There's a very noticeable learning curve for controlling the characters, but it feels good, especially once I started switching mid-fight. Both characters are pretty cool, though it seems like ice collision is bigger than the sprite.
Desperately lacks a tutorial - I didn't figure out that I can upgrade my characters until someone told me that.
Managed to get the boss to stage 4 without any skills, just by levelling up.
Took the boss down in a couple of seconds after I learned some skills.
Game is VERY stingy with healing potions, dunno if that's intentional, dunno how to feel about that (I managed, somehow). Also lost my first mythril armor to drag-n-drop outside of the inventory box. Felt bad about that.
It's a solid start, even if rough around the edges. I liked it, even if I had a pretty rough start with it.
Watched the vod of your stream a few days after and got a lot of ideas on what to change, including the things you bring up here. Bringing attention to the upgrades will definitely be a top priority. Thanks for the feedback and the stream!
Thanks for playing m8! Idea is to prepare for the boss fight (portal to boss in the start room) by leveling up (and picking ability boons/upgrades with the level points which I think a lot of people miss lol) and gearing up. Yea maybe I should make the witch attacks faster to compensate for the fact that she can't move while doing it.
Very buggy, but the graphics and music are nice. I think for stuff like interactable you should increase the font size. I think if you focus on making the bugs not as apparent and focus on more movement based attacks with the player, then you have a shot of making something very fun here. So all I can say is to keep what you are doing, make sure to keep certain things in mind and to fix up some of the bugs/smaller stuff while doing so and it will be great.
Yea I have a good idea what to fix now that I saw someone play it on a stream. Really didn't have time to polish at all for this demo so hopefully it won't be as rushed for the next one.
A lot of potential here. I remember seeing you post the excellent meteor animation in a thread. Really digging the pixel art and animations.
Pretty much all my feedback will be from playing with the melee girl since the wizard seemed a lot more wip.
Hitstun feedback from the basic attack is already pretty satisfying. Something about the timing of performing follow-up attacks with LMB seems a little off though
I think the mouse controlled camera is a little too sensitive. It's easy to accidentally move it around too much making combat a little nauseous to watch. I also don't think there's any reason for it to travel as far as it currently can from the player position since the character's attack range is so small
RMB attack is pretty OP compared to LMB attack. For the wizard, MMB attack would not work for me because the browser would eat the input for scrolling.
It's possible to get stuck onto the blue (water?) tiles in the first room above the spawn area. To reproduce this just move the player as far as you can towards it until they're touching it and try moving left and right.
There probably should be another visual indication on the player when they are out of stamina / energy to do attacks. Maybe make them flash red or something? I agree with Hap.dev that glancing to the left to track it can take a little too much attention away from what's going on the screen.
More of a nitpick but the mixing of pixel art assets at different resolutions is bothering me. I'm also noticing a mix of pixel art fonts and smooth anti-aliased fonts. Sticking to one resolution + only pixel fonts would help a lot with visual coherency and more appeal.
Hope you found my feedback helpful. Looking forward to see more from this project. Keep it up.
Thanks a lot for the detailed feedback! It's funny, you're not the only one that has recognized the game from that meteor animation, even though I posted that so long ago and barely got any response in the thread. Makes it feel worth it.
But yea I agree with all your points. I rushed a lot of it at the end to make the deadline, especially the fonts like you mentioned and some of the UI art is very WIP. Was there any specific assets that you can remember that felt off besides the UI? I try to make everything pixel perfect but I've heard similar remarks before and I think I've become blind to it.
The mixels is most noticeable with the inventory interface. It looks like the weapon and armor sprites are scaled up there at a much larger resolution than everything else and it clashes pretty hard. Redrawing larger assets specifically for the inventory would be a waste of dev resources so perhaps you could try reworking the ui a bit so you can just use the weapon / armor sprites at native res.
I think corekeeper and minecraft's uis are good references to look at for something like this. Pic related.
Oh yea the inventory sprites are horrible at the moment lol, there's no reason for them to be upscaled like that. Also that's a good idea, I was thinking of just finding smaller icons for the inventory but it might still work with the 32x32 icons I have now if I make the inventory slots larger.
I played it for a bit and got kinda hooked, but i also ran into some bugs/issues:
-Some enemies spawn into the walls and stay stuck there -I couldn't use the middle mouse button because the browser somehow caught it instead of the game, resulting in the website scrolling around while i was playing.
The game is pretty hard (to me) and the pacing of the attacks took me some time getting used to. I think having the "energy" bar under the character, or closer to the center of the screen could be better, cause glancing at it takes your eyes away from the fight
The boss fights are pretty hard, and it would be cool if health potions could be picked and stored in the inventory for that kind of fights (maybe i just didn't figure out how to do that though)
Putting the energy bar under the character sounds like a good idea. I was trying to find a sound effect for when you run out of stamina but I couldn't something that was fitting in time.
I didn't have much time to play test the difficulty at the end as I kept adding upgrades and nerfing the boss (too hard even for me for a while) without really testing how it all ended up so any feedback on the difficulty is very valuable. Do you remember what level you were when you faced the boss? I only faced the boss when I was around level 8-10 with lots of upgrades and items but it's probably too hard even then for a new player.
