itch.io

I really like Fels portrait and room art. Did you do them?

The Environment models are nice though I think the lighting needs to be tweaked. In the apartment specifically there was some heavy artifacting. The outlines for a few objects are a little too thick too. Pic below should show you what I mean about the artifacting. Notice how the shadows by the bed appear fuzzy?

Doing "Talk" -> "Need Anything ?" in the apartment repeats the same line about 3 times but I think this has to do with all dialogue responses playing all at once. Some of the dialogue has grammar errors so I highly recommend getting another pair of eyes to proofread it during development.

Has a lot of potential if the story is interesting. Definitely a game I'll be keeping an eye on.

Very cute game you have so far. UI and art have high GMI energy. I really like the loading animation between levels.

Doing smaller turns while sprinting is pretty awkward. I find myself entering the skid animation at times when I think I shouldn't.  If I had to guess the player controller for aggy will force her to enter a skid and stop if it detects the back button input while running forward. Which is fine, but this also happens when I do a back diagonal input (i.e. back + right).  In Mario 64, the player controller does something similar but it's very snappy and will send you back into the sprint state almost immediately. With aggy she goes from a skid -> a few seconds of walking -> running and it just feels so much less responsive.

Seems like a missed opportunity to not be able wall jump from a crouching jump to gain a little extra height.

Not sure if it counts as a bug but outfit changes aren't saved between level restarts. aggy will always start in her default outfit.

Never played the monkey ball games so I won't be able to make any comparisons or notice any shared quirks.

There's a noise that plays when the player seems to take a few steps? It's pretty annoying honestly and should be reserved to maybe only when you bump into things.

The fixed 90 degree camera turns took some getting used to. I don't think it's all that bad as long as the level design relies on sharp 90 degree turns for its geometry. Going up the spiral staircase in the tutorial level was pretty painful with it though.

The game is pretty hard and I think it has more to do with dealing with the enemies than the level design. I actually think this game would benefit a lot more from having next to no enemies. The precision platforming is already really difficult on its own and interactions with the enemies feel a lot less deterministic than they should be (I swear the direction and strength they bump you away feels random).

Enemies can die when they're knocked only a tiny bit off the ledge but this only seems to happen if you're able to bump them at a high enough velocity. It feels odd.

The push back mechanic isn't very well explained. I ran into the issue where I died on the tutorial stage and was never able to use it again. Maybe have a ui element that shows you when you can use it? I also don't think it feels as useful as it should be. The few times I was able to use it the enemies were barely pushed away.

The music and aesthetic you have so far have high GMI energy. I find it really amusing you went from the more basic NOVABREAKER to this. Once a few kinks are sorted it out I could see this being a game I'd purchase. Keep it up.

The mixels is most noticeable with the inventory interface. It looks like the weapon and armor sprites are scaled up there at a much larger resolution than everything else and it clashes pretty hard. Redrawing larger assets specifically for the inventory would be a waste of dev resources so perhaps you could try reworking the ui a bit so you can just use the weapon / armor sprites at native res.

I think corekeeper and minecraft's uis are good references to look at for something like this. Pic related.

On startup, the window opens at a weird position and not centered. I have to drag it a bit to the left to access the minimize / maximize buttons. My monitor is 1980x1080

Character sprite seems to jitter when moving. The parallax  background also seems to bug out a little while moving too. Probably has something to do with how you snap your sprite positions.

Combat is really OP. There's nothing stopping me from just spamming sword strikes like a mad man and obliterating all the mushroom enemies I see.

Mining is not as responsive as I feel it should. I popped open Core Keeper and Terraria to compare quickly. In Terraria it seems mining activates within a small radius around the player. While in Corekeeper, it doesn't matter where the mouse is on the screen is, so long as there's a wall block in the path between the player and mouse and the LMB is pressed, the player will try to mine in that direction. In your game it feels like if you're not precisely touching the block you want to mine then your character won't mine at all. I think it would benefit more if you borrowed more from either of the two examples and had the character mine in the direction of the mouse if the LMB is pressed regardless if it's hovering over a specific block or not.

Considering this game is enginedev (I think?) it's pretty impressive what you have so far. Didn't get the chance to try out multiplayer but I've seen your progress posts in the threads showing it off. Really cool what you have so far.

