Absolutely stunning visuals. Not only does it look nice, but there are a lot of little details that add to the experience. A good example that I thought was really impressive was when the light from energy bolt impacts were reflected off of tiles.
However, there are a few minor issues that I noticed:
First thing I want to note is the screen space. Sometimes it feel as if there isn't enough room on screen? Certain enemies move so quickly that I have to shoot at them offscreen, and it happens often. It also makes knockback significantly more disorienting. (Also maybe the knockback could be dialed back a little?)
As for controls. I think it might be preferable to dash in the direction (left or right) that the mouse is pointing in? Because there were a lot of moments where I unintentionally dashed into something because of how the dash currently works. Could just be down to personal preference.
Even with the minor issues above I had a lot of fun with the game. Level design was good, etc. Good job.
One final thing I wanted to mention is that I tried plugging in my controller to see if it would do anything. Controller input caused the player's model to scale to ~0.5 or something (I'm assuming your using scaling to turn the player left/right).
Really like the visuals. Only thing worth mentioning is that the character sprite clashes a bit with the tiles (dunno if the palette or the amount of details is the issue)
I'd say the spiky dogs could be improved a bit, they are really tough and not even getting them on the back makes a dent on them so I just try to avoid them. Also if you just get the distance right you can kill them without any reaction from them (I think if you are above a cliff?), I'd suggest that if hit they should initiate a chase regardless of distance.
Pressing S an shift for sliding through a crack is kinda uncomfortable.
I couldn't get the grenade belt inside the cracks (skill issue?)
Boss wrecked me but I'll give it another try later.
Disclaimer: This is an early gameplay demo, and is not representative of the quality or polish of the final game. Most of the content you see here are placeholders which will not be present in the final game. The intent of this demo is to determine how ready the game is from a mechanical standpoint, and to test out the general gameplay to see if it's good enough to begin planning and building the final game world.
Acrolyte is a 2D metroidvania game with a heavy focus on movement and combat.
i like the water fx and the paralax layers in the background
COOL GAME, nice ui. I had to go into the menu and read the equipment to learn you slide dodge to get through the gap. I thought ESC should show the menu instead of just ENTER.
Massive skill issue detected: I may not be the target difficulty for this? I wouldn't say it was hard but I did have issues with just this small demo. I would count it mostly on me, but I didn't really expect to die much for just a basic demo. I died 3 times: Once when I was starting out and just kept running into more and more enemies without really having a good grasp on how to deal with them; two times on the final boss (more on that later). Losing progress each time because I didn't get to a save point sucks. It's a design that I have to respect. The only thing I could think of is adding more but then it feels goofy. I would chalk it up to skill issue.
Movement feels good for the most part. There are some things like wall kicks that felt kind of awkward. I think the go-to these days is to have your character slide down a wall if you want to incorporate wall jumping, giving the player more forgiveness.
One thing I will say is this game will benefit greatly from sound effects. I think all my complaints can just be summed up as "this doesn't have sound yet so it felt weird." I feel that sound is pretty integral in a game like this, especially if you want to have stuff off screen.
Level design felt good but can be improved. There were some platforms that might have been at a weird angle but most of it was ok. Once you get the hang of movement the level design makes more sense. I will say overall, the game felt hard to me in the first 5/10 minutes and I would say tweaking enemy spawns and room layouts accordingly would probably help if that was the issue, but again, I may not be the target difficulty here. Another thing is that I don't know if save rooms have visual tells or not, but I ended up going to the final boss instead of the save area the first time and had to redo ~15m of gameplay from a death. If I were to see a long, narrow hall or some foreboding thing, I might have been more hesitant to turn back and explore somewhere else for a save point.
Enemies: I don't like the flying guys who rapidly zoom to you when you hit them, feels weird. Maybe they're too fast? The charge monsters felt brutal at the beginning when I was first learning it but I got better and also grenades are badass against those guys.
