Cool and very well realized, cute models! I was having an easier time than is probably intentional beating up the Paladin by interrupting looping her pray animation. Is this intentional?
The dashing feels like it could use some extra oomph, and a combo guide would be very helpful.
Interrupt looping her transformation is intentional, but I think I'll reduce how long you can do it for next time since it seems to be too easily exploitable. I still need to go back and do up the VFX for the dashing, right now it's just a simple sound effect. I do have plans for a combo guide (or rather, a list of abilities similar to Sekiro's prosthetic descriptions that show controls), but that'll have to wait until I implement a lot of other menus first.
Battle area looks gorgeous. I really like the graphics for this game. Character designs are cute.
Didn't get any where close to beating Louise but it I still enjoyed slowly learning her movement patterns. Spark effect for well timed blocks are really satisfying. It was cool to figure out the kunais can knock her out of her power-up animation.
Dashing feels kinda useless. Doesn't cover enough distance to avoid a lot of her attacks. I sometimes found myself jumping away instead because it covers slightly more distance quickly.
I feel like the camera should be either zoomed out a little or position slightly higher above the player and angled downwards. Sometimes Louise can be obscured by the player character because of how level the camera is. You will probably need to implement some sort of dynamic zoom based on how close you are to enemies too.
Getting knocked down does not feel good. It feels like there's a lag between it receiving my inputs and the character getting up. Doesn't help that the input buffer window seems to be large too so sometimes I would get up and immediately do a basic attack because LMB was pressed once while I was down.
I like what you have so far. I'll definitely check it out next time you submit.
Honestly, I'm still quite conflicted on how far the dash should travel, since it used to be about 1.5x-2x as long when I first implemented it. I think the current iteration strikes a decent balance between recovery time, distance, and iframe duration that I quite like, but I've also heard comments on the invulnerability being too short or the dodge feeling unresponsive, so it's definitely something I want to experiment with in future. Camera is another big aspect I need to really dig into, but these are some good suggestions. The current camera code does a little bit of angling downwards, but it's not very strong and doesn't work well at further distances. Dynamic zoom isn't something I've tried yet, so I'll look into that too.
Getting knocked down probably shouldn't feel good since it's a form of punishment for messing up. There's 2 types of knockdown you could be referring to here: getting knocked down by a specific strong attack, or getting stance broken when your meter fills up. There's a dodge recovery input for the first almost immediately once you hit the ground, but there's a bigger delay before you can do it on the second since you have to wait until you recover from being stance broken. Perhaps the animation poses aren't clear enough here? As for the input buffer, I believe it's still set at 0.2s buffer time, so I'll have to investigate the case of attack buffering during stance break and see if it needs to be reduced.
Blocking no longer ends immediately when releasing the block button, you get up to an extra 0.1s depending on how much deflect time you had left, so you no longer need to hold the block all the way through and can tap the button instead, much more like Sekiro and less like Lies of P.
Landing animation has been given a new transition directly to walking, this should make it feel less sticky when jumping.
Added stance regeneration when holding the block button. This is a little over 2x the base regen speed as compared to not holding it. (subject to change, but this is for Sekiro feature parity)
Works well enough. I'm not much of a souls/sekiro/eldenrang/fromsoft player, but I do enjoy myself some DMC every now and then. Managed to beat the boss after 20 minutes.
Big props for controller support and for great SFX, a lot of times sound quips actually helped me understand what's going on. Visual cues are also good, BUT may be a tad insufficient - I was a bit stuck getting blasted by "powering down from red halo after 4 interrupts" explosion. Also, I think it takes more than 4 interrupts sometimes. I definitely kinda cheesed the boss by only damaging her when she's powering down. Maybe that's one of the intended ways to beat her, I dunno.
Character models are great, VERY, VERY beautifully modelled, especially MC. The environment is also fantastic, very pretty, very atmospheric.
There seems to be a whole combo system hidden under the hood which I probably haven't fully discovered (even with your help on stream), which makes me think there needs to be a tutorial or at least a move list somewhere in the menu.
Great stuff, surprisingly enjoyable (even for a filthy casual like me)
Thanks for playing and streaming! It's really such a coincidence that mine was first because I probably would've ended up sleeping and missing it, but it was great hearing everyone's comments on it in real time.
