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I recorded some clips of playthroughs for the new opening level and the more complete Downtown. I'm liking where this is going. As always, it feels really good.

The level design is on point. I think for the most part they're straightforward. In the second level, I did end up missing the blue key and forgetting where it was again. But I like most touches. It feels pretty cohesive. I could see where I need to go, and objectives or environment changes are hinted at really clearly.
In my video you could see what I tried to do at times, like jumping on the tree canopies.

The breakables were really cool. I definitely wanted to try and smash up all that glass in Downtown, although I was vaguely disappointed that falling glass doesn't hurt you. The broken cacti seemed to be kind of active for a long time, and I could keep kicking them around. Quite nice.

I only found a single secret, and while it doesn't bother me, I wonder if it's something to do with how the secrets are laid out. I broke through the wall under the hotel in the second level. The rest, while I looked around, I wonder if there was much reason to look for them (e.g. underwater in Downtown - I suspect there's a lot there but I didn't want to bother swimming. Maybe pushing the player to try it out might help - even a little).

AI feels and looks pretty good. I felt like the voices for the paramilitary dudes was kind of weird, and funny. They look like professional types, but sound like street toughs. Still, I found the AI in general pretty easy to deal with, and noticed them acting a little stupid. Dumb choices at times, but it was a fun experience overall. The mechs in Downtown got stuck on roof overhangs twice.

Overall, a really good experience. Here are two clips of me playing through. Feel free to check and see from my perspective. Keep it up!

Holy hell, my man left me an essay. Thanks so much for playing! I'll say up-front that I really appreciate all of the comments you left me.

I totally understand some of the gripes you've left me with. I wanted to make sure that sprint would drive you forward, but with the level changes I want to tune it a little more to be more suitable to the level. It's not where I want to be. Same with the aiming while jumping. I have it on a list somewhere to turn it into a recoil multiplier along with an initial recoil kick, rather than the weird aim modification that it is right now. Thanks for pointing it out. It's a super valuable reminder. The glass is *definitely* going to be breaking soon. It's one of the points I really want to work on, and is gonna be a step into the more immersion level features I'd want for myself.

You're right. Aim is only a single FOV slider along with a modifier for when you are in slowmo. A hidden combo variable determines how much it will zoom in, but adding a separate aiming FOV sounds like a pretty interesting option. The test level wasn't this big before so it's starting to become a small problem.

I feel your satisfaction and frustration with the ninja guys. I made them work out a little more but they're still kind of pushovers, until they really get up close. After a lot of feedback, I made it so you could pick up the sword, but the full melee system isn't really working yet, so you only get a single swing. Kinda bad, but I'd agree, a couple of extra moves would be cool. Unfortunately, you're still a cop.

For the AI in general, honestly it's a recurring comment but I totally agree with you. They need a full rework because they're currently either complete pushovers or extremely brutal. Especially the shotgunners just instantly react and perforate you in seconds. Don't worry, things are going to be overhauled soon. I'm glad you like how they track you. They're meant to be smarter than that, but right now they don't do much else. Currently unfinished, unfortunately. But that will change soon.

I'll take a look at the keybinds issue, but I've noticed that some configs don't change or reset properly *sometimes* in the export builds. I'll play around with it. But thanks, you're one of the few that actually tried to rebind the keys, so I really appreciate it!

There are going to be some future changes regarding ammo pickups (it won't be infinite forever ;)), health and armour pickups, and even other special items like grenades. I hope you'll stay tuned for that! There's other things like trying to hone the feel for features like the slide and vault, because I'm also noticing it feels a little clunky (e.g. if you want to jump over a box instead of vault along it). I'll be tweaking those in time too.

Thanks again for putting the effort into this comment and feedback. Hope you'll stick around for next time. Cheers!

The man himself! Thank you so much for giving it a try again. 