A lot of potential here. I remember seeing you post the excellent meteor animation in a thread. Really digging the pixel art and animations.

Pretty much all my feedback will be from playing with the melee girl since the wizard seemed a lot more wip.

Hitstun feedback from the basic attack is already pretty satisfying. Something about the timing of performing follow-up attacks with LMB seems a little off though

I think the mouse controlled camera is a little too sensitive. It's easy to accidentally move it around too much making combat a little nauseous to watch. I also don't think there's any reason for it to travel as far as it currently can from the player position since the character's attack range is so small

RMB attack is pretty OP compared to LMB attack. For the wizard, MMB attack would not work for me because the browser would eat the input for scrolling.

It's possible to get stuck onto the blue (water?) tiles in the first room above the spawn area. To reproduce this just move the player as far as you can towards it until they're touching it and try moving left and right.

There probably should be another visual indication on the player when they are out of stamina / energy to do attacks. Maybe make them flash red or something? I agree with Hap.dev that glancing to the left to track it can take a little too much attention away from what's going on the screen.

More of a nitpick but the mixing of pixel art assets at different resolutions is bothering me. I'm also noticing a mix of pixel art fonts and smooth anti-aliased fonts. Sticking to one resolution + only pixel fonts would help a lot with visual coherency and more appeal.

Hope you found my feedback helpful. Looking forward to see more from this project. Keep it up.

Was curious to see how much has changed since the last demo. I really appreciate having easier difficulty options for scrubs like me. Would appreciate a life system on top of that though. Nothing kills my mood more than getting hit by a stray laser during the first boss and having to restart the entire level. Speaking of which, that laser needs to be telegraphed better for how fast it moves. 

I also still don't get why you have to move the arrow keys to have Hilly start shooting. Her starting position should just be her aiming upwards. As far as I can tell she'll never otherwise enter the non-aiming state so it's just a pointless input.

For some more minor nitpicks:

• It doesn't seem to be possible to go back to the main menu or stage select from the game over screen. 
• Hildengarde's arrows are too dark and blend in a little too much with the background
• Lombard's sword is still pretty unwieldy to use with its awkward angles. You are also still pretty much defenseless to bullets heading your direction from a more horizontal angle.
• Story could use a little more substance but I'll chalk that up to personal taste. If the dialogue doesn't really add much to the experience then I'd rather not have it at all. Appreciate that it's skippable.

Hope you find the feedback helpful. Looking forward to further updates.

Yea I got filtered pretty hard by this. I have no idea how the puzzles work and was only able to start the game by bruteforcing. I wanted to start over to figure it out but it doesn't seem possible to delete your save data.

Needing to press enter at the main menu to start the game is weird.

Needing to hold ESC to use the settings menu is weird. Why not just have it as a toggle.

I'm not a fan of the tank controls. If you need finer camera control you could try tying it to right click + mouse move perhaps. I think this game could work really well with point and click movement.

At the start of the game when the camera is in a bird's eye view, it's pretty hard to tell what direction the player is moving because of their hat.

I really like the aesthetics you have here. Unfortunately I was too much of a brainlet to figure out how to play.

Writing another review since the recent update fixed the framerate issue

I think it's weird that you have to angle Hildegarde's bow at the start before you can start shooting. It'd make more sense to have her pointing straight up from the very beginning.

I can respect the difficulty but having only one life is pretty brutal.  A bomb mechanic where you can clear the screen in a pinch would also be nice. Not sure if this is what the charge mechanic does. I always die before I'm able to figure it out.

It's possible to be in a situation where a bullets is moving horizontally towards the player below Lombard's range. As far as I can tell there's no way to way to survive this. I made a shitty drawing to show roughly what I'm talking about.

I think Lombard's sword could use a buff in general. The sword collider is really tight and awkward to control especially when moving backwards.

After I got used to angling Hildegarde's bow the game overall is not too bad. But I found it too difficult to get very far. Looking forward to further updates.

Is the physics framerate uncapped? I couldn't really play it cause the game moved really fucking fast for me and I'd die instantly lol

It's not possible to go back to the main menu from the game over screen

Managed to complete the demo. Combat is really solid. I like the lightheartedness of the story.