It's not what I originally intended, but after seeing you come to that conclusion live I think it's perfectly fine. I might try to make the AI try to close the distance more aggressively so that it's not as easy to just run away, though.
I'm glad that there's been such positive reception to my designs, makes all the time I spent designing and redesigning the characters feel worth it. There's definitely a lot of work that needs to be done in teaching players how to play this, so I'll try and focus on that in the coming months.
full disclosure, i was only able to ever get her down to half health but i have beaten a bulk of the souls games and bayonetta/mgr movement and jumping should definitely be snappier, as should the camera the camera could also use a bit of distance and maybe some "smart" framing to keep your opponent in frame in a readable way more tells of combat state would be nice (meatier sounds, visual effects for staggers/hyperarmor/poise/etc.) but, i like the idea overall and its a strong demo to show off the idea
As always with these kinds of games, the camera is an issue that I will have to continue to iterate upon. Definitely need a lot more telegraphing effects, especially in the sound department because it's more or less just a whoosh sound at the moment. I'll need to look around a bit more for ideas on how to design effects for combat state, but I guess there's always the good old red glow effect I can fall back on.
I had fun figuring out the timings on deflects. The best part of that was realizing I could get a better reward for counterhitting the boss. It reminded me of God Hand's counter hit system a little although much more subdued in terms of what I get as a reward since they still continued their combo sometimes. To be honest these two tools are so powerful I barely engaged with the rest of the mechanics you had. The only point I found for using the projectile was to teleport to the boss at the start or do deal damage to the knocked down boss after a riposte which I felt couldn't be intentional (but should totally be kept in). I've never played Sekiro though so I don't know if it's the same in that game. I'd definitely be careful with making parrying the only strong mechanic since it feels so passive.
I only found out that you already mentioned the AI was random after I had beaten them so I was prepared to talk about how inconsistent their behavior was. I couldn't tell what the difference was between her forms since they all tended to use all 3 weapons the same way. I also couldn't figure out their poise which made me play way too safe and barely ever attack since I figured she would just armor through everything unless she was specifically in Dark Halo mode charging into Human mode.
The poise being so obscure made me never want to commit to longer attacks or try out other mechanics out of fear of screwing myself over. Maybe her poise could only apply to the beginnings of specific attacks (like the great sword) so I could be encouraged to whiff punish still.
I'd like more responsiveness out of my other evasive moves like jumping away and running, I felt so suckered to the boss in the current state of these moves and opted to just stand there and deflect instead of doing anything else. Might just be my bias towards games like Ys or Wonderful 101 where I'm running around the entire arena while fighting, probably the benefit of having a fixed camera angle so far away I guess.
Overall I like the idea of the game and I'm interested in what comes next, especially if more comes out of interrupting the bosses.
I never actually finished God Hand, but I heard of counter hits recently while doing research on existing mechanics but never found the time to try going back to the game (got filtered by one of the early bosses back when I first tried it lmao). Parries have a strength level to them which dictates whether or not you get interrupted. Most attacks are around level 2 or 3, and you only get interrupted if your level is lower. This works both ways, and the intent of it was so you could exploit longer combo chains by parrying multiple attacks for more damage by drawing instead of only being able to parry one hit and breaking the whole combo. The charged attack inputs and the leniency in combo input windows was meant to allow players to be able to delay and time their own combos to match up with the parry timings without having to stop attacking, but in practice this is too difficult to pull off (even for me)
Parries in their current state are extremely strong, but I'm not sure where to put it as far as the difficulty risk/reward curve goes. Some types of parries are very difficult, and they should be rewarding if you pull them off, but waiting for a specific attack you know you can parry shouldn't become the degenerate strategy. (Although I'm perfectly fine if someone is able to parry literally every single attack in a row without stopping because that's the most extreme level of learning the boss. Can't say I'll be able to make it totally possible, but I would like to see someone try. )
It's somewhat of an oversight that you can damage them while they're knocked down, but it actually affects the player as well since they're using the exact same code. (However, the player is able to dodge out of it while the AI does not.)
