itch.io

>If I understand you correctly, you're saying that the various status effects you can apply to enemies aren't very impactful. Is that accurate?

That, as well as how using the weakness system feels more like a convenience bonus than something that affects your survivability. You are at your most vulnerable right when you enter a room, full of traps and obstacles. Once you get a circle strafe mob going, DPS matters very little and is not worth diverting attention unless you're impatient and at no risk of dying.

>Why is that? I don't see any inherent issue with respecing during a run. I plan to delegate weapon upgrades to a special workbench that you come across between floors, that way you can't change your build in the middle of a fight, maybe that solves the issue you saw?

I don't know what plans you have for this game specifically, but locking builds is a solid way to add variability and replayability to roguelike runs. As for changing builds in the middle of a fight, that would be so hard to execute without pausing functionality that it could be a net positive IMO - as long as it doesn't become impactful enough to become a mandatory strategy.

>How about enemies that apply something on you that make you unable to heal or make healing hurt you? I could also nerf your healing abilities.

Yeah I think the healing potions are in dire need of some serious nerfing, as they are completely dictating the game right now. Once you no longer have to assume the player is at full health at all times, damage output could be rebalanced overall.

>I get that comment quite a bit, I'm not sure why. Is it because the visuals are relatively polished?

Yes.

Pretty solid character controller; I found no glitches or issues with it. I couldn't figure out how to make the camera move with mouse+keyboard, though, so I couldn't finish the climb.

I like the visuals and systems in this game very much. It just looks like it's floundering a bit to put that together into something that's balanced and fun to play.

The control scheme feels a bit confusing in the beginning. It's counterintuitive how left click is an action and right click is a switch, whereas Q is an action and R is a switch. I often found myself being tripped up by expectations of having all actions on mouse click and all switches on the keyboard. It's very difficult to move around while pressing Q. E being reserved for interactions is weirdly asymmetric as well. Thankfully, you can change it. I changed my alchemy button to ctrl, weapon change to the scroll wheel, utility weapon use to rmb and upgrades to tab.

Falling down a bridge later on during the tutorial booted me back all the way to the title screen

It's a bit unwieldy to switch elements on the fly, so I found myself just sticking to the healing green and swapping to a single offensive element here and there to finish off enemies. Potions are a bit wasted since most elements will hurt you and healing is mandatory. I often got annoyed at accidentally unequipping elements. 

It is nice how there is quite a bit of variety generated through encounters from the limited set of enemies/props. I do wish the rooms had more base shapes, though. 

Sometimes with all the dynamic lighting it's hard to tell the red explosive barrels from the orange non-flammable ones.

The elemental system in general felt very low-impact for weapons, whereas being able to heal yourself constantly with green is a massive bonus, especially when you get the density upgrade. I don't know if the plan is to make magic increase in importance as you grow more powerful, but at the moment I just found myself gunning down everything without worrying about elements or effects too much. Overlapping waves were never pressing enough for kill speed to be an issue.

The scythe felt very situational, since so much in this game can quite literally blow up on your face.

I love the imsim-ish touches like how you can get manipulate enemies into attacking each other. It's just a shame most of these interactions are not particularly useful yet.

It is great to be able to turn off the screenshake.

Some skill tree nodes look connected, like they're being presented as if there is a set path with prerequisites, but you can just skip to the bottom if you have enough currency. 

It is nice that you can respec, though if this ends up as a roguelike I assume that will have to be removed. 

Most upgrade nodes are noticeably well thought-out and impactful.

I don't like how the primary threats in this game are quick gank kills. I don't know what could be done about that when healing is so easy.

You can manipulate that large laser boss enemy into being stuck doing nothing by making it try to chase you through a gap that's too narrow for it to fit.

Overall I found this a nice game, though quite a bit earlier in development than I had expected from footage.

This is pretty good. I really like how there are no collectibles, gaudy gfx/sfx bloating up the screen, or convoluted tangential systems. Everything is fairly readable, but with plenty of flavor still.

At the start I was lasering whenever possible because the spread shot felt a bit unreliable, the enemy distribution seemed to always favor taking out major threats and switch delay appeared to be non-existent. But then I got the impression the laser DPS is barely any higher, if at all, so it sort of evened out.

The patterns on the final boss are nice but it switches them out too quickly. You barely have to deal with them. 

