itch.io

Very interesting, I guess the "speedrun" aspect explains the sudden cut from the Jackalope fight as well. And I had no idea Swagger was tied to screen transitions, I didn't pay a lot of attention to them so maybe it is working more-or-less as intended.

About Euthanasia, though, I did beat her without Crackerlacker this time around (I can't remember if I hadn't unlocked it yet or if I did and just forgot). The fight was pretty long, and yet she didn't use the healing move a single time, hence why I brought it up. I don't know how much RNG there is to enemy decisions in this game, though, so maybe it was pure dumb luck.

Very interesting, thanks for clarifying the unsubtletly was intentional! I guess that's that gripe dealt with, can't wait to see how you handle those themes!

This looks quite promising! The Undertale influences are apparent, but I think the Gameboy Pokemon aesthetic and the differences in the combat system help it stand out. The combat on its own was quite fun to figure out, I can’t wait to see in what ways the bullets can be interacted with in future fights, and what exactly it means to "show mercy". The avatar selection fakeout with one of the options being a full character with their own agenda is a pretty novel idea, and story-wise I’m very interested by the implication that Despra has already killed at least one other pacifist. The musicians' voices being the instruments they play is a neat touch, the easter eggs are fun to find, and the music is pretty good!

If there’s one major criticism I have, maybe the whole “violence vs mercy” theme is too on the nose at the moment? The way Despra just goes on and on about how pathetic pacifists are and how cool murder is actually broke my immersion a bit, almost feels like the game’s trying too hard to mimic Undertale. But then again, maybe that’s intentional, and I don’t know how exactly you could make it subtler.

I also found the easter egg where Despra crashes the game if you skip too much of her dialogue a little frustrating; mostly for the purposes of testing the demo, but I imagine it might also be an issue in repeat playthroughs and speedruns of the full game. I do like the idea of her being mad that you’re doing that, though, so maybe she could instead skip ahead to her violent phase with unique dialogue?

Finally, around halfway through the unique restart cutscene, Ally’s sprite suddenly moved downwards at startling speed and went offscreen. She wasn’t visible for any of her remaining lines, including one where her jumping SFX played, and she snapped back in place at the very end, so I imagine it’s not intentional.

Overall though, I’m excited to see how this game develops from here! Hope this feedback helps.

Thanks for letting me know! Already finished replaying the normal route, haven’t done the evil route (I don’t think I have the guts for it, lol) or managed to beat the Warbear yet.

My previous praise still stands, and most of the new additions are pretty neat! I don’t know how many of them are new and how many I just missed on my previous playthrough, but I like the optional interactions that depend on your current party, like young Sarah staying behind if you try to take her to the fight against the Majestic Deer, or Billy being confused at the Sarah in the tree claiming he’s still in his camp. The trapped bunnies are a nice way to liven up some rooms, and the fact that they become shadows when you free them is pretty intriguing story-wise, especially since the same thing happens to the one young Billy butchers near the end. Speaking of, I also really liked the nuance added to Billy’s character at the end, and the apparent parallels between his childhood and Sarah’s. And it might not be quite for me, but the addition of a dark route is bound to make the game a lot more interesting and replayable.

I did notice some of the things I mentioned in my previous comment aren’t fixed yet (mirror disappearing, Swagger bar not being visible in the Strats menu, young Sarah’s collision in the hidden pond), but I understand they might take some time. As for some new issues I had:

• I don’t remember if this was also an issue in the original version or not, but some of the rabbits seemed to have their animations “reversed” from the side. Their midair pose is the default and they periodically switch to the grounded pose instead of the other way around. I don’t remember which specific ones had this issue, unfortunately.
• I found another instance of sprites transforming when interacted with from the wrong angles: the chest in the room below the Hunter’s Camp momentarily transformed into a completely different chest sprite when I opened it from behind. I haven’t noticed this with any other chests, though.
• I forgot to ask this in my previous comment, but is there any way to reach the red slime things in the room below the Camp? They really look like they should be able to be fought or otherwise interacted with.
• I’m very confused about how Swagger carries over between combats. On the previous version I was under the impression that it only reset when you use a healing spot like Sarah’s room, but now I’ve noticed I’ll sometimes lose a lot of the Swagger (but usually not all of it) I built up and didn’t use in one combat when I start another. Doesn’t help that the Strats screen will always display the amount as 0 regardless of how much you have at the beginning of a fight.
• The Euthanasia never used the healing move she had in 1.5 when I fought her this time. Is that intentional?
• A minor one, but the bosses’ health bars seem to go a bit offscreen while you’re attacking them, making it harder to tell how much HP they have left. It also seems like boss minions, like the Majestic Deer’s organs and frozen Sarah’s jellyfish, don’t have health bars of their own, which makes the mechanic feel pretty inconsistent, but that might be intentional.
• The computer on the Southern Fields tower is pretty broken. Someone already brought up the background being stuck on the screen, but on top of that the AI chatlog file won’t open at all.
• The second paragraph of the message on top of the path to Anatea’s grave seems to be missing one or more letters at the start.
• It seems like when you talk to the Sarah instance in the Frozen Lake, she’ll refer to Winter as James regardless of what first name you actually gave him. Don’t know if that’s intentional.
• In the Frozen Cavern, to the right of Sarah’s memory of Anatea in the hospital, the entire wall is missing collision, allowing you to walk into it.

