Thanks for the amazing review and feedback! I was not expecting such a great response, I enjoyed your game so much too.
It was a challenge of mine to setup story better and find a way to communicate it smoothly, seems that I reached that goal. I wanted to play with the concept that monsters are a perspective, and thanks for preventing the spoiler :D
Oh the body count... I have a restart game function and I must forgot the line (boss_lives = 0;) my kingdom for that line, wonder if I can fix that and upload it. I had it in my to do to setup the boolean to avoid having the sound replay, silly me, I already had it for the dialog and my mind must have blocked at that point. Interesting that you mentioned the boss scale as a potential problem, I had to make some fixes along the way to ensure that the local scale for the grabbed boxes. I think you might be up to something here.
Finally, your recommendations:
- A checkpoint after the first blue door would be great: I agree completely, I test it quite a lot and I knew that would be useful even for me LOL.
- Sound. Even just a light ambient track, something that evokes sneaking around would be awesome: music is my achilles heel, adding some crunchy sounds for detection or a score for chasing would have been great and helped a lot.
- Maybe different armor for the boxes, so you could throw than once and some would be more valuable to have so you could quickly wipe out a room of enemies and feel more powerful: great idea, use the boxes as power ups, some can explode and attack others, some might cause delays other are exclusive for certain enemies, even a kill multiplier.
- A third state for the guard. Maybe if one sees you they yell an alert and every guard in a certain radius acts too. It would make being spotted more scary: I had it in the plan, if the player is in the cone of the enemy, it would do a sphereoverlap and check for nearby enemies to let them know that they need to chase the player too. I would love to do that, even peripheral vision. I saw a GMTK video about that was fascinating.
Again, thanks for your feedback and positivity! Sorry for the long response, but your reply was so nice and the feedback so on point that I wanted to return the respect.