Once I got the hang of it (with some help) it felt pretty alright to play. That being said, the menu you bring up to swap and mix elements broke the flow of gameplay. It was not the greatest.
Hey, thanks a bunch for playing and taking the time to do this! Sorry for not replying to you last time, I had the intention of doing it but forgot... I'll address some points you made in the commentary now.
Mixing menu breaks the flow of gameplay ... you could use number keys for mixing and a corner UI to make it better.
I've received this specific piece of criticism/feedback many times. I experimented with this idea a little more shortly after this DD ended, but it felt really clunky to me. Having to take your hand off WASD to mix stuff renders you completely defenseless, not to mention you have to stretch your hand all the way to the 6 key. To me, this could only work if the time slow-down also happened when you're mixing with the number keys, but then it might still break the flow of gameplay. What do you think?
Secondary fire doesn't do anything.
That's just because the current weapons have no secondary fire, sorry.
It would be nice if rooms had indestructible environmental pieces.
Absolutely, other people have also requested this. I'll add some pillars and stuff.
It's not clear when the room is cleared ... you could have a progress bar on top.
I agree, I'm working on sorting this out. I'm going to add a distinct "room cleared" sound effect, and I'll also add an objective display on top of the screen which will change depending on what room type you're in.
Is there a reason for [the mixing menu] to be timed like that?
Yes, the mixing menu slows time down but lets you walk around. If there was no timer on the menu, the player could stay in slow-motion forever, using it to easily dodge everything and only coming out to occasionally attack. I can make the timer last longer, but the timer stays.
Maybe you should be able to use your utility while in the mixing menu?
Good suggestion, but then again, that encourages people to stay in the mixing menu for as long as possible. I'll try it out and see if it feels balanced.
Right-clicking in the mixing menu causes you to dash if you use your utility (if dash is bound to right-click.)
Wow, nice find. I'll try to fix it.
It gets to a point where there's a lot of down-time and you don't know where you're supposed to be going, so you could use a full map.
Good point, I should add that. It could be a fog-of-war kind of thing where you can't see the entire dungeon at once, only rooms you've visited and nearby rooms.
I expect the second level to have different enemies with different colors.
Yes, that'll be the case soon. There's a miniscule amount of content in the game right now, so it just repeats the same stuff.
I would expect healing to get rid of the poison.
That was the case for a while, but it made healing way too strong and too versatile. Instead, that functionality is relegated to purifying wash, which you make with water and healing.
If you stand still, the enemies stand still. They should move, even if just by little a bit.
Good point, I'll try that.
Really fun game ... I'll see you next DD.
I will be there for sure. You didn't find any of the cool combos you can pull off, I'm tempted to record a video to show them... Anyway, thanks a lot for being so helpful!
I've received this specific piece of criticism/feedback many times. I experimented with this idea a little more shortly after this DD ended, but it felt really clunky to me. Having to take your hand off WASD to mix stuff renders you completely defenseless, not to mention you have to stretch your hand all the way to the 6 key. To me, this could only work if the time slow-down also happened when you're mixing with the number keys, but then it might still break the flow of gameplay. What do you think?
I assume you want to keep movement as WSAD, and not make it so you can move with mouse instead.
I guess your reasons are that players have more control over movement with WSAD compared to just clicking to move. My suggestiong would be to make it so you move with WSAD, but when holding a mixing key, you can mix with WSAD. At first I thought you could maybe keep the last movement direction before pressing the mixing key, so it would allow you to move while mixing, but I think if you do it the way I described you are not going to need slowing down or anything, since every mix would be Hold Mixing + Rapid Keyboard clicks, so I don't think a moment to stop would be bad.
If you can make mixing faster without breaking the flow of combat, then players will be able to mix a lot more in combat. When Magicka went online PvP in Wizard Wars, they made it so each cast/mix was limited to 3 inputs, unlike the original game with 5 - What I mean by that is you would make all the spells by choosing 3 keys to press out of 8 (not counting extra combo elements like steam, or ice). That way it allowed for fast paced combos in form of multiple spells chained one after the other, rather than spending more time on clicking combinations inbetween each shot. Example of combos I am talking about
It is much more fun when you can make enemies wet with first spell, and then quickly zap them and freeze them with second, and then finish them off with a giant rock in 3rd cast and everything lasting split second.