I also felt like the difficulty spiked a lot towards the end, with the Spirit of Rebellion and the Jackalope both being able to one-shot my party members on a whim; but I didn’t fight a lot of enemies that run, so maybe I was just underleveled, and either way I managed to beat both of them in 1-2 tries each. And I don’t quite understand rebel Sarah’s role in the story, particularly the way she attacks Winter and hardly acknowledges it after you beat her, or how the scene where she leaves home is abruptly cut to from the Jackalope fight; but you could argue that the ambiguity enhances the surrealism of the game.

Either way, I’m still very interested to see where the game goes from here! Hope this feedback helps.

Thanks for checking it out again! I'm not particularly good with music or sound effects, but I'll try to add those on the proper demo, and I'm definitely going to slow down the combat turns, as well as indicate things like status conditions and passive traits more clearly. And yeah, most of the pause menu was always there, but I didn't add the disclaimer on how to open it until later because I somehow didn't realize most people wouldn't instinctively know to press Esc for it.

I did play your demo a while back and have been meaning to review it since, but I'm still gathering my thoughts on it. It's a lot to take in and analyze, and I mean that in a positive way.

Hey again! I've made some more updates and finally tried to make the combat menu a bit less overwhelming, so once again I'd really appreciate some feedback, both for the combat system in general, for this decision and for any glitches that might have shown up from such a big change.

Unless there's something horribly wrong with the current version, this will probably be the last update I make to this prototype. I'll start working on a proper demo for the game after this, with things like a functional leveling system, a more elaborate tutorial "dungeon", better gameplay balance and maybe actually decent visuals.

Glad to be helpful! I'm admittedly not too knowledgeable on animation myself, I only learned this recently trying to look up an explanation for why the walk cycle was bothering me, but I'll try to elaborate on the whole contact pose thing.

Basically, walk cycle animations tend to have 4 key frames: one contact pose where both legs are on the ground, one on the front and one on the back; a second contact pose where the legs' positions are reversed; and two passing poses in between where the legs are superimposed.  So for example, you could animate a character like this:

1. With their left leg on the front and their right leg on the back (first contact pose, idk if it matters which leg goes on the front first)
2. With the right leg raised behind the left, both right below the body (first passing pose)
3. With the right leg in front and the left leg on the back (second contact pose)
4. With the left leg raised in front of the right leg (second passing pose)
5. Loop back to the first contact pose.

It's admittedly a bit hard to tell because the animation is so fast, but here, each of the playable overworld characters seem to have only one passing pose where the legs are perfectly still, which I think is acceptable under this limited pixel artstyle; but also only one contact pose that repeats after every passing pose, with the same leg on the front and the same leg on the back (which one is which depends on the side, since the sprite is mirrored) every time.  So it ends up looking like the character is only ever taking steps with one of their legs somehow, if that makes any sense.

Again, I wasn't even sure if this was intentional, especially since the forward and backward walk cycles look much better, and it's argurably a very minor thing many players won't even notice. But I did find it quite distracting myself, so I thought it was worth mentioning. Hope this helps!

(Oh, and I'll have to think about the playtester thing)

I've played through everything I found in version 1.5 (not sure how to update to 1.6 while keeping my savefiles, also I don't think I ever found that fourth party member), including past the end-of-demo message, and I think this has a lot of potential! I like the artstyle, the music and the general surreal atmosphere, and the story is positively harrowing so far. I also find it interesting how you’re seemingly able to retroactively decide what Winter’s relationship with Velouria was like, or at least his views on it, through your ingame choices.