I still have a lot to learn when it comes to animating, but I'll try adjusting the speeds a bit more to make it feel different. Poise is a very problematic function to design around, because it's really hard to convey to the player without just showing a number, and it gets even worse when it's modified in any way. In the current build, Louise has 25 poise in base form and 50 when transformed, and most player attacks deal 10 poise damage, which means it goes from ~3 attacks to flinch to 5 when transformed, but I doubt anyone could figure that out exactly just from playing. I think some passive poise is necessary to prevent stunlocks, and there are some active poise (super armour) actions in the game already, but doubling it to 50 was probably too much considering how sensitive this mechanic's numbers can be to change.
Could you elaborate on the part on responsiveness? Is this about the landing animation from the jump taking too long, or the step dodge being too short, or something about sprinting? I haven't played an Ys game, so I'll see if I can try it sometime soon to see what you mean.
I ran into the same issue with showing poise in my own game before taking it out completely recently so I definitely get the struggle.
The responsiveness thing might just be from watching the character still face the enemy when I start holding the run button and holding away, making me want to mash jump to get further away before seeing my character face the direction I want then to run. There was a little jerkiness to seeing that happen with the camera and player still being near the boss after trying to escape.
-Walking in small circles cause the camera to look jerky... Walking in a straight line, the camera keeps looking back and forth? Kind of looks like it's targeting the real position but due to offsets for root animation it's wrong looking.
-The camera is really close in, it feels claustrophobic for default zoom. Of course, would be nice to customize said zoom.
-Not being able to move my mouse outside the window when pausing the game is annoying, I have to alt tab.
-Responsive prompts for controller vs mouse UI is good, but said change only happens when you press a button. So, there's a disconnect when you move around with the stick and still have keyboard glyphs visible until you press something. Same deal with moving the mouse with controller glyphs still there.
-'Lag' when landing after a jump feels gross. In general, my actions feel slightly unresponsive due to the animations.
-Her 'kneel and charge' attack is confusing. If I attack her early on in the animation it staggers, but later on it does jack? Bad design. [later on] Or are they different charge moves? If they are, I couldn't tell.
-In general, this first boss is annoying and too hard(like 4 healthbars) for what should be the intro to your gameplay. Besides the aforementioned kneel move, she is hard to stagger and the parry timings are harder than I think they should. And yes, I have beaten Sekiro.
-Forcing me to restart manually instead of doing it automatically when I die is awful(especially on controller where I need to use my mouse to click restart), thanks mr lazy bones.
-When you restart you don't clear the lock on reticle. Which to be fair, is probably the desired outcome if you're just fighting one on one bosses over and over. However, I bring it up in case it's wrong.
-In abstract, the boss changing weapons mid fight is interesting, but it sucks in several ways since a beginner may be tempted to just wait out the transformation until the one they're comfortable with shows up, and also as a first boss you have to do much more work to learn the attacks(due to all the 'modes'), compared to a one weapon boss.
-I nearly beat her a couple times but then I started getting worse, so I'll just leave it there. Keep up the deving.
I guess I could add more damping to this? It seems like there's an issue with walking towards the camera, which isn't something that I ever tested. I think I can try to implement a separate target object that follows the character rather than having the target be parented to the root, since I know some of my root animations can be a bit jerky.
I had planned to add some kind of mouse-wheel zoom control before, but I couldn't think of a suitable mapping for the controller and it just wasn't a particularly high priority feature at the time. I think now that I have a settings menu set up I can just move it in there, though. As for this being the default zoom, that was a concern when I initially set it to be so close, although now I realize it's probably also an important setting to have for accessibility reasons, so this will definitely get some changes and settings.
Definitely, I don't know how I didn't think of this until your comment when I've been using alt-tab in-editor to free my mouse too
I think there's some considerations for unwanted mouse movements and controller drift that I need to test out first before I add the device switching code to that input, but it should be possible.
Only the locomotion state is affected by the jump exit time, it shouldn't affect any other actions. But I'll try adjusting the exit time to be shorter, or add some interrupts.
This definitely needed to be separate animations; there's the action where she's transforming (no halo) and the action where she's transforming out (red halo), and only the red halo can be interrupted.
It's about 4 healthbars if you count each stance break as one, but unlike Sekiro where deflecting is your main option, this game also has weapon clashing (parrying) that does a lot more break damage. If I shortened it down to 2 health bars, it's possible to beat her in less than a minute by using parries, so the problem here is that the game doesn't teach this mechanic at all right now.
Yeah, this was a pain point I'm very aware of. I'll try and get a fix out for that by this week.