You also want more enemy variety, so quick mixing when changing from one target to the other mid fight is going to be even more important in future.
I can make the timer last longer, but the timer stays.
I think I already explained above how else you can do it without both timer, and slowing down time.
I expect the second level to have different enemies with different colors.
Yes, that'll be the case soon. There's a miniscule amount of content in the game right now, so it just repeats the same stuff.
I hope in future you plan to have more enemy variety in each room, and not just changing them on different floors.
You didn't find any of the cool combos you can pull off
I could definitely do more, but right now the game doesn't "require" me to do it after you find just one combo that works, and the way mixing is done right now does not make it fun (breaking the flow, taking too long). Let me know what you think of my control suggestions. I am curious what you are going to say. I will be happy to brainstorm more if you give me good reasons why you wouldn't want to do things in certain ways.
-No controller support is a bit disappointing. I decided to play with my 4:3 monitor. UI seemed to be fully readable, except on death in which case it bleeds off the sides of the screen.
-Game kicked my ass about 3 times in a row, then I realized my special item was a drinking flask and not a throwing flask, and I realized I could easily heal with it.
-Following this discovery I can actually go through several rooms and find myself enjoying it a bit. I also encountered a weird bug where at one point I couldn't right-click to remove parts of a mixture for whatever reason. Went away after flushing though.
-Feels like the camera is a little too zoomed in for how far away enemies are.
-Made it to floor 2, nice teleporter. I notice how far off the aim laser is from the reticle, is this on purpose? Regardless, at least up to this point I didn't really notice the difference, though I was mainly aiming with the laser anyhow.
-Drinking water hurts by default, for some reason. Guess it's to balance putting out fires. Speaking of, it would be a cool detail if water shots put out the torches on the wall.
-I then died of stupid.
Cool game, looks like you're making good progress.
Sorry, it's on my to-do list. I'll probably have it by next DD.
UI seemed to be fully readable, except on death in which case it bleeds off the sides of the screen.
I'll take a look at that, thanks for the heads-up.
I also encountered a weird bug where at one point I couldn't right-click to remove parts of a mixture for whatever reason.
It might be because you added a chemical that reacted with a chemical already present in the mixture, which consumes the two chemicals to create a product. Since the original chemical is no longer present, you can't remove it with right-click. For example: if you add water then add phlogiston, it will consume the two and create steam. Right-clicking on water or phlogiston will do nothing now since they're not in the mixture, only steam is.
But it could also just be a bug. I'll test it a bit.
Feels like the camera is a little too zoomed in for how far away enemies are.
Noted.
I notice how far off the aim laser is from the reticle, is this on purpose?
Not really, the laser is technically right over where you're aiming but since the game is 3D and the camera is tilted back, the aim looks displaced. I can try to add an offset to the aim or something.
Drinking water hurts by default, for some reason. Guess it's to balance putting out fires.
It's just a limitation of the current iteration of the mechanics: a chemical needs to deal damage in order to apply status effects. Water has to deal damage regardless of that because some enemies will be weak to it in the future. FYI, you're splashing water on yourself, not drinking it.
Speaking of, it would be a cool detail if water shots put out the torches on the wall.
i played through it a bunch, and despite that my average run time is still about 3 rooms. while i'm sure you're aware of difficulty complaints, i'm going to focus on another aspect that i think wasn't covered enough.
the idea of the game (from what i can tell, anyway) is that it's a fast paced reactionary shooter/combat game, with the idea being that you see an enemy of type X that is vulnerable to Y damage, so you change your "loadout" to deal Y damage to dispatch that. i tried to play the game that way - but i feel like the design and capabilities of the player's kit goes against this idea. it simply feels too slow to play this way, and it feels better to just pick random elements and start blasting. i think this can be easily improved by speeding up the player side of things. for example, add a quickswitch button for the weapons (maybe to the mousewheel, like in shooter games?). then, try and make the alchemy part quicker. if you already have the fluids at the bottom of the screen, how about mapping keys to add an element? so instead of opening the menu, i'd press 333-444 and have a combination of 2 elements and i'll be ready to shoot in under a second, and i'd also be able to see this change since the fluids are showing at the bottom.
something else that needs addressing is the enemy targetting range. if an enemy has sight of me from across the room where i can't see them, then i can't prepare for it. i think this is too much for the first 1-2 rooms where the player is still learning, so i'd see about lowering their detect radius until the player is at least familiar with the game. they could also use better death animations, since i often times slapped a dead enemy i thought was still alive.
