I think the base mechanics of your game are strong, you put a lot of work into your combat and it shows. The quality of animation, the way you convey motion in your animations is great. There's definitely depth to the weighty, slow nature of combat, and the abstract presentation of the enemies allows for a lot of possibilities for enemy variety. But the context that combat is surrounded by doesn't work to its advantage.
Levels are very large, and it's very aggravating walking through these massive levels between deaths only to be deleted in one or two hits. Especially in your dungeon where the magma can instantly annihilate the player for slipping off the thin bridges. I personally assumed the magma would be treated the same as the cliffs, and I'd just pop up safe after taking some damage. Was very surprised when my lil guy was fiendishly immolated.
I'm just extrapolating here but I imagine you made the levels so massive to accommodate player's varying movement speeds, they can level up their stats to go faster, and eventually they'll be able to dart around these levels really quickly. I feel like this can only end in one of two ways, either you never get enough move speed for it to feel meaningful, or you eventually become so quick that it enormously affects the balance of your combat. Consistent movement speed in single player action games is fairly standard for this reason, it's very difficult to account for large gaps in move speed, and I can imagine a lot of these enemies being trivialized by some simple strafing eventually.
That's a pretty fundamental critique, and if you intend for these levels to be large and you care a lot about keeping the movement speed leveling, I can respect judging your game for what it is rather than what I'd like it to be. Here's a simpler observation. Why on earth do I need to sleep in the tent to equip weapons? Finding that sword was very exciting, but the wind was taken out of my sails after 10 minutes of trying to figure out how to equip it, pressing every button on my keyboard before using the tent out of desperation. It doesn't make sense mechanically to not allow me to collect items as I'm traveling, and it certainly makes no sense narratively that the item vanishes from my character's inventory into their base camp. Your game gets a full point better the instant I can equip a weapon on the spot.
The last thing I want to express after all that negativity; I love your setting. "What's the setting for this slow soulsy action RPG? Cyberpunk? Victorian? Medieval?" "No. Modern day Hawaii." Completely left field, but opens the door to SO many exciting ideas. Beaches, volcanoes, hotels, slums, the Dole plantation, ABC stores. The culture clash of the mythology and the tourist reality. BRILLIANT decision. I think you should seriously consider putting a lot of your thought and resources into selling this setting, teaching people about the area, because it's a fantastic premise. You obviously have an eye for the aesthetics with your statues and your kick ass logo.
Keep the brochures I love them. "Go to Hawaii idiot."
Hey, thanks for playing. So far only one enemy has been given a look, and in the end they're all going to be proper monsters of some kind.
Yeah, I need to add save points, or warp points in the dungeon for sure. I don't know when that will happen in the future, but it will eventually.
I have a couple of different goals that probably aren't very clear in the game's current form, as I'm working on various other systems instead of making those goals crystal clear. The reason the over world is so large is actually just because I want exploration to be a major focus of the game. The dungeon turned out as large as it did so I could satisfactorily explore several things with the water pipes mechanic. Ideally also, combat will change to reflect faster enemy speeds as the game progresses. Enemies will get faster and more aggressive, and hopefully late game combat will look a bit more like Devil May Cry, or other character action games. Although it's kind of there in the current game, I'm still figuring out ways to include the survival elements I want, but I'm imagining things like requiring certain types of gear for certain climates and making your loadout something to think about for the entirety of your over world traversal. In the final game more dangerous enemies will appear at night as well, adding time pressure to over world travel.
For a while, you could change gear by accessing a chest, and only with this demo did I experiment with sleeping in the tent being where you could change gear, since I thought of it as a sort of daily preparation. For DD 51 it'll be back to accessing a chest to change gear. Unfortunately, my experiment with putting weapons out in the over world was pretty short sighted, and as you express, it's annoying to find something you can't just equip. I don't know if I'll have a more logical system by DD 51 (such as smithing weapons) but it should at least be less annoying then.
Dang I'm not sure what I'm envisioning for the game will live up to those expectations! Although I enjoy my sort of cheeky "tourist stuck in a troical hell hole" flavor, the game likely won't lean that into modern Hawaiian life. The island itself (although the map is currently just Maui) is a lost Hawaiian island hidden away by magic hundreds of years ago, so you won't see many modern things on it, other than stuff that washes up on shore somehow. The plan is also for the camp sites to be things the player builds themself, even if it's just a quick cut scene when a suitable spot is found. Hopefully you'll like the game anyway.