In my dev testing, I absolutely agree with you that it's kinda leaning into reliance on slowmo. I think part of it is level design, since it's sparser and open rooms in some cases, and others it's tight corners. Most importantly, it basically feels like the previous AI challenge is double-downed. With the AI rework, I'm hoping to make things feel a little better. I'll keep your comments in mind though, because they perfectly sum up my own thoughts too! Thanks. Going off of your FEAR experience, I'll be doing some test runs without slowmo as well to see how it goes.

Oh right. I totally messed up the tutorial, because I forgot to say that you can powerslide with a dedicated key. It's Alt.

For Fate's VA, you can blaim Haid's SO lol. It's all placeholder stuff though, so I'm more than grateful that it's even there and not some ElevenLabs slop. 

The new test level is way closer to the kind of overall look that I want, but I'm both dissatisfied with some of the unfinished components. In particular, the floors above and below you need to be present as well. I agree, the floating floor without anything around you when you look out just plain looks odd. But the level's basically going to be reworked because the current GridMap approach is not scalable anyway. So I hope I'll have more than primitives to work with soon.

Oh, the glass being able to break and then something like a blowing wind sound playing, as well as falling to your death is definitely on the "priority fluff" list. I think that'll be in my next DD (59?) submission.

Thanks again. Knowing your thoughts and opinions, I rate this super high and I really appreciate it.

By the way, I swear I'm gonna play your game tonight too, but trying to manage a family at the same time is pushing my limits. So I'll give my thoughts soon! 

Thanks for giving the game a try!

You're right. Level design, and some of the core features really aren't coming together, although a lot has changed since my last DD. But I'll be iterating on this in the coming weeks for sure. Hope there'll be more substance there. Things are always in flux, so as the AI and other content pieces come together, so too will the level design. Thanks for raising this. It's really valuable to me.

By the way, to do a basic power slide, just run and hit the Alt key. It's a dedicated button. I sadly forgot to include it in my rush job tutorial.

But thanks again! Hope you'll see more next time.

Hey, thanks for playing!

You're absolutely right. AI has been such a poor and broken implementation for long, that it's fast becoming one of my highest priority reworks soon. With a few more level design changes (especially when I have doors, more props and other stuff that adds dynamics to the level), I'll be leaning into more up-close combat. The AI will be reflecting that at the time.

But thanks for pointing it out. Hope you'll be able to see it in the next one!

Thanks so much for playing!

I've noticed that the game is periodically closing during the export builds I've been making, but not in dev builds. Rest assured, I'll be looking into it. I have a sneaking suspicion it's Jolt causing troubles. Sorry about that.

I'm so happy you found it interesting. Right now, you're just seeing the Quake lean that I added in. With the way the control scheme is going now, I'd probably want the lean to either be contextual, or just not present, to be honest. With AI reworks, I'd be happy with face checking corners. But you definitely made the neurons fire with your comment. I'll give it some good consideration. 

Really appreciate it!

Love you bro! I'm glad you managed to get to the end. I gave you a shoutout in my credits :D

Thanks for getting aroudn to playing it. I really appreciate all of the points you raised. I'm glad there was stuff that you liked.

There is definitely a polish issue in many of these cases, simply because of how much there is to do. Things like balance tweaking, and that pesky input buffer (which works fine in many cases, but as you pointed out, shooting after a reload is really weird). I'll be taking your feedback and addressing them. I really appreciate it.

Regarding the shotgunning enemies and some of the level design, I totally agree with you. The level is around what I'd like the game to play with, but AI is super rudimentary, and is one of the next features I'm going to be reworking. Your frustrations are valid, and they're not behaving how I want them to. So stay tuned and I hope you'll enjoy it again once I've sorted them out.

But thanks for all of your points. Much love!

It's done bro. Feel free to try again.

One sec bro. Itch deleted my links after I was putting up the new build. Can't believe I never noticed. Thanks brew.

There was a recent critical bug that made restarting a level break the game. If you downloaded a previous version, please give the new build a try. Thanks!

I made a fix for the sound issue. I know there's still issues around (like with the crouch), but testing the new build seems to run fine. Please give it a try if you can and let me know if it's working fine for you. Thanks again!