Bosses: Something that applies to both of them is that they have a bit too much health IMO. The speeding up mechanic is ok, but having some kind of visual to indicate the next "stage" would be nice, like sparks flying off the robot drone or the tentacle metroid thing changing color. The Frenzy mechanic also seems to kick in 1/3rds? Which seems way off scale. Maybe second phase at 50% and the last phase 80% or something, but trying to fight a boss in it's last frenzy phase should be a brief experience, but not overwhelming. A small shot of adrenaline is all you need to make something memorable and not frustrating.
The first boss was fine, but again, I was surprised at how much health this dude had. Seemed like an insane amount of time for just a basic beginner boss. A very fair boss otherwise.
Second boss: Going back to the whole sound thing is that this dude would have been a lot better with them. A sound for when it's going to spawn little guys(DPS phase) A sound for when it's going to use it's divebomb, etc. Near the end it just felt kind of like I was playing a fighting game and all I could do is mash because I could never read my opponent. There were visual tells, but the thing is: the speed-up or frenzy mechanic or w/e it's called in combination with the no-sounds means later phases the boss is flying across the screen, out of sight, and then getting ready to do another thing that I can't hear or react to. I was basically thinking of Eye of Cthulu from Terraria when fighting this thing and I realized how much I rely on sound cues for that boss. Mechanics aside: Very fun fight and nice design.
Overall very promising. It feels like a complete demo that i'd play on a GBA display in a K-mart back in 2001. I really like the art direction and aesthetic and I hope to see more from you soon.
The Double Jump feels a little awkward to use for platforming since it doesn't give you any height if you're holding left or right at the same time and you usually need to move horizontally as well when you need the double jump. Maybe I just needed more time to get used to it, but it really annoyed me.
Wall jump is a little esoteric. I only figured out how to do it because I did it by accident. Is it explained somewhere that I missed? I think I'd have gotten stuck near the end without it.
Found a bug. If you enter the inventory screen in the room with the combat rifle, you can still highlight it in the inventory screen with the cursor. I didn't think to check if it also happened when I dropped it.
Would've been nice to get a pop-up telling me how to switch weapons after I picked up the combat rifle or pulse rifle.
Another bug: After I died embarrassingly after picking up the rifle, I got kicked back to my save before the robot boss. When I got the grenades again, I checked to see if they'd damage me while exploding the floor, and it seems like the map didn't know where I was until I exited the room.
Gotta say, not having enemies drop any health makes the game feel VERY hard core, and it feels kind of incongruous with the way they drop plenty of grenades and ammo.
I keep wanting to cook the grenades by holding the button, but that's not a mechanic. :(
I noticed the smooth pillars reflecting the main character when I got close to them. Jeez, now you're just being extra lol, stop making the rest of us look bad.
I got up on the spot after dying to the big green boss thingy the first time? It didn't happen again so I don't imagine it's intended. To go into more detail, I died, it gave me the option to return, but instead of sending me back to the save point I just did the regular get-up-at-the-altar animation right there in the boss room. My health was still 0.
Would've been very cinematic if the boss hadn't immediately murdered me again anyway.
The boss' moves seem to have very varying openings for actually hitting it back. Like the shove it does seems completely unpunishable, while it's just eating shot after shot when it spawns the little purple dudes. Shove is also really hard to dodge if it starts up outside of the screen.
After five or so deaths in a row to the boss, the very slow get up animation at the save point when loading your save gets a little grating. Please hurry him up if I spam jump or something.
My one graphical complaint is the lack of foot IK. You've probably already got it planned, but with the slopes and curves of the terrain, it stands out as pretty bad when you're standing on nothing at the edge of a ledge or on a slope.
I played in windowed mode since that's what it did by default and I couldn't find a menu, and my constant frantic clicking at enemies with the pistol got me to leave the window a lot by accident. I can't think of a way to avoid this myself, but I thought it was worth mentioning.