Pressing "OK" while the text in a dialogue is being typed out skips the entire message instead of just skip typing like most games. Can get annoying to wait for the typing animation to finish if you're a fast reader.

The player's sprite jitters when moving. This is most noticeable in the overworld.

I think there's a minor text bug If you open a chest when your inventory is full. You get the message: "String not found:  Not enough inventory space"

Seems like a missed opportunity not to have Cyan heal you before entering the first dungeon. I got almost softlocked on my first attempt cause I entered the dungeon with half health.

I'm a massive fan of the older Pokemon Mystery Dungeon games so I'll be sure to keep my eye on this one. Keep it up.

As others have mentioned, completing the tutorial level disables mouse controls on the main menu and you have to exit the game to fix it. 

Cigarettes don't reset. After I used them all up on the tutorial I was permanently unable to heal for the rest of the game. This is true even if I exit and restart the application. I used them all up on my first tutorial playthrough so I'm not sure if something is being saved or if it just being set to 0 for whatever reason.

The boxes on the ground don't seem to do anything when I touch them. They didn't heal me or refill my ammo or cigarettes.

Dashing does not feel very good. I think it would make more sense to use the shift key here. The way it quickly tilts the screen makes me a little nauseous.

A lot of the guns kinda suck honestly. I only found the SMG and shotgun worth using. Pistol takes too many hits to kill and has so little ammo. I enjoyed using the katana but it could use a little more range.

I gave it an honest shot but I couldn't get passed the first red door since I'd always get filtered by that one massive room with a metric fuckton of enemies all over. Didn't help that I couldn't heal lol. I'll make sure to give it another try after you update it a bit.

A lot of interesting ideas here so I'll definitely keep an eye out for further updates. Definitely has a lot of that early build jank though. 1.5 GB is pretty wild for a 0.01 build.

Not a fan of the unlock / peek  / knock menu controls. Scrolling to select feels pretty cumbersome. Why not use WASD? There's only 3 options so I think giving them dedicated buttons  in the action hints would be better. I also don't like how peeking always puts you into a crouch position afterwards. I'd rather it return the player to the previous position .

Getting a game over broke (bordered) fullscreen mode for me but thankfully it can be quickly fixed by re-applying it in the settings menu.

Movement in the vents is really finnicky. It's very easy to get stuck on walls if the camera isn't angled correctly.

I think the low-res pixel art clashes pretty hard with the environment currently. I'm not familiar enough with 3D to advise you how to improve it though :(

I almost lost all of my lives to the boulder -> ladder jump segment but I'm happy to say I completed the demo. Boulders and lava being an instant kill is some absolute cheese though lol.  It can be frustrating with the unforgiving checkpoint placement. Once I got used to the controls I had quite a bit of fun.

The slide could use some more utility.  I only used it twice. Once at the beginning where it's mandatory, and  the next to collect that one healing item. Perhaps steal from Megaman and have it be more useful for avoiding enemies and projectiles.  It also doesn't feel very good since it kills all momentum and isn't much faster (if at all) than just walking. You also can't cancel it with a jump like Megaman does.

The game lags pretty hard if you walk during the elevator segment in the lava area. I wonder if the collision detection code is being stressed out or something. I played on web for reference. Pic below is the area I'm talking about.

Game could use some more interesting enemies.  Aside from the skeleton (which I think should have slightly less health), the enemies feel kinda samey in how you deal with them.

Anyways, it's pretty cool to see some homebrew games on here. I'm looking forward to seeing how you implement magic in the next update. Nice work.

Not sure how useful this late review will be since I saw that you declared the game complete in the threads but I played up until I got softlocked after skipping a generic encounter with a raider. It just transitioned into an empty screen with a grey background. Hadn't reached a save point before then so I just lost all my progress :(

 Combat doesn't end  when your units are wiped out and they don't seem to respawn either so after I lost (and skipped) the second battle with Made and Masieu they became permanently unusable.

Love the background art.

Character models and customization are pretty nice.

I broke the camera while trying to wall climb as glider kid and the only way to fix it was to try climbing a wall again. Climbing overall is pretty hard with her.

It's possible to easily fall off the map on the small bridge towards where you can pick up items. I wasn't able to climb back up when it happened and had to restart.