Hey, thanks for giving this a try!

I think I know what the issues are for these. I'm busy working now, but I'll be fixing these in the next few hours. Especially the sound issue being related to multiple levels being around now. I hope you'll try it again when it's fixed. 

Stay tuned. Thanks! 

I'm not sure if this has happened to you before, but I've noticed some strange behaviour.

1. When loading the AssetPlacer, I get a TypeLoadException while Godot is trying to load the plugin. I don't know if this is related to the .NET version or the pre-processor directives like `#if TOOLS`.
2. When trying to load the AssetPlacer, it seems that it's attempting to load the plugin before a large number of scripts, including my starting scene and an Autoload. This causes the starting scene to bug out and throw exceptions relating to attaching C# scripts to nodes. 
3. Turning on verbose mode shows that the scripts are eventually loaded, but long after the scene has already attempted to be loaded. 
4. Removal of the AssetPlacer script causes my game to load correctly as normal.

Have you seen this kind of behaviour before?

I am not too sure on the life cycle of script loading or first startup in Godot. Ideally this should be an Editor-only plugin and Godot should not even attempt to load it at runtime (which is probably not even possible at this point). But for the most part, I don't know what causes AssetPlacer to take either priority over the starting scene, or simply take too long to load.

Hey Mr Sauce! Thanks for trying this out again.

I'm sorry about the UI. It's a common complaint that the UI is subpar and the font is straight trash. I'm replacing it with another font soon, at least when it comes to content.

I'm still torn on the control scheme and making compound moves for sliding, but you can rebind Slide to a new control if you want now. Options do work so feel free to tweak the settings to your liking.

Regarding your skill issue comment:

• The AI is overly aggressive in too many ways because they are still simplistic. A few more features later and I'm reworking them entirely. Their burst logic is broken and they are spraying like crazy, their senses are all messed up, their positioning and self preservation are not working correctly either. You get more success being overly aggressive yourself than defensive. So stay tuned!
• There's still balancing tweaks I want to apply. I think Slowmo regenerates easily from kills, but not easily passively. Certain weapons are not good for slowmo regeneration either. Slowmo consumption is too strong from action moves and even sprinting. Lastly, slowmo is too weak for action moves as you still can't react easily. I'm planning on tweaking them all.
• Firing on empty, I kinda want to leave as a personal preference.
• I'm sizing up the possibility of a Difficulty level now, since Options and Save Data work. I think it'll be a bit easier to ease into the game with a lower difficulty.
• I still have a tutorial in mind once I have core tech. I think it'll feel a lot more comfortable to know what you can do once that's in game.

Anyway, thanks for playing! I really appreciate it!

Gave it a go for the first time in like 2 years I think. It's really come a long way. 

I found it very intuitive, and just had to double-check controls to make sure I wasn't missing anything. Got a couple minor points so I'll just ramble here:

• I feel like having a small indicator of your available weapons would be really good. I wasn't sure which weapons I had and when I picked up a new one, what number they were assigned to.
• Enemies were pretty easy to deal with. Circle-strafing everyone seemed to get the job done. Do they consistently miss if you do that? It seems like it. Maybe a bit of target tracking, especially for projectile weapons, could go a long way.
• The weapons felt great. Recoil was pretty easy to control on the machine gun. Short, controlled bursts went out the window because pulling straight down seemed to get the job done. The plasma gun worked really well on the robotic enemies. 
• I had a huge abundance of ammo, and plenty of backup spots for medkits. 
• This definitely felt familiar, and the first level is kino. I know the second level still needs some work, but I tried out the water and went back to land. Hope you'll be able to incorporate it more soon!

Great job as always. Keen to see more. Cheers!

Hey Stomy! Thanks for giving it a try! 

Got it. I'll test out other fonts now that I have way more text this time round, and it's grating now. 

As for the rest of the UI, I agree. The magazine display is stylistically very much what I want, but the rest of the UI has been haphazard ad lacking quality. I'm not very good art-wise, so the plan is getting an art direction document in order. I'm making a plan to get out of the programmer art phase.

