said I think the simplicity of the art style lends itself well to the difficult gameplay so it’ll likely be small things like different tile sets (you caught me. I’m artistically limited.)
You’re not the first person to think the wand would have the gem on the bottom so there’s definitely a type of player who expects it. I may reword the journal to make it more clear it goes on top, the wandblade is intended to look kind of dopey.
Skipping through death tips is an excellent idea, no notes.
It only occurs to me now that I didn’t tell players they can equip two swords at a time using Z and X on the menu screen and swap between them with the shift key. So that should definitely go in the controls. I don’t intend for players to switch which swords they have equipped during combat, only between the two they have on.
I agree items and swords should at least have inspectable names, maybe descriptions.
Hitboxes used to be more representative of 3D space but they were actually far more confusing. They function better when I put them where players “feel” they should be, but if it felt wrong to you I should go back and look at some of them closer.
I was thinking that coins should fly to the player as well. The coins were one of the first things I added a long long time ago.
I could respond in detail to every single thing you’ve said but I’ll spare you. I agree with a lot of it.
Thank you so much for playing and sharing feedback!
Zelda 1 meets Dark Souls.
Thank you so much for playing!
Being able to change controls is a must I know. One of my friends couldn’t play because he doesn’t have arrow keys. I’ll get around to it for sure.
I’ve noticed items dropping into unobtainable spots happens more than I expected, I think I’ll make items drift towards the player when you get close :)
If you’re referring to the little puddles dropped by the wolves or the skreks, those are liquids so you need a bottle to collect them (not available in the demo)
We definitely do need more music, my musician / sound guy gives this game a LOT of its atmosphere.
Thank you again!!
"Thanks for playing my game even though it's really hard" You're welcome, I killed a tree, I died to a tree, circle of life and I love to see a tree. I fought some red monsters and got a rock, I had used my wood to make a sword like the kid tells you t jam them all together, so that's a good in game tip, but I did it on accident before I talked to him. He provided context, but honestly I'd expect the tip to be in the same room as the task. Is the game locked at the default resolution? It's very small as I'm sure you are aware and I'm wondering how you can even test this game when it's
the size of a postage stamp. Don't get me wrong either, I like the size, it looks nice at this resolution, I'm just curious if I missed that. Got across the bridge, signs saying to ignore something, not sure if that's literally from the dev in game, or if it's internal so I'm going to go this way. Well I died, not sure which reason still but I find that funny if it's not because of some development reason (I only bring it up because this is ostensibly a demo, so it could go either way)
Can't kill the reaper with a wooden sword, so I went back past the red guys to the cave where Otto is. Music in the cave is nice, especially the intro which I think is good because you hear it a lot. I got through a few rooms on the left, then three rooms on the right after a bunch of tries, I found myself saying 'alright one more try' more than once which is a good sign, it's not just hard it's also engaging. Thank you for submitting, better late than never.
(starring down my nemesis Old Brawler)
Thank you so much for playing my game!
It must've been brutal playing the game at default resolution. You can change the scale of the window in the Options menu ;_;
I will update the game's description to reflect that. Thank you again!