It seems that if I sit around, I heal back up to the end of the dark red bar. But it takes forever. So of course I don't wait. So am I being punished for my impatience? I think you should introduce a "wait" command where my dude can take a sit and time passes so I regain what I would get if I left the game idle.
It would probably be good practice to introduce a frame limiter so you don't fry graphics cards, I don't need 1000 fps.
I dunno, this game is too hard for me. I can't beat the two dudes in a room in the tutorial. I guess I just suck
After I made this comment I gave it another try and at least made it through the tutorial.
But like the other commenter said... come on bro at least give me a weapon. Even just a wooden sword. I dunno maybe the point is to frustrate the player in which case I'm just not the target audience
Nah, being frustrating isn't the goal. I tried making the tutorial a lot shorter, and experimented with hiding all the gear in the overworld. Clearly it's not going over well. Thank you for letting me know it was so frustrating.
The auto healing is meant to be a reward for players who play well enough to not get hit often, so you're right about not waiting. Unfortunately the thing that's supposed to balance that isn't actually in the game yet (dangerous enemies appearing at night, adding a timed incentive to exploration and the like.)
My bad, that was more of a debug thing for me. The game is limited to 60 fps, but the fps shown there is an extrapolation to show how fast your computer is rendering the frames. It's helped me figure out where optimizations need to be made.
Apologies, I probably should have made them easier. The only reason there's two is to make the lock on required.
Combat plays horribly from the top down perspective, enemy windups are insanely fast and stunlock the player instantly sending you back 5 screens. Which wouldn't be so bad but the player movement is slow and painful, and a lot of design choices rub salt in the wound of the unpleasant combat. Animations all around are bad and it doesn't seem like any thought was put into enemy encounter design, just spam enemies in rooms. Enemies also have visible stamina and mana bars, but basically can't deplete the former and the latter doesn't seem to do anything, so that information is just useless.
Starting the player with no simple access to a weapon is quite annoying. None of them are locked behind particularly difficult challenges, you just have to walk past most enemies, but it means combat is basically pointless until you find one of the weapons. I played for over 45 minutes before I found a weapon. It wasn't enjoyable.
Putting gameplay critical information like how to use consumables or perform alternative attacks inside pamphlets is a bizarre choice. Particularly when you can just check the control binding screen for that information. I'm not really sure what the goal of the pamphlets is, either the player checks the control scheme and they are useless, or the player will be frustrated by important mechanics being taught to them by random missable objects on the ground.
The campsite UI is confusingly designed and annoying to navigate, and the level up screen being separated feels arbitrary since camp fires always feature both. The UI also has a hard to read font and black on grey text is doubly annoying to read. It's also annoying that consumables are so readily available but not explained in the tutorial and not equipped at all by default. This feels totally nonsensical to me.
It's clear to me a huge amount of effort has been put into building the complicated combat system, but the combat itself isn't actually enjoyable at all. Attacks are overly punishing, stunlocks are common for AI and players alike, healing is slow and irrelevant in most combat, AI are highly aggressive and often lack punish windows and it feels to me like ranged weapons are simply overpowered as they let you ignore the AI.
I feel like this game falls for the common pitfall of a designer building content, playing it one time to ensure it's beatable (likely with full equipment, and with the omniscience of the game designer), then moving on to the next piece of content. Even if your game is intentionally difficult this is not a good way to design, you have major blind spots for the users first time experience, the pacing of the game and the ways in which it's frustrating.
Hey thanks for playing. I mentioned this in the thread, but despite being harsh your feedback is actually pretty useful. I consider 99% of what's in the game to be experimental, so plenty of things will be changing in the future. When you say spamming enemies in rooms, are you talking about actual rooms like in the dungeon, or in the overworld? Right now overworld enemies are randomized, other than one encounter with 5 axe guys guarding some gauntlets.
I'm a little surprised you went for that much time given your experience. I was experimenting with players needing to find all the gear with this demo, so clearly that's not working, or at least not in a way that's palatable.
I will at least partially defend the pamphlets. Tutorializing is better than not tutorializing in my experience, and if you learned the information in the pamphlets in the key rebind menu, that means you learned it which is good. As for them being randomly missable, that's fair. Like with the weapons and armor, the goal was to make exploration of the world a requirement. For the next demo day I may focus on making the game a lot more pretty, and improving the current overworld in general, (though it probably won't make the final game at all.)
With this demo I also tried making the gear screen always show up after resting, while beforehand it was a chest you checked. I might make the chest a thing again. I'll take another look at the fonts, and may change it, but it'll depend on how other people react to it as well.
