Thanks for trying it! It is pretty much a demake of sekiro (inspired by jacob gellers video on it), taking just parry / counter / deflect with some super simple movements. So really happy to hear it fit that slot!
Interesting that you thought the first one was too long, I’d really thought that would be the last one. I did test everything without any upgrades though, that might be the reason. But I’ll try to actually run a playtest for next game, this one was just thrown together by me without any exterior feedback.
In the start the attacks were less telegraphed and more complicated. At some point even I struggled with getting them all. So that’s when I started with the “simple simple complexish” thinking for each boss phase. That made it so you were always a bit on edge, but could also actually counter a lot of attacks, even on the first try. Nice to see it worked out!
And yea another defold game it is! With firefrost I really realized the amount of pain pico8 can cause due to its inflexibility (the steam build is currently 300MB because I ship it with electron to be able to do achievements and stuff, since pico can’t send web requests), and defold kinda fills the minimalism of pico while being a lot more flexible. I actually would rather write in typescript, my memory is not fantastic, especially three hours before submission deadline, and the way that typescript lets me “read my own documentation” as I type is really awesome. But defold is implementing the language server protocol, so better autocomplete might be on its way (have yet to try it). I think what I really like with defold and pico is the combo of minimalism / doesn’t get in your way and exports. Unity doesn’t cut it in minimalism, love2d in exports. Defold just gets best of both worlds for me.
I’m probably going to write a post mortem about this, but I think yet another reason I like pico8 so much is because it’s difficult for me to make art that looks bad. It’s 128x128, like it’s not enough space to be able to fuck it up. I absolutely underestimated the difficulty of creating three sets of high res ish animations in like 3 days. I think I make better games in pico because of its limitations. So I’m planning on putting together a template built for pixel art at the celeste resolution, and predefined inputs (makes it a lot easier to prepare for web portals that require mobile to work) to bring that style of limitations to a format that I can work more freely in. So that’s what I’m cooking up for the future me, after the launch of firefrost. Already set my sights on the 7 day roguelike challenge to battle test this idea.
Oh and I’ll make sure to check out battlesc4rs! You putting together a 3D game? That’s something new. I’ve actually already read the post mortem, and I’m really looking forward to a break where I can try it.
Thanks for checking this out and for the feedback!