An absolutely beautiful looking game. Congratulations. Some stunning work.
Without playing it, not really. The art style looks fantastic, and the concept of the game itself is attractive. My initial question for any third person flyer is always controls, closely followed by camera. Or possibly even the other way around. After that it's level design I'd say.
The gifs present a pretty good picture of the camera, the follow looks solid and smooth, and the level design looks quite open, which always helps with a game like this.
That means controls are your big one, especially with a mechanic like the wings-as-weapons one (which I love by the way, puts me in mind of the type of stunts you see with Falcon from the Avengers). This has the capacity to be very empowering for the player, pulling of amazing attacks and getting into a nice state of Flow, but it also has the biggest potential for frustration if the controls get in the way. I'd be very interested to see how it handled. Is there controller support? Or is it keyboard and mouse? Classic Wingman joystick perhaps? :)
As I've said, your level design looks open and free, which I would see as an important part of the player experience here, help them get in that Flow state we all want them to achieve. Mix it up with precision points. The old Pod Racer game was brilliant at doing that. You have the beautiful advantage of making your precision points "friendly". In Pod Racer, if you missed the precision you'd hit the wall, lose your momentum (and probably the race). But that losing of momentum was a big emotional downer to the player. Good motivation to not do it, but also a pretty big punishment. In your game, your precision moments might be something like cutting a cable with your wings. If you miss that, you don't lose momentum, you just are susceptible to a hit from the boss for longer. I think this works greatly in your favour for having a player walk away from a short play of your game (at a conference or PAX for instance) with a smile on their face and Inner Space on their lips.
All in all, I'd say it's a quality looking game. I hope that feedback is helpful.
Wow, thanks for the detailed feedback, it was really cool to hear your thoughts based on what you've seen. Fortunately, the design choices we're making, I think, line up nicely with the points you've emphasized. The open spaces are much more forgiving and allow for large fluctuations between high and low precision gameplay. On a more global scale the flow would generally be: flying to a structure (low precision) > understanding/entering structure(medium precision) > navigating/solving structure interior (high precision) > exit structure into air (low precision) > loop. We're taking a fair amount of inspiration from WindWaker/Shadow of the Colossus here in that both games have moments where players can reflect and observe as they move from point A to B. Additionally, because it's all player directed (the whole "if you can see it, you can go to it" thing), the oscillating gameplay intensity feels really nice. I think it breaks things up well anyway haha.
So camera and controls are things that our programmer is trying to be very conscious of. He's iterated on them more times that I can remember at this point, and each time they get/feel better. There's always more playtesting to be done, but I'm pretty confident in our controls and camera setup. I'll see if I can get a gif or video up showing off some of their more nuanced elements. Oh and we're supporting:
- Mouse and Keyboard
- xinput controller (recommended)
- Steam controller
- flightstick
We're definitely trying to craft a more relaxed experience than most dogfighters/racers/etc. I'm glad you like what you've seen so far ^_^