To be honest, I think the combat might just not be for you. I have fun with it, a lot of other people have as well, and while you're not wrong about stun locks and ranged attacks, that's by design. It makes sense to me that a ranged attack would make things easier for the player, it's a ranged attack after all. It's the right tool for the job, ultimately, and that's what I'm going to be going for with a lot of the combat, being figuring out which weapons will give you the best advantage against which enemies, and then managing to capitalize on it despite being in fights with multiple foes, or despite having dwindling resources, or being low on health. The settings has difficulty options you can try tweaking in the future.
It's a constant work in progress. This has been my 4th or 5th tutorial, and they all change big things to see how players react. My design process is pretty iterative in that regard. I don't know if the game will get easier necessarily, but I've been trying my best to make sure the tutorial eases the player in without being overly long.
I maintain an opinion from the last time I played this that the game is at its best in combat. Whenever you're fighting enemies, you're having a lot of fun. Whenever you're doing anything else, you're most likely not.
While starting the game proper with a fist is nice, you should give players a better weapon during the tutorial, because a bad weapon might make for an bad (and inaccurate) first impression that turns them away.
It would be nice to know how much XP one stands to lose by dying at any given time. Maybe have it be a cash-in at the tent rather than an outstanding count, because it is not clear in the HUD how much you've earned since your last visit.
The UI has lots of unintuitive jank in general but I'm sure you already know that.
The land-to-enemy ratio is too high. Traversal is slow to begin with, and that's especially aggravated by the fact that running slashes your SP cap. Maybe disable that penalty while you have no aggro from any enemies? Movement speed is too slow in general. I know you're supposed to increase it with stats but this is just DS2 ADP syndrome where that decision makes the game so so much worse.
I got to the dungeon again where I saw those water pipes, and that's not a mechanic I ever want to play with again.
That might be just a preference thing. I've seen plenty of people avoid combat, and at least personally I enjoy a focus on exploration, though the art of the game isn't nearly good enough to really justify that yet.
Hmmm, not the worst idea. I've thought of having the tutorial starting on the ship as it's getting dragged under the sea, so I could probably do something with a weapon there. That'd be far in the future though.
I hadn't thought of that. I'm not even totally sure I'll keep the save revert on death. I'll have to think about a way of doing that which makes sense, if I do.
Yeah. Was there anything that stood out to you specifically with the UI jank?
I could probably increase the initial movement speed at least if it really is too slow. Not too keen on getting rid of the SP loss from running though since hunger is supposed to be a real impediment in the game.
Is there something specific you don't like about the water pipes?
I like exploration in games, but between the low speed and emptiness of the world it's not fun at the moment.
It would be easier to list the things the UI does right than the ones it does wrong. It feels like you've been improvising it any way that works as you add and prototype each feature. It could use a total, cohesive redesign at some point.
From what I experienced with the old demo, the water pipes are padding. It seems they were added due to a need to have puzzles in a dungeon, but at that they are about as good as pushing square pegs into square holes, only the holes are all the way around on the other side of the planet. Disregarding the water mechanics themselves for a moment and thinking about what the pipes are adding to them, they are just excuses to make the player pace back and forth and back again through the dungeon flipping switches, which is aggravated by the slow navigation.
Gotcha. It's sounding like I should start shifting gears to making the presentation of the game far more palatable, instead of focusing on mechanics. I'll do my best to take what I've learned from people playing this dungeon to make far better ones that'll make it into the final game.
Wow, you did really well for not finding the sword. That actually makes me feel kinda bad.
I'll look into borderless window mode for Game Maker Studio. I dunno if it's possible.
For the hair, it's not supposed to. When the player dies, they lie down, facing downwards. The graphics might not have made that clear enough.
Yeah, the pamphlets are there as another form of tutorializing. If you learned what you needed to regardless, that seems like a win in my book.
You can't dodge burn damage. Well, kinda. It's more accurate to say dodging reduces your burn. If you run and then dodge, which causes you to belly flop, it reduces burn build up even more.
Nah you weren't blind. You just never entered the area with the sword. With this demo I experimented with making all the weapons findable in the overworld. Critical things like the sword will be harder to miss next time.
Yeah, when you die it goes backwards. The intention was to imply time was reversing to your previous save.
Ahhhh yeah, the graphic for that wasn't clear, and I could have had a text pop up saying something like, "This lever is missing..."
Thanks for screenshotting the error. Although I finished my save system, it has bugs like that I never found in my own testing. Thanks for playing!
I believe I tried this a bunch of demo days ago. I see you have come quite a long way since then. Nice work.
- The combat system scales nicely and it feels like you can create plenty of interesting encounters with it.