lastly, i think the first few rooms should have mandatory indestructible cover. give the player a chance to figure out enemy attack patterns safely without having to worry about dodging things. it can be as simple as a 1x1 pillar by the first door or in the middle of the room, giving the player a bit of breathing room. i guarantee new players will be faced with the shot-cooldown thing if they misuse their elements, so this gives them a bit of time to readjust. in later rooms just get rid of this cover and keep it as is.
otherwise the player model is nice and the UI is very polished and detailed. the dungeon generation works too (hallways maybe a bit too long), and things like the minimap highlighting rooms are a nice touch. i'd just make destroying objects faster for the player (but keep it the same for the enemies) since it's a bit weird to need to hit a box a bunch of times to break it in the starting room with no enemies around.
if you already have the fluids at the bottom of the screen, how about mapping keys to add an element? so instead of opening the menu, i'd press 333-444 and have a combination of 2 elements and i'll be ready to shoot in under a second, and i'd also be able to see this change since the fluids are showing at the bottom.
This was the way the game originally worked, funnily enough. Instead of the mixing menu, you had a little bar at the bottom of the screen that you would fill up by pressing number keys. I scrapped it because it was difficult to use and keep track of, you can read a more in-depth explanation in my reply to the OverCast dev's comment. I can try adding the number-key mixing as an alternative way of mixing stuff instead of replacing the existing menu.
something else that needs addressing is the enemy targetting range. if an enemy has sight of me from across the room where i can't see them, then i can't prepare for it. i think this is too much for the first 1-2 rooms where the player is still learning, so i'd see about lowering their detect radius until the player is at least familiar with the game.
Sure, I'll try toning that down a bit.
they could also use better death animations, since i often times slapped a dead enemy i thought was still alive.
Absolutely, I'll get on that once I finish remodeling the enemies.
lastly, i think the first few rooms should have mandatory indestructible cover. give the player a chance to figure out enemy attack patterns safely without having to worry about dodging things. it can be as simple as a 1x1 pillar by the first door or in the middle of the room, giving the player a bit of breathing room.
That makes sense, I'll make some indestructible props.
i'd just make destroying objects faster for the player (but keep it the same for the enemies) since it's a bit weird to need to hit a box a bunch of times to break it in the starting room with no enemies around.
If you use fire or acid on the props, they break very easily. As you mentioned in your comment, the game is about using type X against an enemy that's vulnerable to Y damage: for this reason, the player's base damage is atrociously low. You deal very little damage without exploiting weaknesses, which is meant to encourage the player to actively use effective combos. That being said, I can tweak the numbers a little more.
Game's still challenging after the enemy rooms were toned down since last DD, but there's more breathing room to mess around - at least in the first few rooms. For now what seems to be working best in my experience was 2 steam with 2 lightning for that AOE damage (I assume later with different enemies having different weaknesses it could mix up more). Partly that I never really used the scythe other than for smashing barrels, even if it does more damage, though when I tried runs when I focused on melee they ended much quicker than my usual pistol-focused runs. I feel like DoTs are still just as strong against you as before, now they're just less prevalent and you have more opportunity to negate them somewhat with healing barrels, but you're still left of the mercy of the map generation. Even with the slow-down, doing alchemy mid-combat kinda messes up the pace of the game - I'd prefer having something like quickslots where you can pre-define mixtures instead of always having to clear and then re-mix when you want to change your damage type. The number for elemental damages show up bit too close to the physical damage number, making the two obscure each other which made difficult to figure out what's working when I was experimenting with different elements and combinations. Having enemy corpses stay around is nice, but I'm not a fan of them slowing down the character. Only found two bugs in the demi: when you die, the player character's cape kinda "freezes" and moves almost detached from the character during ragdoll, and when you open the mix menu quickly after starting a run the camera can glitch out (which can vary between just going slightly-off center to moving down into the floor and keep going in the blackness below).
The new stat menu is nice to look through, even if just for the information's sake, and the general presentation is still looks very slick and well made. The gameplay needs some work, and more enemy variety and stuff that not yet implemented (like different equipment, scraps and upgrades) will definitely help, but I see the potential!
I feel like DoTs are still just as strong against you as before, now they're just less prevalent and you have more opportunity to negate them somewhat with healing barrels, but you're still left of the mercy of the map generation.