Here's some issues I did have with the game, though admittedly I have no idea whether some of these are intentional or not, or if any of them have been fixed on 1.6:

• It seems that the game will always autosave right after you die, locking you out of playing on that slot. I’ve actually lost a significant amount of progress once because of that, so if it’s intentional I’d at least try to communicate that you have to frequently save manually in order to avoid it.
• The Simpleton and Finish stat screens appear to be identical, and both of them cut off near the bottom, preventing you from seeing the character’s Swagger bar and Biography.
• There’s generally a lot of issues with sprites transforming when you interact with them from certain angles. Lacey Door turns into Billy when she’s talked to from the side or from behind, and I remember a similar thing happening to one of the carcass enemies as well. The mirror that gives you the Gaslight skill disappears if you interact with it from the side or behind, and the rope sign in front of the well turns into a blue potion if you interact with it while standing right on top.
• On a similar topic, it seems like interacting with the mirror for the first time in the unfinished part of the map shows the text for gaining the Gaslight skill, even if you already got the skill from the previous mirror.
• The default attack being “blasting with bullets” ends up being weird when paired with the Confusion status, since it makes enemies without any visible guns start shooting themselves or the party out of nowhere.
• Enemies appear to skip their turns very often. Not by guarding or “waiting to see what happens”, they just don’t do anything and there’s no combat message indicating it’s intentional. It was especially noticeable with the Crowcrone, who permanently stopped attacking me after she used the Butchering self-buff.
• The PCs’ sideways walking cycles are very odd: there are visible black lines in the air above their sprites, and they appear to be missing a second contact pose which is very distracting imo.
• The game seems to stop responding to keyboard inputs when you run away from the Euthanasia, but only if you started the fight by interacting with her instead of colliding with her. I don’t know if any other enemies have this issue.
• The Crackerleader gun skill is kind of busted, in my opinion. The high total damage is one thing, but because it hits multiple times it can also easily make back like double its Swagger cost when used, so it’s effectively free to use and very easy to spam. The closest thing to a drawback it has is that sometimes you won’t start combat with enough Swagger to use it on the first turn, but it only takes one or two attacks for it to become spammable again.
• On the other hand, does Sarah’s Curse work on anything? It never affected any of the foes I used it against (Hallowed Mother, the flesh guy before her and the fishmen), and I haven’t felt the need to test with later enemies because she had the seemingly superior and actually working Deathcurse by then. I can’t tell if they were all immune to it or if it just had a very low chance of activating, but either way it felt quite underwhelming.
• When you recruit Sarah again post-demo, her talking instance seems to remain in the pond for some reason, only becoming invisible.
• For some reason, the text box for the Rusted Key (East)’s pickup text permanently stays on the screen after picking it up, and not even closing and reopening the game seems to fix it. It also seems like the Crowcrone’s overworld sprite doesn’t disappear when she’s defeated until you leave and reenter the area.

Overall, a pretty good demo and I’m very interested to see where it goes from here. I hope this feedback helps.

Very fun idea! I even kind of like that you essentially have infinite balls to play each level with at the moment, especially considering the apparent RNG in the animals' shots and the pegs you get to place, which could otherwise end up making the game a lot more frustrating. But then again, I'm not sure how else you could keep the game challenging, so I understand if you'd rather fix it eventually.

Aside from the ball count issues you acknowledged in the game page, here's some minor gripes and thoughts I had:

• For some reason you're able to place pegs outside the boundaries of the level. I'm not sure if that's intentional or not, but you might want to fix it.
• I've noticed that the ball can sometimes get stuck between the gray bricks in Level 4 and force you to restart the level. Not sure if that's an issue in any other levels, though. 
• The victory text seems to render behind the pegs, which is a bit distracting in Level 5 specifically since the gray pegs in the center don't disappear after clearing the level and end up obscuring the text.
• Curved brick pegs have a weird collision issue that makes it so sometimes the ball goes straight through it. I don't know what the exact circumstances for it to occur are, but it's happened to me at least once, and I vaguely remember at least one other time the aiming arrow predicted it by going through the brick as well.
• The zoom in + slow motion effect for the final red peg seems to be active for as long as the ball is within a relatively wide range around the peg, even if its trajectory is aiming nowhere near the peg, or if the peg has already been hit and the ball is resting on some bricks below it. This can lead the effect to draw out for a very long time, which can be quite annoying.
• Finally, maybe you should eventually change the name and some of the assets to make the game look more distinct from Peggle? Potential copyright issues aside, it would help communicate to new players that it's a interesting game on its own instead of a mere ripoff.

