Played it for the first time today and had a blast!
I did run into quite a few bugs; many which were solved by just loading an autosave / recent save, others which were not
I ran into quite a few crashes from 'Failed to load' errors, I believe mostly from trying to load Red facial expression images? They popped up seemingly randomly. Fortunately reloading a save fixed all but one - the big slime that you run into as part of the bridge repair quest consistently 'Failed to load' for me. Per the crash screen it's trying to pull up the following directory:
"img/pictures/Red%20Busts/Reed%20Faces/Red%20Huuuh%3F.png"
Looking through the game files, that directory is correct for Red's facial expressions. There is a 'Red_Huuuh_.png" in there, but seems like it's not pulling it up correctly? Not sure if the '%3F' on the end of the file name is just internal jargon for the underscore, or if it's trying to point to a file with a different name. An especially rough spot for it, since that quest is necessary to fix the bridge and continue on with the game.
I had an instance while trying to work a way around that bug where Red's clothes were destroyed mid battle, and then after the battle ended the cut-in cutscene of 'Red's clothes were destroyed!' looped infinitely. Reloading a save just before it didn't fix it, so at that point I just decided to abandon the run. I was able to use the chapter select functionality to skip ahead to Chapter 3 and poke around a bit in the content afterwards, which was fun.
On the design side of things, I'm not sure how intentional it is for the gun regular attacks to be as potent as they are. Seems like they don't use ammo (or at least still fire even when you're out? I didn't actually try any of the gun special attacks TBQH). Putting a gun in my offhand made my regular attacks super powerful, to the point where it didn't really seem worth using special attacks anymore, since just regular attacking with dagger+gun was doing almost as much damage. Felt weird to get access to more powerful basic attacks without having to interact with ammo at all.
I also had no idea what a lot of the status effects that Red got were ^_^; Some of them like 'ATK arrow down' is obvious, others not so much. Would be nice if there was some way to figure that out ... I initially assumed that info would be in the Witch's books, but I wasn't able to find anything on them there.
EDIT: Also looking more closely at the preview images, I don't think the bottom left HUD is displaying correctly either on my end. I'm seeing the heart and circle, but no shield (clothes durability indicator?). The heart does change color, but I never saw any number in that or the circle, or saw any change in the circle at all, for that matter. (This is all in Windows 10, fwiw.)
Overall though I had a ton of fun with the game! Love the content, love how dangerous things feel at the start of the game. It's clearly made with a lot of love. Looking forward to future updates!
Hey there! I'm glad you enjoyed it! And thanks so much for all the feedback! It's much appreciated!
Yeah so, for some reason the game consistently failed to deploy if the "faces" folder was present at all. So I knew there were going to be problems. I opted to simply remove it, and then manually insert it again in the deployed game. As far as I could tell all of the files were in the proper format so I have no idea what the issue was, but it's a headache I'm gonna have to solve for a stable build. I'll pry have to recreate the folder and insert every expression one at a time and see which one is causing the deployment to fail. (As a further note, test running the game never has any issues with the faces folder, it was just when trying to deploy the exe which usually means an improper file type is present in the files.)
The armor breaking is interesting as well. I can't say I've had it infinitely loop but I'll make sure to look into it. The additions of various armor types may well have caused some line of the code to get jumbled up by mistake.
As for combat, yeah I'm still working on balancing that out. The final game will likely include stronger versions of all enemies that replace the weaker ones as you do milestones (Like fixing the bridge, or clearing out the Thief hideout.) As the only solution. I like that you can go dual daggers and hit twice. I don't like that you can hold a gun and still attack twice. But I also think equipping a gun is necessary to use the skills. But yeah I too haven't found a viable solution. On the plus side, ammo meant you couldn't spam abilities like stun shot which you could use to stun lock most everything in the game before lol. But like you said, being able to hit twice for basic attack makes that almost a moot point.
One thing I REALLY wanted to include in this demo but just didn't have time to finish was a set of bestiary style items. I wanted to put them all around the world and they'd teach the player what magical spells enemies are weak to and what certain status effects did and all that. So checking the Witch's books was the right choice...if only I had finished the relevant items haha. Next time though!
As for the Hud, that was a very last minute change. Since new armors were added in, and the original armor gauge was linked JUST to Red's main outfit. I didn't want a situation where you could be wearing say, the Hoodie, at 20% armor, while your gauge shows your main outfit has 80% and get confused when your armor breaks. I simply opted to turn the gauge off for this current build . I think a reworked version will be added back in though. Pry without numbers to match the rest of her gauges as just an indicator of how much or how little you've got.
Seriously though I super appreciate this message! Players like you are the biggest help with figuring out where the real problems are that I can't find on my own, or what sorts of tweaks need to be made since I know how EVERYTHING works behind the scenes. And of course, I'm really glad you enjoyed it! That makes me super happy and excited to get back to work on it! Please continue to enjoy your time with Project Red!