You've nailed pretty much everything with this demo, including the controller support - really big kudos for that!
The main mission is short and sweet, didn't have any trouble. The VR missions are a FANTASTIC addition, though the third room camera change is a bit rough.
I'm not sure about the tank controls since I ditched them in favour of a more comfortable stick movement. It worked great. Combat is slow, but pretty engaging, found myself relying on the dodge a lot.
Graphics are probably my favourite part of the game, they don't feel "inspired", they feel like "they are" the PS1 graphics.
I don't have enough nice things to say bout this game. But I played with a controller, so maybe its different when you're playing on a keyboard.
Options should be available in the main menu before starting a game. There should be control redundancy (e.g., menu confirm should also be mapped onto space/enter). Why does the game only render in a small square leaving 1/3 of the screen blank? Walls of text are an awful form of tutorial and should be replaced with something else. The writing is not very good, but probably good enough for this style of game. Action combat using classic RE controls feels awful, so I'm really not sure why you're leaning so heavily into that by adding a dodge move. The music is good. There needs to be a more obvious way to know what's interactable and what isn't, since 90% of the environment is superficial. For the life of me I couldn't figure out how to cast spells, so I quit at that part. The choice to start combat off with two minibosses is quite odd.
The presentation is good, but these kind of retro RE clones are plentiful. You'll be competing with games like Signalis, so you'll need to improve on it a lot to succeed in the market. I'm not sure what the selling point is supposed to be, since it appears to be a fairly generic classic Resident Evil clone.
I played it on Linux with Proton 7, works pretty well. Only issue is that the blank viewport appears over the title screen so you can’t see the game title itself. I didn’t notice any issues in-game.
The mechanics were simple enough but I was thrown off by the control scheme of having X as shoot and Square as sprint. I remember MGS having Square as the shooting button and that’s what I was instinctively trying to do so I would prefer to swap them.
The portraits and demon sprites need another pass to tie them in better but otherwise you’ve nailed the art style, I love it.
This is really good, very interested to see where you can go with this.
Thank you for playing!
Unfortunately I haven’t heard of anyone else having the white screen issue, so I must assume it’s caused by Proton. I’ll try to build for other OSs at some point. Can you give me a screenshot?
I see, I was wondering since you said the game looked fine, I assumed it might happen when going back to title… so it’s disappearing once you enter the game then.
I really enjoyed it and think it looks wonderful. It was quite hard, but I assume you haven't really balanced much yet, and more abilities will make fights fairer. The melee and ranged enemy together caught me up, I think the room was too small so I couldn't really kite them, but I understand its just a demo room. I like the graphics, although I think you may have gone overboard with the pixel filter, it looks like my game lol! The ps1 was pixelated, but it wasn't THAT pxielated. Character textures were usually 256 x 256 giving a lot of detail, especially for faces, while objects were 128x128 . but at the end of the day, style is subjective and it works well! By the way, was that the ghost in the shell font at the start? I like it!
Thanks for playing!
I will consider making the last tutorial room a bit easier, I like the combo those enemies create but perhaps it’s a bit too fast as an introduction to multiple enemy fights.
Ghost in the Shell font… I’m not sure, it’s called Onyx, just like the resolution and layout they’re things I’m carrying over from the game this is spinning off of, Digital Exorcist.
The Dialogue Sprites, especially the Digimon look out of Place, the Gamescreen also doesn't Scale to the actual Screen, but instead has massive black Borders all around it.
The Option to move Regularly and via Tank Controls on the same Controller without going through a menu is nice tho.
The Backgrounds could need more definition on Borders, so its clearer when something is just obscuring where you can walk, and when you can actually walk behind it.
Why can't Anon climb out the Window if its open, but I can enter through the Door he said is barricaded? That makes little Sense. (Apparently, she only barricaded the Bedroom, which is later open without any Barricades being seen anywhere. I read it as the House is barricaded. Probably my Bad, but regardles, I'd prefer it if the Door to the Room would be broken down or show Barricades being ripped away after her horrid Acting).
I was dissappointed when the Demo ended, I was really hoping for a lot more Content, ready to sink Days into this, so that's good.