All in all, pretty fun idea, and I'm interested to see where it goes.

Fair counterpoints, I completely missed the commanding guide and the option to increase game speed (I do feel like that kind of information should be included in the game itself as well, though) and I kind of assumed from the tone of the cutscenes and the Almanac descriptions that the story wouldn't be all that complex. Sorry if I sounded too harsh, I guess it's just not my kind of game.

I've played up until part of the third level, and there's some very interesting ideas here, like the different upgrade paths units of the same type can take, or the fact that currency gain is tied to DPS. But honestly, I found they were overshadowed by a lot of issues I had with the game.

• The first two levels feel kind of tedious overall. They are very long, both due to the sheer amount of waves and due to the amount of slow but tanky enemies, and if you die in one of them, which isn't particularly hard even on Easy difficulty, you have to redo it all the way from the start.
• The third level, on the other hand, is way too fast-paced. Is it even a strategy game anymore if the game doesn't give you the time to make a plan more complex than "spam scouts and hope for the best" before bombarding you with enemies old and new?
• Some of the difficulty can feel like pure trial and error, like in the first level which is very easy until 20 ninjas show up at once and instantly kill you at full health for not giving all of your units the "hidden detection" skill, which had no apparent use until that very moment.
• Are the solar panels supposed to be so underwhelming? They’re pretty expensive to place, they keep consuming the rest of your money while they’re active (which the game never even tells you directly unless you check the Almanac) and they don’t seem to produce money until the very end of a wave. Maybe I’m just using them wrong, but they feel more like a liability than anything else, especially when combined with the trial-and-error difficulty since they make it even harder to react to new threats.
• The pause/settings menu is a mess. The sheer amount of options is quite overwhelming, and the fact that the Game options are among them instead of having their own menu is both easy to miss and quite confusing. It's also weird how pressing Exit from the main menu version of the settings menu will just return to the main menu, but pressing that same button during gameplay will quit the game entirely.
• Some of the text is quite hard to read, especially in the Almanac. The text size is inconsistent, there’s no margins, the orthography is very poor, and for some reason switching between entries keeps the scrolling bar at the same position, so you have to manually scroll up every time you finish reading one.
• Lastly, even trying to set aside my general distaste for modern warfare settings, I’m not entirely sure of what to make of the fact that a lot of the “enemies” are clearly just civilians and children. The Commander does call out the General for killing children in the second cutscene, but it’s not clear if it also applies to the shooting range or the battlefield (partially because of the poor writing mentioned above), and the rest of the game I’ve played so far, including the Almanac, doesn’t seem to take the situation very seriously. I genuinely don’t know if you’re trying to show how evil the enemy kingdom is for sending unarmed civilians to war, how evil the General is for making you kill them without remorse, or if you’re just trying to downplay or even justify the situation in general; but I sure hope it’s not the latter, and I don’t like how ambiguous it is in the first place.

Overall, this game has potential, but it could use a lot of polish, and whatever its themes are meant to be they can be interpreted in very questionable ways. I hope this feedback helps.

I'm not too knowledgeable about pixelart or guns, but I think they look pretty neat! My main issue is the outlines feel inconsistent, especially with the models in the third picture, but I don't know if making them continuous would affect their shape too much. Also, the tilted pixels on the top left gun of the third picture don't look great imo, but that's quite subjective.

Well I can't open the game anymore, so I don't think I can take a picture of the logs, sorry. I think F1 is the key I pressed to see the debug menu, maybe pressing it on your build will help?

I'm using Windows 11, and I'm pretty sure the folder has full control permission. I'm not sure how accessing the scripts folder would help so I've tried downloading the Steam version first and now it's even worse, the game window closes itself immediately after launching it OR the original version, and uninstalling either one doesn't seem to fix it. Hope this helps.

Hi, I've tried to play the game but for some reason it won't load properly when I press Play. It only shows the black background and an empty lifebar indefinitely, but it does let me pause the game. I managed to open a debug menu by accident and it seems like it's failing to open and load several scripts, so hopefully that helps fix it.

I see it now, thanks again! I'll try to fix it soon.