Final verdict; jesus christ this is good. The mix of 2D and 3D is incredibly cohesive, and you use it to do some really cool stuff. And while the gameplay itself is not as impressive, it's still very solid. Hot damn am I glad I played this.
thank you very much for the feedback. The reflections are actually done through normal maps on the tilesets, I didn’t have time to complete them but the tilesets react to light and reflect players and enemies, they have a seperate mask to determine how reflective each tile is
As for saving/loading, I’ve noticed a few small bugs with them, I suspect it’s a race condition but I’ll have to investigate further
My biggest takeaway from the demo besides enemy/boss balance and needing to add health pickups is just that things are a little too cryptic for most players without a more direct explanation. It’s 100% a fault on my end since I took a lot of things for granted that only I’d know about by default as the dev.
I wouldn't say you need health pickups. The game is perfectly playable without them, and it does give the gameplay a unique flavor for a metroidvania. I didn't particularly dislike it.
It just seems weird to only take that survival horror-style approach for health pickups, while leaving in all the other usual drops from enemies you'd see in a Metroid game. An alternative where you only restock bombs, bullets etc at save points like it's Dark Souls could be pretty interesting.
my original intention was that pacing out save rooms and not letting the player heal inbetween could build tension, I was a big fan of how this balance played out in castlevania circle of the moon, in that game between save rooms is scary as fuck, but I think it kind of plays against the fast movement and almost punishes you for exploration in this case
Really excellent start. I won't reiterate all the things that are specifically excellent, because it's most of it. I've been admiring the clips of this you posted in the thread so I'm glad to finally get my hands on it. My feedback, is that I personally don't think the camera, controls and movement are quite there yet. Close, but there's a certain last 5% which I think this still needs to achieve. The three are tightly related, so its difficult to change one without changing the others.
When building the camera, there are two dangers. The first is that you're the developer, you've played with this camera over and over and over and over. It's very easy to become accustomed to it. The second is that there isn't one single camera setup that is perfect for everyone. However we can say, that for those whose ideal camera is slower, a faster camera is a problem. And for those whose ideal camera is faster, a slower camera is not a problem. For this reason, a slower camera is preferable. I would classify your camera as a too-fast camera, by about 20% or so.
To get the camera under better control, I think the first thing to do is stop moving it out front of the player. This is the sort of thing that seems smart on paper, but in practice it just adds so much unnecessary movement to the camera. The ideal camera is never even noticed by the players. And this sort of thing really announced itself. In my opinion, toss it. A far better thing to do would be to calculate a camera offset based on the aim offset. Just take the aim vector, and run it through an easing function so that the farther the aim reticule in any direction, the more the camera moves that way. Being a shooting game, I think this will feel a lot better.
The second thing I think the camera needs, it proper lerping. Aside from sticking out front of the player, it feels perfectly glued to the player in an uncomfortable way. Lerping softens the edges of all those movements, making everything easier to visually track. It can be a pretty tight lerp, just add it in and then play with the factor. It's just cameraPos += (cameraPos - targetPos) * lerpFactor * dt. Higher lerp factor for tighter camera movements. Additionally, if you add the aim offset like I suggested above, you can overlay a second lerp, which is the camera lerping to the aim offset position. This one can be a lot softer, so that little adjustments to the aim are not immediately felt by the camera.
Of course, the camera is related to the character movement speed, which I think is also about 20% too fast. The movement speed depends a lot on the character sprite size vs screen size. Here you have a pretty big player, and your screen is fairly small. Zooming out 20% would have a similar effect. Jumping also feels very stiff, and without any camera lerp, is a bit jarring and disorienting. I think setting Y velocity to zero on releasing jump is too harsh, halving Y velocity feels a lot better and smoother, in my experience. That combined with a proper camera lerp should be good, but you can give the camera a different Y lerp factor than X lerp factor if needed.
The ledges and platforming aspect could also be improved. Personally, I think it's a huge mistake to have really technical platforming. That is such a niche thing, that if a game isn't explicitly and obviously leaning into that as its core mechanic, it should be minimized as much as possible. The Dead Cells creator says it a lot better than I ever could, but the essential idea is that as far as movement goes, whatever the players intention was should be executed. That means every time a player tries to jump a gap, get up onto a platform, etc... and they fail, you have made a mistake as the designer.
