Ok, I've been replaying this game regularly, trying to beat it and I got to the moment where the level stopped scrolling and the same enemies kept spawning endlessly, so I guess I could say I beat the game. Unfortunately, I didn't get to enjoy all the cool upgrades I got cause the game shit the bed and performance went down the drain(2-5 fps), and eventually it just crashed.
I didn't get this far due to my skill, though, but purely because the game provided me with good upgrades(staff + damage boost + father's mask) early on, cause often you will not get the staff before the waves of rats spawn and they can easily halve your health and sometimes you never get the chance to receive father's mask, so you can't even outrun the enemies in the later waves, and you're screwed. Some upgrades are garbage(alluring bone, poison, increased firerate for auto-firing weapons, why is there even a distinction auto-fire/non-auto-fire?), while some seem to not be working at all(temporary invincibility on damage, health on killing mini-bosses).
Also when you're firing a lot of bullets and there's tons of orbs lying on the ground, you tend to lose the player sprite, and that's annoying.
I'm not gonna complain about the scrolling which causes the orbs to disappear before you manage to grab them, cause I guess that was the point, but there's also no tactics to minimize this. Sure, you could get the enemies into one bunch pull them to the top of the screen and kill them, but if you don't have a speed upgrade, you won't manage to get all the orbs.
It's fun so far. The theme is funny. Please expand it to deeper Fromsoft lore too. Scrolling serves as a nice twist to the game.
The difficulty curve is shaped like a staircase, which is no good. You spend a lot of time doing nothing and then it ramps up quickly and back again.
Many of the upgrades feel like junk.
There is a clearly dominant strategy in herding everything at the middle-top section of the screen for collecting at the bottom and then picking off threats.
It is not even worth continuing if you don't roll the staff at the start. The staff is way too good already on its own, but having so many walls of rats that it is uniquely positioned to farm gives runs that get it early way too many gems. Most of the threats later on are frail glass cannon enemies that appear in awkward places, failing to give any other weapon an advantage. The creatures that look like actual bosses and have the HP of one barely do anything. They quickly dispose of themselves by lurking around the AoE. The way these layouts are designed currently rewards mobility and range consistently over melee and dps output, so upgrades that concern the latter aren't very good.
I like how RTSR is just as OP as the one in Dark Souls.
The way you have to go to the shop manually at the moment is cumbersome and doesn't seem to add any depth. Maybe each additional time you level up before shopping could get you a reroll? Also, you should have that bar be better positioned, such as by putting it right below the character, because it's annoying to look away to find it during normal gameplay.
The playable character needs more contrast. I should be able to tell where I am while I look elsewhere to aim.
Right clicking to open the shop would be a better solution than moving the cursor over to the other side of the screen, too.
There are optimization issues and they disproportionally stem from the lighting skill. Consider simplifying the visuals for that
I got to 20 million and thought that was a good place to stop. Surely that must be enough avenging for Zanzibart to forgive me.
Pickup range is way to tiny. And with the speed of scaling, anything but Damage pickups become useless, as you immediately loose the required power to make it through the Enemies fast enough if you pick up one of them. Not to mention stuff like HPregen, or increased pickup range do either nothing or way too little. Duration for Attack increase also seems completely useless, as no Attack I found had any duration at all. Unless you mean range, at which Point it only affects the Sword, and is also way too weak. Overall, the only Powerups I could really recognize when picked up were the clone, the Sword, Staff, Missile, and other Weapons, Zaps, Crits, Damage increase and size increase. Every other Powerup wasn't really felt, and Staff, Missiles, Zap, Crit only at the first time picking it up.
I'd actually prefer if it was all on autocast aswell, since holding down the Mouse constantly gets annoying, and there is never a reason to not constantly attack. The Aiming is fine tho.
I find the moving Floor annoying, it forces me to make sure I kill enemies at the top half, so I have time to bait the Horde away before rushing to the bottom half of the Screen trying not to miss any Pickups. And if you do miss enough, which very easily happens due to constantly having to avoid Hordes from everywhere, while making sure not to kill them, so you can then bring them back up top to kill them there, so you even have a chance for Pickups, and rushing to the bottom of the Screen to try and catch any Orbs you've missed, you immediately loose in the scaling race of your Damage. But instead of just loosing then, you have to very slowly run around, avoiding attacks while now being unable to actually kill anything, which just spirals you down further, until you eventually can't go anymore.
dont have much feedback other than i would like more upgrades and that the hitbox for picking up exp feels a bit small. hitbox for taking damage feels good but making it a bit more convenient for the player would be nice too. also maybe highlighiing the shop would be nice, didnt get how to upgrade at first.
edit: i refreshed the window and i got a bunch of other upgrades, first time i only could choose between the same 3
I played it several times, but couldn't get past the part where skeletons appear that walk along the top side of the window and shoot crossbows at you, so I guess that was pretty early into the game. It's... alright, I guess, it's just that I don't enjoy the VS-like formula, even if I'm compelled to return to these games and retry them over and over again.
