Post by KasperBahrentz in Blu comments

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Pretty good demo overall. The 2D-art is great (the pause-screen is amazing!) and the polygon models are pretty good too. The music is definitely the best part of the game, it perfectly captures the atmosphere you are going for.

I quit after dying twice, both times because my character got softlocked between two baddies attacking him. I feel that you should be more forgiving with your checkpoint placement, to prevent people from feeling like they lose a lot of progress :p

I tried out both control schemes, but neither seemed great to me. For the arrow-key layout, I found hitting the attack-button really bothersome and awkward. For the WASD layout, it really broke the flow that I had to take my hand of the mouse to do certain actions (unfolding ladders). A gamepad control-scheme would definitely be preferable, though I assume it's absent due only to this being a demo.

I'd also say that the game felt quite slow and clunky on the whole. It controlled relatively well, but everything just felt sort of off. Most of the animations could benefit from some touch-up as well, though I will say that the attack-animations were pretty great.

Combat felt quite one-sided. Either I would soft-lock the enemy or the enemy would soft-lock me, neither of which was very engaging.

On the whole though, you seem to be going in the right direction. Good job and keep it up! I look forward to seeing more of the project.

MyOwnGames3 years ago

Hello! thank you for your feedback =D

About being locked, yeah unfortunately I just add the Medium and Hard Level two days ago (VERY BAD IDEA) because some people found the first demo too easy and I didn't anticipate that this situation it could happen. Really sorry about that... It really messed the first experience of a lot of people :'(

I just posted a new build with no hard mode and a rebalanced medium mode. I will try to fix the problem asap at a deeper level very soon to make it more fair and engaging for the player, someone already suggests me a very good idea, it should be done in the next couple of days.

About the keyboard mapping, I'm sorry about that too ^^, I always play with a controller so I didn't really know how to map them. I just had a lot of feedback on it, I'll change it next week fore sure. But the controller should have worked thought :/ It is possible that the layout is only displayed if the controller is a Dualshock or a Xbox controller, but technically, you can enter the game and still play with the controller, you just have to figure out the controls during the tutorial. Did you tried with a PS or Xbox controller or one from an other platform?

And in general, I will improve the game on many points. I'm solo on it so I just had the necessary technical feedback before the demo was released, but not a lot of "real players" played it, so there were a lot of things I wasn't aware about. Also I took time to polish some things, but there are also things I just let in their "just working" states. I'll do my best to make it better very soon!

Again, thanks a lot! Hope you'll get the chance to retry the demo in the future :)

KasperBahrentz3 years ago

That's a problem on my part then. Great to hear that controller support is already included! I guess I was initially confused by the "Keyboard only" text in the controls menu, though I now know what you mean.

I played through the demo with the updated difficulty, and actually managed to finish it this time! The difficulty is a lot better now, though far from perfect. I still think game overs lead to much more frustration than they should. Losing all of your money is a big pain, and other things such as unfolded ladders resetting is also a questionable design choice in my opinion.

I liked the weapon variety , abilities and bosses. Though I've gotta say that the game doesn't feel much like a Metroidvania. It was quite linear safe for a few keys, and also very combat focused. That's not necessarily a problem, it just wasn't what i was expecting. Generally I'll also say that keys are a quite boring way of locking off certain parts of the world, and that more ability focused locks would be preferable.

I discovered a few bugs during this playthrough, but that is to be expected, and it was nothing game breaking.

Little things like the tutorial birds and the dancing shopkeeper definitely put a smile on my face. You are clearly passionate about the project, and it shows! Keep up the good work. Looking forward to more!

MyOwnGames3 years ago

Thank you very much. I will!

I take note about the locking system. I will also take some time to adjust the different levels of difficulty very soon.

I'm posting a new build where the player don't have to put his hand off the mouse (Refuse and Accept also work with W and S), character turns toward the mouse and WASD keyboard + Mouse has been set by default.

If I may ask a question, in your first post, when you talked about the position of the attack button being awkward, Do you mean the "Special Attack" button in this config?

Thank you very much for the valuable feedback :)

Best,
Dam

KasperBahrentz3 years ago

I was actually thinking of the attack buttons on the "Only keyboard" layout. They are in a position that makes it quite uncomfortable (for me at least) to use. I quickly found out that I way prefer the keyboard and mouse setup, though I do still think that the special attack button on Ctrl could have a better placement. I personally think the control button is too far down to reach naturally, so maybe the middle mouse button (clicking on the scroll wheel) would be a better choice? The same goes for the heal button, which I think could be more optimally placed on F or E.

MyOwnGames3 years ago

You're totally right! I use a special WQSD config for AZERTY keyboard to play games (French problems ^^), so I didn't noticed that the Ctrl was sooo far from the other buttons... it's totally irrationnal to have to bend the little finger so much to reach a key, not here to play guitar haha.
Thank you very much for the feedback and the little talk, it was really pleasant to share thoughts with you :)
Have a nice week-end!

KasperBahrentz3 years ago

Thank you too for listening! (:
And good luck with the game!

itch.io

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