it's kino. i love the first area and replay it just for the aesthetic
you mention it being a difficult test level but you could have fooled me. the difficulty feels fine and the map is well done, albeit linear
i like the way that the first trap is noticeable just by the detail you put into everything else
i like that the different status effects do different things to you
i couldn't figure out what some status effects do, like the rat bite. it's a shame that i wasn't forced to learn, either, because it's quite easy to kill them and continue
the section with the webs and the crab is fun, but, because i would have to let myself fall into a pit in a game where i have a button to undo my mistakes, i missed it until i was messing around, which is also a shame
the timing of starting a slide feels bad, i'd like to be able to crouch instantly/cancel my crouch into a slide
rewinding and then continuing a jump feels weird. i'd like to be able to rewind then continue holding space to continue the jump as it was but it seems like it gives me the full jump or a hop depending on how far i rewind
i was surprised to find that tapping up twice does a short hop. maybe there's a tutorial i didn't read, idk
the game deserves better than the title/start menu it has
i got stuck in the lava area where you can't stand on platforms for too long or they'll sink it to lava for ages trying to single-wall jump out to the doorway you're supposed to go to (and i actually managed it, somehow!) but when retrying the jump i found you're supposed to just stand on a platform of the same kind i was supposed to avoid stepping on because they sink and wait for it to raise you, i thought that was bad. i played that part a while ago so maybe i'm wrong about the finer details
In addition to the video just thought I'd mention I thought it might be helpful for navigation to have a Super Metroid-style minimap (not full map, minimap) always present on screen. Since the level design is quite chaotic and even rotating the whole world periodically I hardly have a sense of where I am or where I'm going, which is a bit troublesome for a metroidvania, so maybe that helps a bit?
Like last time I really like where this is going. The slide was too easy to trigger last time, but now I felt it was too hard. Have you tried to make it trigger with a 2 keys inputs in a short amount of frames? It's hard to find the perfect timing.
Thanks for the feedback, I got a whole ton watching through the VOD and taking notes. I changed how sliding works from the last build, its no longer a set distance by pressing the inputs, but rather its "hold down+left/right" to slide while you hold it, capped at a max distance per slide. Since lots of people reported wanting short and accurate slides, rather than overshooting targets.
You also found a glitch with how the mouse aiming was handled, I added a feature that lets you change attack directions in a grace timer at the start of each attack, and that was using the movement direction input even when mouse aiming was active, I'll just need to disable it when mouse aiming is on. And a few other things like making the lantern geist chain climbable, changing color palettes to fade out background/doodad/nonactive elements like that lavafall and non-grabbable chains. And yes the incel wizard is killed by taking a shower
Great game, I really enjoyed it, I played through the mario world 3-4 times but I kept getting stuck behind the boss and gave up. But I have a lot of nitpicks:
- Spamming right click doesn't go into rewind mode every time, looks like there's a cooldown between when I exit it and I can enter it again. Not sure if this is intentional but it doesn't feel great. Sometimes this got in the way when I died, rewinded until I was alive, immediately died again and tried to rewind again.
- I feel like I'm spending more time than I should watching my guts being rewinded into place. When I'm dead I just want to go back to before I died, so I guess maybe rewinding could be faster after death.
- The jump doesn't feel too good to me, can't put my finger on it but it feels a bit delayed and the arc feels weird. The sliding and acceleration on the movement is also a bit much, it's not as annoying as it would be in a regular platformer since you can rewind all mistakes, and I got used to it in the end, but it still doesn't feel great.
- The idle animation is a bit too fast probably.
- Camera is jittery when sitting on top of a moving platform like the swing near the end of the 1st area.
- Having a big sign that says "save spot over here" in big letters seems to defeat the purpose of diegetic UI a bit.