I'm glad you like the gameplay aspect as it is right now. Dropping GitS as an vibe makes me happy :D I hope you'll come back to check it out when it's further down the line.

Thanks for checking. I do have a couple of suspicions, and oddly, I don't think it's the bullets. I've done stress tests and my machine is less performant than yours. 

There is an existing issue with the AI that makes things chug (especially on dev builds), but they're requiring a rework already. I'll be looking into it as a super high priority task. 

I don't know if you experienced it, but it also appears that my precaching system is not good enough for Godot and sometimes you can still get some nasty stutters the first few times.

But I'll give this a good check and profile it over the next while. Sorry for the experience ._. I'll hopefully have it fixed next DD

Thanks for giving the game a try! I'm glad you liked it so far. 

Since my last DD, UI has been a big endeavour. Everything was finally worked on, and unfortunately that means there's still things I'm not happy with. 

• The font is just rendered like that and it's hard to change. So I'm replacing it
• The weird scrollbar on the Weapon Screen is a temp fix, until I have scrolling text in the button itself. 
• I'm glad you like the transitions. That took more effort than I wanted. 

I'm glad you liked the gameplay experience. You raise some great points!

• AI was a feature I wanted to improve, but couldn't make it for this DD. They're practically broken right now. After a few more juicy features, they're getting overhauled. They're not much of a challenge yet but I have a few AI tech features cooking. 
• Damage and balance, especially in close quarters, could use a bit of help. I'm planning on looking into it and possibly adding a difficulty level too. 
• Vaulting and sliding on tables put you into prone unless you fall to the ground. If you move you get up from prone. The actual body shape while sliding still needs to be tweaked, as it was a recent feature. But I'll look into that crouch not immediately firing. Since Options exist, I could also add a toggle crouch function for you. 
• Ah you raise a good cheesy point. The weapon exists in real space as you say, so it's true you could cheese enemies by walls. I'm hoping to fix that with a few tweaks, although a lot will change by then. Hopefully increased AI challenge will resolve that. I would like alerted AI to react to your laser. 
• Regarding the visual bug, that's a holdover from a very early version. I forgot about it, so thanks! It'll get fixed. 

All in all, thanks so much for the helpful feedback! 

Tbh the font looked cool and it was better than Godot standard, but I added way more text to my menus since my last demo. I have the same problem with it being so damn wide. I already have a font lined up to try and replace, at least for big text blocks. 

I'm glad you like the game feel so far. It's slowly taking shape but there's so much more to do. 

Yeah, the idea is to go for a PS2 aesthetic. I'm busy setting up an art document to commission some real assets and move away from the awful placeholders. It's something I've been wanting to do for months, once more core tech gets completed. Stay tuned! 

Thanks for playing! Your game looks sick too by the way! I've been following your progress and can't wait to see more. 

Thanka for giving it a try! I have to ask: What system and OS are you running on? Testing on my potato dev machine, it runs solidly, so I'm wondering if it's an environment issue. Especially if you are running a Linux or MacOS version. I'd be happy to take a look and resolve this for you. 

Thank you so much for trying out my prototype!

You're absolutely right. The first points of feedback I noted that were important were some extremely necessary quality of life features. My mouse DPI is very high, which has actually degraded everyone else's experience. I know it's not actual game features, but these settings are coming in ASAP. Thanks!

I'm not planning on adding a scoring system exactly, since I want to leave it up to the Player in terms of how they want to play. While they're low priority now, I do want to add a lot more feedback and quality of life. Ironed out controls, a few more nice features (vaulting and off-wall diving), as well as a per-level breakdown of damage, hits, accuracy, etc.  Unfortunately, there are just so many more core features that need work. 

There are a couple of decisions I made early regarding movement, but it definitely needs refinement. New features always affect the balance of a game. Sprinting was locked to only moving in the general forward direction to prevent backpedaling. I think the slide camera is a little fast and needs minor tweaking too, but the slide momentum situation is a combination of grounding inconsistency and a get-up delay that's a little too aggressive. 

