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This is certainly a very good looking demo; the graphics are good and movement feels very natural.

I have to echo a couple of points made so far: the pickup prompt appears after your first death (and doesn't appear if you find an item before that); it tries to launch Discord on startup; and there seems to be no way to access the pause menu (I'm using keyboard).

The tutorial text is fine, but they're not necessarily located in the best places; I had fallen to my death several times before I learned I could roll, and I lost a further life to the monster before I discovered I could lock on.

One negative thing I would note about the graphics is that the lack of borders to platforms can make it difficult to see where the edges are, when the edge and the ground are both the same colour.

Unfortunately, the one thing that really didn't click with me was the combat. The strike-timing combo itself is fine, although I never could tell why some times a "hit" would still break the combo instead of continuing it (what I assumed to be an energy gauge next to the health bar never changed). More annoyingly, starting a combo will lock Tikal in place until the combo ends, while the enemy is free to attack; I've seen other people mentioning the ability to dodge, but I couldn't find any key that would let me do this, as both movement and jumping were disabled. This meant that it was usually better to attack twice to immediately break the combo than to play it the way it was actually intended to be played.

I think that one improvement that would mitigate a lot of these issues would be to have the key bindings visible (and maybe even changeable) from the start menu. Also, it would be nice to have opponents who are somewhere in difficulty between the immobile targets and the monster and robot.

Thanks for reading, and good luck with the game!

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Hi there! Thanks for the detailed feedback!

Okay, I'll definitely look into that pickup prompt issue. I am certain its another Unity input system bug that's causing that issue, but there are workarounds I can do in the game logic end to make sure that doesn't happen. Noted for a future update.

Hmm, yeah, this isn't the first time someone has said something to the effect of the controls half working which is just odd to me. It seems to be a computer to computer basis on that. It does make sense that the combat didn't exactly do it for you because the dodge is a very integral part of it. Because without the dodge you're a sitting duck, which is by design. I'll try to look into this but unfortunately, as this seems to a be a bug of Unity's input system itself, I'm not super sure where to start, but I'll look into it nonetheless. But just in case you simply couldn't find it, the binding for the dodge is left Ctrl, which you can only do while holding a direction. (though, that's something I could also fix in a later update, making the dodge work regardless.)

Key bindings are also in the pause menu which you get into with Escape, but if that doesn't work for you... then that is troubling. I guess in the mean time I'd recommend maybe trying to hook up a controller. PS4, Switch Pro, and Xbox controllers are all fully supported.

The Discord integration was a fun experiment but it seems to be causing nothing but issues for most so that will be removed in a future update.

Either way, thanks for playing and thanks for the constructive comment!

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Hmm, that could have been the problem. I tried the direction keys on their own, and I think I tried Ctrl too, but didn't think to try multiple keys at once. I would definitely suggest making it only the direction keys, as that feels far more intuitive.

But, yeah, I did definitely try Escape to pause, and that didn't work. Unfortunately, I don't have any controllers. I know a lot of games use P to pause; do you think that would make a difference? (I don't think it should, but you never know.)

Thanks for your reply!

Edit: I just played again, and the dodge does work, but it is very finnicky to have to press both buttons together. Sadly, Escape definitely doesn't work to pause.

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Hi there! Just wanted to let you know in this latest patch I did get to the bottom of all of these bugs and they should now all be fixed.  I also made changes to the dodge based on your suggestions. Thanks again!

Thanks! Both P and esc work for the menu now. The pig-wolves are a lot easier to beat with the new dodge, although I wish I could say the same for the robot... (I would suggest having more easier enemies to practise against to get the timings right, but I realise those are not going to be easy to code.)

One further suggestion I have is that it would be quite nice to be able to see the collected tutorial notes from the menu, as I got one just before falling to my death, and thus missed whatever tip was written on it.

Also, I see that there's an option for changing outfits? Are these implemented in game, and if so, would it be all right to know how to unlock them? Thanks!

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Good to hear!

One is unlocked by finding a secret area. Another is unlocked by finding the six mysterious symbols.

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I'll have to keep a look out for those then (I'm currently on 4/6 symbols and... well, I know a lot of places that the secret area isn't). EDIT: Is is a little thing that looks like a doll? Because if it is, I know where it is, but I have no idea how to get there...

It feels like Tikal should be able to drop down to hang on a ledge that he's already standing on. Are there any plans to implement something like this? EDIT: Likewise, being able to jump in different directions from the walls could be useful.

Also, another thing it would be nice to see on the pause screen would be the total number of collectibles (teeth, symbols, etc) that have been collected.

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Oh I definitely have more plans for Tikal's parkour in the next iteration including those. I just eventually had to set a stopping point for this demo because it takes a long while to animate, code, and test that sorta thing. Every bit of gameplay/character movement code is done from scratch and requires its own dedicated chunk of time to perfect.

Same goes for the pause menu. Don't worry, in the next major iteration of this game, it'll have far more options and information. This one was more or less barebones and function-only.

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That makes a lot of sense, yeah. Thanks for the reply, and good luck with the game.

EDIT: I found both of the costumes, and while they both look good, one of them has a bit of a clipping issue. If you're still thinking about adding other costumes, would Vacuulus pyjamas work?