Thanks for the feedback! I'll look to address some of that stuff
- The rewind indeed has a cooldown, but its arbitrary, I only need it to not be same-frame-as-last-rewind-ends to avoid any glitches that might ensue (and that might even work, I just didn't test around it). I put that in there as a sanity cap considering you could tank fps by spamming it and triggering all the code that swaps between one and the other, so I could lower the delay, its just set to 25 frames right now, I could make it ~10
-I can set rewind speed arbitrarily, and if you cheat and edit the save file you can set it to 2, 3, 5, 10, 100x speed if you want and try it out, but I feel like with fine platforming people wind up pressing the button more immediately and wanting to finesse into the point they leave off, as opposed to letting the guts fly for several seconds. I did a lot of testing at 2x vs 1x speed, I was never too sure which to go with
-I put in a 2 frame delay on the jump recently to allow a very very brief animation where you push off the ground. I may remove this, since it makes it harder to fine tune your jump height and makes it feel that very bit delayed.
-The idle animation probably starts too fast, but it actually slows down as the player goes afk and catches his breath, until his full idle afk loop kicks in
-I'm always fine tuning the camera system, its really complicated with how it works for moving between different angles and doing a vector projection onto a line that might be triggering some ratchet safeguards that are supposed to keep it from jittering back and forth when movement is less than a minimum distance, I'll see if that's at play
-The signs are just for the demo, half the streamers I watched in the initial build ran right past every save spot and then got frustrated if they died and went back to the start, or went through a shortcut back to the start of a level. Would definitely not include such a feature in the final game, I hope that once a player is used to time rewinding they could just ya know, rewind time when they notice they went through a one-way door.
Really clever, and you've got a weirdly high level of polish considering. I can't get very far because I'm playing it on a laptop on my stomach, and it's a bit awkward to control, but if you could get some gamepad controls in, I think I'd be able to get really comfy with it and spend a few hours getting into it. It's great, it's like Braid but with something else to do. Your camera movement's smooth, the playable 'tutorial' intro bit is intuitive, the first instinctive set-piece for learning how the time mechanics work is great, it's just really well made. Well done.
Thanks for the feedback! Yeah I need to do more testing with both gamepad and controller setups since I developed it on KB+M, some folks found other bugs I need to fix with that. The polish and content is all in place to build a large game out of it, so I hope I'll have something to show off in the future, thanks
Thanks for feedback. Yeah the text boxes were done very ad hoc just for the demo, depending on your control scheme (and always the game end one), they can be either prerendered sprites or dynamic text which renders quite differently even with the same fonts, I'd only use sprites for the final game. I just made a couple variations for the default controls.
Right now my setup is that you always highlight and can pick up solid physics objects, but minor objects like eggs/bottles that don't have collision can only be picked up if you're crouching. Maybe I should adjust how that works, but I don't plan on it ever being necessary to pick up non-solid physics.
You are up to something big. You have the aesthethics, you have the mechanics. The time mechanic its super interesting, I hope you can implement some kind of mechanics to interact with it, since (at least what I played) it only works to go back when you die. I thinks theres is huge potential in there.
Thanks! I've got a whole series of traps and enemies already in place that will use time mechanics including for puzzles, stuff like "Not-wallmaster that drags you backwards through time while keeping you locked in position", and other such stuff. Working on adding an ability menu right now which will give the player control over such abilities. You can see one particularly complicated one if you unlock the cheater menu, pressing escape -> "Desynchronous Rewind (?)". That kind of stuff works in the engine already, so it will be fun to design around it
Not a huge fan of rage platformers but had fun with this. Visually game looks great, I had alot of issues with some background objects looking like foreground obstacles and vise versa. Maybe make the distinction a lot more clear. (A big issue I had with this is the lava wall at the end of the lava area, thought it was an impassable wall and spent a few minutes being an idiot going back and forth around the area) Mario level is I'm guessing just for the demo, way too hard for me, had to cheat to get pass that one :(. Curved walls are really neat definitely adds to that mysticism feel you get with Castlevania style games. No metroidvania gameplay is present so not sure if you just plan to add that eventually or something, but just gonna mention it. In terms of rage platformer mechanics I think you should make safe area's a lot more clear. The laser area was quite frustrating for me since I didn't know if where I was, was safe or not. Not a fun section because of that. The firey balls section with the elevator? rift energy thing. not sure what to call it. But it was disorienting, kind of just moved forwards, I had no idea where I was going. Might be cool as a side/hub space for that zone but the entire section being that was just kind of weird. Clearly you have a visually interesting game, keep up the good work. Can't wait to see how the game progresses next DD.