- Maybe I misunderstood something in the controls, but I found it strange that in the main menu I could navigate with keyboard but could only accept an option with left mouse button.
- It would be nice to have more visual feedback for the long-hold jump. I couldn't really tell if there was much of a difference between the two.
I don't think you did. The way it works right now is the accept button is a single button for gamepad as well as KB+M, and up, down, left, and right in menus, is in both as well, so KB+M essentially has an extra control input.
That's fair. I added it to make it so players have more control over their dodge distance as the dodges get longer with leveling. Maybe it'd make more sense to make that more of a thing as they level? I'm sure I could come up with a bigger visual indicator as well.
The options menu should be centered, not tucked away in the top left of the screen. Menu categories should be underlined (currently noninteractive "OPTIONS" looks the same as the interactive "BACK" ). Ticking sound when changing volume sliders is irritating. There should be a more clear distinction between single-player and co-op, currently starting a new game is confusing in that regard. The menu font and normal font have different thicknesses. I suggest you always use the thicker one as it's easier to read. Some fonts like "PAUSED" are aliased, while the rest aren't.
Skipping the tutorial should be done by independently performing an advanced action. The current sign is too eye-grabbing and tempts new players to skip it. The left/right mouse icons should be more clear, as it's hard to tell at a glance which is highlighted. I don't get why there are two different dash lengths, as they're almost identical. Starting the game over when you die in the tutorial sucks - don't do that. Combat feels incredibly sluggish. I'm guessing it's meant to mimic Dark Souls, but it's not nearly as satisfying. Sleeping for the first time made a confusing menu pop up. The level up menu is also confusing. Sprinting is barely faster than running normally (what's the point?). The player character is too small (they normally should take up 10-20% of screen height. Yours is 7%). The poison throwing enemy is awful. The tropical music, while nice, doesn't fit the feel of the game at all. It's hard to tell what atmosphere it's going for, since I'm getting a relaxing tropical vacation vibe, but the controls and enemies feel slow, calculating, and brutal.
Local stamina bars ala Breath of the Wild are superior to Dark Souls' top of the screen. The red directional arrow should be changed to a different color, as now it looks like you're always bleeding/hurt. Attack windup should either be decreased, or you should be allowed to attack while moving. It feels so bad. There has to be a faster way to move around. Going slow is fine when you're always attentive like in Dark Souls, but doing it through empty fluff screens is painful. Getting stunlocked is not fun; avoid letting enemies do that. I found a sword but have no idea how to equip it. That whole system is confusing.
Overall, the game has a lot of soul and love poured into it. You clearly care a lot. However, that does not make it good to play. I don't see it having a future without a complete overhaul.
Hey thanks for playing. A lot of your complaints mostly get a "fair enough" from me. The game is still very early in its development, and things like the punching animations, how enemies act, sounds, music, and fonts, will all likely go through multiple iterations over time. Some of the things in there are more experimental, or can be changed, like the red arrow you mentioned can both be turned off, and have its color changed entirely in the options menu. Other design decisions you took issue with were more forward thinking, and probably won't change for a while. Sprint speed is effected by leveling, and you can get going pretty fast. Same with the dodge distances, which they can be released early so players have more control over it once they get larger dodges, to ensure they don't accidentally dodge off cliffs and the like. If you play again in the future, you'll likely have a lot of other complaints, but some things should be fixed.
There anything you can tell me about your playing environment then? What version of windows you're on maybe? If you're on windows, can you check and see if it successfully created a save file? Should be in a location like C:\Users\YourNameHere\AppData\Local\Moku\saves
Alright, strange. The main thing I can think is the game didn't have the privileges it needed to create the save file, which caused errors? Not totally sure.
Comments
I think the base mechanics of your game are strong, you put a lot of work into your combat and it shows. The quality of animation, the way you convey motion in your animations is great. There's definitely depth to the weighty, slow nature of combat, and the abstract presentation of the enemies allows for a lot of possibilities for enemy variety. But the context that combat is surrounded by doesn't work to its advantage.
Levels are very large, and it's very aggravating walking through these massive levels between deaths only to be deleted in one or two hits. Especially in your dungeon where the magma can instantly annihilate the player for slipping off the thin bridges. I personally assumed the magma would be treated the same as the cliffs, and I'd just pop up safe after taking some damage. Was very surprised when my lil guy was fiendishly immolated.
