I think the difficulty is from the style of game it is. I wouldnt have expected a Kingsfield game here in a horny jam but you made it anyway. I beat the game on normal because I didnt even realise there were difficulty options, playing on easy and knowing the layouts more made it a breeze to get through.
I like the level of cumbersome, its been designed around the cumbersome controls well and really rewards your knowledge of layout + enemies. If i were to offer my balancing feedback, the blue drakes damage itself is fine, but I think their speed should be lowered or health reduced, trapping them into corners was my only reliable way of killing them, and with some of the later groupings, that meant kiting them backwards a long way, when I think rewarding the player for rushing them down feels better (aka how i took down that room with 1 blue/2 green, that was sadistic until i figured out a strat)
The blocking stamina usage only felt bad on the boss with how frequent some of its attacks were, it reliably emptied my stamina and was kind of rng if I would gain the stamina back to block the next. I get that the ideal fight spot was that mid zone between ranged and melee attacks, but the melee hits had some deceptively long ranges. It also just felt bad getting the bonk, but losing so much of the window to attack from the minimum recharge required to use stamina again. Only potential advice I have there is maybe play with being able to attack while at critical stamina? (still using it to zero though)
As for getting stuck in the level, I got a screenshot here. Its right after the split path room if you go right to the blue drake. If you hug that left wall as you step out onto those ledges, you seem to get stuck.
Viewing post in (S)LAY THE DRAGON jam comments
Thanks! And oh damn. There's a whole wall missing from the bit of level geometry there. No wonder You can get stuck in it. I wonder what happened to it. Probably accidentally deleted a portion of the wall while adjusting platforms or something. Got to update the build and fix it.
I did some changes to the blue drakes. Hopefully the broken AI doesn't break further, but they now attack less frequently so you don't have to sweat so hard when there's two of them around. Did some stamina related changes as well when guarding their attacks.
You're right in that the most reliable way to deal with the blue drakes is to pin them against a wall where they can't run away from you. They used to be even faster backing away from the player, but that made them super infuriating. I made them speedy so that in 1-on-1 situations they would be more difficult to deal with, but I never really thought about how well it meshes with having more than one enemy in the scene. Especially since there are very few moments where you can actually fight with one alone.
They're the kind of enemy you want to hang close to so they don't attack, but you need to position yourself in a way where you can still keep an eye on them. That is a tad annoying to do though, especially if you're trying not to die to the other drakes.
You're right about the boss fight ideal range being in the middle. The boss was going to have a couple of more attacks for different threat ranges. Noticed early on that she would sometimes spam the same attacks too much which results in the player having to wait for their turn for a long while at times and then if you mess it up and have to block an attack, you might completely lose the opening for the retaliation.
I didn't get the extra attacks implemented in though, mainly because the there's a giant design error in the animation rig (You can spot some weird crazyness happening with her wrists for example when she moves), which I only noticed way way way late into making all the animations for her, and fixing it would have forced me to remake all her animations from the scratch. So, unless I completely redo her afterwards, she's kind of stuck with what she has for now. Another option would just try and force new animations in using the broken rig. I don't think anybody would notice even if I used broken animations. Haha.