Combat reminds me of Parasite Eve, on the one Hand I really like the Concept of it, on the other, it's a bit too hard I think, with multiple Enemies dodging becomes immensely hard, and they bullet Sponge too much for that. Different Weapons and more Spells later on would be nice, I'd also prefer if Combat just auto-aimed always, with left/right D-Pad switching Target, and Joystick exclusively for aiming Dodge. Often Times I found myself turning away from everything being forced to slowly turn back to aim, without proper indication on where I'm aiming, wasting a lot of Time, letting Enemies recharge or come closer when I just wanted to dodge out of the Way. On that Note, Dodging could be a tiny bit faster and longer ranged I think, to make it just that bit easier to dodge Projectiles that this needs I think.
I'd say Levels need more Doodads, but there's no real Levels there, and you obviously want rather big empty Areas for the Combat. If you'd just leave empty Areas where Combat is happening, it'd be too obvious and the Player wouldn't be surprised by Demons appearing, so probably put them on the Walls or alongside the Walls.
If you increase the Screensize to actually cover the whole Screen, or close to it, with the Dialogue being inside the Play Area, not outside, and add a lot more Content, this could turn out great.
Menus are functional, but could use a bit more Flair I think. There's also most of them missing I guess, no Inventory, no Status Screen, no Talent/Levelup whatever else you have planned, just the basic main Menu.
Portrait Art needs a bit of a rework. It's fine if you're going with stylized Anime Portraits, but not as clean ones as you have currently. Different Emotions could also be good, but are not needed I think.
An Ammocount might be good, you're some form of Cyber Cop or something, you should know how much Ammo you have left in your Gun, so you can recharge when appropriate.
Overall very enjoyable, even tho it's just too short right now, pretty immersive, excited to see where this is going the next DDs.
Thanks for playing!
I’ll try to answer everything:
Demonic Anomalities Termination Agency, in the future an intro establishing the setting will play when you launch the game.
The dialogue sprites are WIP, just concept art.
The game scales to match the window pixel-perfectly (base res * int), but you can toggle pixel perfect mode off in the video settings (can only be accessed through ingame pause right now).
I’m not sure I understand the backgrounds feedback, which rooms do you feel suffered from this?
Bad acting. It’s explained in the end cutscene.
This started out as a short jam project, there’s a longer mission which the full game will have, but future demos will have more challenges and short missions. I don’t really plan on having a lengthy story for now, maybe in a future game.
Yeah, it started as resident evil and ended up being quite parasite eve 2 haha. If you’re talking about the challenge, this one is quite gimmicky and hard on purpose, future ones will have a smoother ramping up of difficulty. In the “main game” rooms tend to be far wider and feature cover. Regarding aiming: If you hold RB you will autoaim, RT is manual aim. While autoaiming, you can flick left/right on the left joystick to switch targets. From what you’re saying it sounds like you were only manual aiming all along.
Currently there’s 0 environment interactions. No time! Will be there in the future.
Maybe. It is designed this way atm to be more in line with Digital Exorcist. It would need quite some work to make sure everything works right, so at least not for now.
We’re going more for action, so there’s no inventory management or backtracking like that. HP is simply shown all the time. In the “main game” you do pick up items and navigate some more, but they simply display on the left side of the game screen.
Answered this earlier. Adding emotions would be very late production polish so not really a consideration right now.
You get 7 bullets and I like the challenge of keeping count, personally.
Thanks for all the feedback!
I noticed it mostly in the starting Screen, when I didn't realize the difference between the Wall blocking the Window from the Street and was thinking for a while I couldn't talk to the NPC.
A Shame that you're not adding a lengthy story into this.
I probably was exclusively manually aiming, I'll try auto aim later maybe.
As for the Screen, I understand wanting pixel perfect scaling, but with the Amount of Blackspace left, you could easily have scaled it up more. I guess thanks to the Dialogue being technically part of the Winow it just looks that Way without actually being true since you have a giant black Rectangle at the Bottom where the Dialogue would normally be. I'd still suggest just moving the Dialogue Window on the actual Playing Screen, instead of always as a black Element on the Bottom, and setting the Resolution of the Playing Screen to 16:9, that Way it should most of the Time cover the Screen completely or almost completely. Sure, it may not fit the Limitations of old Screens as well, but while it's fine to take inspiration from older Games and/or Tech, it should be clear that you're not developing for the old Playstation or CRT Monitors or anything, but for modern PCs, so in some Parts you need to account for that. ( Unless you're actually releasing this for Playstation, in which case ignore this obviously).
