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Guessy4 years ago (1 edit)

It feels stunlock-y; getting hit knocks you around and stops you firing, making you unable to stop the enemy from firing, if that makes sense? Even if you're not taking damage with every hit you lose a lot of control of your character.

...Honestly I never actually noticed you move differently with different weapons. Maybe that could have been made clearer? Heck, if the pistol-mode could double-jump that would encourage its use a lot. Though given you shoot horizontal projectiles you still need to be level at some point with the enemy to shoot them, which jumping around a lot hampers. Currently, the best 'strategy' to use against enemies is to just stand outside their range and plink them. You'd need to either break up the long sightlines in the level geometry or make aiming free-directional to try and combat that.

EDIT: Oh, and despite the screen telling you to use a gamepad... you cannot navigate the menu with a gamepad. Or at least I couldn't with an xbox controller in Opera.

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Ran d'Reille4 years ago (1 edit)

Wow I didn't realize that it wasn't clear how you move much slower (like 50% of dual gun mode) with the assault rifle; I thought the difference was obvious enough considering I used completely different walking animation for the assault rifle and assault rifle alone. Double jumping with the dual gun sounds like a good idea - I want players to feel like "swift ninjas" when using the dual gun mode.

Oh wait do you know that you can actually shoot downwards? I suppose I did not make a level that makes it necessary to use that move but... you can shoot downward... and shooting downwards somewhat gives the player a lift. My bad for also not making it obvious

I don't think I will implement free shooting... this, I must admit, is the main weakness with pixel arts... It is impossible for me to implement such a thing with pixel art. m(_ _)m

Regarding enemies... I think a solution would be slightly more complex AI. The enemy should not notice the player all the time and perhaps add a little element of stealth... I think this is the main problem. This solution tho... is easier said than done... T_T

I just noticed that I might be able to take a few notes from the Metal Slug series due to the somewhat similar gameplay... that game also has similar shooting mechanics and enemy attacks...

Regarding gamepad... you navigate with the left analog. The D-Pad is for changing modes in the game while left analog is for movement -- perhaps at least for the main menu I should've made it possible to use D-Pad huh... ;_;

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Guessy4 years ago (3 edits) (+1)

I did not! And yeah, just some tutorial messages in the background would have helped out a lot to explain all this stuff. My first experience was 'mess about figuring out the controls, discover weapon-switching, find the pew-pew gun, stick with pew-pew gun because it Shoot Good better than the others.

Free-shooting + pixel art is hardly impossible: you can do it with 6 frames (up, up45, forward, down45, down), flip for the opposite direction and as long as the bullets are free-aiming people generally won't care if the character isn't (though you'll need a crosshair for obvious reasons). You'd probably need to split the sprite into upperbody/lowerbody if you want to run-and-gun and still stay sane as an animator, mind.

I wouldn't say you need complex AI, just to build your levels around the AI you've got. As it is, there's a lot of open space, so the player can just outrange the goons, and the tank is only threatening when you can't casually jump over its shots. If you want players to be dodging attacks at close distance... force them to close the distance. Even giving the mooks a range boost would help as long as they can't fire from offscreen.

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