Really fun game! I am looking forward to the full release. The cutscenes were very fun and added a lot to the game. The combat is also really solid and felt rewarding. Maybe adding the dialogue indicator would help for the text reading could help as well.
I really enjoyed your game, but had a series of nitpicks, mainly about controls. Some of the actions are bound to different keys on different actions, so when the character switch happened it was pretty disorienting. Also got severe lag on some of the cutscenes. Which was a bit of a shame - some of them are pretty funny.
I'd originally planned to play it for an hour but I ended up neglecting my responsibilities and playing it for 3 so I could wring every drop of content out of it. I took notes while I did so.
The writing reminds me of Slayers.
Just got to Elsa, and her leg animations don't look great when moving diagonally or holding shift. Arcana might've been the same, didn't notice.
The close up zoom when you enter the skills menu is nice, but the characters' faces really can't stand up to being so close to the camera.
That said, the gameplay itself feels gr8.
Voices are a lot louder than all the other SFX at the same volume level.
I clicked the restart level button while looking for the options menu. Probably needs a confirm.
Cutscenes are pretty low quality but they communicate what they intend clearly and I love them.
I fucking love the writing. The one eyed master marksman somehow manages to be the straight character.
Octavia and Fiera also have problems with their diagonal movement animations.
Just noticed the song doesn't loop cleanly. That's a damn shame.
Looks like if you use Fiera's skill that makes heart pickups explode, you can make hearts explode over and over and over
if you have full health. Not that I'm complaining, that's rad. Actually on further play I couldn't get it to happen again. Dunno what made it happen the first time. Maybe because I was alone?
These camp scenes in between missions are super soulful. Although it's a shame you don't get to see the characters interact in the Melkirian camp aside from Octavia.
I'm really feeling some good potential when I see the infinite missions.
Looking at it for a bit, i get that the missions are ranked bronze, silver, gold and red, but it'd be nice and clear if the difficulty was also mentioned in the description.
Maybe have characters revive faster/instantly if there are no enemies around?
After clutching my way through the first(?) Penelope fight with both Arcana and Elsa fainted, Arcana was standing up while fainted after the cutscene.
Okay so picking up health heals the entire party, not just the one picking it up. That's very important. Maybe I missed the explanation, but if it's not there, make sure it's there.
(found it later on a loading screen tip, but for something so important, maybe explain it when you first unlock party member switching?)
Nothing past Penelope for blue team? It is just a demo I guess.
Trying out the red team mission, it doesn't seem like Octavia's focus mode fire rate improvement works as advertised; I'm not noticing any difference whether I'm holding shift or not.
The difficulty so far has been absolutely amazingly tuned. I don't think there's been a boss where I didn't get scrape through by the skin of my teeth, but I haven't actually died yet (except for the necromancer).
The undead mikuni rangers are a pretty cool idea. Haunted forests are usually either wood critters, spirits or something, but having corporeal undead defenders I don't think I've seen before.
aaaand Yurie take 2 finally beat me. Good thing I can go straight back to the fight.
Yurie 2 might need a little tweaking. Her third stage is an absolute beast. Maybe I missed somethng that's suppsoed to make it easier, but it took me like ten tries before I managed to get through.
On the next (night) part of the stage, I aggroed some enemies through a wall in the area before the shop; that meant when the shop spawned, I was being swarmed by enemies. It doesn't seem intended.
I equipped a whiteflame on Fiera, and after I used her secondary attack, the particle effect on her right hand never went away. (tried it out on later missions and yep, same thing)
The night ambience is nice in the third part of the forest level, but holy shit does it get hard to see sometimes with all the particle effects and projectiles.
The Hanako and Yurie boss fight is great. I love it. Not nearly as hard as Yurie 2 somehow.
Gave the black wall and mountains a try for a finale. Also fun. I love the mountains' tileset.
All over impression; This is great. I love it. I wanna play more. Please work hard so I can play it more because it's great and I love it.
Graphics are basic, but aside from the faces during cutscenes, it's never a problem.
I hope you'll be able to replay story missions with the cutscenes disabled as the other team.
I also hope that there are more items planned that alter the characters' appearances; aside from Elsa's ribbon, it never happened again.
Finally, there better be a climactic point in the story where you get to control all six characters at once.
I've wishlisted it on Steam and I hope to see more of it soon. Thank you for letting me try it out.
The animations are a bit tricky to manage since they're store-bought, so idk if I can fix the leg issues.
I know the faces are bad, but someday hopefully the faces will be good and the zoom will be even nicer!
Glad you liked the gameplay!