I had a white rat turn brown after being hit with a charged punch with the red gloves. Speaking of which, the charge punch doesn't seem to work properly either. First time it'll launch me in the direction I'm aiming, any time after that it'll launch me upwards while spewing out blood textures on the ground.  Is that intentional?

I don't really like how combat feels.  Hitboxes felt cramped and attack knockback didn't really seem responsive. Enemies would go flying in unexpected directions.

 If I try to exit from the tutorial level it'll take me to a black screen where my only options are "host" (which is greyed out) and "join". Only way out is to exit the game.

I can tell it's still a really early build so I hope I don't sound too nitpicky. I'm interested to see how this project develops.

Underrated gem. The puzzles were pretty good. I especially felt satisfied when I finally solved the clock puzzle (I didn't know you could click to open the bottom center part for the longest while lol). Only thing is it's sometimes hard to know what's interactable and what's not. I stumbled upon the fire pit puzzle and solution by complete accident because I was spamming E on stuff.

Game would definitely benefit from sort of minimap. Maybe an inventory item you could open to see which part of the mansion you are in. I was able to navigate pretty easily after some time. But a lot of the hallways felt pretty samey.

Guns trivialize the vampire threat pretty quickly, especially after you find the extra ammo and shotgun. I didn't mind though cause collisions with them were pretty janky. It's easy to get stuck between their arms.

Presentation is definitely going to need a lot of polish before a Steam release. You should try taking queues from VNs for your dialogue ui. Maybe have a dedicated nametag and mini portrait for the characters.

I like it. Very cute characters. 

It just needs to be sped up a bit. The character animations and scoring tallying take a little too long. I also agree with the others that a timing based throwing would be more fun. Intro animations should be skippable.

From a google search the shuffleboards are suppose to have gutters on the side but I think it would also be cool to have extra boards with walls / obstacles so you can bounce the pucks off stuff. The main gameplay is already fairly solid so I'm looking forward to how it develops. Keep it up.

Gameplay you have so far is already pretty fun. Very cute girls. Gattling gun is definitely my favorite weapon. Has the best audio / visual feedback of all weapons so far.

When firing a weapon for the first time there's a 1 frame stutter. If I had to guess it's Godot loading the assets / shaders for the bullet trails. If I'm right you should try preloading them on game start if possible.

Sometimes it can be hard to tell where you're getting hit from. Game could definitely benefit from some sort of damage indicator like picrel (where the red shape indicates the relative direction of impact).

I'm also not too sure what fortress mode does. Does it just slow time down a bit? The naming makes it sound like it improves defenses but I still got mowed down pretty quick with it on. I could see the noise it makes when you turn it on annoying when players use it frequently.

Other than that I like what I see so far. Looking forward to further updates. Keep it up!

Charming models and art.  I'll be sure to check out your main game next time you submit to DD. Curious about the lore of your game.

Now for some critiques:

Wish the sword had just a little more range at the start.

I think you should consider turning off collisions on enemies or nerfing the frequency of how often they damage when touching the player. Once you get surrounded you barely have any time to react as the player gets ping ponged and killed.

Jumping feels too floaty and pointless. You also can't jump during hitstun so it's not very useful for escaping out of the above scenario.

Not sure if it's a bug but if the player touches the death looking guy during the intro it triggers the game over animation and kills you instantly. It's pretty funny but doesn't seem very fair to first time players.

This game has insanely high GMI energy from the audio and aesthetics but I got filtered pretty hard by the gameplay. 

The camera movement made me pretty nauseous. Which is pretty weird since games usually don't do that too me. I was playing with vsync on too for reference.  Maybe add a camera sensitivity option?

Enemies were pretty much impossible for me to see especially once rubble / blood starts piling up. You gotta make them stick out a lot more by either giving them flashier colours or applying an outline shader on them.

Really looking forward to how this project progresses. Keep it up!

Saved. Thank you for the fanart!

Cute game that oozes a lot of soul. I really like the music. I managed to complete all levels except for 2 bonus ones.

Some minor nitpicks:

Controls are kinda weird. You use SPACE to jump, E to read signs and P to pause. But you also use P to progress from the intro cutscene. Wouldn't it make more sense to use SPACE or E to progress?

There doesn't seem to be a point to collecting blue blorbberries but I ended up going for them anyways. Maybe you could implement a level scoring system that's determined by completion speed + number of blorbberries picked up.