This is intended behaviour, but I should probably add a setting for it somewhere.
I think the interval between weapon changes are quite short, which should alleviate some of the waiting. There's definitely a crazy amount of attacks (I say that as the person who had to implement and animate them myself) and it's still missing some big attacks I've been putting off, so this aspect will probably only get worse. However, since blocking is quite lenient and the player's mobility is high, I feel that there's enough opportunities for a patient player to observe and learn the attack, even if there are a lot of them. (also padding for gameplay time haha...)
Ultimately, I expect the kind of people who'll play this game to mostly be Sekiro vets looking for something even more challenging, so I think it's good if it's already managing to be difficult to seasoned players at this early stage. I'll definitely be adding another simpler boss before Louise, and maybe he'll be more like Hanbei the Undying as a kind of tutorial/practice character for those who aren't already familiar with Sekiro.
(I haven't played sekiro, I did not beat the boss) If you hit and stagger holy knight louise while she's trying to pray she just keep trying and trying (assuming you keep interrupting her) until she gets dazed (the X prompt). I don't know if that's intentional or not And I don't think the Demo Day thumbnail/ cover art is very good (for conveying what your game is about), you should have the MC in combat in some way to reflect what the game is.
Yes, that's intended. It's not a very easy concept to convey, but the idea is that she's trying to transform out of the armour because she'll start to take damage over time after a certain point, and if she can't do it in time or gets interrupted too many times she'll still force it which staggers her.
Yeah, the cover art is pretty bad for the purpose of conveying what it's about since I didn't have any other marketing materials prepared other than this pic I use as a profile pic and I didn't really want to use a screenshot either. I had thought about commissioning someone for it for DD60, but I figured it wouldn't be done in time and I wasn't going to try and rush it.
There is a lock-on mechanic on middle mouse click, sorry that I forgot to mention it in the menu.
Definitely one of the next features I'll be adding, didn't have time to even make a victory screen either lol
I'll look into it. The root motion animation is just a straight line, and rotations are locked during that action, so I'll have to figure out how to make it turn around (hopefully without having to modify the animation)
Thanks for playing! I've had a bunch of other friends try it, and even they've been struggling with it despite being souls/sekiro veterans lol. I'll probably have to prioritize making the tutorial for the next release.
It's almost impossible to hit with the Q skill or the charged attack if you're not using lock on even if you line up perfectly. You're kinda forced to keep the lock, it makes it a lot easier. I would prefer if the dash was less spamable but had more invincibility, I got hit while dashing pretty often but then again I haven't played many similar games, idk how they do it. Oh and I know it's an early demo but I have to point out that my framerate was inconsistent
The game is very much intended to be played with lock-on (which I forgot to add instructions for in the pause menu lol), but I'll check on that "line up perfectly" thing. Compared to mainline Souls games, the enemies I'm adding are a lot smaller in size and mostly a lot faster, so it might not be viable at all to play unlocked, but I'll see if I can add some kind of aim assistance when playing unlocked.
Dodge invulnerability is short so that players have to parry or deflect instead, but after looking it up just now I found that most souls games are at about 20+ iframes at 60FPS while this only has about 8, so I should probably extend it a little more.
What hardware specs are you using and what FPS did you get?
It wasn't anything major, it was around 50-60fps mostly. When I was looking at something shiny it fell to around 40 but I think that's the lowest it got. Just pointing it out because I don't have a potato PC
Very nice demo. The controls feel great and the visuals are nice. The boss is difficult, but beatable once you learn it. I found it just the right difficulty (though I did resort to kiting a bit at the end). I only have one complaint: I found it very easy to accidentally activate the lock-on button by pressing the left and right mouse buttons at the same time, since it's set to the middle mouse button. It also seems I triggered a visual bug at 24:30 in the video.
took me a solid 15 minutes before realizing i could lock onto the enemy with middle mouse button.
is the boss invincible while her aureola is up? at the very least it feels like it, which kind of slows the flow because i have to wait for it to expire before approaching her again
she completely destroyed me repeteadly regardless the music kind of gets repetitive after a while
maaaaaybe the first fight should be more manageable so that people get used to the controls before getting thrown at a big bad boss? like for a non souls fan it's completely overwhelming
Whoops, forgot to add that control to the page lol.