The voice volumes have a separate volume slider in the settings, so you could always try tweaking that.
Restart button needs a confirmation, yeah, lots of people have suffered from it by now.
Glad you liked the cutscenes and writing! I really enjoyed working on those! Octavia is a good girl to be sure!
Not sure what happened to the health explosions, I'll look into it.
Glad you liked the idea of the infinite missions too! I may end up reworking the map a bit, so the mission difficulty indicators should hopefully be clearer in the future.
I will add the other characters to the Melkirion hub, but I haven't gotten to it yet.
Cutscene death animation bug need fixing, yeah.
Both factions have 1 story mission each in the demo, yeah.
Glad you liked the forest guardians! They're doing their best!
Yurie is strong!
Enemies spawning near the shop needs fixing, yeah.
Fiera's whiteflame has now been fixed in a new update!
Night map needs some tweaking, yeah.
Hanako and Yurie both doing their best!
Glad you liked the dungeons!
And glad you liked the game! I will do my best to keep working on it!
The animations are a bit tricky to manage since they're store-bought, so idk if I can fix the leg issues.
Probably you're having a different problem, but I thought it looked a bit like an issue I had with blending between four-directional running animations that happened because the animations didn't all start with the same foot in front - that is, the run left and backwards animations started with the left foot hitting the ground, while the run right and forward animations started with the right foot hitting the ground.
If that is what's happening, I was able to make them all start on the same foot by simply switching the first and second half of the offending animations in Unity
The voice volumes have a separate volume slider in the settings, so you could always try tweaking that.
Yeah it's a minor nitpick, it just bothered me that the voices were much louder than the sfx when the sliders were at the same height.
Anyway, I'm glad some of my feedback was useful and I hope to see Marmoreal again next DD.
What is new in this version compared to last demo day?
If I decided to play this for some hours and complete the main story missions and maybe some side missions, would you like a recording of it (at a decent quality level)?
Just new rewards and alternate cutscenes for beating the tutorial boss. I always appreciate videos of my game, but if you could have some timestamped comments for it as well it would be extra helpful since you're not using the mic for live feedback.
Comments
This is awesome, great work!
Thank you friend!!
Really fun game! I am looking forward to the full release. The cutscenes were very fun and added a lot to the game. The combat is also really solid and felt rewarding. Maybe adding the dialogue indicator would help for the text reading could help as well.
Thank you for playing and streaming the game! I had a really fun time watching! I'm glad you liked it!
I really enjoyed your game, but had a series of nitpicks, mainly about controls. Some of the actions are bound to different keys on different actions, so when the character switch happened it was pretty disorienting.
Also got severe lag on some of the cutscenes. Which was a bit of a shame - some of them are pretty funny.
Thanks for playing! Could you tell me which cutscenes you noticed the lag on?
Yeah, the one where two teams see each other on the moving elevators (right after fire mage gameplay)
I'd originally planned to play it for an hour but I ended up neglecting my responsibilities and playing it for 3 so I could wring every drop of content out of it. I took notes while I did so.
The writing reminds me of Slayers.
Just got to Elsa, and her leg animations don't look great when moving diagonally or holding shift. Arcana might've been the same, didn't notice.
The close up zoom when you enter the skills menu is nice, but the characters' faces really can't stand up to being so close to the camera.
That said, the gameplay itself feels gr8.
Voices are a lot louder than all the other SFX at the same volume level.
I clicked the restart level button while looking for the options menu. Probably needs a confirm.
Cutscenes are pretty low quality but they communicate what they intend clearly and I love them.
I fucking love the writing. The one eyed master marksman somehow manages to be the straight character.
Octavia and Fiera also have problems with their diagonal movement animations.
Just noticed the song doesn't loop cleanly. That's a damn shame.
Looks like if you use Fiera's skill that makes heart pickups explode, you can make hearts explode over and over and over
if you have full health. Not that I'm complaining, that's rad. Actually on further play I couldn't get it to happen again. Dunno what made it happen the first time. Maybe because I was alone?
These camp scenes in between missions are super soulful. Although it's a shame you don't get to see the characters interact in the Melkirian camp aside from Octavia.
I'm really feeling some good potential when I see the infinite missions.
Looking at it for a bit, i get that the missions are ranked bronze, silver, gold and red, but it'd be nice and clear if the difficulty was also mentioned in the description.
Maybe have characters revive faster/instantly if there are no enemies around?
After clutching my way through the first(?) Penelope fight with both Arcana and Elsa fainted, Arcana was standing up while fainted after the cutscene.