Thank you very much for the feedback! I'll definitely try to reduce the amount of move options now that multiple people have pointed it out, and I'm glad Delayed Gore of all things was so useful.

That crash is very odd, though, I haven't been able to replicate it yet. Could you try elaborating on what exactly you did to make it happen?

Hey all! I've made a couple of updates to the prototype now, and I'd still appreciate some more feedback on the game's combat. I'd also like to know if you think the game mechanics are explained and showcased well in the prototype.

Hi, I've played up to the third space level, and I like this game's concept! It's quite creative, and surprisingly challenging while still being pretty fun. I also like how the objects interact with each other in various ways.

That said, I do have several gripes with it that might be worth looking into:

• My biggest issue is that most of the game's mechanics aren't explained at all in either the main page or the game itself. It took me a while to figure out that I could and was supposed to break the blocks by hitting them from below, let alone what coins do, why objects will suddenly start falling faster than usual partway through some levels, what makes octopi come out of their holes, the fact that I could jump on the sewer slimes in order to kill them or whatever's going on with the space worm's movement pattern. Sometimes its hard to tell if something is even an intentional mechanic or a glitch.
• I'm not sure how to feel about the current lives system. The fact that you don't immediately lose your progress upon dying once is nice, especially considering the random nature of the game, but that effectively makes it a regular health system where taking damage pointlessly freezes the game for 3 whole seconds and teleports you to the top of the screen. Maybe try committing to one approach or the other.
• I'm not sure if this goes against your vision for the game, but I think there should be a way to select specific levels from the main menu so you don't have to replay the entire game every time you want to redo one specific level.
• Wasabi already complained about the octopus enemies and I agree with them for the most part, but personally I think the bullets are in the biggest need of a nerf at the moment. Right now they're alright most of the time, but if one spawns right above you it's almost impossible to react to it and avoid it, which can feel very cheap. I don't think nerfing their speed is a great idea because it's the main thing differentiating them from Thwomps, so maybe they should have some kind of telegraph before they actually enter the screen, or even be coded so as to never spawn right above the player.
• The UFO could use a clearer telegraph for its laser attack as well, unless the intention is for the player to memorize how long the downtime between attacks is. Also, maybe tweak its AI so it doesn't stay in one corner for a significant portion of the level.
• I think objects that disappear after a while, like coins and Thwomps, should have some kind of despawn animation, both so the game looks nicer and so you have a better feeling of how much time you have left to reach a coin. Even a simple flickering effect would probably do the trick.
• Coins have some really weird collision issues. Blocks falling on them will crush them into one tile and then wobble on top of them until they disappear, and sometimes they'll bounce off the player's head instead of being collected if the player jumps under them, especially if they're stacked on top of each other.
• Another apparent collision glitch I found makes it so that sometimes if the player moves into a block while in the air they'll cling to the side of the block instead of falling. It's especially common in the sewer and space levels for some reason.
• Yet another glitch makes it so that sometimes the slime drops in the sewer levels will spawn two slimes instead of one, randomly making it near-impossible to jump on them without dying.
• I'm not sure if this is even possible to fix, but I've noticed that sometimes, especially during "fast mode", two different objects will fall very close to each other and their sprites will overlap, which can lead to some unfair moments like dying because you tried to hit a falling block concealing a slime drop behind it.

Overall, I think the game has a lot of potential and is fun enough as is, but it could use a lot of polish. I hope this feedback helps.

Hi, I tried the game out and for some reason I'm completely unable to draw a circle. Not even a second after I start holding down Left Mouse the bar at the top center of the screen runs out and my line (assuming I even had the time to begin drawing one) dissapears, even in Chill mode. This did happen to me in both the newer and the older versions of the game, though, so it might be an issue on my end.

Also, I've noticed the "Retry level?" menu is very buggy. Pressing Restart or Menu doesn't seem to actually close the level, which leads to the tutorial and the game over screen overlapping with themselves or the main menu respectively, and for some reason the button shows up in the "Change thread" menu as well, where pressing Restart will start the first level while the menu is still visible. And on a related topic, I think there should be a Quit button somewhere in the main menu so it's easier to close the game.

That said, I do think the concept and the artstyle are pretty nice, and from the gifs you posted the gameplay looks interesting without the first glitch. I hope this feedback helps.

Hi, I tried to play the game but the executable doesn't seem to work for me. I tried with both Java 17 and Java 20, and all it seems to do is open an empty window before immediately closing it. Could you try to look into that?