Bounce mechanic seems half baked. Blorb will bounce up after falling a certain distance but it never felt particularly useful. I think giving the player more control with a dedicated bounce button could be pretty cool.

Save system would be pretty nice. Only realized after I read another comment that I lost my progress :(

Looking forward to your next project!

None of the ui seems to work except for starting the game. It's possible to turn the camera enough to see the bounds of the skybox and the whitespace outside of it. I saw quite a few visual artifacts underwater, I'll post a screenshot below of what I mean. 

Boosting definitely needs a lot more "oomph" beyond the lightning effect. I don't feel much faster whenever I use it. The modern Sonic games like to zoom out the camera bit at higher speeds to cheat the effect.

It's possible to avoid sinking into the water by spamming the jump button as soon as you touch the surface. Not sure if that's intentional.

Controlling the camera can be pretty awkward at sharp turns and loop de loops. 

I got filtered by the ramp jumps so if there's more level beyond the first checkpoint I wasn't able to explore it lol.

Hope I don't come across too negative here, I like what you have so far and look forward to how it develops. If you haven't already played it, Spark the Electric Jester 3 is a great game to look at for inspiration.

Has potential. Moving the pan was too clunky for me and it was really uncomfortable for my wrists to cover longer distances to catch eggs in time. As others have mentioned the camera should be angled down more so depth perception is easier. Also it's kinda strange having to press 1 to deliver an egg. Why not just just use left / right click since we're already using the mouse to control the pan?

Looking forward to further updates!

As another person mentioned the costume closet stops working after completing the game. I completed the game again on hard and it still wouldn't unlock :(

Controls are tight and while the difficulty is tough, the precision platforming really starts to shine on replays. I can't wait to see potential speedrun shenanigans. Aesthetics are also on point.

I do fear the booba might hinder its potential for wider appeal though. Maybe a "streamer mode" option could work? Could just have it so the fanservice cgs don't show up on stage complete, since the game is pretty sfw otherwise. Up to you though, I'd buy it regardless.

The girl is cute, so I drew her, hope you like it.

Aesthetics are really cool. I liked all the characters so far and their quirks. The writing can be pretty hard to follow sometimes. It's obviously intentional with the story running on dream logic but I could see it becoming a problem down the line if you want to keep a reader invested in what's happening (i.e. "why should I pay attention to what's going on now if the subject's going to be completely different 5 seconds from now").

I'm a little confused on how much agency I actually have in the game. The infinite hallway segment was almost setup like an escape room and I was pretty excited to solve some puzzles / riddles but it was resolved pretty quickly by just finding the green room and going through that door. Felt like I maybe missed something. There's also a lot of single choice responses in conversations which I always thought were pretty pointless.

Config menu can be a little hard to read with a transparent bg. It's noticeable in the first table scene talking with Jojo. Maybe give it a semi-transparent black bg instead?

Music can sometimes be too loud. This was most apparent in the last table talk with Jojo. I already had the bgm set at 50% and it was still super loud.

Anyways looking forward to its development. Playing it got me in a drawing mood so I made some fanart of Jojo doing a jojo pose. I hope you like it!

Does its job well enough.

It's just missing QOL stuff like being able to skip typing (i.e. pressing Z while text is typing out will immediately make all text typed out). EDIT: Took a peek at the options right after, and apparently that's something that needs to be specifically turned on. Why? It's a staple in most games so it should be on by default imo.

If the point of the game is to make the character happy to progress, and it's possible to farm happiness from repeating choices, I feel that most players will eventually just end up spamming the same choices because they know what works. There's no real incentive to explore other options if you risk losing progress, save for some flavour text.

Anyways that's all I can really say for now. Looking forward to how this game turns out, keep it up!

As someone whose never played card games before a really basic combat tutorial would be heavily appreciated. Still had fun going unga bunga on my first run though. I only ended up losing because I tried "pulling a card from an empty deck."

UI is incredibly polished, everything was fairly readable and tooltips on hover are always a nice touch. I usually hate seeing AI art but I think it surprisingly works here.

Can confirm GPU usage is pretty high on my RTX 3050 though. Also I fought a "champion" who didn't really do anything for the entire battle. They drew exactly one card and didn't attack. Not sure if it was a bug.