Anyway, great work. In my humble opinion it has really huge potential. Here's the Dead Cells creator with a great talk I mentioned:
Some very useful feedback here, I’ll take this all into consideration. Mouse effecting the camera is something I planned to have ready for the demo, but my camera system is a little archaic and it ended up causing a lot of issues on the programming side so I held off
-Environment looks beautiful, I could eat it. Only weirdness is that when jumping some white lines in the background columns show up.
-Controller seems partially supported? Causes funny visuals like so:
-I imagine that's the case since you're scaling the image by 1.0 inputs and you didn't know the analog stick was auto-bound. Anyways, I was disappointed that controller support wasn't there.
-Sudden infinite falling glitch, was messing with controls so I don't know why:
(right side of pool at spawn)
-I like how enemies can get dislodged from surfaces and not die, makes them a bit more dynamic.
-I killed the mini boss but after picking up the red orb I seemed to have gained nothing?(maybe it was HP but I didn't notice) The fight was alright, though it seemed to take a while for how simple it was.
-Don't care for how you have to spam click to get high DPS. It's also more of a problem(compared to other 'vanias) because shots can intercept projectiles, so it acts as your shield to a degree against ranged enemies. This makes a turbo button even more powerful, and me more annoyed with having to tap repetitively.
-Grenades instead of missiles is a nice change of pace. Only thing is that it felt a bit weird when trying to blow something up next to a slope or if it had no floor. Felt like I lucked into, rather than figured out, how to do it.
-Exploring and so far it's pretty fun, I like the movement options, especially doing the high jump into wings. Dashing feels a bit weird at times, though I think it's just me. Wall jump is mostly fine, though it falls into the category of "sometimes I just can't do it", which is a me problem in some metroidvanias. New weapons are pretty neat, though for the demo it seems a bit much considering most things die in a second or two regardless if you can aim. The battle rifle is an interesting idea, a little treat that adds some spice to the otherwise energy weapons.
-Woops I accidently went into the flying boss before saving, and I lost like half of the gameplay time. I could get back but I don't feel like it. Regardless, the boss seemed pretty fun for how far I got.
-Overall I'd say it's mechanically solid. Spread over a longer period of time I can see the upgrades having a nice progression path. The enemies could be better though, they're all trivial except the bosses.
Thanks for playing. Very thorough, I appreciate it
Controllers are unfortunately not supported currently, some mechanical issues will have to be worked out first but it is planned
That infinite falling glitch has been bugging the shit out of me too, it happens very rarely and Ive yet to replicate it in editor, but if I manage to I should be able to sort it out
Visually one of the best agdg demos I've played, gameplay felt pretty smooth as well. I think the player character looks really good, I love the attention to detail where he'll point his gun towards the camera when the cursor is over his body. I also loved how the enemies burst into giblets. The only concern is that it might be a little too similar to Metroid given that even the enemy and UI designs are pretty close matches to their metroid counterparts. It could detract from the feeling of exploring this alien world because of how familiar things look & feel right off the bat, but that might just be a nitpick.
Either way great demo! I look forward to seeing more from this game.
It's a mistake on my part that i didnt make it more clear, but you start out the demo with the kickslide and dash abilities. You can see how to use them in the equipment screen
Didn't cross my mind since this demo wasn't originally intended for public release, my private testers already knew how to use those abilities
Comments
Game took me about 29 minutes to complete.
Absolutely stunning visuals. Not only does it look nice, but there are a lot of little details that add to the experience. A good example that I thought was really impressive was when the light from energy bolt impacts were reflected off of tiles.
However, there are a few minor issues that I noticed:
First thing I want to note is the screen space. Sometimes it feel as if there isn't enough room on screen? Certain enemies move so quickly that I have to shoot at them offscreen, and it happens often. It also makes knockback significantly more disorienting. (Also maybe the knockback could be dialed back a little?)
As for controls. I think it might be preferable to dash in the direction (left or right) that the mouse is pointing in? Because there were a lot of moments where I unintentionally dashed into something because of how the dash currently works. Could just be down to personal preference.