Okay so picking up health heals the entire party, not just the one picking it up. That's very important. Maybe I missed the explanation, but if it's not there, make sure it's there.
(found it later on a loading screen tip, but for something so important, maybe explain it when you first unlock party member switching?)
Nothing past Penelope for blue team? It is just a demo I guess.
Trying out the red team mission, it doesn't seem like Octavia's focus mode fire rate improvement works as advertised; I'm not noticing any difference whether I'm holding shift or not.
The difficulty so far has been absolutely amazingly tuned. I don't think there's been a boss where I didn't get scrape through by the skin of my teeth, but I haven't actually died yet (except for the necromancer).
The undead mikuni rangers are a pretty cool idea. Haunted forests are usually either wood critters, spirits or something, but having corporeal undead defenders I don't think I've seen before.
aaaand Yurie take 2 finally beat me. Good thing I can go straight back to the fight.
Yurie 2 might need a little tweaking. Her third stage is an absolute beast. Maybe I missed somethng that's suppsoed to make it easier, but it took me like ten tries before I managed to get through.
On the next (night) part of the stage, I aggroed some enemies through a wall in the area before the shop; that meant when the shop spawned, I was being swarmed by enemies. It doesn't seem intended.
I equipped a whiteflame on Fiera, and after I used her secondary attack, the particle effect on her right hand never went away. (tried it out on later missions and yep, same thing)
The night ambience is nice in the third part of the forest level, but holy shit does it get hard to see sometimes with all the particle effects and projectiles.
The Hanako and Yurie boss fight is great. I love it. Not nearly as hard as Yurie 2 somehow.
Gave the black wall and mountains a try for a finale. Also fun. I love the mountains' tileset.
All over impression; This is great. I love it. I wanna play more. Please work hard so I can play it more because it's great and I love it.
Graphics are basic, but aside from the faces during cutscenes, it's never a problem.
I hope you'll be able to replay story missions with the cutscenes disabled as the other team.
I also hope that there are more items planned that alter the characters' appearances; aside from Elsa's ribbon, it never happened again.
Finally, there better be a climactic point in the story where you get to control all six characters at once.
I've wishlisted it on Steam and I hope to see more of it soon. Thank you for letting me try it out.
Thanks for playing! Glad you liked it!
The animations are a bit tricky to manage since they're store-bought, so idk if I can fix the leg issues.
I know the faces are bad, but someday hopefully the faces will be good and the zoom will be even nicer!
Glad you liked the gameplay!
The voice volumes have a separate volume slider in the settings, so you could always try tweaking that.
Restart button needs a confirmation, yeah, lots of people have suffered from it by now.
Glad you liked the cutscenes and writing! I really enjoyed working on those! Octavia is a good girl to be sure!
Not sure what happened to the health explosions, I'll look into it.
Glad you liked the idea of the infinite missions too! I may end up reworking the map a bit, so the mission difficulty indicators should hopefully be clearer in the future.
I will add the other characters to the Melkirion hub, but I haven't gotten to it yet.
Cutscene death animation bug need fixing, yeah.
Both factions have 1 story mission each in the demo, yeah.
Glad you liked the forest guardians! They're doing their best!
Yurie is strong!
Enemies spawning near the shop needs fixing, yeah.
Fiera's whiteflame has now been fixed in a new update!
Night map needs some tweaking, yeah.
Hanako and Yurie both doing their best!
Glad you liked the dungeons!
And glad you liked the game! I will do my best to keep working on it!
The animations are a bit tricky to manage since they're store-bought, so idk if I can fix the leg issues.
Probably you're having a different problem, but I thought it looked a bit like an issue I had with blending between four-directional running animations that happened because the animations didn't all start with the same foot in front - that is, the run left and backwards animations started with the left foot hitting the ground, while the run right and forward animations started with the right foot hitting the ground.
If that is what's happening, I was able to make them all start on the same foot by simply switching the first and second half of the offending animations in Unity
The voice volumes have a separate volume slider in the settings, so you could always try tweaking that.
Yeah it's a minor nitpick, it just bothered me that the voices were much louder than the sfx when the sliders were at the same height.
Anyway, I'm glad some of my feedback was useful and I hope to see Marmoreal again next DD.
i dont have any audio crackling issues anymore.
Great!
What is new in this version compared to last demo day?
If I decided to play this for some hours and complete the main story missions and maybe some side missions, would you like a recording of it (at a decent quality level)?
Just new rewards and alternate cutscenes for beating the tutorial boss. I always appreciate videos of my game, but if you could have some timestamped comments for it as well it would be extra helpful since you're not using the mic for live feedback.
It's Marmo. It's Real.