Maybe they are too strong, but I think this issue comes down to a lack of communication between the game and the player (which is what most issues boil down to.) You can cure almost any debuff immediately by splashing yourself with the right chemicals, e.g. water extinguishes burn and antidote (healing + water) cures poison, so making debuffs very dangerous makes sense to me: it encourages the player to actively try to get rid of them instead of waiting for them to run their course. However, since the game does not tell you what cures what, most players think that letting the debuffs wear off with time is the only option! If I make a good tutorial that teaches people how this works, I believe you'll think debuffs are much more manageable. I'll still try to tweak the numbers a little bit.
Even with the slow-down, doing alchemy mid-combat kinda messes up the pace of the game - I'd prefer having something like quickslots where you can pre-define mixtures instead of always having to clear and then re-mix when you want to change your damage type.
I agree that quickslots could be beneficial for quality of life and I'll most likely implement them, but I don't see a future where I change the base alchemy menu. It's too integral to the game, the point of the game is mixing unique combinations for specific situations on the fly, which is something that quickslots cannot perform on their own. There's also the possibility of a Magicka-style system where you press keys to mix stuff in real-time without a menu taking up your screen, but I don't think that would work either due to two reasons:
Magicka uses A, S, D, F, Q, W, E, and R for mixing—most of these keys are dedicated to basic controls in Alchemickal, so I would have to resort to number keys. To use number keys, one has to take their hand off WASD, meaning they become a sitting duck. Unless there's some very heavy time slow-down, this will be a problem.
Magicka only has 2 or 3 "product elements," i.e. elements that you create by combining other elements. Alchemickal already has 4 and will have many more, since combining stuff is the point of the game. This means it would be very hard to keep track of what's happening in a Magicka-style menu, especially when you consider that some product chemicals are created from other product chemicals.
Only found two bugs in the demi: when you die, the player character's cape kinda "freezes" and moves almost detached from the character during ragdoll, and when you open the mix menu quickly after starting a run the camera can glitch out (which can vary between just going slightly-off center to moving down into the floor and keep going in the blackness below).
i can’t play this lol. i spent a while learning the controls and trying to learn alchemy then entered the first room and 6 guys locked lasers on me and i exploded
i don’t know the recipes, i don’t know what the spells do and when to use them, and the controls are hard to manage even when i’m not under attack
resource management is hard. in an FPS running out of ammo usually means my guy starts auto-reloading while i consider my options: do i flee? switch weapons? the actions needed from me are simple and the consequences are deep
in this, i run out of alchemy juice so i need to flush my vial, then, while calculating how to dodge near-perfect accuracy lasers and stay away from AoE bombs, i have to figure out which weapon and spell i want next and enter it into the potion screen.
i haven’t seen any situations where i was able to take cover and do combat alchemy, every situation was just an open arena with boxes blocking my movement and all i could do was dodge. i would think the fun part of a game like this would be to be able to duck out of combat to heal and buff yourself based on the situation, then go back in until you needed to change buffs or something
keeping enemy corpses and having them looks the same as live enemies is bad, having them restrict your movement is worse. i can’t think of any interesting scenarios that would come out of that
i was grateful for the options settings, i wouldn’t have been able to run the game without them
i can’t play this lol. i spent a while learning the controls and trying to learn alchemy then entered the first room and 6 guys locked lasers on me and i exploded
That's unfortunate, I apologize for the lack of a tutorial. It'll be included in the next DD build for sure.
i don’t know the recipes, i don’t know what the spells do and when to use them,
You're supposed to experiment and figure what things do. There will be a manual in the future that catalogues what each chemical does, but for the most part you're supposed to just play and figure it out on your own. You can infer what most chemicals do just based on their name and appearance: the fire one burns stuff, the cold one freezes stuff, the water one wets things and thus extinguishes fire, and so on.
in this, i run out of alchemy juice so i need to flush my vial, then, while calculating how to dodge near-perfect accuracy lasers and stay away from AoE bombs, i have to figure out which weapon and spell i want next and enter it into the potion screen.
Yes, that's intentional. This is a hard game.
i haven’t seen any situations where i was able to take cover and do combat alchemy, every situation was just an open arena with boxes blocking my movement and all i could do was dodge.
