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Fredspipa2 years ago

I'm trying to be restrained and honest in my praise and give ideas for improvement, but for this I'm just going to tell you to keep going. Really, really great fucking work.

There's no point in pointing out the "faults" here, because there's always a million of them in a jam game, and here they don't stem from bad design decisions but a lack of time. What I mean by that is things like visual feedback, pacing, balancing, etc. and those are areas you obviously are going to succeed at judging by what you managed to pull together here, so again I'm not going to comment on that.

What I am going to comment on is the combat, character and enemy design, because wow. So much thought put into them, way above any of the jam games I've tried so far. The way they're combined to counter your instincts as a player without being random works so well, I was giggling to myself out of joy as I was playing.

Example: the room where you enter and there's the spawner mobs along the top wall. If you go in defensively, and retreat when all the other mobs surprises you, you put yourself at a disadvantage. The mechanics encourage you to be aggressive (Souls-like), the back cannon is a genius early addition to help with that, so to get the upper hand and to kill enemies fast enough (spawners put a time pressure on the situation) you need to get the most out of both guns, so that means towards the center of the room. That means dodging bullets from all angles.
Even if you do manage to kite them along the wall, or shoot from a narrow hallway, the way the different enemy types act means they will quickly overpower you. At no point did I feel like I could outsmart them with my "gamer brain", I had to outperform them. I had to take risks, and got rewarded for it.

And this is where the take on the theme works so well. You've incorporated ideas I've seen in many other games here already, but here it just clicks. I'm genuinely interested in seeing how changes to the cell is going to affect the flow of combat, how it's going to change your priorities.

There's a bunch more here to be impressed by, on so many fronts, but I'm out of keyboard juice. Good luck continuing on this title!

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Golden Projects2 years ago (1 edit)

Thank you so much for your words, and if it's not a problem I would still like your feedback on things to improve, since this is only the second game that I've published (That was not a crappy game made with RPG maker lol)

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Fredspipa2 years ago (2 edits)

Hmmm areas to improve... I can think of things it could be smart to avoid or to strive for, based on what's done right here.

  • Avoid scaling health to increase difficulty on enemies, and keep player health scaling small. Make a 5% increase to health feel huge and have a real impact on your strategies. A unique way of doling out rewards in strength can be through your actions (think Elder Scrolls series) and fits with an evolving organism. Your physiology (traits and appearance) changes on a curve instead of in steps, if that makes sense, based on how you play. Make you grow your own character, literally train it, instead of picking up upgrades or selecting from a menu.
  • Make retries and/or replays the focus. Try finding the rhythm that prevents the player from relaxing their controllers, but doesn't feel rushed, for a death/retry loop so they can stay in the flow. If your play style changes your character over time, it's tempting to see the results from playing differently, and players gets to see more aspects of the game.
  • Don't do procedural generation. It's OK to replay the same areas on multiple playthroughs if the combat is varied enough, and it often can just make your game less interesting as players instinctively notice no matter how good it is.
  • The concept does sound good for a roguelite, so it's tempting to go that way, but my instinct tells me it will work better as a defined progressive story you play through 1-5 times depending on the player. Better to be short and sweet though, than long and tedious for this concept.
  • Don't indulge too much in particle effects or light sources, less is often more and shouldn't be added early cause that constant slowdown in launch time and framerate really adds up to the frustration and lack of momentum when developing. There's other ways of making it feel good early on that doesn't affect performance, like slight camera shake and physical feedback. Write yourself a nice and versatile camera shake function and you can use it for both combat and story telling, even in cutscenes. Your cannons in this game felt really weak compared to their actual effectiveness.
  • If you're lucky you can get someone dedicated to sound. Sound design is going to do a lot for the feeling of being inside a body, like a muted no-reverb kind of soundscape with "squelching" and indistinct bodily sounds, and if you do that right it's going to be the X factor that makes the environments memorable.
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