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Oh this exist? Hell yes.

I really like the concept of this, this feels like the interactive tutorial taken to its extreme. And it's really good as well, I like how story is baked into it. That theming combined with the scenery (wind blowing the capes, a knight training you) does make for a really intriguing setting. Kind of makes me wonder what could come after this...

I'm not entirely convinced about grading the tutorial phase. It makes me feel anxious rather than challanged. It feels like the opposite of having a safe playground to learn in, here I'm immediately being tested. Might just be me who is student-damaged. I enjoy the "get up" system much more than the grades in the tutorial. 

I adore the attacks, and the combination of parrying and attacking is way too much fun! I feel there was a lot of variation here, and all the attacks were interesting on both their own and in combination. The switchup phase was really cool as well! It was a good balance between having to improvise while not being overwhelming.

The music was really good too! I do feel like you are starting to get a bit too comfortable with the style that you have though? You have changed up the instrumentation a bit between, but it's the same slightly melancholy mood in pretty much all tracks. I've been using chiptune.app to get midi files to learn from. Might be worth checking out.

Also, the animations are so so smooth! Especially the black circle, then red circle combo. It looks really powerful. And I love the squash and stretch in the jump, it just looks fun! Makes just jumping around feel good. The animation work really feels like all of your best tricks coming together.

All that said, fantastic work! This was a good way to spend an evening.

(+1)

Thanks! Glad you liked it. Really happy you found the attack patterns fun. I don’t usually spend so much time on a single boss fight, but since this game was just 1 fight, I had a lot of fun making the attack patterns more intricate.

I totally hear you on the grading system. When I watched my friends play it on discord pre-launch, I could hear the anxiety ramping up in their voices when they’d be close to no-damaging an attack, only to get hit at the end. The grades here were kind of an ‘engagement stop-gap’ to give players something to strive for during the practice phase, but if I ever return to this concept, I think I’ll have a more free-form practice mode (a ‘playground’ like you describe). Or maybe I’d do something like the player has to demonstrate a certain level of mastery before proceeding, but they get as many tries as they want.

Music is something that’s been on my ‘list of things to improve’ for a bit. I’ve been doing “seasonal themes” this year, so my fall season theme was “drawing”. I might do “winter of music” or something to give myself a reason to do some music exploration. I’m still happy with the OST, but I do feel like I’ve fallen into a bit of a formula. I’ll check out chiptune.app, I’m definitely in the market for new musical inspirations. I’ve been listening to a ton of jazz fusion recently, so I might try experimenting with that a little.

Thanks a ton for playing and for the comment. I think I always say this but I’m always really happy to get a notification from you.