She takes reduced HP damage and deals more damage while her armour is up, but stance damage taken remains the same. If you stance break her, it immediately dispels the armour.
Yeah, this is pretty rough for a first encounter. I'm planning to make her be the first boss after an easier tutorial boss that actually teaches you the basics.
Yeah, the tutorial is going to have to carry a lot of weight for this one, since I'm probably not going to implement some skill tree to slowly drip feed moves to the player.
Controls really well and the fight totally works like a fromsoft boss! Boss character has charm. Couldn't beat the boss after a handful of tries. Never played Sekiro, so maybe that's why. I'm just bad in general though
Comments
Cool and very well realized, cute models! I was having an easier time than is probably intentional beating up the Paladin by interrupting looping her pray animation. Is this intentional?
The dashing feels like it could use some extra oomph, and a combo guide would be very helpful.
Thank you!
Interrupt looping her transformation is intentional, but I think I'll reduce how long you can do it for next time since it seems to be too easily exploitable. I still need to go back and do up the VFX for the dashing, right now it's just a simple sound effect. I do have plans for a combo guide (or rather, a list of abilities similar to Sekiro's prosthetic descriptions that show controls), but that'll have to wait until I implement a lot of other menus first.
Battle area looks gorgeous. I really like the graphics for this game. Character designs are cute.
Didn't get any where close to beating Louise but it I still enjoyed slowly learning her movement patterns. Spark effect for well timed blocks are really satisfying. It was cool to figure out the kunais can knock her out of her power-up animation.
Dashing feels kinda useless. Doesn't cover enough distance to avoid a lot of her attacks. I sometimes found myself jumping away instead because it covers slightly more distance quickly.
I feel like the camera should be either zoomed out a little or position slightly higher above the player and angled downwards. Sometimes Louise can be obscured by the player character because of how level the camera is. You will probably need to implement some sort of dynamic zoom based on how close you are to enemies too.
Getting knocked down does not feel good. It feels like there's a lag between it receiving my inputs and the character getting up. Doesn't help that the input buffer window seems to be large too so sometimes I would get up and immediately do a basic attack because LMB was pressed once while I was down.
I like what you have so far. I'll definitely check it out next time you submit.
Thank you!
Honestly, I'm still quite conflicted on how far the dash should travel, since it used to be about 1.5x-2x as long when I first implemented it. I think the current iteration strikes a decent balance between recovery time, distance, and iframe duration that I quite like, but I've also heard comments on the invulnerability being too short or the dodge feeling unresponsive, so it's definitely something I want to experiment with in future.
Camera is another big aspect I need to really dig into, but these are some good suggestions. The current camera code does a little bit of angling downwards, but it's not very strong and doesn't work well at further distances. Dynamic zoom isn't something I've tried yet, so I'll look into that too.
Getting knocked down probably shouldn't feel good since it's a form of punishment for messing up. There's 2 types of knockdown you could be referring to here: getting knocked down by a specific strong attack, or getting stance broken when your meter fills up. There's a dodge recovery input for the first almost immediately once you hit the ground, but there's a bigger delay before you can do it on the second since you have to wait until you recover from being stance broken. Perhaps the animation poses aren't clear enough here? As for the input buffer, I believe it's still set at 0.2s buffer time, so I'll have to investigate the case of attack buffering during stance break and see if it needs to be reduced.
Quick update:
Works well enough. I'm not much of a souls/sekiro/eldenrang/fromsoft player, but I do enjoy myself some DMC every now and then. Managed to beat the boss after 20 minutes.
Big props for controller support and for great SFX, a lot of times sound quips actually helped me understand what's going on. Visual cues are also good, BUT may be a tad insufficient - I was a bit stuck getting blasted by "powering down from red halo after 4 interrupts" explosion. Also, I think it takes more than 4 interrupts sometimes. I definitely kinda cheesed the boss by only damaging her when she's powering down. Maybe that's one of the intended ways to beat her, I dunno.
Character models are great, VERY, VERY beautifully modelled, especially MC. The environment is also fantastic, very pretty, very atmospheric.
There seems to be a whole combo system hidden under the hood which I probably haven't fully discovered (even with your help on stream), which makes me think there needs to be a tutorial or at least a move list somewhere in the menu.