The congratulations score screen showed a different number than the score UI. I think that might be due to it showing up too soon and then not refreshing? 

I think I died to a bike spawning in from below me and one of those exploding spikes? It would be nice to have clearer visual feedback when you get hit. Both felt like particularly aggravating deaths, too, but it's likely I am just a salty scrub.

Being able to resize the window would be nice.

Sound options reset themselves when you return to the main menu.

It's nice that you're showing moves being added to the character controller, but this demo level is a downgrade over the old one.

You can hug the wall and jump to climb out of the pit. The jank with wall collision is worse here in an enclosed space too. There should really be some sort of slope angle sanity check when the character is detected to be grounded.

I got the 3 vials but the NPC acts as if I didn't.

I liked the old music better. It wasn't as repetitive.

Running into a jump, sliding to gain speed, then double-jumping and sliding again to cover a huge distance is very fun. Doing more with these state interactions could be a nice direction to take the game.

Nice Monkey Ball-like. It's interesting how it plays more like Marble Madness in some ways. The presentation and basic controls are already pretty much perfect. My main issue for this build is the level design.

The levels are too long and repetitive. You don't need to introduce a challenge style and then every so slightly ramp up the difficulty over and over again. Just have the complete version straight away and I can retry until I get it. Slow escalation only works for games with infinite retries.  

Other issues: The rolling sfx seems a bit off and inconsistent. Often it's not playing at all or is lower-pitched than what I expect. Conversely, standing completely still on a moving platform will play it.

I don't like how knocking enemies around is harder the more momentum you have. It should be the other way around. It feels like you apply the same knockback to them every time, but you yourself are knocked back more the more speed you have. It's boring to have to slow down to fight; that should not be the optimal playstyle. Or if they are to work this way, they should be sparser and the levels should be designed around the strategy of avoiding them entirely.

A drop shadow would be useful for making jumps.

Non-fullscreen doesn't work. Let me resize the game window, too.

All that being said, I had quite a bit of fun! I'll be looking forward to the next build.

It would be nice if you added an in-game gallery or something with all this art that has been removed over time.

It's pretty fun. There's a nice interplay between little tricks you can do going back down and dumb luck. Horizontal movement feels slow, but of course that's part of the balance.

I recognized the Kevin Macleod slop immediately. It might be worth considering picking royalty-free music that's not as overused. It's not like the track even fits the game particularly well.

I liked this quite a bit back when I played an earlier version. Keep in mind it's been a while and I might be misremembering a bit in my comparisons.

What happened to the various dungeons with meta progression? Or that tutorial stage with the fairy for that matter. That was very nice.

The menus are not the mess they used to be, but the in-game UI feels a little bit claustrophobic compared to what I remember. The art and design style is still very much all over the place.

Didn't this use to have rhythm mechanics? I can't seem to find them.

I played a few runs and all my losses were from picking death. One time I got stuck in a room where I had no option but to choose it.

There's some interesting potential in restricting the player's movement like this to add something meaningful to the game in return. There needs to be more, though. Aiming is one thing, but as-is, it is way too situational. Most angles go straight off-screen from most positions. 

The control scheme is awkward. Why can't I aim by holding down a key and then pressing the direction I want? Using up and down is counter-intuitive enough on its own, but the aiming uses some sort of gradual, awkward truncated scrolling for holding the keys instead of simple digital inputs on key press. 

Why is the sword a toggle rather than a hold or having its own button? These state-dependent selection commands are very awkward, as I have to look to my character to know its current state. The sword felt pretty useless, too.

Why is there only one movement speed, for that matter? Movement is already limited, so by forcing me to move quickly, a lot of potential depth in that space is already lost. I can barely position my character correctly to take down the tiny enemies by lightly tapping the arrow keys.

The low base shooting rate at the start is annoying. Power-ups are a bit too high-impact for my liking.

I tried playing on hard first. I found the movement too fast for me to consistently dodge the waves on the first boss pattern, so I tried medium and had the same issue. Then I went to easy and got through the rest of the game that way. The patterns are nice, but only the swinging laser one feels like it's getting any use out of the game's 1D movement. That could probably use some telegraphing though.

Yeah, these sure are getting repurposed for something else. Thanks.

Thank you for playing!