Even with the minor issues above I had a lot of fun with the game. Level design was good, etc. Good job.
One final thing I wanted to mention is that I tried plugging in my controller to see if it would do anything. Controller input caused the player's model to scale to ~0.5 or something (I'm assuming your using scaling to turn the player left/right).
Really like the visuals. Only thing worth mentioning is that the character sprite clashes a bit with the tiles (dunno if the palette or the amount of details is the issue)
I'd say the spiky dogs could be improved a bit, they are really tough and not even getting them on the back makes a dent on them so I just try to avoid them. Also if you just get the distance right you can kill them without any reaction from them (I think if you are above a cliff?), I'd suggest that if hit they should initiate a chase regardless of distance.
Pressing S an shift for sliding through a crack is kinda uncomfortable.
I couldn't get the grenade belt inside the cracks (skill issue?)
Boss wrecked me but I'll give it another try later.
description
Disclaimer: This is an early gameplay demo, and is not representative of the quality or polish of the final game. Most of the content you see here are placeholders which will not be present in the final game. The intent of this demo is to determine how ready the game is from a mechanical standpoint, and to test out the general gameplay to see if it's good enough to begin planning and building the final game world.
Acrolyte is a 2D metroidvania game with a heavy focus on movement and combat.
CREDITS:
CONTROLS:
Notes: In this demo, you begin with the kickslide and the dash abilities. Check the equipment screen to see how to execute these abilities
i like the water fx and the paralax layers in the background
COOL GAME, nice ui. I had to go into the menu and read the equipment to learn you slide dodge to get through the gap. I thought ESC should show the menu instead of just ENTER.
An exceptionally promising metroidvania.
Total play time around 1hr10m, no bugs to report.
Massive skill issue detected: I may not be the target difficulty for this? I wouldn't say it was hard but I did have issues with just this small demo. I would count it mostly on me, but I didn't really expect to die much for just a basic demo. I died 3 times: Once when I was starting out and just kept running into more and more enemies without really having a good grasp on how to deal with them; two times on the final boss (more on that later). Losing progress each time because I didn't get to a save point sucks. It's a design that I have to respect. The only thing I could think of is adding more but then it feels goofy. I would chalk it up to skill issue.
Movement feels good for the most part. There are some things like wall kicks that felt kind of awkward. I think the go-to these days is to have your character slide down a wall if you want to incorporate wall jumping, giving the player more forgiveness.
One thing I will say is this game will benefit greatly from sound effects. I think all my complaints can just be summed up as "this doesn't have sound yet so it felt weird." I feel that sound is pretty integral in a game like this, especially if you want to have stuff off screen.
Level design felt good but can be improved. There were some platforms that might have been at a weird angle but most of it was ok. Once you get the hang of movement the level design makes more sense. I will say overall, the game felt hard to me in the first 5/10 minutes and I would say tweaking enemy spawns and room layouts accordingly would probably help if that was the issue, but again, I may not be the target difficulty here. Another thing is that I don't know if save rooms have visual tells or not, but I ended up going to the final boss instead of the save area the first time and had to redo ~15m of gameplay from a death. If I were to see a long, narrow hall or some foreboding thing, I might have been more hesitant to turn back and explore somewhere else for a save point.
Enemies: I don't like the flying guys who rapidly zoom to you when you hit them, feels weird. Maybe they're too fast? The charge monsters felt brutal at the beginning when I was first learning it but I got better and also grenades are badass against those guys.
Bosses: Something that applies to both of them is that they have a bit too much health IMO. The speeding up mechanic is ok, but having some kind of visual to indicate the next "stage" would be nice, like sparks flying off the robot drone or the tentacle metroid thing changing color. The Frenzy mechanic also seems to kick in 1/3rds? Which seems way off scale. Maybe second phase at 50% and the last phase 80% or something, but trying to fight a boss in it's last frenzy phase should be a brief experience, but not overwhelming. A small shot of adrenaline is all you need to make something memorable and not frustrating.