Vertically scrolling vampire survivors kinda game, thats a pretty neat idea. Found myself playing a bunch of times. I like the aesthetics and the layout, it looks like one of those DOS games that has the score, inventory, health and upgrades and whatnot all in one screen next to the game screen.
I think there's some tweaking needed when it comes to balance and economy. It's easier to miss the cash orbs(?) compared to VS because of the auto scrolling so naturally I'd be earing less item over the run which is fine, but it did feel like I had to get 3-4 of the same upgrades or get lucky with items like Powerstance to be able to keep up my damage. Some upgrades seems to have really small improvement on level up, so I couldnt tell if some items like the item pickup range upgrade did anything. Looking forward to playing new characters too.
nice I think I remember playing this in a previous demo day you've made lots of progress, I like the waves of rats you added I assume those are a dps check and also add some urgency.
I died to a swarm of rats, I must be missing a mechanic or something because I was constantly attacking but the rats piled up. When I saw the first rat I was like, oh nice a cute rat, then there were so many. I killed so many rats that I'm not sure where the rats end and I begin. Anyway, completely functional from the looks of it. I like the number damage display on screen.
I didn't expect much because of the meme-theming and souls parody aspect but I thought it was quite enjoyable. I've never played VS or any of it's clones, so I'm not sure what's unique to this game and what's a genre staple.
I like the rat wall as a way to check player progression early. Once I knew it was coming, it made deciding early upgrades more interesting, since I have to at least get some offensive moves if I want to be able to get past it, but I also want to stock up on movement and defensive upgrades while enemies are still sparse.
You could make the XP progression a little more obvious. Based on what enemies drop them I assume that the progression goes light blue -> dark blue -> green, but some visual differentiation besides color could help make it obvious that it's more valuable when you see it the first time.
I also felt like the XP progression ground to a halt after the crossbow guys show up, but that could just be because I'm bad.
The magic circle having infinite range seems a little not right, it feels a bit cheesy to beat up the archers from the other side of the map while also whittling down the herd of rats, mushrooms, and soldiers I've accumulated.
All in all, pretty solid. I hope that one day I can be forgiven.
Thanks for trying it out, and for the compliments.
>You could make the XP progression a little more obvious. Good idea, I can add some increasing glow or more intense animation with higher tiers. The shop items have colored icons over them indicating a rarity tier, too, but I don't think those are particularly obvious, either. I just took the classic Phantasy Star rarity color scheming, but of course there's no C/B/A rankings here that actually give that info.
>I also felt like the XP progression ground to a halt after the crossbow guys show up It seems the same way to me when I test it. I think it's because the hollow soldier enemies are too spongy, so all your money drops are covered up by a blob of them.
>The magic circle having infinite range seems a little not right Interesting observation. I was thinking of keeping its damage lower against enemy HP scaling (right now static bullet shooting enemies don't have any scaling), but giving it an increasing period of stun or slowness so you can use it for better crowd control. I have stuns & knockback implemented, but I think right now the only weapon that does that is the upgraded magic circle (like 1% chance to get from a chest, lol) which pulls enemies to the center.
it's pretty good, but vampire survivors-style pausing the game once you've levelled up to select your upgrade is better than having to keep an eye on your progress and then visit a timed (!?) shop. a pause for chests so you can more easily see what you just earned would be good also
I'm going to make the pause indefinite & at-will, since it's buggy & annoying everyone (including me, lol). I mentioned this in my reply to Gatherdev in the general, but I'm going to make the progress bar much more obvious when it's filled - a jingle & much more prominent animation.
The issue with a "forced" Survivors style pause in this game, is that it's a bit more shmuppy than most of those, so getting paused, then kicked off once you pick an upgrade is a recipe for taking unfair damage.
Chests will also get a proper animation & probably a manual click-to-open thing in that box on the right. I was thinking about "key" items you can get which will improve your loot tier out of chests, so you could want to save them sometimes.
Quite tough but managed to survive the rat walls after upgrading only the magic staff. Balance could be tweaked a bit to allow for a bit of experimenting before that first wave. Also the giant rat seemed overly spongy.