Thanks for the thoughts. Yeah The metroidvania gameplay would be in the final game, you can see the elements are there like minimap and save points and map reveals, but this was just a linear demo I slapped together quickly. I do want to do another pass to make sure traps are more visible and non-traps are less prominent like that lavafall, really just a matter of slapping some palette swaps in there. Thanks!
Superb polish and presentation, if a bit disjointed in level design at times. I don't quite see what possibilities the time mechanic is supposed to be adding to this game just yet. It functionally plays like a kaizo platforming romhack, which is not what you'd expect from the Castlevania presentation or Metroidvania genre claims at all. It seems you understand that yourself, judging by the inclusion of a Mario area.
Sorry to deliver the label of bad fortune, but in its current state this game is indeed a 2D indie precision platformer. Checkpoints are dressed up as rewinding the player and defeating enemies is dressed up as rewinding them, but neither thematic fluff has any substantial effect upon how the game is played. Areas look different, yet ultimately what you're doing all the way through is tiptoeing around death contraptions and rerecording segmented TAS adjustments.
Thanks for the feedback! This is really just a tech/asset demo on some levels I cooked up just to make a demo, so its very linear and threat-dense instead of the more exploration focus you'd expect of a castlevania. After all, I've got hundreds of enemies and traps implemented so I went heavy on including a sampling of them when I'd expect the final game to spread that out, and ramp up the difficulty more slowly. Likewise there's also a whole host of time manipulation mechanics not seen here, which I'll be able to use for puzzles, so it will go beyond just being used for rewinding deaths. Thanks!
Yeah you've already got yourself a full game's worth of assets in here IMO. Looking forward to seeing future developments on this because the game looks great and the idea has potential.
Comments
it's kino. i love the first area and replay it just for the aesthetic
In addition to the video just thought I'd mention I thought it might be helpful for navigation to have a Super Metroid-style minimap (not full map, minimap) always present on screen. Since the level design is quite chaotic and even rotating the whole world periodically I hardly have a sense of where I am or where I'm going, which is a bit troublesome for a metroidvania, so maybe that helps a bit?
Like last time I really like where this is going. The slide was too easy to trigger last time, but now I felt it was too hard. Have you tried to make it trigger with a 2 keys inputs in a short amount of frames? It's hard to find the perfect timing.
Thanks for the feedback, I got a whole ton watching through the VOD and taking notes. I changed how sliding works from the last build, its no longer a set distance by pressing the inputs, but rather its "hold down+left/right" to slide while you hold it, capped at a max distance per slide. Since lots of people reported wanting short and accurate slides, rather than overshooting targets.
You also found a glitch with how the mouse aiming was handled, I added a feature that lets you change attack directions in a grace timer at the start of each attack, and that was using the movement direction input even when mouse aiming was active, I'll just need to disable it when mouse aiming is on. And a few other things like making the lantern geist chain climbable, changing color palettes to fade out background/doodad/nonactive elements like that lavafall and non-grabbable chains. And yes the incel wizard is killed by taking a shower
Great game, I really enjoyed it, I played through the mario world 3-4 times but I kept getting stuck behind the boss and gave up. But I have a lot of nitpicks:
- Spamming right click doesn't go into rewind mode every time, looks like there's a cooldown between when I exit it and I can enter it again. Not sure if this is intentional but it doesn't feel great. Sometimes this got in the way when I died, rewinded until I was alive, immediately died again and tried to rewind again.