The first boss was fine, but again, I was surprised at how much health this dude had. Seemed like an insane amount of time for just a basic beginner boss. A very fair boss otherwise.
Second boss: Going back to the whole sound thing is that this dude would have been a lot better with them. A sound for when it's going to spawn little guys(DPS phase) A sound for when it's going to use it's divebomb, etc. Near the end it just felt kind of like I was playing a fighting game and all I could do is mash because I could never read my opponent. There were visual tells, but the thing is: the speed-up or frenzy mechanic or w/e it's called in combination with the no-sounds means later phases the boss is flying across the screen, out of sight, and then getting ready to do another thing that I can't hear or react to. I was basically thinking of Eye of Cthulu from Terraria when fighting this thing and I realized how much I rely on sound cues for that boss. Mechanics aside: Very fun fight and nice design.
Overall very promising. It feels like a complete demo that i'd play on a GBA display in a K-mart back in 2001. I really like the art direction and aesthetic and I hope to see more from you soon.
I enjoyed this game a lot, I uploaded a video of it here: https://mega.nz/file/BTsyRAKS#lq-wqi2IUDxpx4traORBiOdjLn3gFCmKBxCbUPNR8_c . Sorry about the failed stream earlier, I need to fix those internet connection issues, I encountered them last demo day as well. The VODs should be up for 7 or 14 days depending on Twitch: https://www.twitch.tv/demo_longrunner_99 .
Probably took twice that long counting my deaths.
Anyway, took some notes while playing:
Game looks fantastic. Holy heck.
The Double Jump feels a little awkward to use for platforming since it doesn't give you any height if you're holding left or right at the same time and you usually need to move horizontally as well when you need the double jump. Maybe I just needed more time to get used to it, but it really annoyed me.
Wall jump is a little esoteric. I only figured out how to do it because I did it by accident. Is it explained somewhere that I missed? I think I'd have gotten stuck near the end without it.
Found a bug. If you enter the inventory screen in the room with the combat rifle, you can still highlight it in the inventory screen with the cursor. I didn't think to check if it also happened when I dropped it.
Would've been nice to get a pop-up telling me how to switch weapons after I picked up the combat rifle or pulse rifle.
Another bug: After I died embarrassingly after picking up the rifle, I got kicked back to my save before the robot boss. When I got the grenades again, I checked to see if they'd damage me while exploding the floor, and it seems like the map didn't know where I was until I exited the room.
Gotta say, not having enemies drop any health makes the game feel VERY hard core, and it feels kind of incongruous with the way they drop plenty of grenades and ammo.
I keep wanting to cook the grenades by holding the button, but that's not a mechanic. :(
I noticed the smooth pillars reflecting the main character when I got close to them. Jeez, now you're just being extra lol, stop making the rest of us look bad.
I got up on the spot after dying to the big green boss thingy the first time? It didn't happen again so I don't imagine it's intended. To go into more detail, I died, it gave me the option to return, but instead of sending me back to the save point I just did the regular get-up-at-the-altar animation right there in the boss room. My health was still 0.
Would've been very cinematic if the boss hadn't immediately murdered me again anyway.
The boss' moves seem to have very varying openings for actually hitting it back. Like the shove it does seems completely unpunishable, while it's just eating shot after shot when it spawns the little purple dudes. Shove is also really hard to dodge if it starts up outside of the screen.
After five or so deaths in a row to the boss, the very slow get up animation at the save point when loading your save gets a little grating. Please hurry him up if I spam jump or something.
My one graphical complaint is the lack of foot IK. You've probably already got it planned, but with the slopes and curves of the terrain, it stands out as pretty bad when you're standing on nothing at the edge of a ledge or on a slope.I played in windowed mode since that's what it did by default and I couldn't find a menu, and my constant frantic clicking at enemies with the pistol got me to leave the window a lot by accident. I can't think of a way to avoid this myself, but I thought it was worth mentioning.
