Post by FrozenTrovador in Suggestions / Feedback

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FrozenTrovador36 days ago (11 edits) (+1)

Hello! First of all, given it's the first time I see your game and is in its early stages, you got a very solid work already done! Congrats!
Very excited of how it's looking and to know the future of this game, it called my attention a bit when I read it was going to be inspired by Packetrat's game.
Upon reading just how much I typed on this.... sorry for typing the entire Bible, lol.

____Feedback
The general movement and animations of the character feels nice, nothing to really say there. Jumping currently has a fixed height, I'd say it feels better when it scales up depending on how long you hold 'Space'. The character struggles to jump down from platforms when moving, stopping you in place as if the game tries to move and stop you at the same time, and holding 'Down' doesn't let you jump off of all platforms you stand on (As in, if theres two platforms ontop of eachother, you cant just hold the button to pass through both).

Very nice aesthetic/visual style. Specially for a solo dev project, this looks pretty neat and should not cause you much trouble compared to other games, you could even make slight variations on the tileables and some objects for depth, subtle guides for the player (we are yellow tape HATERS here) or to identify different areas. I've read about your level roadmap from another post, and I'd be careful to see how each area links together. No idea on what the lore or script is for the game, but never hurts to point that out.

Basic attacks seem to not do much damage, sticks you in place for a long bit and are spammable, enemies are flung off from the attacks, its sound effect isn't very pleasant to listen to after a while (sounds like shattering glass), and I find no reason to hold my attacks. Making combat a bit faster and "free" could benefit you in the long run, specially if you are planning on adding new mechanics afterwards. It can grow a very toxic/unsatisfying behavior of just standing around smashing your attack button, which will be an issue in boss fights. I recommend checking other metroidvanias and side scrollers, if you are scared of the controls getting too difficult for keyboard users... using the mouse buttons for combat doesn't feel bad at all in games.

Very nice menus, there's already a lot of accesibility (If we can call vore fetish tags as such lol) and is completely functional. Given how -Sharp- all the graphics in the game are, seeing the font be slightly blurry feels off, like I suddenly changed my screen resolution. I would recommend having one/few tags for certain sounds like screaming, bone crunching, crying, etc. (if you ever plan to add those in the first place)

The game feedback when interacting with enemies is a bit too little in my opinion. Perhaps this is probably because of this being an early demo, but it's still nice to mention. A hurt/stunned stance for enemies would be great, specially whenever you jump/struggle away from a grab (Currently, enemies either switch between walk/idle animations, or just stand still). The player could have more sounds, like landing on the floor, jump, footsteps...

I'd be careful with the "Metroidvania" side of the game, the backtracking. The area with the elevators/sliding platforms forces you to wait for them to come down every time you wanna go up, which is slightly annoying with how slow it is compared to going down, which is simply jumping off the platforms. Either make the platforms appear already at the bottom when you activate them, or make it so you can easily toggle the elevator position while laying the map out... basically make it feel nice to go back and forth. Speaking of maps, one would be nice but I've seen you have one in the elevators area, so making sure there's a few around as quality of life would be great!

____Bugs (Or seemingly so)
Player is capable of landing hits on enemies behind doors, and I imagine walls too (though this is impossible with the current level design).
Boss fight music won't stop after beating them (very minor since you can simply leave the area or reload save, but still).

After escaping from struggling, you have invincibility for a few moments against that enemy. That doesn't happen when you are close to another. You can easily end up locked between two of them.

The plant enemy can be escaped from without receiving damage. Might not be a bug, but careful in case you want to make a platforming area with a bunch of plants below, players could potentially just jump from plant to plant without loosing hp at all.

____Suggestions

Given how big areas are, I assume there would be upgrades like double jumps and other possible movement mechanics. Perhaps enemies that could attempt to vore you from a distance could be cool in these cases: A frog sticking its tongue on you and having a struggle mechanic to pull away while it drags you, a spider lasoing you in the air, a suspicious jackalope doing voodoo doll vore on you if you stay in their line of sight for too long... I've read you dont want a struggle system, but the current one is a bit too forgiving, perhaps you can make something more similar to the game Echidna Wars DX, or just quicken the struggle system (Eg. Movement button appears on screen, press the right one quickly enough or you are getting caught)

Speaking of enemies, you could even make certain ones that can appear in any area just to mess around with people. Slime mimics that hide as objects from the map, additional ghost enemies appear in areas you die a lot... (though these kind of enemies can do for a whole area/level of their own).

Zoom out the camera a little bit, or make it adjustable by the player. Not only this means some can zoom in to see all the d e t a i l but so it doesn't feel too claustrophobic. Specially helps if you are planning on adding ranged enemies, can mess with the level design though, up to you if to adjust it at all or make it a slider for the player to mess with.

If you need more ideas, I honestly think you can take inspiration from SCP and the game Prey. Its gimmicky type of creatures make for great inspiration for enemy concepts, and you can see it in multiple games already (Enemy that approaches only when you dont see them, slow but unstoppable enemy , sound based hound, hacker placing traps around...)

Dont forget to give some love and care to the sound design, it can really give the punch to a lot of things, and be the reason why some elements might fall flat or not feel as impactful... for example, ambience music.

I am a huge fan of modding tools, but I haven't seen a single project try make mod tools for Godot games, so this isn't much of a suggestion but rather a thought. If you are able to find anything about it, or even create it, that'd be sick as f**k.