Don't worry; everyone has found this game hard to understand at some level. I think I have gotten a grasp of the main pain points and I will be sure to make it much easier and less dense in the future.

I will consider getting a cursor-only control scheme to work, since so many people keep asking for it. That has to come with all sorts of custom provisions, though, for when you are in a free movement mode and such. So it will require some iteration.

What brick wall did you hit?

These starting hexes are there to familiarize the player with the interface and then later help isolate and exclude a few things that don't work when returned to. It's not really about whether they resolve, but rather how. The entirety of this demo is tutorial content. They are all solved in pretty much the same way. It's hard to know what you even mean by "solvable in the same way" though, and perhaps looking at their resolution as a solution could be argued not to be the right mindset to have for this game. I suppose this isn't as clear with how unfinished the tutorial is, but I guess even then you wouldn't see it anyway if you weren't interested by that point? I can look into your concerns if they are more specific.

What do you mean by "dedicated introduction"?  The soul of the game is that of a subtle hostility, so it is tricky to make it interesting straight away without making it feel like it's rolling out a red carpet for the player.

I think what makes the panning particularly worse is the fact that you're typically panning to the right, where you need to overshoot the fairly thick UI for any movement to happen. The cursor isn't even trapped in the game window either.

My muscle memory from all sorts of software is to hold the middle or right mouse buttons.

The wood mechanics and the lumberjack's interaction with that is interesting. I like all the unique little gimmick uses of srpg mechanics actually.

The end turn animation takes too long. A lot of stage mechanics require you to end turns a lot and it's not pretty.

Panning the map is not intuitive. The overlay that indicates your movement range is often not particularly noticeable against the background color. Pathfinding is aggressive enough to force you to take damage through flames, but not enough that I can move to an enemy tile to go there and attack with a single command?

Thank you for playing!

On which cube did you get stuck?

Did you not notice a telescope? That's supposed to show the goal (not that it's accessible yet)

I saw some streamers struggling with the font too. I will change it.

Don't worry, I want feedback from all sorts of players. This is not strictly a puzzle game.

The aesthetics and lore are interesting, but there was too much slow walking through empty space and I eventually got bored because of it.

I know it's supposed to be Diablo x Touhou but your game reminds me a lot of Epic Battle Fantasy in that is has a bit of that 00s "rawr xD" flavor of weebery that's rather charming.

I unfortunately seem to have accidentally hit the stop recording hotkey while playing the game, but the gist of it is that the tutorial is a bit too front-loaded, there is too much time spent walking between enemy clusters, cutscenes look a lot better (and just really high-effort in general) with these models, the character hub is extremely soulful, the world map is a bit confusing with too much insufficiently coded information.

Pretty alright Castlevania-like. The Gameboy is not exactly known for being the best console for platformers, but you're doing about as well as anyone could with the limitations.

I feel the level design is too slow-paced for lives to be fun as a gameplay feature, but I guess it fits the retro theme.

This is a very well-made game. I like how open-ended the levels are as a principle, and you have found lots of nice ways of adding encounter variety to the maps in natural-looking ways. The low-poly artstyle is smart and seems very much deliberate in giving just enough context that the locales are properly contextualized without making them look awkward when they are designed in a way that may appear a little bit unreal. 

My main problem with the game at the moment is that I found the best way to play when I haven't yet memorized the map to be to just prance around and not engage the enemies a whole lot, which is boring. And even though I like how the keycard system just barely helps in punishing that a little bit, it feels like a bit of a crutch with how hard it bottlenecks progression. Maybe there could be some mobility resource that's tied to killing enemies? IDK just ideasguying solutions here

My entire playthrough is in the video, including the softlock. You can see my card inventory from later on at around 53:57

I know. I equipped it when I found it, but later on it wasn't anywhere to be found

>What conversation softlocked you?

One that happens just outside the hospital room door.

>To kill Euthanasia easily, get a level or two at the lake and make sure to equip the Jack of the Torpid card you got just before meeting her. 

I got that card much earlier on. I'm guessing it was consumed at some point because I didn't have it in my inventory by the time I got stuck.