Final verdict; jesus christ this is good. The mix of 2D and 3D is incredibly cohesive, and you use it to do some really cool stuff. And while the gameplay itself is not as impressive, it's still very solid. Hot damn am I glad I played this.
thank you very much for the feedback. The reflections are actually done through normal maps on the tilesets, I didn’t have time to complete them but the tilesets react to light and reflect players and enemies, they have a seperate mask to determine how reflective each tile is
As for saving/loading, I’ve noticed a few small bugs with them, I suspect it’s a race condition but I’ll have to investigate further
My biggest takeaway from the demo besides enemy/boss balance and needing to add health pickups is just that things are a little too cryptic for most players without a more direct explanation. It’s 100% a fault on my end since I took a lot of things for granted that only I’d know about by default as the dev.
Thanks for playing, glad you enjoyed
I wouldn't say you need health pickups. The game is perfectly playable without them, and it does give the gameplay a unique flavor for a metroidvania. I didn't particularly dislike it.
It just seems weird to only take that survival horror-style approach for health pickups, while leaving in all the other usual drops from enemies you'd see in a Metroid game. An alternative where you only restock bombs, bullets etc at save points like it's Dark Souls could be pretty interesting.
my original intention was that pacing out save rooms and not letting the player heal inbetween could build tension, I was a big fan of how this balance played out in castlevania circle of the moon, in that game between save rooms is scary as fuck, but I think it kind of plays against the fast movement and almost punishes you for exploration in this case
Really excellent start. I won't reiterate all the things that are specifically excellent, because it's most of it. I've been admiring the clips of this you posted in the thread so I'm glad to finally get my hands on it. My feedback, is that I personally don't think the camera, controls and movement are quite there yet. Close, but there's a certain last 5% which I think this still needs to achieve. The three are tightly related, so its difficult to change one without changing the others.
When building the camera, there are two dangers. The first is that you're the developer, you've played with this camera over and over and over and over. It's very easy to become accustomed to it. The second is that there isn't one single camera setup that is perfect for everyone. However we can say, that for those whose ideal camera is slower, a faster camera is a problem. And for those whose ideal camera is faster, a slower camera is not a problem. For this reason, a slower camera is preferable. I would classify your camera as a too-fast camera, by about 20% or so.
To get the camera under better control, I think the first thing to do is stop moving it out front of the player. This is the sort of thing that seems smart on paper, but in practice it just adds so much unnecessary movement to the camera. The ideal camera is never even noticed by the players. And this sort of thing really announced itself. In my opinion, toss it. A far better thing to do would be to calculate a camera offset based on the aim offset. Just take the aim vector, and run it through an easing function so that the farther the aim reticule in any direction, the more the camera moves that way. Being a shooting game, I think this will feel a lot better.
The second thing I think the camera needs, it proper lerping. Aside from sticking out front of the player, it feels perfectly glued to the player in an uncomfortable way. Lerping softens the edges of all those movements, making everything easier to visually track. It can be a pretty tight lerp, just add it in and then play with the factor. It's just cameraPos += (cameraPos - targetPos) * lerpFactor * dt. Higher lerp factor for tighter camera movements. Additionally, if you add the aim offset like I suggested above, you can overlay a second lerp, which is the camera lerping to the aim offset position. This one can be a lot softer, so that little adjustments to the aim are not immediately felt by the camera.
Of course, the camera is related to the character movement speed, which I think is also about 20% too fast. The movement speed depends a lot on the character sprite size vs screen size. Here you have a pretty big player, and your screen is fairly small. Zooming out 20% would have a similar effect. Jumping also feels very stiff, and without any camera lerp, is a bit jarring and disorienting. I think setting Y velocity to zero on releasing jump is too harsh, halving Y velocity feels a lot better and smoother, in my experience. That combined with a proper camera lerp should be good, but you can give the camera a different Y lerp factor than X lerp factor if needed.
The ledges and platforming aspect could also be improved. Personally, I think it's a huge mistake to have really technical platforming. That is such a niche thing, that if a game isn't explicitly and obviously leaning into that as its core mechanic, it should be minimized as much as possible. The Dead Cells creator says it a lot better than I ever could, but the essential idea is that as far as movement goes, whatever the players intention was should be executed. That means every time a player tries to jump a gap, get up onto a platform, etc... and they fail, you have made a mistake as the designer.