That's unfortunate, you must've gotten unlucky with your level generations. There's been plenty of times where other playtesters and I use cover to hide from a barrage of lasers.
keeping enemy corpses and having them looks the same as live enemies is bad, having them restrict your movement is worse. i can’t think of any interesting scenarios that would come out of that
Agreed, I'll fix that.
i was grateful for the options settings, i wouldn’t have been able to run the game without them
Yeah, the game isn't super performant right now. I'll try to optimize more stuff.
Main menu should have music just so you can adjust its volume correctly. When starting a game "Launch" should be above "Back", and overall be more prominent. The game is way too dark. Mapping something as important as dash to shift feels bad, it should be right-click or spacebar. There needs to be a tutorial (e.g., a series of rooms where the controls are written on the ground). Enemy corpses turning into physics objects is awful, they both get in the way and make it hard to tell when they die. There needs to be some signal when all enemies in a room are dead. The alchemy system is confusing and the game makes no effort to teach it. Enemies locking into you and not being able to dodge it without dash/cover feels awful. The gameplay isn't fun. There was great care put into the art and assets, but it doesn't match the quality of the gameplay experience.
Main menu should have music just so you can adjust its volume correctly. There needs to be a tutorial (e.g., a series of rooms where the controls are written on the ground).
I'm working on those, hopefully I'll have them by next DD (I'll definitely have a tutorial.)
The game is way too dark.
I agree, I plan to add more props with light sources to help alleviate that. If that isn't enough, I'll raise the environment brightness.
Mapping something as important as dash to shift feels bad, it should be right-click or spacebar.
You can remap your keys.
Enemy corpses turning into physics objects is awful, they both get in the way and make it hard to tell when they die.
I'll try making them lighter so they impair your movement less.
There needs to be some signal when all enemies in a room are dead.
Technically there is one already: the music fades from the combat version to the calm version whenever you clear a room. But yes, a proper indicator would be good.
Enemies locking into you and not being able to dodge it without dash/cover feels awful.
Don't know what you mean by this, if you could dodge everything by just walking then there would be no challenge. There's also ways to stop/stun enemies, such as freezing the bomb enemies.
The gameplay isn't fun. There was great care put into the art and assets, but it doesn't match the quality of the gameplay experience.
I disagree, I think the game is fun (if not a little repetitive right now.) However, you do need to know how to play effectively for the game to be satisfying, so I don't blame playtesters for thinking the game is not fun since there's no tutorial yet.
Comments
Once I got the hang of it (with some help) it felt pretty alright to play. That being said, the menu you bring up to swap and mix elements broke the flow of gameplay. It was not the greatest.
Thanks for playing!
I finally got to play your game on linux.
The video of me playing it can be found at https://mega.nz/folder/WQ91HBxL#X4-j8Mj7H30Ai3aevWFEmA
Hey, thanks a bunch for playing and taking the time to do this! Sorry for not replying to you last time, I had the intention of doing it but forgot... I'll address some points you made in the commentary now.
I've received this specific piece of criticism/feedback many times. I experimented with this idea a little more shortly after this DD ended, but it felt really clunky to me. Having to take your hand off WASD to mix stuff renders you completely defenseless, not to mention you have to stretch your hand all the way to the 6 key. To me, this could only work if the time slow-down also happened when you're mixing with the number keys, but then it might still break the flow of gameplay. What do you think?
That's just because the current weapons have no secondary fire, sorry.
Absolutely, other people have also requested this. I'll add some pillars and stuff.
I agree, I'm working on sorting this out. I'm going to add a distinct "room cleared" sound effect, and I'll also add an objective display on top of the screen which will change depending on what room type you're in.
Yes, the mixing menu slows time down but lets you walk around. If there was no timer on the menu, the player could stay in slow-motion forever, using it to easily dodge everything and only coming out to occasionally attack. I can make the timer last longer, but the timer stays.
Good suggestion, but then again, that encourages people to stay in the mixing menu for as long as possible. I'll try it out and see if it feels balanced.
Wow, nice find. I'll try to fix it.
Good point, I should add that. It could be a fog-of-war kind of thing where you can't see the entire dungeon at once, only rooms you've visited and nearby rooms.
Yes, that'll be the case soon. There's a miniscule amount of content in the game right now, so it just repeats the same stuff.
That was the case for a while, but it made healing way too strong and too versatile. Instead, that functionality is relegated to purifying wash, which you make with water and healing.