I'm just extrapolating here but I imagine you made the levels so massive to accommodate player's varying movement speeds, they can level up their stats to go faster, and eventually they'll be able to dart around these levels really quickly. I feel like this can only end in one of two ways, either you never get enough move speed for it to feel meaningful, or you eventually become so quick that it enormously affects the balance of your combat. Consistent movement speed in single player action games is fairly standard for this reason, it's very difficult to account for large gaps in move speed, and I can imagine a lot of these enemies being trivialized by some simple strafing eventually.
That's a pretty fundamental critique, and if you intend for these levels to be large and you care a lot about keeping the movement speed leveling, I can respect judging your game for what it is rather than what I'd like it to be. Here's a simpler observation. Why on earth do I need to sleep in the tent to equip weapons? Finding that sword was very exciting, but the wind was taken out of my sails after 10 minutes of trying to figure out how to equip it, pressing every button on my keyboard before using the tent out of desperation. It doesn't make sense mechanically to not allow me to collect items as I'm traveling, and it certainly makes no sense narratively that the item vanishes from my character's inventory into their base camp. Your game gets a full point better the instant I can equip a weapon on the spot.
The last thing I want to express after all that negativity; I love your setting. "What's the setting for this slow soulsy action RPG? Cyberpunk? Victorian? Medieval?" "No. Modern day Hawaii." Completely left field, but opens the door to SO many exciting ideas. Beaches, volcanoes, hotels, slums, the Dole plantation, ABC stores. The culture clash of the mythology and the tourist reality. BRILLIANT decision. I think you should seriously consider putting a lot of your thought and resources into selling this setting, teaching people about the area, because it's a fantastic premise. You obviously have an eye for the aesthetics with your statues and your kick ass logo.
Keep the brochures I love them. "Go to Hawaii idiot."
Hey, thanks for playing. So far only one enemy has been given a look, and in the end they're all going to be proper monsters of some kind.
Yeah, I need to add save points, or warp points in the dungeon for sure. I don't know when that will happen in the future, but it will eventually.
I have a couple of different goals that probably aren't very clear in the game's current form, as I'm working on various other systems instead of making those goals crystal clear. The reason the over world is so large is actually just because I want exploration to be a major focus of the game. The dungeon turned out as large as it did so I could satisfactorily explore several things with the water pipes mechanic. Ideally also, combat will change to reflect faster enemy speeds as the game progresses. Enemies will get faster and more aggressive, and hopefully late game combat will look a bit more like Devil May Cry, or other character action games. Although it's kind of there in the current game, I'm still figuring out ways to include the survival elements I want, but I'm imagining things like requiring certain types of gear for certain climates and making your loadout something to think about for the entirety of your over world traversal. In the final game more dangerous enemies will appear at night as well, adding time pressure to over world travel.
For a while, you could change gear by accessing a chest, and only with this demo did I experiment with sleeping in the tent being where you could change gear, since I thought of it as a sort of daily preparation. For DD 51 it'll be back to accessing a chest to change gear. Unfortunately, my experiment with putting weapons out in the over world was pretty short sighted, and as you express, it's annoying to find something you can't just equip. I don't know if I'll have a more logical system by DD 51 (such as smithing weapons) but it should at least be less annoying then.
Dang I'm not sure what I'm envisioning for the game will live up to those expectations! Although I enjoy my sort of cheeky "tourist stuck in a troical hell hole" flavor, the game likely won't lean that into modern Hawaiian life. The island itself (although the map is currently just Maui) is a lost Hawaiian island hidden away by magic hundreds of years ago, so you won't see many modern things on it, other than stuff that washes up on shore somehow. The plan is also for the camp sites to be things the player builds themself, even if it's just a quick cut scene when a suitable spot is found. Hopefully you'll like the game anyway.
It seems that if I sit around, I heal back up to the end of the dark red bar. But it takes forever. So of course I don't wait. So am I being punished for my impatience? I think you should introduce a "wait" command where my dude can take a sit and time passes so I regain what I would get if I left the game idle.
It would probably be good practice to introduce a frame limiter so you don't fry graphics cards, I don't need 1000 fps.
I dunno, this game is too hard for me. I can't beat the two dudes in a room in the tutorial. I guess I just suck
After I made this comment I gave it another try and at least made it through the tutorial.
But like the other commenter said... come on bro at least give me a weapon. Even just a wooden sword. I dunno maybe the point is to frustrate the player in which case I'm just not the target audience
I'm glad you made it through the tutorial.
Nah, being frustrating isn't the goal. I tried making the tutorial a lot shorter, and experimented with hiding all the gear in the overworld. Clearly it's not going over well. Thank you for letting me know it was so frustrating.
Hey, thanks for playing.