More generally: at first having to click to attack was a bit annoying compared to the usual auto-fire in this genre. And I lost tons of gems to the bottom of the screen. And the shop timer was annoying. But after a few runs I enjoyed the extra tactics that those things necessitate, especially the aiming cursor. Clicking a million times was still a bit tiresome though.
You can hold down left mouse to shoot automatically, but I am going to add an toggle option since Myrmidon doesn't really lose anything by stopping attacks. The second character gains damage & loses speed for every continuous manual attack, so it's an option because of gameplay variations like that.
I'm definitely going to make the shopping pause infinite & activatable at any time, since that's a common complaint and a bit buggy anyway.
Rat wave density will go down, since that was just a test on pattern spawning, and I'm going to tune damage across the board with enemy HP since I haven't given that any work yet.
Losing gems to the bottom of the screen is a common complaint, but it's definitely something that requires some strategy the player movement. I think I'll slightly increase the base pickup range & make its upgrades more effective, as well as some uncommon "powerup" drops that will suck all gems towards you.
Your game was one of the first I tried because I remember it from all the updates you've posted. I like the rat boss and the wall of rats. Since the shop fills a progress bar, many times I found myself forgetting to check it and upgrade. The white reflection on it does help, but for me it was not enough. I was wondering if the skeleton could give us a sign, maybe wave (or dance, ok maybe dancing is too much). Even if he just woke up and said "heh heh" it would be a good reminder and increase their participation (they have charisma). A thing I really enjoyed and your game brings to the "survivors" table is the fact that the landscape moves instead of the player moving. This opens a few new possibilities, like immobile enemies showing up and leaving the screen (Shmups did that a lot). Big dragons and catapults come to mind. Just my overall feedback. You got a nice game going. (Rat character maybe?)
The aethetics and music are great with the shop. The wall of rats suck when it happens multiple times before you can deal with it, the player should be faster with the movement. Add more enemies that shoot back at you instead of willing the screen to have skill with dodging. Also timed skills for each class that can be activated.
Thanks for trying it out. Yeah, definitely going to lighten up enemy density & add more bullet patterns to dodge. Spamming enemies is easier, so I went with that for demo day, lol.
I actually meant to decrease the density so you don't need an upgraded staff or magic missile to get through without damage. So that'll be made a bit more fair.
Comments
Ok, I've been replaying this game regularly, trying to beat it and I got to the moment where the level stopped scrolling and the same enemies kept spawning endlessly, so I guess I could say I beat the game. Unfortunately, I didn't get to enjoy all the cool upgrades I got cause the game shit the bed and performance went down the drain(2-5 fps), and eventually it just crashed.
I didn't get this far due to my skill, though, but purely because the game provided me with good upgrades(staff + damage boost + father's mask) early on, cause often you will not get the staff before the waves of rats spawn and they can easily halve your health and sometimes you never get the chance to receive father's mask, so you can't even outrun the enemies in the later waves, and you're screwed. Some upgrades are garbage(alluring bone, poison, increased firerate for auto-firing weapons, why is there even a distinction auto-fire/non-auto-fire?), while some seem to not be working at all(temporary invincibility on damage, health on killing mini-bosses).
Also when you're firing a lot of bullets and there's tons of orbs lying on the ground, you tend to lose the player sprite, and that's annoying.
I'm not gonna complain about the scrolling which causes the orbs to disappear before you manage to grab them, cause I guess that was the point, but there's also no tactics to minimize this. Sure, you could get the enemies into one bunch pull them to the top of the screen and kill them, but if you don't have a speed upgrade, you won't manage to get all the orbs.
It's fun so far. The theme is funny. Please expand it to deeper Fromsoft lore too. Scrolling serves as a nice twist to the game.
The difficulty curve is shaped like a staircase, which is no good. You spend a lot of time doing nothing and then it ramps up quickly and back again.
Many of the upgrades feel like junk.
There is a clearly dominant strategy in herding everything at the middle-top section of the screen for collecting at the bottom and then picking off threats.
It is not even worth continuing if you don't roll the staff at the start. The staff is way too good already on its own, but having so many walls of rats that it is uniquely positioned to farm gives runs that get it early way too many gems. Most of the threats later on are frail glass cannon enemies that appear in awkward places, failing to give any other weapon an advantage. The creatures that look like actual bosses and have the HP of one barely do anything. They quickly dispose of themselves by lurking around the AoE. The way these layouts are designed currently rewards mobility and range consistently over melee and dps output, so upgrades that concern the latter aren't very good.
I like how RTSR is just as OP as the one in Dark Souls.
The way you have to go to the shop manually at the moment is cumbersome and doesn't seem to add any depth. Maybe each additional time you level up before shopping could get you a reroll? Also, you should have that bar be better positioned, such as by putting it right below the character, because it's annoying to look away to find it during normal gameplay.