Comments
There's a very noticeable learning curve for controlling the characters, but it feels good, especially once I started switching mid-fight. Both characters are pretty cool, though it seems like ice collision is bigger than the sprite.
Desperately lacks a tutorial - I didn't figure out that I can upgrade my characters until someone told me that.
Managed to get the boss to stage 4 without any skills, just by levelling up.
Took the boss down in a couple of seconds after I learned some skills.
Game is VERY stingy with healing potions, dunno if that's intentional, dunno how to feel about that (I managed, somehow). Also lost my first mythril armor to drag-n-drop outside of the inventory box. Felt bad about that.
It's a solid start, even if rough around the edges. I liked it, even if I had a pretty rough start with it.
Watched the vod of your stream a few days after and got a lot of ideas on what to change, including the things you bring up here. Bringing attention to the upgrades will definitely be a top priority. Thanks for the feedback and the stream!
Thanks for playing m8! Idea is to prepare for the boss fight (portal to boss in the start room) by leveling up (and picking ability boons/upgrades with the level points which I think a lot of people miss lol) and gearing up. Yea maybe I should make the witch attacks faster to compensate for the fact that she can't move while doing it.
Very buggy, but the graphics and music are nice. I think for stuff like interactable you should increase the font size. I think if you focus on making the bugs not as apparent and focus on more movement based attacks with the player, then you have a shot of making something very fun here. So all I can say is to keep what you are doing, make sure to keep certain things in mind and to fix up some of the bugs/smaller stuff while doing so and it will be great.
Yea I have a good idea what to fix now that I saw someone play it on a stream. Really didn't have time to polish at all for this demo so hopefully it won't be as rushed for the next one.
A lot of potential here. I remember seeing you post the excellent meteor animation in a thread. Really digging the pixel art and animations.
Pretty much all my feedback will be from playing with the melee girl since the wizard seemed a lot more wip.
Hitstun feedback from the basic attack is already pretty satisfying. Something about the timing of performing follow-up attacks with LMB seems a little off though
I think the mouse controlled camera is a little too sensitive. It's easy to accidentally move it around too much making combat a little nauseous to watch. I also don't think there's any reason for it to travel as far as it currently can from the player position since the character's attack range is so small
RMB attack is pretty OP compared to LMB attack. For the wizard, MMB attack would not work for me because the browser would eat the input for scrolling.
It's possible to get stuck onto the blue (water?) tiles in the first room above the spawn area. To reproduce this just move the player as far as you can towards it until they're touching it and try moving left and right.
There probably should be another visual indication on the player when they are out of stamina / energy to do attacks. Maybe make them flash red or something? I agree with Hap.dev that glancing to the left to track it can take a little too much attention away from what's going on the screen.
More of a nitpick but the mixing of pixel art assets at different resolutions is bothering me. I'm also noticing a mix of pixel art fonts and smooth anti-aliased fonts. Sticking to one resolution + only pixel fonts would help a lot with visual coherency and more appeal.
Hope you found my feedback helpful. Looking forward to see more from this project. Keep it up.
Thanks a lot for the detailed feedback! It's funny, you're not the only one that has recognized the game from that meteor animation, even though I posted that so long ago and barely got any response in the thread. Makes it feel worth it.
But yea I agree with all your points. I rushed a lot of it at the end to make the deadline, especially the fonts like you mentioned and some of the UI art is very WIP. Was there any specific assets that you can remember that felt off besides the UI? I try to make everything pixel perfect but I've heard similar remarks before and I think I've become blind to it.
The mixels is most noticeable with the inventory interface. It looks like the weapon and armor sprites are scaled up there at a much larger resolution than everything else and it clashes pretty hard. Redrawing larger assets specifically for the inventory would be a waste of dev resources so perhaps you could try reworking the ui a bit so you can just use the weapon / armor sprites at native res.
I think corekeeper and minecraft's uis are good references to look at for something like this. Pic related.
Oh yea the inventory sprites are horrible at the moment lol, there's no reason for them to be upscaled like that. Also that's a good idea, I was thinking of just finding smaller icons for the inventory but it might still work with the 32x32 icons I have now if I make the inventory slots larger.
I played it for a bit and got kinda hooked, but i also ran into some bugs/issues:
-Some enemies spawn into the walls and stay stuck there
-I couldn't use the middle mouse button because the browser somehow caught it instead of the game, resulting in the website scrolling around while i was playing.
The game is pretty hard (to me) and the pacing of the attacks took me some time getting used to. I think having the "energy" bar under the character, or closer to the center of the screen could be better, cause glancing at it takes your eyes away from the fight
The boss fights are pretty hard, and it would be cool if health potions could be picked and stored in the inventory for that kind of fights (maybe i just didn't figure out how to do that though)
Cool visuals and sfx too!
Thanks for playing and the feedback!
Putting the energy bar under the character sounds like a good idea. I was trying to find a sound effect for when you run out of stamina but I couldn't something that was fitting in time.
I didn't have much time to play test the difficulty at the end as I kept adding upgrades and nerfing the boss (too hard even for me for a while) without really testing how it all ended up so any feedback on the difficulty is very valuable. Do you remember what level you were when you faced the boss? I only faced the boss when I was around level 8-10 with lots of upgrades and items but it's probably too hard even then for a new player.