The auto healing is meant to be a reward for players who play well enough to not get hit often, so you're right about not waiting. Unfortunately the thing that's supposed to balance that isn't actually in the game yet (dangerous enemies appearing at night, adding a timed incentive to exploration and the like.)
My bad, that was more of a debug thing for me. The game is limited to 60 fps, but the fps shown there is an extrapolation to show how fast your computer is rendering the frames. It's helped me figure out where optimizations need to be made.
Apologies, I probably should have made them easier. The only reason there's two is to make the lock on required.
Combat plays horribly from the top down perspective, enemy windups are insanely fast and stunlock the player instantly sending you back 5 screens. Which wouldn't be so bad but the player movement is slow and painful, and a lot of design choices rub salt in the wound of the unpleasant combat. Animations all around are bad and it doesn't seem like any thought was put into enemy encounter design, just spam enemies in rooms. Enemies also have visible stamina and mana bars, but basically can't deplete the former and the latter doesn't seem to do anything, so that information is just useless.
Starting the player with no simple access to a weapon is quite annoying. None of them are locked behind particularly difficult challenges, you just have to walk past most enemies, but it means combat is basically pointless until you find one of the weapons. I played for over 45 minutes before I found a weapon. It wasn't enjoyable.
Putting gameplay critical information like how to use consumables or perform alternative attacks inside pamphlets is a bizarre choice. Particularly when you can just check the control binding screen for that information. I'm not really sure what the goal of the pamphlets is, either the player checks the control scheme and they are useless, or the player will be frustrated by important mechanics being taught to them by random missable objects on the ground.
The campsite UI is confusingly designed and annoying to navigate, and the level up screen being separated feels arbitrary since camp fires always feature both. The UI also has a hard to read font and black on grey text is doubly annoying to read. It's also annoying that consumables are so readily available but not explained in the tutorial and not equipped at all by default. This feels totally nonsensical to me.
It's clear to me a huge amount of effort has been put into building the complicated combat system, but the combat itself isn't actually enjoyable at all. Attacks are overly punishing, stunlocks are common for AI and players alike, healing is slow and irrelevant in most combat, AI are highly aggressive and often lack punish windows and it feels to me like ranged weapons are simply overpowered as they let you ignore the AI.
I feel like this game falls for the common pitfall of a designer building content, playing it one time to ensure it's beatable (likely with full equipment, and with the omniscience of the game designer), then moving on to the next piece of content. Even if your game is intentionally difficult this is not a good way to design, you have major blind spots for the users first time experience, the pacing of the game and the ways in which it's frustrating.
Hey thanks for playing. I mentioned this in the thread, but despite being harsh your feedback is actually pretty useful. I consider 99% of what's in the game to be experimental, so plenty of things will be changing in the future. When you say spamming enemies in rooms, are you talking about actual rooms like in the dungeon, or in the overworld? Right now overworld enemies are randomized, other than one encounter with 5 axe guys guarding some gauntlets.
I'm a little surprised you went for that much time given your experience. I was experimenting with players needing to find all the gear with this demo, so clearly that's not working, or at least not in a way that's palatable.
I will at least partially defend the pamphlets. Tutorializing is better than not tutorializing in my experience, and if you learned the information in the pamphlets in the key rebind menu, that means you learned it which is good. As for them being randomly missable, that's fair. Like with the weapons and armor, the goal was to make exploration of the world a requirement. For the next demo day I may focus on making the game a lot more pretty, and improving the current overworld in general, (though it probably won't make the final game at all.)
With this demo I also tried making the gear screen always show up after resting, while beforehand it was a chest you checked. I might make the chest a thing again. I'll take another look at the fonts, and may change it, but it'll depend on how other people react to it as well.
To be honest, I think the combat might just not be for you. I have fun with it, a lot of other people have as well, and while you're not wrong about stun locks and ranged attacks, that's by design. It makes sense to me that a ranged attack would make things easier for the player, it's a ranged attack after all. It's the right tool for the job, ultimately, and that's what I'm going to be going for with a lot of the combat, being figuring out which weapons will give you the best advantage against which enemies, and then managing to capitalize on it despite being in fights with multiple foes, or despite having dwindling resources, or being low on health. The settings has difficulty options you can try tweaking in the future.
It's a constant work in progress. This has been my 4th or 5th tutorial, and they all change big things to see how players react. My design process is pretty iterative in that regard. I don't know if the game will get easier necessarily, but I've been trying my best to make sure the tutorial eases the player in without being overly long.
I got to the dungeon, beat my head against it for a bit, took a break, and when I tried to reload, this bastard showed up.