Anyway, great work. In my humble opinion it has really huge potential. Here's the Dead Cells creator with a great talk I mentioned:
very thorough, thanks for playing
Some very useful feedback here, I’ll take this all into consideration. Mouse effecting the camera is something I planned to have ready for the demo, but my camera system is a little archaic and it ended up causing a lot of issues on the programming side so I held off
Sorry I mispronounced the name of the game at the start lol.
-Environment looks beautiful, I could eat it. Only weirdness is that when jumping some white lines in the background columns show up.
-Controller seems partially supported? Causes funny visuals like so:
-I imagine that's the case since you're scaling the image by 1.0 inputs and you didn't know the analog stick was auto-bound. Anyways, I was disappointed that controller support wasn't there.
-Sudden infinite falling glitch, was messing with controls so I don't know why:
(right side of pool at spawn)
-I like how enemies can get dislodged from surfaces and not die, makes them a bit more dynamic.
-I killed the mini boss but after picking up the red orb I seemed to have gained nothing?(maybe it was HP but I didn't notice) The fight was alright, though it seemed to take a while for how simple it was.
-Don't care for how you have to spam click to get high DPS. It's also more of a problem(compared to other 'vanias) because shots can intercept projectiles, so it acts as your shield to a degree against ranged enemies. This makes a turbo button even more powerful, and me more annoyed with having to tap repetitively.
-Grenades instead of missiles is a nice change of pace. Only thing is that it felt a bit weird when trying to blow something up next to a slope or if it had no floor. Felt like I lucked into, rather than figured out, how to do it.
-Exploring and so far it's pretty fun, I like the movement options, especially doing the high jump into wings. Dashing feels a bit weird at times, though I think it's just me. Wall jump is mostly fine, though it falls into the category of "sometimes I just can't do it", which is a me problem in some metroidvanias. New weapons are pretty neat, though for the demo it seems a bit much considering most things die in a second or two regardless if you can aim. The battle rifle is an interesting idea, a little treat that adds some spice to the otherwise energy weapons.
-Woops I accidently went into the flying boss before saving, and I lost like half of the gameplay time. I could get back but I don't feel like it. Regardless, the boss seemed pretty fun for how far I got.
-Overall I'd say it's mechanically solid. Spread over a longer period of time I can see the upgrades having a nice progression path. The enemies could be better though, they're all trivial except the bosses.
Thanks for playing. Very thorough, I appreciate it
Controllers are unfortunately not supported currently, some mechanical issues will have to be worked out first but it is planned
That infinite falling glitch has been bugging the shit out of me too, it happens very rarely and Ive yet to replicate it in editor, but if I manage to I should be able to sort it out
Visually one of the best agdg demos I've played, gameplay felt pretty smooth as well. I think the player character looks really good, I love the attention to detail where he'll point his gun towards the camera when the cursor is over his body. I also loved how the enemies burst into giblets. The only concern is that it might be a little too similar to Metroid given that even the enemy and UI designs are pretty close matches to their metroid counterparts. It could detract from the feeling of exploring this alien world because of how familiar things look & feel right off the bat, but that might just be a nitpick.
Either way great demo! I look forward to seeing more from this game.
Looks really nice for an early demo , but I couldn't figure out where to get the double jump or the upgrade used to go through the tiny passage.
It's a mistake on my part that i didnt make it more clear, but you start out the demo with the kickslide and dash abilities. You can see how to use them in the equipment screen
Didn't cross my mind since this demo wasn't originally intended for public release, my private testers already knew how to use those abilities
in an age of metroidvanias, it's actually very pleasant to see a proper, high quality metroid-like.
i loved everything about it
Very good demo, I like the agility the character have, it feels like playing Vanquish but in a metroidvania, and that is very fun.
The movement system is very deep and rich, lots of techs to learn. Can't wait to see it play out in the future