Hi, I've played a significant amount of Hunter mode as CyBot (furthest boss I've gotten to was the little guy with five platforms around it) and a little bit of Survivor, and I thought I'd share my thoughts on this game.

I really like various things about this game. The bosses have fairly simple patterns, but the limited HP helps most of them feel quite challenging in a fair way regardless, and the random variants each run help keep the gameplay varied. Giving every boss a last ditch attack is an interesting decision to keep the player on their toes. I like the alien setting and the detail of some bosses appearing in the background during fights with other ones, and the art style used to portray it feels quite unique.

However, I do have multiple gripes with the game, most of them minor but some of them major, that made me enjoy it a bit less than it could have.

• The fact that aiming and moving are mapped to the same buttons is quite hard to get used to, and even after that trying to simultaneously hit the bosses consistently and dodge their attacks without spread shot upgrades can be frustrating. Especially against the bosses that fly above you, which is almost every boss I've found so far.
• I know the whole point is for it to be a boss rush game, but I feel like Hunter mode in particular could really use some kind of checkpoint system, maybe one every 5 bosses or so? Right now the later stages of the gamemode feel very tedious and the infinite lives near-pointless compared to Survivor's one life, because every time you die you have to redo every single previous boss anyway, making it frustrating to learn the tougher fights, and unlike in Survivor it feels more like a waste of time than part of the challenge because most of those fights are completely trivialized by the amount of upgrades you've probably gathered at that point. The fact that there's a repetitive spaceship scene at the start of every run doesn't help.
• On a related note to the previous point, the game appears to have a "Load Game" function, but no apparent way to actually save a game first. And there's a possible glitch that makes it so clicking that option and then pressing "Back" will make the screen go black for a few seconds and then close the game, instead of returning to the main menu.
• There's little indication of what exactly each upgrade does, which can make early runs feel a bit too reliant on trial and error. Additionally, sometimes the bars will start rapidly flashing black after opening the menu, and I can't tell if it's intentional or a glitch.
• The green owl's laser attack is kind of painful to look at, with how quickly it flashes and zooms around the player. Maybe the game should have a flashing lights warning just for that and the aforementioned upgrade bars.
• Some bosses, like the boulders and the hopping cyclops things, appear to be able to instantly kill the player on contact regardless of health upgrades, which can feel a bit cheap when it first happens considering many other bosses don't do this. Particularly during the fight with the two red boulders, where you might accidentally walk into one of them trying to pick up the crystals that appear at the start of the fight. If you think this is important for the design of the fights, I'd recommend trying to communicate the fact that they can one shot the player beforehand more clearly.
• This one's subjective and I understand if it's not a priority in the first place, but in terms of visuals, I think some of the more earthly boss designs clash a lot with the games' otherwise alien setting, especially the birds.

Also, I saw this game on that one feedback chain post and couldn't reply for various reasons, so I'll try to answer the other questions you asked there that I'm more neutral about:

• I don't quite understand how exactly the upgrade prices scale at the moment, but I think they're fine as they are now.
• I like the random bosses as they are at the moment, but I think selectable bosses could work as a separate gamemode, especially for practicing the harder fights without having to go through multiple easy ones first.
• I think most attacks are simple enough to see coming or react to, in big part because of the focus on ranged combat and the relatively simple patterns each boss has, but I did get surprised by some things that might be worth looking into. Do note that I'm not particularly good at this game, though, so some of this might just be a me problem.
  
  • One of the possible boulder bosses would always shoot three projectiles at varying arcs at once, but I found it very hard to tell what trajectory it would pick each time. I'm not sure if there's a pattern I haven't spotted yet or if it's just random, but it alone made the boss surprisingly hard and frustrating for how early it can be encountered.
  • I can't remember what it looked like, but when fighting one of the flying bosses on the spaceship it would fire small projectiles upwards and rain them back down for most of the fight, which allowed me to stay a bit closer to it than with most others, before suddenly firing a single, massive projectile straight at me that I couldn't dodge at that distance. For almost every other fight I think the focus on ranged combat helps make up for the general lack of windup animations, but because of how close it feels you're allowed or even encouraged to get to this specific boss I think the big projectile should have one such animation or some other kind of telegraph to make it feel more fair.
  • There's some bosses that seem to behave notably different between attempts despite looking the exact same each time. For example, my first encounter with the brown worm boss had it use the fire shockwave exactly once at the very start before switching to short underground lunges and then waves of projectiles, but on a later encounter it spammed the fire attack throughout the first half of it before switching to the projectiles. I'm not entire sure how these inconsistencies works or if they're even intentional, but if they're meant to be random variants like other earlier bosses I think they should give the boss a different sprite to match.