The playable character needs more contrast. I should be able to tell where I am while I look elsewhere to aim.
Right clicking to open the shop would be a better solution than moving the cursor over to the other side of the screen, too.
There are optimization issues and they disproportionally stem from the lighting skill. Consider simplifying the visuals for that
I got to 20 million and thought that was a good place to stop. Surely that must be enough avenging for Zanzibart to forgive me.
Thanks a lot, especially for the long gameplay recording. That helps a ton - you're better at my game than me, lol.
Pickup range is way to tiny. And with the speed of scaling, anything but Damage pickups become useless, as you immediately loose the required power to make it through the Enemies fast enough if you pick up one of them. Not to mention stuff like HPregen, or increased pickup range do either nothing or way too little. Duration for Attack increase also seems completely useless, as no Attack I found had any duration at all. Unless you mean range, at which Point it only affects the Sword, and is also way too weak. Overall, the only Powerups I could really recognize when picked up were the clone, the Sword, Staff, Missile, and other Weapons, Zaps, Crits, Damage increase and size increase. Every other Powerup wasn't really felt, and Staff, Missiles, Zap, Crit only at the first time picking it up.
I'd actually prefer if it was all on autocast aswell, since holding down the Mouse constantly gets annoying, and there is never a reason to not constantly attack. The Aiming is fine tho.
I find the moving Floor annoying, it forces me to make sure I kill enemies at the top half, so I have time to bait the Horde away before rushing to the bottom half of the Screen trying not to miss any Pickups. And if you do miss enough, which very easily happens due to constantly having to avoid Hordes from everywhere, while making sure not to kill them, so you can then bring them back up top to kill them there, so you even have a chance for Pickups, and rushing to the bottom of the Screen to try and catch any Orbs you've missed, you immediately loose in the scaling race of your Damage. But instead of just loosing then, you have to very slowly run around, avoiding attacks while now being unable to actually kill anything, which just spirals you down further, until you eventually can't go anymore.
I liked it!
dont have much feedback other than i would like more upgrades and that the hitbox for picking up exp feels a bit small. hitbox for taking damage feels good but making it a bit more convenient for the player would be nice too. also maybe highlighiing the shop would be nice, didnt get how to upgrade at first.
edit: i refreshed the window and i got a bunch of other upgrades, first time i only could choose between the same 3
I played it several times, but couldn't get past the part where skeletons appear that walk along the top side of the window and shoot crossbows at you, so I guess that was pretty early into the game. It's... alright, I guess, it's just that I don't enjoy the VS-like formula, even if I'm compelled to return to these games and retry them over and over again.
Vertically scrolling vampire survivors kinda game, thats a pretty neat idea. Found myself playing a bunch of times. I like the aesthetics and the layout, it looks like one of those DOS games that has the score, inventory, health and upgrades and whatnot all in one screen next to the game screen.
I think there's some tweaking needed when it comes to balance and economy. It's easier to miss the cash orbs(?) compared to VS because of the auto scrolling so naturally I'd be earing less item over the run which is fine, but it did feel like I had to get 3-4 of the same upgrades or get lucky with items like Powerstance to be able to keep up my damage. Some upgrades seems to have really small improvement on level up, so I couldnt tell if some items like the item pickup range upgrade did anything. Looking forward to playing new characters too.
nice I think I remember playing this in a previous demo day you've made lots of progress, I like the waves of rats you added I assume those are a dps check and also add some urgency.
I died to a swarm of rats, I must be missing a mechanic or something because I was constantly attacking but the rats piled up. When I saw the first rat I was like, oh nice a cute rat, then there were so many. I killed so many rats that I'm not sure where the rats end and I begin. Anyway, completely functional from the looks of it. I like the number damage display on screen.
I didn't expect much because of the meme-theming and souls parody aspect but I thought it was quite enjoyable. I've never played VS or any of it's clones, so I'm not sure what's unique to this game and what's a genre staple.
I like the rat wall as a way to check player progression early. Once I knew it was coming, it made deciding early upgrades more interesting, since I have to at least get some offensive moves if I want to be able to get past it, but I also want to stock up on movement and defensive upgrades while enemies are still sparse.
You could make the XP progression a little more obvious. Based on what enemies drop them I assume that the progression goes light blue -> dark blue -> green, but some visual differentiation besides color could help make it obvious that it's more valuable when you see it the first time.
I also felt like the XP progression ground to a halt after the crossbow guys show up, but that could just be because I'm bad.
The magic circle having infinite range seems a little not right, it feels a bit cheesy to beat up the archers from the other side of the map while also whittling down the herd of rats, mushrooms, and soldiers I've accumulated.
