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XCVG4 years ago

Thanks for playing! I know the feeling of getting super busy unexpectedly, it can be pretty stressful.

I'm assuming you didn't read the postmortem- which is fine, it's long as hell and I know you've been busy- so I'll give you the short version here. I started off with a very different project, one much bigger in scope, and realized it wasn't really doable a few weeks into the jam. I hurriedly retooled what I had into something very, very different and of course much smaller. That's where a lot of the weirdness and, yes, flaws come from I think. 

In particular the style of combat and the way it's balanced ended up weird.

Magic was always planned to be infinite and recharging, but in the original concept there was a progression to it. You would start off with pretty weak magic and gain stronger attacks over the course of the game. I ended up basically with the attacks I implemented for testing, slightly tweaked, and granted pretty much immediately.

Having limited bullets probably seems odd and kind of pointless as well but again, in the original concept, there was more to it than that. There would have been ammo pickups (these are actually implemented but unused) and I even wanted to have it so you could pick up new weapons.

I am kind of surprised that you found the enemies to be too strong. In testing I found I blew through them easily, and so did most of my friends. That being said most of my friends play a lot of shooters.

I think there is a trick to it which you're missing- which is entirely fair since it's never actually explained in the game itself- and that's how guns and magic are balanced. Enemies have shields and health. Magic is more effective against shields, bullets more effective against health. Take down their shields with the magic, then shoot them.

Is the dialogue box simply boring and uninspiring or does it have legibility issues? The former is something I'll try to improve next time, the latter is something I'll patch ASAP.

I've gone back and forth on the size of the text and the dialogue box itself a lot since Garlic Gang. The problem I've run into is that what works for a 27" monitor doesn't work for a 13" laptop screen and vice versa. Someday I might make it a user-configurable option, or try to do something fancy and adaptive.

As for quality over quantity, well... this is as good as it gets. I did try to polish things up more this time though at the end I was too burned out to get the last few bits in. I know there are some super polished games in this jam and I do find them very impressive. I used to strive for that but it was always a struggle, and over the past few years I've found that I enjoy making weird broken janky shit a lot more. I know this one won't win any awards, but that's not really what I was ever going for.

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Ran d'Reille4 years ago (3 edits)

I see. Yeah I unfortunately didn't read the post mortem XP

For the enemies... now that I know this experience was not intended... well with that explanation now I know what was going on...

...so basically in between my bullet attacks the enemies must have regenerated the shields and that's why they seemed to have really thick HP while I was playing it. And yea I suck at FPS games -- my specialty is bullet hell SHMUPs XP

The players were probably expected to figure that out because that system is basically the same as the player's; but imo it's not intuitive at all. This is an area that could've been polished: give some effects indicating the enemy has got a shield that depletes; for example when shot give a barrier that changes color that breaks when the shield gets broken (I actually don't know whether you implemented this or not tho but if you did I didn't notice).

Now as with the enemy strength itself... unless your aim is for a grim atmosphere where the players are made to feel weak and powerless, either weaken those standard enemies (in particular, try removing the shields for the standard enemies) or add some enemies that the player can easily butcher.

There are certainly a ton of things you can improve and polish. Aside from the above, the most glaring problem is in the dialogues. It's not the contents that's bad, although some stuffs in the dialogue indeed should be trimmed imo. It's the appeal of the dialogue box and text. No offense here, but if I may be frank, it's just so, so painful to read. Make the texts bigger and decorate it more man -- my suggestion would be to make the dialogue box style in similar style with the super polished UI :P

> I enjoy making weird broken janky shit a lot more

Wellp. No complainin here. I feel the same way. I guess Game Jams ARE good for experimental games. But game jams can also be good to train the polishing skill when your game is shorter, and players enjoy polished games more.

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XCVG4 years ago

Killing the Shades off is quick if and only if you use the magic+bullets combo... and I think this is where my limited testing strategy (force my friends to play it, basically) really fell down. That combo is very similar to something in Halo called the "noob combo" and my friends all play Halo. For us it was almost instinctive, but for a player coming in from the cold yeah, why would you even try that?

Otherwise it takes almost a full magazine, which is probably a little excessive in retrospect. By FPS standards it's not unreasonable but more into bullet-sponge mid-level enemy territory. From my limited experience SHMUPs have fairly short TTK on non-boss enemies in general, don't they? I can see why you'd find the Shades so overpowered.

I do see the value in having an absolute cannon fodder basic enemy. I didn't really think of it at the time and I'm not sure if I'd put such an enemy in were I to do this again given how small and short the game was, but if I was going a bit bigger in scope I'd slot something in under the existing Shades. Some kind of Lesser Shade, maybe. I think it would add something to the combat in addition to serving as a gentler introduction.

There is a visual indicator for the enemy's shields- it's the glow they give off which fades as they take damage and there is a bit of a flash and pop when they drop. Unfortunately- and you're not the first to bring this up- it didn't work out as well in practice as it did in theory. Part of it is the effect just not being noticeable enough- in particular the audio cues are basically inaudible in the heat of combat. I think it also would have helped a lot the point it out at least once, which is again something that would have been in the original much bigger concept but was left by the wayside.

I think there might also be a bug with the lighting effect that causes it to become almost invisible when enemies drop below about half shields but I've never confirmed that.

I find your disdain for the dialogue box kind of amusing to be honest. I will try to make it nicer next time. But no promises.

Out of curiosity, what kind of setup are you playing this on? You've mentioned twice that you found the text too small but to me it actually seems too big. 

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Ran d'Reille4 years ago (3 edits)

Well in regular SHMUPs indeed there are usually a ton of enemies whose sole purpose is simply to be mowed down (low ttk) so the player can feel powerful; and only the bigger enemies take a bit to kill XP

Yup I don't play HALO. Such concept is so alien to me. I can't deduce by myself that the shield is weaker to magic, or that I shoukd expect the enemies to have shield -- I thought only the player had that kind of mechanic because you know... the player is an armored magical girl XD

As for my setup... I'm not really sure tbh. I play on Windows 10 w/ 1920×1080 resolution screen size - full screen. I don't know what other informations might be relevant, but the reading the dialogue texts felt like reading Wikipedia pages -- it's that small in my screen (well I think I'm exaggerating a bit but still)

I think another issue is how big of a chunk of the screen the dialogue box takes. In other visual novels (e.g. DDLC, Steins;Gate) the dialogue box is only like 1/4 of the screen vertically at most. The gigantic dialogue box felt intimidating to read I think. You should only present a small amount of text at the time to the player for Visual Novels I think XP

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XCVG4 years ago

Some shooters do that, some don't. Closest to what you describe I can think of off the top of my head is the Flood Infection Forms from Halo, but I hate fighting them. 

The shields thing is probably something that would have been more obvious in the original concept. Your own shield mechanic would have been introduced and would have had plot significance, and the characters would have had a discussion at some point about the best way to fight the mysterious monsters.

I think you've hit the nail on the head with the height of the dialogue box! I've called my games visual novels, but in all honesty the dialogue system draws more from western RPGs than anything. Looking at both Fallout New Vegas and The Outer Worlds, both of them use at most as much vertical space as I do, and- this is something that's never occurred to me before- it's dynamic. The height of the dialogue box is generally a lot smaller than mine because it's sized to its contents.

I don't know when I'll get a chance to prototype it but that is absolutely what I'm going to try next. I'll probably have to rethink how I do character portraits at the same time. Then again they've looked a little weird since I switched to a semitransparent dialogue box anyway.

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