itch.io

Hey, thanks a lot for playing and for the extensive feedback. I'll watch the VODs as soon as I can.

"Enter the Gungeon" but you start with all weapons unlocked except there are really complicated hotkeys to activate them. 

 I've never played Enter the Gungeon so a lot of your comparisons fall on deaf ears, sorry. There will be more weapons the player can unlock in the future.

Also there are exploding barrels EVERYWHERE
Gunplay/movement alone is more complex with all the barrels

I've received this complaint from a few separate people, I'll reduce the spawn rate of the explosive barrels and make them more visually distinct. The thought process behind the barrels was to allow the player to use the environment to their advantage, but most people just end blowing themselves up. 

So your game, in the first level, is already thrice as complicated as EtG

The game is very difficult by design, yes. 

Getting to the second level rewards you with: More of the same. I think the individual aspects are honestly fine (maybe fun), but it would really help if you focused on one gimmick alone. At least at the start.

The repeating level is a temporary measure to pad for time since I only have one dungeon biome made at the moment, the real game would feature different environments and enemies. On that note, I might reduce the total number of levels in a run from 9 to 6 (2 levels per biome) to avoid redundancy.

For all I care, have the final levels be super complex (like the first one is now). But for the first ones, honestly, my wish and expectation would be that there are e.g. some rats, and I should use fire/poison to kill them, and then some robots, and I should use electro to kill them. And these enemies alone be simpler than the first enemies you encounter in EtG.

I plan to add a tutorial which does just this as level 0. This is arguably the biggest problem with the game in its current state (in my opinion), people are just dropped into the game without any instruction on how the game works.

It also feels very unrewarding right now to combo elements. The mental effort of e.g. first drenching and then electrocuting enemies... and then it does a puny 8 damage… I suppose it does more damage if I stack the elements higher; but the game really makes you hate stacking 3x-4x because then it takes like 4 seconds until you can shoot again. I suspect the stacking better be removed completely (or limited to 2x). And going drench->electro should INSTAGIB on the first level, else it’s ridiculously not worth the effort.

Here's the thing: elemental weaknesses are dictated by an enemy's faction and their elemental composition. For example, the little guy that shoots a fire beam is weak to acid (because it's a robot) and ice (because it's a fire enemy). Robots are nigh immune to electric attacks, so that combo is ineffective against them. At its core, the game is about being adaptable and exploiting enemy weaknesses rather than creating cool general-purpose combos. That being said, I think you're right that there's very little incentive to trying out complex combos just now. Once there are more varied and complex enemies, those combinations should hopefully shine

- Zip comes with "DoNotShip" folder (Linux)
- Game crashed my GPU at first because framerate uncapped by defaul

Whoops, I'll look into that.

- Why do I want to kill the boss? Apparently it is not guarding the portal.

The miniboss room gives you a bigger chest with a lot more purple drops, which will be important when the game is more complete. There's no purpose right now.

The chests are a joke. I get a couple healing orbs (not even full health) when I can infinitely heal myself? No clue what scrap is for. At least make the chests always heal you to full; or put something actually exciting in them and let me do the healing myself.

The healing orbs are a convenience to speed up gameplay. It can take a while to fully heal yourself from low health, even more so in hard mode since it reduces the amount of healing you receive, so the healing orbs help to reduce the monotony. The scrap will be used to upgrade weapons in the future, it isn't implemented right now.

Again, thanks for playing. I will try your demo out as soon as I am able.