Great stuff, surprisingly enjoyable (even for a filthy casual like me)
Thanks for playing and streaming! It's really such a coincidence that mine was first because I probably would've ended up sleeping and missing it, but it was great hearing everyone's comments on it in real time.
It's not what I originally intended, but after seeing you come to that conclusion live I think it's perfectly fine. I might try to make the AI try to close the distance more aggressively so that it's not as easy to just run away, though.
I'm glad that there's been such positive reception to my designs, makes all the time I spent designing and redesigning the characters feel worth it. There's definitely a lot of work that needs to be done in teaching players how to play this, so I'll try and focus on that in the coming months.
full disclosure, i was only able to ever get her down to half health
but i have beaten a bulk of the souls games and bayonetta/mgr
movement and jumping should definitely be snappier, as should the camerathe camera could also use a bit of distance and maybe some "smart" framing to keep your opponent in frame in a readable way
more tells of combat state would be nice (meatier sounds, visual effects for staggers/hyperarmor/poise/etc.)
but, i like the idea overall and its a strong demo to show off the idea
Thanks for playing!
Yeah, a lot of souls vets I know had trouble tooAs always with these kinds of games, the camera is an issue that I will have to continue to iterate upon. Definitely need a lot more telegraphing effects, especially in the sound department because it's more or less just a whoosh sound at the moment. I'll need to look around a bit more for ideas on how to design effects for combat state, but I guess there's always the good old red glow effect I can fall back on.
I had fun figuring out the timings on deflects. The best part of that was realizing I could get a better reward for counterhitting the boss. It reminded me of God Hand's counter hit system a little although much more subdued in terms of what I get as a reward since they still continued their combo sometimes. To be honest these two tools are so powerful I barely engaged with the rest of the mechanics you had. The only point I found for using the projectile was to teleport to the boss at the start or do deal damage to the knocked down boss after a riposte which I felt couldn't be intentional (but should totally be kept in). I've never played Sekiro though so I don't know if it's the same in that game. I'd definitely be careful with making parrying the only strong mechanic since it feels so passive.
I only found out that you already mentioned the AI was random after I had beaten them so I was prepared to talk about how inconsistent their behavior was. I couldn't tell what the difference was between her forms since they all tended to use all 3 weapons the same way. I also couldn't figure out their poise which made me play way too safe and barely ever attack since I figured she would just armor through everything unless she was specifically in Dark Halo mode charging into Human mode.
The poise being so obscure made me never want to commit to longer attacks or try out other mechanics out of fear of screwing myself over. Maybe her poise could only apply to the beginnings of specific attacks (like the great sword) so I could be encouraged to whiff punish still.
I'd like more responsiveness out of my other evasive moves like jumping away and running, I felt so suckered to the boss in the current state of these moves and opted to just stand there and deflect instead of doing anything else. Might just be my bias towards games like Ys or Wonderful 101 where I'm running around the entire arena while fighting, probably the benefit of having a fixed camera angle so far away I guess.
Overall I like the idea of the game and I'm interested in what comes next, especially if more comes out of interrupting the bosses.
Thanks for playing, I'm glad you enjoyed it!
I never actually finished God Hand, but I heard of counter hits recently while doing research on existing mechanics but never found the time to try going back to the game (got filtered by one of the early bosses back when I first tried it lmao). Parries have a strength level to them which dictates whether or not you get interrupted. Most attacks are around level 2 or 3, and you only get interrupted if your level is lower. This works both ways, and the intent of it was so you could exploit longer combo chains by parrying multiple attacks for more damage by drawing instead of only being able to parry one hit and breaking the whole combo. The charged attack inputs and the leniency in combo input windows was meant to allow players to be able to delay and time their own combos to match up with the parry timings without having to stop attacking, but in practice this is too difficult to pull off (even for me)
Parries in their current state are extremely strong, but I'm not sure where to put it as far as the difficulty risk/reward curve goes. Some types of parries are very difficult, and they should be rewarding if you pull them off, but waiting for a specific attack you know you can parry shouldn't become the degenerate strategy. (Although I'm perfectly fine if someone is able to parry literally every single attack in a row without stopping because that's the most extreme level of learning the boss. Can't say I'll be able to make it totally possible, but I would like to see someone try. )
It's somewhat of an oversight that you can damage them while they're knocked down, but it actually affects the player as well since they're using the exact same code. (However, the player is able to dodge out of it while the AI does not.)