Thank you for playing! That's fine! I wanted to know where people would get stuck and that information helps with figuring out what to change

Thank you for playing! Nice, you have done better than most. The gate seems to be holding people back more than I thought, but it should become really obvious what to do about it once you can talk to someone. The trick to get the wand is easy to miss, and getting that object is pretty hard/not that intuitive when the area as a whole is unfinished, so consider it cleared for this version.

kino (i'm stuck)

Also I'm pretty sure it's a glitch that the game softlocked during a dialogue sequence

I don't play mech games much but I still figured out more or less how this works. I think the one major thing I didn't understand was what the red circle selection on the HUD does.

The first missions were manageable. I did not understand how to clear the solar system one. Then I got to the highest building on the city stage and there was nothing there. I had no idea what to do in that one either.

I recorded my thoughts, but unfortunately the game spontaneously reverted itself to fullscreen when I started and that appears to have messed with the recording.

You need to use the mouse to wake up first. Thanks for testing! I will see what I can do to make that part more obvious.

Maybe it could work to prolong the game a bit, but I feel that would hurt the simplicity appeal it has going for it.

Superb presentation; this could easily pass for some sort of Puyo spinoff at this point. And speaking of Puyo, the feeling I get trying to do well in arcade mode on this reminds me of how Puyo Puyo noobs will flounder around doing 1-chains due to not knowing about floor transitions. Analogously, I get the impression there's a Rubik's Cube-esque algorithm to properly play this game that I'm not aware of. When you get around to reimplementing the tutorial/challenge mode, it would be nice to teach the player not only the rules, but also the strategies of how to play, as recent Puyo games do. It is possible I am just tryharding too much at a casual game, though.

Pretty comfy platformer, reminded me of flash games like Fancy Pants and N

Very charming style.

The game starts very slowly even at high speeds. Honestly I think it would benefit from some "prewarming" where the board starts with a lot going on already.

The stamina bar is a bit pointless. And it's so short that running might as well not be an option. The board is lot large enough for running to be particularly useful in the first place. Everything bounces around, so there is no reason to rush away from the center of the screen.

The way the chains work tripped me up for a bit. In this sort of chaining system I usually expect that, once I get 3 of a kind, I can go for another kind without breaking the chain. I don't quite understand why it doesn't work that way. As-is, the game quickly becomes about waiting and hoping for good RNG, and even then, you are forced to break your chain eventually. I might be wrong but it seems that since scoring is exponential, the optimal strategy is to NOT chain, but avoid collecting a single color until the screen is full of it. Then collect all of it in one go to start the game proper with a 10+ chain to get your best shot at a super long one. That's quite a toxic waiting period to have in a game.

Were you unable to get through the others that same way? Sorry, it is a bit hard to know what you're struggling with through words. I'm definitely changing that in some way though. Thanks for trying to clarify.

>What for? Windowing, I/O, audio playback, and rendering context would all be wrapped by Unity wouldn’t they? The only remaining thing I normally use OS calls for is hot-loading DLLs.

Mainly for setting the cursor position, and also some minor reading of window data like border width. I should probably change to an in-game virtual cursor implementation at some point for many reasons, and that should get written out then. 

I wonder why the performance is so bad, then. Are your specs good, and these other Unity games you're running 3D? The people running on Windows don't seem to be having any issues, and I get hundreds of FPS on a 1060.

Interesting. How did you get through the first one? I thought people might not realize what they're supposed to do with them, so that star one was supposed to force a basic level of understanding before you were even allowed to move. Maybe I should have more.

Well done on getting it to work on Proton at all, because I've tried and failed to even get it to boot. Unfortunately, I use a bunch of Windows API calls, so native Linux builds are not an efficient use of efforts for now. Do you generally get Unity games running with a good framerate?

I have experimented with different (click-to-move and forward=camera normal) control schemes, but the tank controls ended up tourning out pretty integral for the game to work, since a lot of it ultimately benefits from 100% camera-independent movement. I'm open to any suggestions on that though. What did you find disorienting?

On what did you get stuck?

You have to unlock the title screen because that teaches you something for later.

It is supposed to be obtuse, but not so much that you can't fumble through and figure out the bare minimum to progress. Where did you get stuck?

+The Runescape style looks right

+There's plenty of variety in little strategies you can use for how simple the moveset is. Mid-air tuning, holding shift, tapping jump, etc.

+Nice prop variety, not a lot of repetition

-It's usually not clear what props do until you've been rekt by them

-No context to all the random furniture floating around

- Can't resize the window