Repeating myself a bit here since I do talk about this in the feedback section, but using the mouse for stuff like attacks feels way better than having everything on the keyboard. You might not use it to move a cursor around, but it's more comfortable in my opinion.

Pthalo26 days ago(+1)

t h a t s a l o t o f f e e d b a c k

I can say that at this point, a few of the issues you mentioned are either redone at this point, or are on the todo list. Attack sound has been changed, regular attack has been replaced with single hit attack, charged attack does more damage, enemies have hit indication, etc.

As for the things that I haven't addressed yet:

Jump height / drop down - Hold to jump is something that I could potentially implement down the line, and I could definitely see it being an issue with flying enemies in some cases if you can't limit your movement. Currently jumping just adds a velocity impulse to the character, so I'd need to look into how to rewrite the jump script. Fall-through is something that I want to fix, I just need to tweak the code a little so that it checks if the down key is continuously being pressed instead of just a single impulse. All it does is just move the player down slightly, which causes them to pass through the one-way collision on platforms, so I need to make sure this wouldn't cause any issues if it were continuously happening on the ground.
Menu things - As for the blurry text, I briefly looked into text stuff while writing this, and found that you can turn off antialiasing for fonts. Text looks much crisper as of now, if a tiny bit weird in some places due to font sizing at 2x pixel scale. Enemy messages also look significantly better now too. I don't plan on adding sound settings like the ones mentioned, just because I generally try to keep stuff fairly lighthearted, and that's a little outside of my comfort zone.
Enemy stun / break invincibility - Enemies actually do have a stun state that they switch to when the player breaks from a grab, it's just not very obvious at the moment. I'll add clearer stuns to the todo list, probably as like a half-opacity sprite type thing. As for the player breaking the grab near other enemies, that's actually something super important that I hadn't considered, because I was just testing on single enemies while making the break system. I will be adding a player invincibility period on break to the todo list.
Map - I've mentioned it elsewhere, but a map is planned as an unlockable at a later point, otherwise having more diegetic maps and other directional hints up until that point. Fast travel from certain save points will also be implemented probably in the update after this next one, which should limit how much you can get lost as well. The elevators in the large vertical room can have their start position switched, but I originally was worried that people might just drop down the pit without turning on the power, so they were set to start at the top. I've since realized that I can just put a fall-through platform over the default position without any collision issues, so this can be changed.
Camera zoom - The camera has been zoomed out somewhat at this point. I originally thought that I couldn't adjust the camera zoom without breaking the pixel scale, but changing the game's window scale instead of the camera gets around this, and doesn't break when going fullscreen. (current release scale is at 960p, development version is at 1200p. Not a massive change in zoom, but enough that ranged and fast enemies should be much less bs. ) Zoom can't be manually adjusted in-game without breaking pixel scale or potentially seeing past the edges of the map though.

All of the bugs mentioned have been looked at at this point (the plant thing is actually deliberate; the chain jump is exactly why they don't do instant damage, specifically so that it can be used to climb walls).

The suggestions you've given are pretty good as well, though I don't plan on adding a struggle mechanic to breaks to avoid pacing issues. I especially like the prop mimic enemy, and attacks like the ranged grab. Things like that could definitely have a struggle mechanic still in there for the hook grab before the actual main grab.

I would be open to modding, but I have literally no idea how that would work in Godot, and my code skills are definitely not at a level that I would be able to do it without a lot of research, trial and error. (That and I don't want people to see the actual spaghetti hell that is the entity setup lol)

FrozenTrovador24 days ago (1 edit) (+1)

Glad to hear the majority has been solved! And yeah, I tend to overexplain myself since im passionate with gamedev too haha!

I can imagine you can patch the jump so you get vertical velocity by holding down until a set deltatime. That should allow you to not redo all the code, but itll need some value tweaking so the player doesnt shoot upwards like a rocket.... no idea if something like that would be possible, my only code knowledge is with Unity, there should be some Godot sidescroller guide with such info for sure.

Cool! That sounds about right for the antialiasing. Personally glad you will be taking a more lighthearted approach lmao, so fair enough!

I did see there was an invincibility state, is just that it felt like it was from [EnemyInstance] to [Player]. So, if theres a second enemy nearby, it would not be stunned. I'd have to check for myself again though, cannot say for sure. Nice it's there!

Using plants as platforming sounds really cool! Excited to see how that will affect the level design. I'd recommend tweaking the camera so it doesn't zoom in right after getting grabbed then, so we dont have it zoom in and out constantly, could be disorienting.

Yeah I saw your concerns with struggle systems and pacing, which I do agree that it can be incredibly annoying to deal with whenever you are not getting grabbed on purpose... is just, as you said, some enemies with ranged attacks might need it more so they don't become insufferable. Echidna Wars DX took that kind of approach, very similar to what you have for now, only very specific enemies have a struggle mechanic and instead uses a magic/stamina bar (you use it to either do powerful attacks or avoid damage from the first 1-3 grabs).

If the camera showing too much of the scene becomes troublesome, I'd suggest creating some camera boundaries, just so you don't have to deal with the camera showing potentially out of bounds. You know, stopping the camera from moving to the right when you reach said side of the room. Though if you wan't to create secret rooms for the player to find, it might cause more problems than the intended... something to mess around with I guess!

Yeah modding can be a bitch and a half, and most of it comes from having very grounded devtools to ease the process. Don't blame you at all if you prefer to not deal with all that garbage, I wasn't even able to find a straightforward enough answer when I looked at it myself lol.

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