Overall, I think it's a pretty solid game, and quite fun as it is if you have enough patience, but it could be much better with some more work. I hope this feedback helps.

I'm going to be honest, everything about this game feels very unpolished. I don't know if it gets better after beating the first boss, but I don't think it matters with how many issues I found before reaching that point.

• Some of the controls are quite odd and not explained as well as they should be. The instructions are split between the page description, which is hard to read due to the pixelated font and the large text size, a wiki and a poorly-organized ingame tutorial (and allegedly the credits, but I didn't find anything useful in them, unless you don't mean the ingame ones), making it hard for players to gather all the information they need to play the game properly. Both of them omit some important information, like how to craft items (again, despite the game claiming otherwise), and some of the things they do explain are so unintuitive that some players won't even bother to look up how to actually do them until they try and fail to do it themselves, like S opening a speedrun menu while the other WASD keys work as usual, or said speedrun menu having to be closed with a different key from the one that opens it.
• The visuals are very unpleasant, with the default Scratch UI elements, the pixel art and the handdrawn sprites simultaneously not looking great on their own and clashing very heavily with each other. The animations are very barebones as well, most noticeably on the main character who doesn't even have a walking sprite and whose attacking sprite consists of the sword floating in the air behind them. Additionally, some of the sprites are very blatantly ripped from other games, most notably Terraria and Minecraft, and I'm not sure you can get in legal trouble for doing that because it's not a paid game, but it definitely makes it look even more like a bootleg.
• There's lots of glitches and general jank. Inventory slots past 3 are inaccesible through hotkeys despite the documentation saying otherwise, which is especially bad if the Dark Crystal ends up in one of them because as far as I can tell you're then softlocked out of the first boss (unless there's another way to summon him I don't know about, which leads back into my first point). Your sword's sprite teleports below you if you so much as swing it while facing left, and I'm not sure it actually affects the hitbox but it definitely doesn't look good. Enemies can spawn right into you for unavoidable damage as you enter a room, will frequently display negative or even 0/0 HP long before actually dying, and sometimes they can even revive shortly after killing them. Walking into a new room will teleport all enemies and chests on screen into it which can result in having to fight multiple strong foes at once. Even the main menu is a mess, with buttons dissapearing after pressing others for no discernible reason and randomly appearing partway through the credits.
• Terraria comparisons aside, the gameplay is just not particularly fun in my opinion. Most of the time you're just hopping through empty, same-looking rooms hoping a chest or an enemy finally spawns, combat boils down to either spamming a button to trade melee blows or waiting a long time for your arrow to hit the target before you're able to fire another one, and item prices are so high compared to the money you get from the process that you'll have to repeat it dozens of times just to be able to buy a single healing potion, let alone the Hellstone Sword recommended for beating the first boss. I haven't fought any bosses yet due to the aforementioned softlock, but just from watching the trailer I doubt they're much more interesting than the rest of the game.

Overall, this really feels like the result of an inexperienced developer or team biting more than they can chew for one of their first projects, which wouldn't be as bad if you didn't also hype it up as this amazing game so pervasively and weren't apparently already working on a sequel. I'd strongly recommend taking a step back and doing some simpler games to improve your skills, maybe even try out a different game engine if Scratch feels too limiting, before tackling a project of this scope again. If you really want to continue working on this game or a similar one, though, I do hope this feedback helps make it more tolerable in some way.

Thanks for the feedback! Admittedly I focused more on implementing the basic mechanics than in making them understandable or balancing them for the prototype, and the lack of attack descriptions seems to be a bug: there should be a panel at the top of the combat screen describing the highlighted move and the wheel's effects on it, but it seemingly doesn't update if you hover over the moves with the mouse. I'll try to fix all that in the next update before continuing development.

Hey all! I've been prototyping a concept I have for a potential turn-based RPG and I've recently released it on this site to see if it's worth developing into a larger project. I'd really appreciate some feedback on the prototype's current combat system, particularly the titular wheel mechanics.

Link: https://dinoman972.itch.io/wheelrpg-prototype