Good point, I'll try that.
I will be there for sure. You didn't find any of the cool combos you can pull off, I'm tempted to record a video to show them... Anyway, thanks a lot for being so helpful!
I guess your reasons are that players have more control over movement with WSAD compared to just clicking to move. My suggestiong would be to make it so you move with WSAD, but when holding a mixing key, you can mix with WSAD. At first I thought you could maybe keep the last movement direction before pressing the mixing key, so it would allow you to move while mixing, but I think if you do it the way I described you are not going to need slowing down or anything, since every mix would be Hold Mixing + Rapid Keyboard clicks, so I don't think a moment to stop would be bad.
If you can make mixing faster without breaking the flow of combat, then players will be able to mix a lot more in combat. When Magicka went online PvP in Wizard Wars, they made it so each cast/mix was limited to 3 inputs, unlike the original game with 5 - What I mean by that is you would make all the spells by choosing 3 keys to press out of 8 (not counting extra combo elements like steam, or ice). That way it allowed for fast paced combos in form of multiple spells chained one after the other, rather than spending more time on clicking combinations inbetween each shot. Example of combos I am talking about
It is much more fun when you can make enemies wet with first spell, and then quickly zap them and freeze them with second, and then finish them off with a giant rock in 3rd cast and everything lasting split second.
You also want more enemy variety, so quick mixing when changing from one target to the other mid fight is going to be even more important in future.I think I already explained above how else you can do it without both timer, and slowing down time.
I hope in future you plan to have more enemy variety in each room, and not just changing them on different floors.
I could definitely do more, but right now the game doesn't "require" me to do it after you find just one combo that works, and the way mixing is done right now does not make it fun (breaking the flow, taking too long). Let me know what you think of my control suggestions. I am curious what you are going to say. I will be happy to brainstorm more if you give me good reasons why you wouldn't want to do things in certain ways.
-No controller support is a bit disappointing. I decided to play with my 4:3 monitor. UI seemed to be fully readable, except on death in which case it bleeds off the sides of the screen.
-Game kicked my ass about 3 times in a row, then I realized my special item was a drinking flask and not a throwing flask, and I realized I could easily heal with it.
-Following this discovery I can actually go through several rooms and find myself enjoying it a bit. I also encountered a weird bug where at one point I couldn't right-click to remove parts of a mixture for whatever reason. Went away after flushing though.
-Feels like the camera is a little too zoomed in for how far away enemies are.
-Made it to floor 2, nice teleporter. I notice how far off the aim laser is from the reticle, is this on purpose? Regardless, at least up to this point I didn't really notice the difference, though I was mainly aiming with the laser anyhow.
-Drinking water hurts by default, for some reason. Guess it's to balance putting out fires. Speaking of, it would be a cool detail if water shots put out the torches on the wall.
-I then died of stupid.
Cool game, looks like you're making good progress.
Hey, thanks a ton for playing!
Sorry, it's on my to-do list. I'll probably have it by next DD.
I'll take a look at that, thanks for the heads-up.
It might be because you added a chemical that reacted with a chemical already present in the mixture, which consumes the two chemicals to create a product. Since the original chemical is no longer present, you can't remove it with right-click. For example: if you add water then add phlogiston, it will consume the two and create steam. Right-clicking on water or phlogiston will do nothing now since they're not in the mixture, only steam is.
But it could also just be a bug. I'll test it a bit.
Noted.
Not really, the laser is technically right over where you're aiming but since the game is 3D and the camera is tilted back, the aim looks displaced. I can try to add an offset to the aim or something.
It's just a limitation of the current iteration of the mechanics: a chemical needs to deal damage in order to apply status effects. Water has to deal damage regardless of that because some enemies will be weak to it in the future. FYI, you're splashing water on yourself, not drinking it.
Holy shit, you're a genius.