Game's good fun though. Might give it another shot later when I have enough time to beat it in one sitting.
Thanks for playing. Glad you got as far as you did before that bug reared its head. Hopefully I can figure out what went wrong with the error message.
I maintain an opinion from the last time I played this that the game is at its best in combat. Whenever you're fighting enemies, you're having a lot of fun. Whenever you're doing anything else, you're most likely not.
While starting the game proper with a fist is nice, you should give players a better weapon during the tutorial, because a bad weapon might make for an bad (and inaccurate) first impression that turns them away.
It would be nice to know how much XP one stands to lose by dying at any given time. Maybe have it be a cash-in at the tent rather than an outstanding count, because it is not clear in the HUD how much you've earned since your last visit.
The UI has lots of unintuitive jank in general but I'm sure you already know that.
The land-to-enemy ratio is too high. Traversal is slow to begin with, and that's especially aggravated by the fact that running slashes your SP cap. Maybe disable that penalty while you have no aggro from any enemies? Movement speed is too slow in general. I know you're supposed to increase it with stats but this is just DS2 ADP syndrome where that decision makes the game so so much worse.
I got to the dungeon again where I saw those water pipes, and that's not a mechanic I ever want to play with again.
Hey thanks for playing.
That might be just a preference thing. I've seen plenty of people avoid combat, and at least personally I enjoy a focus on exploration, though the art of the game isn't nearly good enough to really justify that yet.
Hmmm, not the worst idea. I've thought of having the tutorial starting on the ship as it's getting dragged under the sea, so I could probably do something with a weapon there. That'd be far in the future though.
I hadn't thought of that. I'm not even totally sure I'll keep the save revert on death. I'll have to think about a way of doing that which makes sense, if I do.
Yeah. Was there anything that stood out to you specifically with the UI jank?
I could probably increase the initial movement speed at least if it really is too slow. Not too keen on getting rid of the SP loss from running though since hunger is supposed to be a real impediment in the game.
Is there something specific you don't like about the water pipes?
I like exploration in games, but between the low speed and emptiness of the world it's not fun at the moment.
It would be easier to list the things the UI does right than the ones it does wrong. It feels like you've been improvising it any way that works as you add and prototype each feature. It could use a total, cohesive redesign at some point.
From what I experienced with the old demo, the water pipes are padding. It seems they were added due to a need to have puzzles in a dungeon, but at that they are about as good as pushing square pegs into square holes, only the holes are all the way around on the other side of the planet. Disregarding the water mechanics themselves for a moment and thinking about what the pipes are adding to them, they are just excuses to make the player pace back and forth and back again through the dungeon flipping switches, which is aggravated by the slow navigation.
Gotcha. It's sounding like I should start shifting gears to making the presentation of the game far more palatable, instead of focusing on mechanics. I'll do my best to take what I've learned from people playing this dungeon to make far better ones that'll make it into the final game.
Played for about an hour. Video:
Like the video shows, I think I'm very bad at this game. Some notes:
- It would be nice an option to have a borderless full screen window
- The tutorial is a bit brutal, but since this has a souls-like vibe to it, it should be ok
- When I died and the character turned upside down, its hair didn't rotate
- Cool pamphlets! I like that kind of flavor things, but I think I learned almost everything they had to say from the keyboard rebind menu
- You can dodge burn damage, is this intended?
- I didn't find a weapon. I might be clinically blind though and missed it.
- Some way to save progress mid-dungeon would be nice
- I believe the sky animation that happens when you die played backwards sometimes.
- I have no idea what that interactable block in the room of the two spiky dudes did.
I finished playing because the game crashed. This is the error message I got:
I cannot load the game also. Hopefully the video will help you spot where the bug is.
Nice progress, keep up the good work!
Wow, you did really well for not finding the sword. That actually makes me feel kinda bad.
I'll look into borderless window mode for Game Maker Studio. I dunno if it's possible.
For the hair, it's not supposed to. When the player dies, they lie down, facing downwards. The graphics might not have made that clear enough.
Yeah, the pamphlets are there as another form of tutorializing. If you learned what you needed to regardless, that seems like a win in my book.
You can't dodge burn damage. Well, kinda. It's more accurate to say dodging reduces your burn. If you run and then dodge, which causes you to belly flop, it reduces burn build up even more.
Nah you weren't blind. You just never entered the area with the sword. With this demo I experimented with making all the weapons findable in the overworld. Critical things like the sword will be harder to miss next time.
Yeah, when you die it goes backwards. The intention was to imply time was reversing to your previous save.