Comments
You've nailed pretty much everything with this demo, including the controller support - really big kudos for that!
The main mission is short and sweet, didn't have any trouble. The VR missions are a FANTASTIC addition, though the third room camera change is a bit rough.
I'm not sure about the tank controls since I ditched them in favour of a more comfortable stick movement. It worked great. Combat is slow, but pretty engaging, found myself relying on the dodge a lot.
Graphics are probably my favourite part of the game, they don't feel "inspired", they feel like "they are" the PS1 graphics.
I don't have enough nice things to say bout this game. But I played with a controller, so maybe its different when you're playing on a keyboard.
Options should be available in the main menu before starting a game. There should be control redundancy (e.g., menu confirm should also be mapped onto space/enter). Why does the game only render in a small square leaving 1/3 of the screen blank? Walls of text are an awful form of tutorial and should be replaced with something else. The writing is not very good, but probably good enough for this style of game. Action combat using classic RE controls feels awful, so I'm really not sure why you're leaning so heavily into that by adding a dodge move. The music is good. There needs to be a more obvious way to know what's interactable and what isn't, since 90% of the environment is superficial. For the life of me I couldn't figure out how to cast spells, so I quit at that part. The choice to start combat off with two minibosses is quite odd.
The presentation is good, but these kind of retro RE clones are plentiful. You'll be competing with games like Signalis, so you'll need to improve on it a lot to succeed in the market. I'm not sure what the selling point is supposed to be, since it appears to be a fairly generic classic Resident Evil clone.
Thanks for playing! The tutorial explains how the spells system works. Firing a spell uses the same input as firing your gun.
I played it on Linux with Proton 7, works pretty well. Only issue is that the blank viewport appears over the title screen so you can’t see the game title itself. I didn’t notice any issues in-game.
The mechanics were simple enough but I was thrown off by the control scheme of having X as shoot and Square as sprint. I remember MGS having Square as the shooting button and that’s what I was instinctively trying to do so I would prefer to swap them.
The portraits and demon sprites need another pass to tie them in better but otherwise you’ve nailed the art style, I love it.
This is really good, very interested to see where you can go with this.
Thank you for playing! Unfortunately I haven’t heard of anyone else having the white screen issue, so I must assume it’s caused by Proton. I’ll try to build for other OSs at some point. Can you give me a screenshot?
It flashed between black and white
Hey! Any context on what you did before this happened would help, thank you! We’ll push a build with some fixes in a bit.
Nothing? This is when the game launches
I see, I was wondering since you said the game looked fine, I assumed it might happen when going back to title… so it’s disappearing once you enter the game then.
Yeah, any time I’m in the title menu, whether from launch or after playing. In-game everything looks fine.
I really enjoyed it and think it looks wonderful. It was quite hard, but I assume you haven't really balanced much yet, and more abilities will make fights fairer. The melee and ranged enemy together caught me up, I think the room was too small so I couldn't really kite them, but I understand its just a demo room. I like the graphics, although I think you may have gone overboard with the pixel filter, it looks like my game lol! The ps1 was pixelated, but it wasn't THAT pxielated. Character textures were usually 256 x 256 giving a lot of detail, especially for faces, while objects were 128x128 . but at the end of the day, style is subjective and it works well! By the way, was that the ghost in the shell font at the start? I like it!
Thanks for playing! I will consider making the last tutorial room a bit easier, I like the combo those enemies create but perhaps it’s a bit too fast as an introduction to multiple enemy fights. Ghost in the Shell font… I’m not sure, it’s called Onyx, just like the resolution and layout they’re things I’m carrying over from the game this is spinning off of, Digital Exorcist.
very hard, but i think difficulty is appealing for a game like this.
yeah the portraits maybe are a bit TOO low res.
the ambience ost felt very appropriate and never became tiresome even after i lost against the two demons over and over again lol
Thank you for playing! Portraits are currently temp, just concept sketches.