I'm pretty sure that's it then, I didn't notice since it was in the heat of battle and after that point I started using tab primarily.
i played through it a bunch, and despite that my average run time is still about 3 rooms. while i'm sure you're aware of difficulty complaints, i'm going to focus on another aspect that i think wasn't covered enough.
the idea of the game (from what i can tell, anyway) is that it's a fast paced reactionary shooter/combat game, with the idea being that you see an enemy of type X that is vulnerable to Y damage, so you change your "loadout" to deal Y damage to dispatch that. i tried to play the game that way - but i feel like the design and capabilities of the player's kit goes against this idea. it simply feels too slow to play this way, and it feels better to just pick random elements and start blasting. i think this can be easily improved by speeding up the player side of things. for example, add a quickswitch button for the weapons (maybe to the mousewheel, like in shooter games?). then, try and make the alchemy part quicker. if you already have the fluids at the bottom of the screen, how about mapping keys to add an element? so instead of opening the menu, i'd press 333-444 and have a combination of 2 elements and i'll be ready to shoot in under a second, and i'd also be able to see this change since the fluids are showing at the bottom.
something else that needs addressing is the enemy targetting range. if an enemy has sight of me from across the room where i can't see them, then i can't prepare for it. i think this is too much for the first 1-2 rooms where the player is still learning, so i'd see about lowering their detect radius until the player is at least familiar with the game. they could also use better death animations, since i often times slapped a dead enemy i thought was still alive.
lastly, i think the first few rooms should have mandatory indestructible cover. give the player a chance to figure out enemy attack patterns safely without having to worry about dodging things. it can be as simple as a 1x1 pillar by the first door or in the middle of the room, giving the player a bit of breathing room. i guarantee new players will be faced with the shot-cooldown thing if they misuse their elements, so this gives them a bit of time to readjust. in later rooms just get rid of this cover and keep it as is.
otherwise the player model is nice and the UI is very polished and detailed. the dungeon generation works too (hallways maybe a bit too long), and things like the minimap highlighting rooms are a nice touch. i'd just make destroying objects faster for the player (but keep it the same for the enemies) since it's a bit weird to need to hit a box a bunch of times to break it in the starting room with no enemies around.
keep up the good work
Hey, thanks for playing!
This was the way the game originally worked, funnily enough. Instead of the mixing menu, you had a little bar at the bottom of the screen that you would fill up by pressing number keys. I scrapped it because it was difficult to use and keep track of, you can read a more in-depth explanation in my reply to the OverCast dev's comment. I can try adding the number-key mixing as an alternative way of mixing stuff instead of replacing the existing menu.
Sure, I'll try toning that down a bit.
Absolutely, I'll get on that once I finish remodeling the enemies.
That makes sense, I'll make some indestructible props.
If you use fire or acid on the props, they break very easily. As you mentioned in your comment, the game is about using type X against an enemy that's vulnerable to Y damage: for this reason, the player's base damage is atrociously low. You deal very little damage without exploiting weaknesses, which is meant to encourage the player to actively use effective combos. That being said, I can tweak the numbers a little more.
Game's still challenging after the enemy rooms were toned down since last DD, but there's more breathing room to mess around - at least in the first few rooms. For now what seems to be working best in my experience was 2 steam with 2 lightning for that AOE damage (I assume later with different enemies having different weaknesses it could mix up more). Partly that I never really used the scythe other than for smashing barrels, even if it does more damage, though when I tried runs when I focused on melee they ended much quicker than my usual pistol-focused runs.
I feel like DoTs are still just as strong against you as before, now they're just less prevalent and you have more opportunity to negate them somewhat with healing barrels, but you're still left of the mercy of the map generation.
Even with the slow-down, doing alchemy mid-combat kinda messes up the pace of the game - I'd prefer having something like quickslots where you can pre-define mixtures instead of always having to clear and then re-mix when you want to change your damage type.
The number for elemental damages show up bit too close to the physical damage number, making the two obscure each other which made difficult to figure out what's working when I was experimenting with different elements and combinations.
Having enemy corpses stay around is nice, but I'm not a fan of them slowing down the character.
Only found two bugs in the demi: when you die, the player character's cape kinda "freezes" and moves almost detached from the character during ragdoll, and when you open the mix menu quickly after starting a run the camera can glitch out (which can vary between just going slightly-off center to moving down into the floor and keep going in the blackness below).
The new stat menu is nice to look through, even if just for the information's sake, and the general presentation is still looks very slick and well made. The gameplay needs some work, and more enemy variety and stuff that not yet implemented (like different equipment, scraps and upgrades) will definitely help, but I see the potential!
Hey, thanks a lot for playing again.