Thanks for the input though! I'll be looking into these and hopefully making it a lot more solid around my next DD. Hope you'll be able to try it out then!

Thanks for the feedback! 

Recoil is one of those things that needs to be both tweaked and better communicated, to be honest. I totally get that frustration.

Regarding slides and slow-mo, I share your points on this. They were implemeted extremely early in the prototype, and now they need more refinement. I'm not happy with the fluidity of movement (hotkeys, behaviour and overall utility), so I'm planning on making some very important changes in the short-term. I also have an additional change planned for slow-mo that should make it feel a lot better.

But again, thanks so much. I really appreciate you taking the time to try this out.

Thanks for the feedback!

That ammo counter is definitely staying that way. I'm glad you like it! I want more UI elements to look like that down the line, but sadly, there are a lot more higher priority features. Weapons are very much still temporary, until I get higher quality assets. But high quality animations are key for the FPS logic. The Weapon Animation system was the most recently fleshed out system.

A lot of the AI systems, and tweaks to Weapon Balance (including a Damage rework) are still required to really sell the feel. But it makes me happy to know it felt satisfying. 

For a future DD, I'll be planning on making a much better introduction tutorial, and a better level system. After AI, it's a top priority. A lot of quality of life features, and adjustments to the poor visuals are also high priority. I totally agree.

Oh, and that bug with semi-auto weapons was a bug that was meant to add Grace Time for more fluid firing. It's since been fixed, but remains broken in the demo. Thanks for pointing it out though!

Anyway, thanks again. I hope I'll have a lot more to give next time round, and that you'll check it out!

I can understand there's a lot of frustration in here. I think a lot of what's happening is early development + lackluster features. You really raise some good points though.

Regarding weapons, you're right. A lot of balance elements are poor, and need to be reined in. The recoil is all over the place after the animation overhaul, but I hear you. Oh, and the bolt action rifle's firing is a poorly programmed quality of life behaviour (believe it or not) that's not working as intended.

I don't like where the AI's at either. Tbh the Enemy AI itself is actually not even complete. That's why they go from a relatively harmless state to unloading on you. That's a big next milestone I hope to work on, so I hope you'll see it in a future DD.

Games missing even minor features like Mouse Sensitivity and Resolution settings (or settings in general) are super frustrating, so that's definitely something I'll be adding in time.

Hopefully you'll check the game out again sometime, and the game will give a clearer direction in what to do for the demo. For now it's barely a showcase of some super rough development.

But anyway, thanks for playing! I really appreciate it.

Thanks for the feedback!

Admittedly, a lot of the visual style is incomplete because it's still really early in development. I'm not happy with a lot of it, so I hope you'll see it when it changes and develops further.

I also get where you're coming from with the gunplay and movement. I'm already busy changing the control scheme to make movement feel smoother. Gunplay is a combination of poor tutorialisation and balance. There's still a lot to be done in that aspect.

Overall, I know it's in a pretty rough state, but thanks for playing!

This was really fun to play! I liked it a lot. I can't wait to see more.

I don't know if sounds were bogged, but even a couple of basic ones would go a long way. I was playing in silence.

Most of the RTS functionality is there, but I think a little bit of feedback in the combat would go a long way. I wasn't sure why I was successfully shooting at long range, or doing trades. I also don't know what V and P were.

Please add a basic menu instead of instantly quitting the game on Escape. I was halfway through and had to restart. 

Overall, the art style is cute and everything is very cohesive. Without knowing what I was doing exactly, I got the hang of it fast and made it through pretty well. Nice one! There's a very solid groundwork for a great tactics/RTS.

Thanks for the feedback!

I pre-initialise most scenes and assets, but I have a suspicion that it's the way that Godot actually handles shaders. I'll look into pre-compiling the shaders for various effects, especially the bullet impacts. I really appreciate it, because I've kinda forgotten that these annoying stutters exist.