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Xane's itch.io pageResults
| Criteria | Rank | Score* | Raw Score |
| Art / Graphics | #6 | 4.564 | 5.000 |
| Sound/Music | #31 | 3.469 | 3.800 |
| Controls / UI | #46 | 3.104 | 3.400 |
| Overall Fun | #55 | 2.921 | 3.200 |
Ranked from 5 ratings. Score is adjusted from raw score by the median number of ratings per game in the jam.
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Hello! Welcome to Feedback Quest 6! My name's Hythrain, and I'm one of the hosts and streamers for this event! This feedback is being written live on my stream.
Visually, I love this. It looks fantastic and I love the distortion that went on as I continued playing. The controls also worked, mostly. I couldn't "pause" the game with the ESC key as the controls said should work, nor did pressing F1 while in game for the Controls.
However, beyond that I got immediately frustrated. Enemies I could never outright that took way too long to kill even with the "stronger" secondary ammo, being shoved around away from ammo drops that would despawn, having a difficult time even hitting enemies. Then came in that one big enemy that never seemed to take any damage, yet was so big and in the way that it would take shots intended for smaller enemies, leading to more and more small enemies existing. The number of enemies on the screen ended up getting disorienting and I couldn't keep track of anything. From what I can tell in the screenshots, the actual "boss' is the big pyramid thing, yet I could never even shoot it because of too many smaller enemies to kill, being shoved around and losing my aim, and then the big thing that just absorbed everything. If this is working as intended, it ends up becoming a not-fun experience. If it's a bug, then at least that means it can get better. And this is to say nothing about if I could even die myself, which I tried to.
Also, the whole "energy blast" thing didn't work.
If your plan is to expand this into a bigger game, then there are a few things I could suggest you do to improve this:
1. Give enemies less health. I should be able to kill the lowest enemies fast enough that, if I'm keeping up on it, there won't be a new spawn by the time the enemy dies, let alone the two that I keep getting.
2. Don't despawn ammo. If there's an enemy that can shove me around and delay me from getting ammo, making it that ammo despawns is just a dick move.
3. Let the player be able to outrun the enemies. When every single enemy is right in my face the entire time, it becomes disorienting to play. I even thought it might be that moving backwards is slower, but when I'd turn to face where I wanted to go and did multiple dashes, I'd turn around to find every enemy right where it was before. This is frustrating.
4. Sound effects on shooting and hitting stuff. You have visuals, but the sound lacks for how the rest of this looks. This is especially true when it comes to that one huge enemy that just takes every shot ever.
5. Easier to hit enemies. See the points about the one big enemy. Legit, that dude was just ruining my fun.
I see a lot of potential with this and there's already a LOT of good things in this for being just a boss fight, it just needs to, y'know, be controllable for the player.
Thank you for your review and feeback! Surely there is things to improve, I'l work on them. Tetrahaedron is not a boss, not an enemy at all. This is you chance to stay alive. You deal that via "exchange" mechanic, I recommend you to read "How to play this thing" on main project page. This is designed as a hardcore game. You should dash and hover alot to avoid enemies. They will surely prevent you to collect yellow energy balls, this is by design. Anyway, I will surely try to balance this more in future builds.
Ok, so let me be more precise with my words. I apologize this come off as harsh, I want to make sure the gravity of my concern is understood.
I am constantly dashing, usually on cooldown, to try and keep enemies off me. If I don't hit it on cooldown every time, enemies catch up within a second or two. Having to hit shift every 2-3 seconds with your pinky finger while you're constantly trying to navigate with your other three fingers can cause the hand to tense up so intensely that it causes physical pain. This is not okay. You need longer dashes (with a bigger cooldown) or to slow enemies down. The game can still be hardcore without this.
Meanwhile, the combination of enemies that take longer to kill than the time it takes for a new to spawn, ammo despawning despite seemingly being a necessity to winning, enemies able to easily swarm you and obscure your vision entirely AND enemies being able to shove you around is just bad game design. The enemies swarming you is disorienting enough, let alone when 4 of them decide "we're going to push you now" and they send you way off course and you have no idea where you are anymore. And this is before the health reduction effect, which is something I like and feel should stay. I was not the only person who felt it was disorienting, as people in my audience said it was disorienting to watch. A game that relies on disorienting the player constantly to make it "hardcore" is just bad design. You don't need to disorient players for a hardcore experience. There are all sorts of examples out there for this, but From Software games come to mind as a prime example. The latest Doom games also do and are a lot more relevant due to being first person shooters.
If someone needs to read your project page to know how to play then you've screwed something up. You need to tell this information in game. If I'm required to read something offsite to figure out the basics for playing the game, then there's something wrong.
Thank you for your feedback. I agree that there are omissions, perhaps even serious balance errors. I didn't record any videos for this project because I was hoping to watch how other people play this game first, to get a sense of the difference in perception. Yeah.. I need to balance game towards a wide audience and your detailed answer a step on that, in fact I really lack feedback because I balanced the game for myself. Among my friends, I noticed that people who played Quake series much could easily cope with it (like myself). And I'm in a difficult situation from a design point of view: on the one hand, I won't be able to make a game that I wouldn't play myself or take it too easy, on the other hand, it turns out to be a very specific gameplay, which is very far from casual experience. I carefully accept your point of view and will try to find a compromise. There still may be design errors which I missed, which cannot be attributed as part of challenge. Good design always has a difficulty curve that isn't presented here (I just didn't have time to get everything done by the jam deadline), and the game is probably too raw right now to evaluate as release state. You also right about lack of ingame tutorial or gameplay hints. Will work on that. Thank you for your time!
Wow your game looks really polished! I love the sound design and the overall aesthetic it has going on! The only problem I had going was it was lagging a bit on my machine running a RTX 3070Ti. When a more few enemies started to spawn my FPS started to tank quite a bit below 60 FPS. Though that being said, it might be because I was running the game using Wine since I use a Linux desktop, but not 100% sure. Just wanted to mention the performance issue just encase since this game looks really polished, and not sure if you wanted to eventually start selling it! Overall, great entry :)
Thank you! Surprisingly, this game does not load the GPU much. If lags start, it's probably the CPU. Wine runs in emulation mode, which is really slower, especially when it comes to multithreading. Probably the physics engine does not have the ability to work multi-threaded in emulation mode, most likely this is the lags reason. For me this runs smoothly under 16 ms with 50+ monsters on Windows with Ryzen 5 3600 and GTX 970.
Ahhh that makes sense! Feel free to disregard my performance comment lol. Anyways, best of luck to your development!
This game is so dang awesome looking and sounding!
I really need a mouse sensitivity slider though
Thanks! Sounds resonable, will add sens option in one of next builds.