Maybe they are too strong, but I think this issue comes down to a lack of communication between the game and the player (which is what most issues boil down to.) You can cure almost any debuff immediately by splashing yourself with the right chemicals, e.g. water extinguishes burn and antidote (healing + water) cures poison, so making debuffs very dangerous makes sense to me: it encourages the player to actively try to get rid of them instead of waiting for them to run their course. However, since the game does not tell you what cures what, most players think that letting the debuffs wear off with time is the only option! If I make a good tutorial that teaches people how this works, I believe you'll think debuffs are much more manageable. I'll still try to tweak the numbers a little bit.
I agree that quickslots could be beneficial for quality of life and I'll most likely implement them, but I don't see a future where I change the base alchemy menu. It's too integral to the game, the point of the game is mixing unique combinations for specific situations on the fly, which is something that quickslots cannot perform on their own. There's also the possibility of a Magicka-style system where you press keys to mix stuff in real-time without a menu taking up your screen, but I don't think that would work either due to two reasons:
Noted, I'll take a look at those.
i can’t play this lol. i spent a while learning the controls and trying to learn alchemy then entered the first room and 6 guys locked lasers on me and i exploded
i don’t know the recipes, i don’t know what the spells do and when to use them, and the controls are hard to manage even when i’m not under attack
resource management is hard. in an FPS running out of ammo usually means my guy starts auto-reloading while i consider my options: do i flee? switch weapons? the actions needed from me are simple and the consequences are deep
in this, i run out of alchemy juice so i need to flush my vial, then, while calculating how to dodge near-perfect accuracy lasers and stay away from AoE bombs, i have to figure out which weapon and spell i want next and enter it into the potion screen.
i haven’t seen any situations where i was able to take cover and do combat alchemy, every situation was just an open arena with boxes blocking my movement and all i could do was dodge. i would think the fun part of a game like this would be to be able to duck out of combat to heal and buff yourself based on the situation, then go back in until you needed to change buffs or something
keeping enemy corpses and having them looks the same as live enemies is bad, having them restrict your movement is worse. i can’t think of any interesting scenarios that would come out of that
i was grateful for the options settings, i wouldn’t have been able to run the game without them
Thanks for playing.
That's unfortunate, I apologize for the lack of a tutorial. It'll be included in the next DD build for sure.
You're supposed to experiment and figure what things do. There will be a manual in the future that catalogues what each chemical does, but for the most part you're supposed to just play and figure it out on your own. You can infer what most chemicals do just based on their name and appearance: the fire one burns stuff, the cold one freezes stuff, the water one wets things and thus extinguishes fire, and so on.
Yes, that's intentional. This is a hard game.
That's unfortunate, you must've gotten unlucky with your level generations. There's been plenty of times where other playtesters and I use cover to hide from a barrage of lasers.
Agreed, I'll fix that.
Yeah, the game isn't super performant right now. I'll try to optimize more stuff.
Main menu should have music just so you can adjust its volume correctly. When starting a game "Launch" should be above "Back", and overall be more prominent. The game is way too dark. Mapping something as important as dash to shift feels bad, it should be right-click or spacebar. There needs to be a tutorial (e.g., a series of rooms where the controls are written on the ground). Enemy corpses turning into physics objects is awful, they both get in the way and make it hard to tell when they die. There needs to be some signal when all enemies in a room are dead. The alchemy system is confusing and the game makes no effort to teach it. Enemies locking into you and not being able to dodge it without dash/cover feels awful. The gameplay isn't fun. There was great care put into the art and assets, but it doesn't match the quality of the gameplay experience.
Hey, thanks for playing.
I'm working on those, hopefully I'll have them by next DD (I'll definitely have a tutorial.)
I agree, I plan to add more props with light sources to help alleviate that. If that isn't enough, I'll raise the environment brightness.
You can remap your keys.
I'll try making them lighter so they impair your movement less.
Technically there is one already: the music fades from the combat version to the calm version whenever you clear a room. But yes, a proper indicator would be good.
Don't know what you mean by this, if you could dodge everything by just walking then there would be no challenge. There's also ways to stop/stun enemies, such as freezing the bomb enemies.
I disagree, I think the game is fun (if not a little repetitive right now.) However, you do need to know how to play effectively for the game to be satisfying, so I don't blame playtesters for thinking the game is not fun since there's no tutorial yet.
Honestly my only real suggestion is use a different color than sickly greenish-yellow for healing; it looks too much like poison damage.
Hey, thanks for playing. I'll try some other shades out.
a more blueish-green would probably work better
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