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(+1)

To start, I must apologise sincerely for my harshness. I tend to not mince words but that is no excuse for rudeness. I would like to still emphasize that your game is still very solid and I feel is the polish all games should strive for because I FEEL that quality and effort you put in. 

Anyway to give a proper response, I rewatched my own VOD to regather my thoughts. 

I think the bug might be entirely the demo so I feel that I could disregard that money and sound but entirely. An oversight? maybe a build issue but regardless, its nothing a bit of debugging can't fix.

Now to the crux of it. For the controls, I recommend you do away with the WASD + Arrow keys and instead opt for WASD being the control, space bar to jump and the mouse as the key "attack" function. Left click to shoot and such. Maybe map some other buttons to do other things that are convenient like Q and R. I feel that this would do your game a lot more justice since you can just use the mouse to click during the RPG section, to attack during most of the games and such. However, I understand it'll be an insane programming feat and if you feel its better to stick to WASD as the interaction buttons and the Arrows and movement, I recommend the ability to remap it. I think this could mitigate a lot of issues but I feel like its not gonna do much cuz I feel that games like these should be simple-ish and let me get right to it. Alternatively maybe you could also had a huge "Play with Keyboard or Gamepad" option. As mentioned, I feel that would be a good indicator, I could easily get my XBox controller to play. Still something to consider.

As for the RPG section being clunky. I gave it a lot of thought as to why and how to fix it. The why is a bit vague but it feels like an old FF game interface or something you'd see from an RPG maker game. Feels classic. However, I looked back at it and functionally it was perfect, I even praised it for being perfect. I feel that the issue was the pace change. You started off with a Bullet Hell, then to a Rogue Shooter, then if I picked the other side, a Platformer, so to change the pace to RPG... it would slow down and make the experience clunky. My solution to this, is fairly simple. Give the main character, AOE spells right off the bat and have MP be refilled per hit rather than through potions. Small changes BUT I feel that this would speed up the RPG sections without making it too easy. Consider this, that each monster requires 2 to 3 hits to kill, You drop anywhere between 2 to 3 monsters and that means 6 hits in total if its the best case and 9 to maybe more hits at worst. So an AOE spell that early helps. I also saw the trailer and guess that, maybe, the companion girl would be the AOE spell caster? I might be wrong but still waiting to that point, might be too late to establish a pace and my mind just went from "gotta go fast" to "I've just been glued to the floor" 

Overall I think that if you do that for the RPG section it might keep the pacing consistent enough that no one gets taken out of the game while playing. Make the blaster or sword AOE and maybe add a super strong attack spell for all the marbles. I made a comment about how there should be one major element to the game despite there being multiple genres. I think keeping a somewhat consistent pacing between genre changes is the key to solving your problems. I mentioned No More Heroes: Travis Strikes Back as a good reference. So maybe something there can help you. 

I still love the look of the game, its concept, the characters. Its a good game with polish but I feel like its bogged down by some fundamental flaws that I feel could be mitigated if not outright fixed entirely. 

Please keep up the good work and I hope to play your game again ^^ and I apologise once more for the harsh critique. 

(1 edit)

Hey there! Wanted to tell you that the fixed Demo builds are up! I'm sorry again for the issues. I still don't know what happened, but I've tested the new builds and they don't have any of the issues you encountered. Hope you can finish your playthrough now.

As for the things you said, it's all ok :) like I've said: I'm also a gamer and I've streamed games as well. I know sometimes opinions can sound harsh but come from a good place (want to improve things). In the end what matters is that you liked the characters, the concept of the game and the world we're building, which is my ultimate goal with all of this. 

I'm happy that the quality and polish is there, because I'm very into every detail of what I do. Unfortunately I'm the only programmer and game designer of the project, so I know things can slip away sometimes. But it's important to be open to criticism and be ready to make changes when they're needed.

As for the controls: one of the features that I want to implement for the next update is the ability to fully re-bind the controls. Currently you can rebind most things (like jump, dash, items, cancel, accept), except the arrow keys + WASD. I know that, given que nature of this game, it's hard to adapt the controls to a keyboard / mouse scheme, but we'll find a better solution, I know it. I'll still give that WASD + Mouse idea a shot :) Thanks for the detailed explanation. I also considered the Gamepad sign, because the game feels much better on a gamepad.

About the RPG section pacing, yes. It's really hard to balance pacing between genres. I already added holding down space to activate "Turbo Mode" which speeds RPG battles 4x times the normal speed.

I've also thought of solutions to this problem. In RPG Battles there's an in-battle "Social Media" system which gives you the thing you just said, but it's not fully implemented yet. It will give you special abilities to wipe out enemies based in points you earn from using "trending" attacks (ie using a fire attack when it's trending, trend changes each X turns). But now that I see your idea, I know for sure that we were on the right path with that system. I want to finish it for the new update (v0.4.3). I'll add a task so I also update the demo when I finish that feature.

We're also adding things outside RPG Battles for that section, so it's not all just run and avoid enemies. There will be more ways to interact with things.

And also we're currently working on that big element that ties the experience together for the new update as well. We will also have just one HP / MP system for all genres, so it feels like one big thing rather than separate games.

Thanks again for the detailed explanation and the kind words :)