All in all, pretty solid. I hope that one day I can be forgiven.
Thanks for trying it out, and for the compliments.
>You could make the XP progression a little more obvious.
Good idea, I can add some increasing glow or more intense animation with higher tiers. The shop items have colored icons over them indicating a rarity tier, too, but I don't think those are particularly obvious, either. I just took the classic Phantasy Star rarity color scheming, but of course there's no C/B/A rankings here that actually give that info.
>I also felt like the XP progression ground to a halt after the crossbow guys show up
It seems the same way to me when I test it. I think it's because the hollow soldier enemies are too spongy, so all your money drops are covered up by a blob of them.
>The magic circle having infinite range seems a little not right
Interesting observation. I was thinking of keeping its damage lower against enemy HP scaling (right now static bullet shooting enemies don't have any scaling), but giving it an increasing period of stun or slowness so you can use it for better crowd control. I have stuns & knockback implemented, but I think right now the only weapon that does that is the upgraded magic circle (like 1% chance to get from a chest, lol) which pulls enemies to the center.
it's pretty good, but vampire survivors-style pausing the game once you've levelled up to select your upgrade is better than having to keep an eye on your progress and then visit a timed (!?) shop. a pause for chests so you can more easily see what you just earned would be good also
Thanks for playing it!
I'm going to make the pause indefinite & at-will, since it's buggy & annoying everyone (including me, lol). I mentioned this in my reply to Gatherdev in the general, but I'm going to make the progress bar much more obvious when it's filled - a jingle & much more prominent animation.
The issue with a "forced" Survivors style pause in this game, is that it's a bit more shmuppy than most of those, so getting paused, then kicked off once you pick an upgrade is a recipe for taking unfair damage.
Chests will also get a proper animation & probably a manual click-to-open thing in that box on the right. I was thinking about "key" items you can get which will improve your loot tier out of chests, so you could want to save them sometimes.
Quite tough but managed to survive the rat walls after upgrading only the magic staff. Balance could be tweaked a bit to allow for a bit of experimenting before that first wave. Also the giant rat seemed overly spongy. More generally: at first having to click to attack was a bit annoying compared to the usual auto-fire in this genre. And I lost tons of gems to the bottom of the screen. And the shop timer was annoying. But after a few runs I enjoyed the extra tactics that those things necessitate, especially the aiming cursor. Clicking a million times was still a bit tiresome though.
Thanks for trying it!
You can hold down left mouse to shoot automatically, but I am going to add an toggle option since Myrmidon doesn't really lose anything by stopping attacks. The second character gains damage & loses speed for every continuous manual attack, so it's an option because of gameplay variations like that.
I'm definitely going to make the shopping pause infinite & activatable at any time, since that's a common complaint and a bit buggy anyway.
Rat wave density will go down, since that was just a test on pattern spawning, and I'm going to tune damage across the board with enemy HP since I haven't given that any work yet.
Losing gems to the bottom of the screen is a common complaint, but it's definitely something that requires some strategy the player movement. I think I'll slightly increase the base pickup range & make its upgrades more effective, as well as some uncommon "powerup" drops that will suck all gems towards you.
Your game was one of the first I tried because I remember it from all the updates you've posted. I like the rat boss and the wall of rats.
Since the shop fills a progress bar, many times I found myself forgetting to check it and upgrade. The white reflection on it does help, but for me it was not enough. I was wondering if the skeleton could give us a sign, maybe wave (or dance, ok maybe dancing is too much).
Even if he just woke up and said "heh heh" it would be a good reminder and increase their participation (they have charisma).
A thing I really enjoyed and your game brings to the "survivors" table is the fact that the landscape moves instead of the player moving. This opens a few new possibilities, like immobile enemies showing up and leaving the screen (Shmups did that a lot). Big dragons and catapults come to mind.
Just my overall feedback. You got a nice game going. (Rat character maybe?)
The aethetics and music are great with the shop. The wall of rats suck when it happens multiple times before you can deal with it, the player should be faster with the movement. Add more enemies that shoot back at you instead of willing the screen to have skill with dodging. Also timed skills for each class that can be activated.
Thanks for trying it out. Yeah, definitely going to lighten up enemy density & add more bullet patterns to dodge. Spamming enemies is easier, so I went with that for demo day, lol.
Great concept. The aesthetics and the music are great. Also I liked how the shop was implemented. But isnt the wall of rats a little unfair?
Thanks :)
I actually meant to decrease the density so you don't need an upgraded staff or magic missile to get through without damage. So that'll be made a bit more fair.