I like the concept/Idea that you describe in the game page, but it's definitely in too much of an early stage for someone to leave feedback for now
Really like the whole idea of trying to do a quake-like movement system. Although, I dont really see QUAKE for the time being, only being able to gain a lot of momentum from a ramp and maintaining it while jumping.
I can imagine that you can stack a LOT of speed if you are careful enough, and thats gonna mess up your reaction times... it'd be pretty nice to have the camera move ahead of you slightly while moving and to not zoom in too much... think of games like "Pizza Tower" or even "Speedrunners". That means not having the camera be adjusted by your mouse though, which should allow you to let people freely use their mouse for other things like a weapon, stungun, hook, flashlight...
Since its a 2D game you can't really do strafing, which is a shame since that means not being able to keep some momentum while turning around... this is pretty much solvable with how Speedrunners deals with this.
Enemies grab you instantly when you touch them. This is probably going to become an issue as the movement mechanics start being more grounded and people dart through the map. It means getting caught by something the moment they pop out of a door, and probably will feel unfair, specially since creatures stay locked on you until you reach a safe area. I imagine that making you grab immune when you reach a certain velocity would be enough, or allow you to floor slide to "dodge" a grab.
If you wanna push for more detailed and elaborate gore scenes, or about more niche kinks, I recommend having a way to disable those animations. The current one is brief and not really an issue at all, but still food for thought.
Biggest flaw I see at the moment is the dissonance between the fast paced movement and survival horror, in my opinion. It feels like putting cookie clicker or farm sim mechanics to a Doom game. I'm not saying you can't make a grime and dark looking bhop game, but players are either A) Be too scared to play with the movement, they want to be careful (like in any survival horror) B) Become the literal manifestation of a quake 3 comp player.
Nice work and good luck with this project! (Also, what does the character say when you press the taunt/talk button? Lol)
We released this demo as early as possible so that we can change the game easier in response to feedback, there's some good thoughts here.
I'm realizing when people think of Quake movement they see movement tech like bhopping and such that's not in our game, even though we're using the math from Quake which was translated for 2D. In 2D stuff like retaining momentum with those tricks doesn't translate, so maybe that's technically a bit misleading, will think this over.
The camera-bit is a good point. We noticed a lot of starbound/terraria/etc players don't mind it but a fair amount of people also disliked the mouse-looking mechanic. I'll bring up the idea of a automated camera system where the developer decides where the camera should be positioned and zoomed per-room, in order keep the action in-frame.
Our biggest inspirations for the current speed and grabbing mechanics are games like Rain World and Space Beast Terror Fright. We want to have that "Death Tag" feeling where there's little between the monster and the player's actions, since we're trying to be a tense horror game foremost. SBTF and Rain World do a great job at putting all the stress of surviving on the player's movement and positioning skills during a chase, and we also need the movement system to be fun with the environment since the majority of these games are walking around and running (we didn't think another walking sim horror game would track as well with the idea of being chased).
We noticed the door-thing early on too. We're planning to reduce ambiguity around doors once we get art assets for them: it's on the todo list that doors must always to indicate when something dangerous is close to the other side in order to keep players informed of off-screen dangers.
First off, thank you! Seeing new projects is fun, I wan't yall to have a good time while making this (Or at least, as much as you can get from indiedev lol).
Aah I see. Yeah, a lot of people have that first impression from mentioning quake. Perhaps boomer-shooter-like movement would be more accurate? I agree it should be thought over so to not cause wrong ideas.
Rainworld and SBTF move wildly different from what I saw on youtube videos, and I'd say Rainworld is the most interesting. The character is almost completely simulated with physics and its like they're made out of jiggle bones... flopping all over the place, letting velocity, acceleration, weight... do all the work. I'd say it's achievable as long as the foundation of your movement is quite unique as this. it's gonna need plenty of work for it to look appealing though (unless you want the main character to also look like a cluster of simulated pixels)
Fully agree, I've heard so much about Rainworld and how much pressure it puts under your shoulders. Thankfully their movement techs are still kind of slow paced and dont require much of your brain process moreso than usual reflexes/intuition... it won't need to you pay attention to everything as dashing through an entire map
Great to hear! Yeah some kind of early warning will do, just seeing the door shake with the doorsteps for example would be enough