I still have a lot to learn when it comes to animating, but I'll try adjusting the speeds a bit more to make it feel different. Poise is a very problematic function to design around, because it's really hard to convey to the player without just showing a number, and it gets even worse when it's modified in any way. In the current build, Louise has 25 poise in base form and 50 when transformed, and most player attacks deal 10 poise damage, which means it goes from ~3 attacks to flinch to 5 when transformed, but I doubt anyone could figure that out exactly just from playing. I think some passive poise is necessary to prevent stunlocks, and there are some active poise (super armour) actions in the game already, but doubling it to 50 was probably too much considering how sensitive this mechanic's numbers can be to change.
Could you elaborate on the part on responsiveness? Is this about the landing animation from the jump taking too long, or the step dodge being too short, or something about sprinting? I haven't played an Ys game, so I'll see if I can try it sometime soon to see what you mean.
I ran into the same issue with showing poise in my own game before taking it out completely recently so I definitely get the struggle.
The responsiveness thing might just be from watching the character still face the enemy when I start holding the run button and holding away, making me want to mash jump to get further away before seeing my character face the direction I want then to run. There was a little jerkiness to seeing that happen with the camera and player still being near the boss after trying to escape.
-Walking in small circles cause the camera to look jerky... Walking in a straight line, the camera keeps looking back and forth? Kind of looks like it's targeting the real position but due to offsets for root animation it's wrong looking.
-The camera is really close in, it feels claustrophobic for default zoom. Of course, would be nice to customize said zoom.
-Not being able to move my mouse outside the window when pausing the game is annoying, I have to alt tab.
-Responsive prompts for controller vs mouse UI is good, but said change only happens when you press a button. So, there's a disconnect when you move around with the stick and still have keyboard glyphs visible until you press something. Same deal with moving the mouse with controller glyphs still there.
-'Lag' when landing after a jump feels gross. In general, my actions feel slightly unresponsive due to the animations.
-Her 'kneel and charge' attack is confusing. If I attack her early on in the animation it staggers, but later on it does jack? Bad design. [later on] Or are they different charge moves? If they are, I couldn't tell.
-In general, this first boss is annoying and too hard(like 4 healthbars) for what should be the intro to your gameplay. Besides the aforementioned kneel move, she is hard to stagger and the parry timings are harder than I think they should. And yes, I have beaten Sekiro.
-Forcing me to restart manually instead of doing it automatically when I die is awful(especially on controller where I need to use my mouse to click restart), thanks mr lazy bones.
-When you restart you don't clear the lock on reticle. Which to be fair, is probably the desired outcome if you're just fighting one on one bosses over and over. However, I bring it up in case it's wrong.
-In abstract, the boss changing weapons mid fight is interesting, but it sucks in several ways since a beginner may be tempted to just wait out the transformation until the one they're comfortable with shows up, and also as a first boss you have to do much more work to learn the attacks(due to all the 'modes'), compared to a one weapon boss.
-I nearly beat her a couple times but then I started getting worse, so I'll just leave it there. Keep up the deving.
Thanks for playing!
Ultimately, I expect the kind of people who'll play this game to mostly be Sekiro vets looking for something even more challenging, so I think it's good if it's already managing to be difficult to seasoned players at this early stage. I'll definitely be adding another simpler boss before Louise, and maybe he'll be more like Hanbei the Undying as a kind of tutorial/practice character for those who aren't already familiar with Sekiro.
Thanks for the thorough feedback!
plays really well with a controller, terribly (imo) with a keyboard, because of the camera that keeps going left and right
cool character models
I see the UI adapts to the fact you're using a controller/keyboard which is very nice, too bad i can't restart the game with the controller
The game was pretty hard to beat, i had to cheese it by jumping and dodging until Louise was in her pink phase
Thanks for playing! I'm not sure what you mean by the camera going left and right, but there's definitely a lot of work I need to do on the camera.
Updates:
(I haven't played sekiro, I did not beat the boss)
If you hit and stagger holy knight louise while she's trying to pray she just keep trying and trying (assuming you keep interrupting her) until she gets dazed (the X prompt). I don't know if that's intentional or not
And I don't think the Demo Day thumbnail/ cover art is very good (for conveying what your game is about), you should have the MC in combat in some way to reflect what the game is.
