I suppose when when I say the magic circle is abrupt, I mean I'm exploring the dungeon, then am quickly effectively teleported to an open prison to... continue exploring the dungeon. there's also a similar sudden transition when first heading into her pocket dimension home with the armchair
other thing: jumping the rocks was a good intro to the QTEs. is there a way to cross that with magic? I hadn't much understood the magic system at that point
I played one run and got captured then game over'd after my second fight against goblins, which are very cute. didn't see any cursed items. I could certainly see myself going back to play more. Here's some notes I took while playing:
- Apple stealing is good, I wish I could steal more of them
- Good note on the magical gate mechanism having receptacle for elements on two different sides. that also proved a good way to get me to look at the menus and abilities available to me
- Entering past that gate rotated my direction of travel 90 degrees: Enter going left, continue going up. Might not be possible to change that now, but best to keep direction of movement consistent in future
- I like all the stuff being interactable and getting dialogue responses
- Music looping is abrupt
- Distance mechanic in combat could be interesting, I like it instinctively
- Cool ass music on the piano
- I suspect these adorable silly goblins are placeholder. if so I hope their design doesn't change too much
- The QTEs are an interesting twist on RPG combat
- Spell circle and getting teleported to jail was rather abrupt
- Often there's no indication of confirmation when you do something. You have two moves in combat but on completing the first of two there should probably be a sound effect and visual effect or something to show that
- I think if you order a manoeuvre to a different distance, the spells available should change to reflect the new distance
thanks for the detailed feedback. I agree that there's some need of more variety in the game in general, especially with the cleaning minigame. but how to properly do that remains a bit of a vexing question.
thanks comrade. whilst you're here a question: do you see any rhyme or reason to patreon's culling of this kind of project? that is something I would rather avoid
I should probably make this clearer in-game in some way, but how it's intended to work is that melee enemies won't attack if
they can't bind you, i.e. you're already so covered in bondage that they can't fit anything more on you
they've run out of items; each melee enemy only has a few items in its inventory and when they're all used up it'll go passive
you have maid stuff on: some of them recognise you as a valued servant, but in execution it looks like you say, like the AI is bugging out
thanks for playing and for the report! perhaps the solution to that is like a smiley face symbol or something like that to signal passiveness, I'll give it some mulling over
I get it, moving platforms are super hard. Once I had them in a game but couldn't get them to work right so I just delete them and replace them with conveyer belts. Dunno if I've ever made them work right.
I think the real appeal of the hands, to me at least, is that when they first appear that's a real WTF moment, y'know, it's memorable. you're expecting normal human stuff and spooky supernatural hands appear out o nowhere. I think it's worth keeping that but lowering the annoyance of getting grabbed so often. for that reason a quick solution might have been something like, if you struggle and escape them, then the hands go away and leave you alone for a while.
I didn't manage to get up on that moving platform.
Even before that, the hand enemies - they gave me a good fun spook when they first appeared, but in practice they're pretty annoying cos they just hang on you and stop you in your tracks every four seconds. Protagonist is cute though
I think a little extra animation here or there would do wonders. Perhaps a little vibration for building up a jump or increasing the animation speed when you struggle. doing button inputs and seeing nothing change is a little naff
I wonder if this would have been better as a purer point-and-click thing. instead of moving a character around, just moving the camera around and clicking on folks. I really like the art style here, I have a lot of appreciation for this kind of sketchy look. A+ art.
would have been nice to see my inventory of items or have some external clue as to what items need to be used on whom.
name of the game is funny. the platforming feels a bit awkward, especially whenever you have to use springs. you did successfully avoid the alluring trap of 'bondage = slow and annoying movement' though, kudos for that
cool animations, and the idea of a reverse-bondage metroidvania like this is a good one. the slow movement goes on a bit too long though with not much to do in that time. I also would have enjoyed having really fast and fluid movement in the end, jumping from vine to vine like it's mario, to contrast the slowness of crawling. but such is the limitation of a gamejam I suppose.
animations sometimes played at the wrong times - jumping animation when climbing a ladder for instance - but they're still delightful. full points for that for sure.
thanks for breaking it, these kind of reports are very useful. I assume that when you egressed->begun, the way in which the game was broken was: there was no terrain and you couldn't move nor do anything, right?
it is about 90 minutes long if you don't meander around and look at everything. essentially completely done, I'm just posting it to identify bugs and niggles to iron out before release