Beat the demo, the missions and grinded a bit to have a damage-less final fight. Video:
The game has a very sweet PS era graphics to it. If you would tell me this came in 1997, I would absolutely believe it.Played for roughly 15m
What's DATA stand for?
The Dialogue Sprites, especially the Digimon look out of Place, the Gamescreen also doesn't Scale to the actual Screen, but instead has massive black Borders all around it.
The Option to move Regularly and via Tank Controls on the same Controller without going through a menu is nice tho.
The Backgrounds could need more definition on Borders, so its clearer when something is just obscuring where you can walk, and when you can actually walk behind it.
Why can't Anon climb out the Window if its open, but I can enter through the Door he said is barricaded? That makes little Sense. (Apparently, she only barricaded the Bedroom, which is later open without any Barricades being seen anywhere. I read it as the House is barricaded. Probably my Bad, but regardles, I'd prefer it if the Door to the Room would be broken down or show Barricades being ripped away after her horrid Acting).
I was dissappointed when the Demo ended, I was really hoping for a lot more Content, ready to sink Days into this, so that's good.
Combat reminds me of Parasite Eve, on the one Hand I really like the Concept of it, on the other, it's a bit too hard I think, with multiple Enemies dodging becomes immensely hard, and they bullet Sponge too much for that. Different Weapons and more Spells later on would be nice, I'd also prefer if Combat just auto-aimed always, with left/right D-Pad switching Target, and Joystick exclusively for aiming Dodge. Often Times I found myself turning away from everything being forced to slowly turn back to aim, without proper indication on where I'm aiming, wasting a lot of Time, letting Enemies recharge or come closer when I just wanted to dodge out of the Way. On that Note, Dodging could be a tiny bit faster and longer ranged I think, to make it just that bit easier to dodge Projectiles that this needs I think.
I'd say Levels need more Doodads, but there's no real Levels there, and you obviously want rather big empty Areas for the Combat. If you'd just leave empty Areas where Combat is happening, it'd be too obvious and the Player wouldn't be surprised by Demons appearing, so probably put them on the Walls or alongside the Walls.
If you increase the Screensize to actually cover the whole Screen, or close to it, with the Dialogue being inside the Play Area, not outside, and add a lot more Content, this could turn out great.
Menus are functional, but could use a bit more Flair I think. There's also most of them missing I guess, no Inventory, no Status Screen, no Talent/Levelup whatever else you have planned, just the basic main Menu.
Portrait Art needs a bit of a rework. It's fine if you're going with stylized Anime Portraits, but not as clean ones as you have currently. Different Emotions could also be good, but are not needed I think.
An Ammocount might be good, you're some form of Cyber Cop or something, you should know how much Ammo you have left in your Gun, so you can recharge when appropriate.
Overall very enjoyable, even tho it's just too short right now, pretty immersive, excited to see where this is going the next DDs.
Thanks for playing! I’ll try to answer everything:
I noticed it mostly in the starting Screen, when I didn't realize the difference between the Wall blocking the Window from the Street and was thinking for a while I couldn't talk to the NPC.
A Shame that you're not adding a lengthy story into this.
I probably was exclusively manually aiming, I'll try auto aim later maybe.
As for the Screen, I understand wanting pixel perfect scaling, but with the Amount of Blackspace left, you could easily have scaled it up more. I guess thanks to the Dialogue being technically part of the Winow it just looks that Way without actually being true since you have a giant black Rectangle at the Bottom where the Dialogue would normally be. I'd still suggest just moving the Dialogue Window on the actual Playing Screen, instead of always as a black Element on the Bottom, and setting the Resolution of the Playing Screen to 16:9, that Way it should most of the Time cover the Screen completely or almost completely. Sure, it may not fit the Limitations of old Screens as well, but while it's fine to take inspiration from older Games and/or Tech, it should be clear that you're not developing for the old Playstation or CRT Monitors or anything, but for modern PCs, so in some Parts you need to account for that. ( Unless you're actually releasing this for Playstation, in which case ignore this obviously).
Thank you for the details!