Yes, that's intended. It's not a very easy concept to convey, but the idea is that she's trying to transform out of the armour because she'll start to take damage over time after a certain point, and if she can't do it in time or gets interrupted too many times she'll still force it which staggers her.
Yeah, the cover art is pretty bad for the purpose of conveying what it's about since I didn't have any other marketing materials prepared other than this pic I use as a profile pic and I didn't really want to use a screenshot either. I had thought about commissioning someone for it for DD60, but I figured it wouldn't be done in time and I wasn't going to try and rush it.
Replayed a little for you as asked..
-You need an lock-on mechanic, I fight more the camera than the girl.
-A respawn button on death so I don't have to open the menu
-Dodge doesn't feel right because you only dodge in straight line, can you add strafing?
Thanks for replaying!
She kicked my ass, those 4 hit combos catch me by surprise every time though I never did beat sekiro properly so maybe i'm a scrub.
Thanks for playing! I've had a bunch of other friends try it, and even they've been struggling with it despite being souls/sekiro veterans lol. I'll probably have to prioritize making the tutorial for the next release.
It's almost impossible to hit with the Q skill or the charged attack if you're not using lock on even if you line up perfectly. You're kinda forced to keep the lock, it makes it a lot easier. I would prefer if the dash was less spamable but had more invincibility, I got hit while dashing pretty often but then again I haven't played many similar games, idk how they do it. Oh and I know it's an early demo but I have to point out that my framerate was inconsistent
Good work so far, pretty good for a first demo
Thanks for playing!
The game is very much intended to be played with lock-on (which I forgot to add instructions for in the pause menu lol), but I'll check on that "line up perfectly" thing. Compared to mainline Souls games, the enemies I'm adding are a lot smaller in size and mostly a lot faster, so it might not be viable at all to play unlocked, but I'll see if I can add some kind of aim assistance when playing unlocked.
Dodge invulnerability is short so that players have to parry or deflect instead, but after looking it up just now I found that most souls games are at about 20+ iframes at 60FPS while this only has about 8, so I should probably extend it a little more.
What hardware specs are you using and what FPS did you get?
It wasn't anything major, it was around 50-60fps mostly. When I was looking at something shiny it fell to around 40 but I think that's the lowest it got. Just pointing it out because I don't have a potato PC
My specs are :
Very nice demo. The controls feel great and the visuals are nice. The boss is difficult, but beatable once you learn it. I found it just the right difficulty (though I did resort to kiting a bit at the end). I only have one complaint: I found it very easy to accidentally activate the lock-on button by pressing the left and right mouse buttons at the same time, since it's set to the middle mouse button. It also seems I triggered a visual bug at 24:30 in the video.
Thank you for playing! I'll have to work on adding some rebindings so that accidental lock-on doesn't happen. Really appreciate the full video for it.
took me a solid 15 minutes before realizing i could lock onto the enemy with middle mouse button.
is the boss invincible while her aureola is up? at the very least it feels like it, which kind of slows the flow because i have to wait for it to expire before approaching her again
she completely destroyed me repeteadly regardless
the music kind of gets repetitive after a while
maaaaaybe the first fight should be more manageable so that people get used to the controls before getting thrown at a big bad boss? like for a non souls fan it's completely overwhelming
Whoops, forgot to add that control to the page lol.
She takes reduced HP damage and deals more damage while her armour is up, but stance damage taken remains the same. If you stance break her, it immediately dispels the armour.
Yeah, this is pretty rough for a first encounter. I'm planning to make her be the first boss after an easier tutorial boss that actually teaches you the basics.
An interesting project, the tutorial will need to be really good as the mechanics asks for some trying.
Thanks for the art!
Yeah, the tutorial is going to have to carry a lot of weight for this one, since I'm probably not going to implement some skill tree to slowly drip feed moves to the player.
Controls really well and the fight totally works like a fromsoft boss! Boss character has charm. Couldn't beat the boss after a handful of tries. Never played Sekiro, so maybe that's why. I'm just bad in general though
Thank you for playing! (realized I never ended up replying to you and didn't want to leave you out even though it's been 2 days, sorry about that)
I think it's to be expected, most people have remarked so far that it's difficult, and I've had some say it's the hardest boss they've ever fought.