Your criticism is totally valid. I honestly haven't done anything to improve the casual experience because I made this game for platform fighter fans (particularly melee) who are used to the no buffer and prefer it that way.
I have other projects that are much more accessible in the works and I see this game really as just a love letter to melee. There is the argument of an optional buffer like you mentioned that I'm not ruling out, but I feel like if there is a buffer then it undermines the technicality, and that can push away my target audience.
Oh hey, thanks for responding. I'm fine with the game being a love letter to Melee, I think it's a really unique vision to have for a game like this. We've obviously seen countless multiplayer fighting games aspire to recapture Melee's magic, but applying that to a single player beat em up ROUGELIKE? Conceptually brilliant.
My main concern is that I felt like a singleplayer game like this will just inherently attract a much broader and more casual audience than just Melee fans, I mean I checked it out because it was a roguelike (one of my absolute favorite game genres) with an exceptionally unique gameplay hook featuring gameplay inspired by one of my all time favorite series, being Smash, of which I've played every game AFTER Melee, more than anything. Singleplayer games just naturally attract casual players due to the lowered stakes, and Melee's controls are pretty notorious for being really difficult for casual players, especially those who've only played the newer Smash titles (which consists of the vast majority of platform fighter players), to get used to, so I was suggesting that it would be beneficial to add optional changes to the gameplay and controls to give those players something more familiar to them, thus expanding the potential audience of the game and reducing the amount of people that become alienated by the controls. I explicitly wanted them to be optional for the exact same reason that Celeste's accessibility options are, so that you can maintain your current vision of high technicality and precision while still giving more casual players a way to play the game in a way that, while untrue to the game's purpose, still allows them to enjoy it and experience it in a way that's comfortable for them. Then, maybe once they've gotten into the game with the easier controls, they can commit to learning the real controls and experience the game how it's meant to be played.
Ultimately, it's your game, and you can make it however you like, I'll still buy and play it regardless. I just felt I should report my personal experience, my personal issues as a consumer, and offer a suggestion on how to remedy them in a way that makes the game more accessible and easily appreciated by more people without forcing changes that ruin the game's appeal and compromise your artistic vision.
Just want to toss my hat in and say for the love of god, keep the no buffer! Love letter to Melee is what I've been looking for for *years* and the packaging you're putting it in is AMAZING. The speedrun potential is going to be awesome, I could really see it being a hit and I think a massive part of that is the movement!