Ahhhh yeah, the graphic for that wasn't clear, and I could have had a text pop up saying something like, "This lever is missing..."
Thanks for screenshotting the error. Although I finished my save system, it has bugs like that I never found in my own testing. Thanks for playing!
Lol. At least I found good setups to stunlock enemies, though fighting two at the same time was a pain.
I believe I tried this a bunch of demo days ago. I see you have come quite a long way since then. Nice work.
- The combat system scales nicely and it feels like you can create plenty of interesting encounters with it.
- Maybe I misunderstood something in the controls, but I found it strange that in the main menu I could navigate with keyboard but could only accept an option with left mouse button.
- It would be nice to have more visual feedback for the long-hold jump. I couldn't really tell if there was much of a difference between the two.
Hey thanks for playing.
Glad the combat feels good for ya.
I don't think you did. The way it works right now is the accept button is a single button for gamepad as well as KB+M, and up, down, left, and right in menus, is in both as well, so KB+M essentially has an extra control input.
That's fair. I added it to make it so players have more control over their dodge distance as the dodges get longer with leveling. Maybe it'd make more sense to make that more of a thing as they level? I'm sure I could come up with a bigger visual indicator as well.
The options menu should be centered, not tucked away in the top left of the screen. Menu categories should be underlined (currently noninteractive "OPTIONS" looks the same as the interactive "BACK" ). Ticking sound when changing volume sliders is irritating. There should be a more clear distinction between single-player and co-op, currently starting a new game is confusing in that regard. The menu font and normal font have different thicknesses. I suggest you always use the thicker one as it's easier to read. Some fonts like "PAUSED" are aliased, while the rest aren't.
Skipping the tutorial should be done by independently performing an advanced action. The current sign is too eye-grabbing and tempts new players to skip it. The left/right mouse icons should be more clear, as it's hard to tell at a glance which is highlighted. I don't get why there are two different dash lengths, as they're almost identical. Starting the game over when you die in the tutorial sucks - don't do that. Combat feels incredibly sluggish. I'm guessing it's meant to mimic Dark Souls, but it's not nearly as satisfying. Sleeping for the first time made a confusing menu pop up. The level up menu is also confusing. Sprinting is barely faster than running normally (what's the point?). The player character is too small (they normally should take up 10-20% of screen height. Yours is 7%). The poison throwing enemy is awful. The tropical music, while nice, doesn't fit the feel of the game at all. It's hard to tell what atmosphere it's going for, since I'm getting a relaxing tropical vacation vibe, but the controls and enemies feel slow, calculating, and brutal.
Local stamina bars ala Breath of the Wild are superior to Dark Souls' top of the screen. The red directional arrow should be changed to a different color, as now it looks like you're always bleeding/hurt. Attack windup should either be decreased, or you should be allowed to attack while moving. It feels so bad. There has to be a faster way to move around. Going slow is fine when you're always attentive like in Dark Souls, but doing it through empty fluff screens is painful. Getting stunlocked is not fun; avoid letting enemies do that. I found a sword but have no idea how to equip it. That whole system is confusing.
Overall, the game has a lot of soul and love poured into it. You clearly care a lot. However, that does not make it good to play. I don't see it having a future without a complete overhaul.
Hey thanks for playing. A lot of your complaints mostly get a "fair enough" from me. The game is still very early in its development, and things like the punching animations, how enemies act, sounds, music, and fonts, will all likely go through multiple iterations over time. Some of the things in there are more experimental, or can be changed, like the red arrow you mentioned can both be turned off, and have its color changed entirely in the options menu. Other design decisions you took issue with were more forward thinking, and probably won't change for a while. Sprint speed is effected by leveling, and you can get going pretty fast. Same with the dodge distances, which they can be released early so players have more control over it once they get larger dodges, to ensure they don't accidentally dodge off cliffs and the like. If you play again in the future, you'll likely have a lot of other complaints, but some things should be fixed.
A pleasure to play, as always. I honestly have nothing bad to say, it's really coming along. Keep at it, man. It's fun.
Thanks for playing!
That's a weird one. Are you playing on Wine or something? Sometimes that causes issues.
No, nothing like that.
There anything you can tell me about your playing environment then? What version of windows you're on maybe? If you're on windows, can you check and see if it successfully created a save file? Should be in a location like C:\Users\YourNameHere\AppData\Local\Moku\saves
This is the only file i see created. I'm using windows 10
Alright, strange. The main thing I can think is the game didn't have the privileges it needed to create the save file, which caused errors? Not totally sure.
I think I figured out and solved your error, if you want to give the game another go.
Thank you! I'll try it again soon!