- I feel like I'm spending more time than I should watching my guts being rewinded into place. When I'm dead I just want to go back to before I died, so I guess maybe rewinding could be faster after death.
- The jump doesn't feel too good to me, can't put my finger on it but it feels a bit delayed and the arc feels weird. The sliding and acceleration on the movement is also a bit much, it's not as annoying as it would be in a regular platformer since you can rewind all mistakes, and I got used to it in the end, but it still doesn't feel great.
- The idle animation is a bit too fast probably.
- Camera is jittery when sitting on top of a moving platform like the swing near the end of the 1st area.
- Having a big sign that says "save spot over here" in big letters seems to defeat the purpose of diegetic UI a bit.
Thanks for the feedback! I'll look to address some of that stuff
- The rewind indeed has a cooldown, but its arbitrary, I only need it to not be same-frame-as-last-rewind-ends to avoid any glitches that might ensue (and that might even work, I just didn't test around it). I put that in there as a sanity cap considering you could tank fps by spamming it and triggering all the code that swaps between one and the other, so I could lower the delay, its just set to 25 frames right now, I could make it ~10
-I can set rewind speed arbitrarily, and if you cheat and edit the save file you can set it to 2, 3, 5, 10, 100x speed if you want and try it out, but I feel like with fine platforming people wind up pressing the button more immediately and wanting to finesse into the point they leave off, as opposed to letting the guts fly for several seconds. I did a lot of testing at 2x vs 1x speed, I was never too sure which to go with
-I put in a 2 frame delay on the jump recently to allow a very very brief animation where you push off the ground. I may remove this, since it makes it harder to fine tune your jump height and makes it feel that very bit delayed.
-The idle animation probably starts too fast, but it actually slows down as the player goes afk and catches his breath, until his full idle afk loop kicks in
-I'm always fine tuning the camera system, its really complicated with how it works for moving between different angles and doing a vector projection onto a line that might be triggering some ratchet safeguards that are supposed to keep it from jittering back and forth when movement is less than a minimum distance, I'll see if that's at play
-The signs are just for the demo, half the streamers I watched in the initial build ran right past every save spot and then got frustrated if they died and went back to the start, or went through a shortcut back to the start of a level. Would definitely not include such a feature in the final game, I hope that once a player is used to time rewinding they could just ya know, rewind time when they notice they went through a one-way door.
Really clever, and you've got a weirdly high level of polish considering. I can't get very far because I'm playing it on a laptop on my stomach, and it's a bit awkward to control, but if you could get some gamepad controls in, I think I'd be able to get really comfy with it and spend a few hours getting into it. It's great, it's like Braid but with something else to do. Your camera movement's smooth, the playable 'tutorial' intro bit is intuitive, the first instinctive set-piece for learning how the time mechanics work is great, it's just really well made. Well done.
Thanks for the feedback! Yeah I need to do more testing with both gamepad and controller setups since I developed it on KB+M, some folks found other bugs I need to fix with that. The polish and content is all in place to build a large game out of it, so I hope I'll have something to show off in the future, thanks
I feel like the text rendering's kind of weird. Some bits are aliased, others are blurry, I dunno.
Love the world interaction, though I can't tell if I was able to pick up objects like eggs and bottles or if it was just the physics on my character.
Kinda want an option to zoom out or in. Games like Phoenotopia Awakening and Starbound (which isn't the best but still) have this and it's useful.
Thanks for feedback. Yeah the text boxes were done very ad hoc just for the demo, depending on your control scheme (and always the game end one), they can be either prerendered sprites or dynamic text which renders quite differently even with the same fonts, I'd only use sprites for the final game. I just made a couple variations for the default controls.
Right now my setup is that you always highlight and can pick up solid physics objects, but minor objects like eggs/bottles that don't have collision can only be picked up if you're crouching. Maybe I should adjust how that works, but I don't plan on it ever being necessary to pick up non-solid physics.
Thanks!
Ah that was it. Either way, this slaps. If it's a good length I'll definitely pick it up when it's done.
I didn't get very far and this game was kicking my ass but it was very cool. And fun. I look forward to playing it again in the future.
Thanks! I dialed up the difficulty way more in the demo than I would in the final game since its too short to build up the curve properly
You are up to something big. You have the aesthethics, you have the mechanics. The time mechanic its super interesting, I hope you can implement some kind of mechanics to interact with it, since (at least what I played) it only works to go back when you die. I thinks theres is huge potential in there.
Thanks! I've got a whole series of traps and enemies already in place that will use time mechanics including for puzzles, stuff like "Not-wallmaster that drags you backwards through time while keeping you locked in position", and other such stuff. Working on adding an ability menu right now which will give the player control over such abilities. You can see one particularly complicated one if you unlock the cheater menu, pressing escape -> "Desynchronous Rewind (?)". That kind of stuff works in the engine already, so it will be fun to design around it
Not a huge fan of rage platformers but had fun with this. Visually game looks great, I had alot of issues with some background objects looking like foreground obstacles and vise versa. Maybe make the distinction a lot more clear. (A big issue I had with this is the lava wall at the end of the lava area, thought it was an impassable wall and spent a few minutes being an idiot going back and forth around the area) Mario level is I'm guessing just for the demo, way too hard for me, had to cheat to get pass that one :(. Curved walls are really neat definitely adds to that mysticism feel you get with Castlevania style games. No metroidvania gameplay is present so not sure if you just plan to add that eventually or something, but just gonna mention it. In terms of rage platformer mechanics I think you should make safe area's a lot more clear. The laser area was quite frustrating for me since I didn't know if where I was, was safe or not. Not a fun section because of that. The firey balls section with the elevator? rift energy thing. not sure what to call it. But it was disorienting, kind of just moved forwards, I had no idea where I was going. Might be cool as a side/hub space for that zone but the entire section being that was just kind of weird. Clearly you have a visually interesting game, keep up the good work. Can't wait to see how the game progresses next DD.
Thanks for the thoughts. Yeah The metroidvania gameplay would be in the final game, you can see the elements are there like minimap and save points and map reveals, but this was just a linear demo I slapped together quickly. I do want to do another pass to make sure traps are more visible and non-traps are less prominent like that lavafall, really just a matter of slapping some palette swaps in there. Thanks!
Superb polish and presentation, if a bit disjointed in level design at times. I don't quite see what possibilities the time mechanic is supposed to be adding to this game just yet. It functionally plays like a kaizo platforming romhack, which is not what you'd expect from the Castlevania presentation or Metroidvania genre claims at all. It seems you understand that yourself, judging by the inclusion of a Mario area.
Sorry to deliver the label of bad fortune, but in its current state this game is indeed a 2D indie precision platformer. Checkpoints are dressed up as rewinding the player and defeating enemies is dressed up as rewinding them, but neither thematic fluff has any substantial effect upon how the game is played. Areas look different, yet ultimately what you're doing all the way through is tiptoeing around death contraptions and rerecording segmented TAS adjustments.
Thanks for the feedback! This is really just a tech/asset demo on some levels I cooked up just to make a demo, so its very linear and threat-dense instead of the more exploration focus you'd expect of a castlevania. After all, I've got hundreds of enemies and traps implemented so I went heavy on including a sampling of them when I'd expect the final game to spread that out, and ramp up the difficulty more slowly. Likewise there's also a whole host of time manipulation mechanics not seen here, which I'll be able to use for puzzles, so it will go beyond just being used for rewinding deaths. Thanks!
Yeah you've already got yourself a full game's worth of assets in here IMO. Looking forward to seeing future developments on this because the game looks great and the idea has potential.
This demo is largely unchanged from DD49, just some tweaks to animations/movements/attack. If you didn't see it before, take a look