itch.io

Hey, thanks for playing Moku again. The aesthetic stuff is definitely coming along down the line. Been doing a lot of plant research to figure out what I need to make assets for. And yeah, I've been thinking about reducing base stamina drain in general, cause needing to eat after every fight is kind of a pain.

Hey, thanks for playing Moku again.

I would for sure place the first food a lot earlier to introduce the concept earlier and I guess place the second food where the first one was.

Moving the first food item might not be a bad idea. I'll take it into consideration.

however I really like the Hawaii theme you've coopted and I would love to see the enemies fit the theme a bit more

Yeah, there's a lot of art work that still needs doing, which has been low on the priority list for me as I work on improving the tutorial and figuring out other mechanical things.

Once last note is that, in many cases but especially blatant in the iron room, you can just grab items and ignore all enemies, which could be a strategy right, but I would consider locking certain items behind a cage that you need to kill all the enemies to unlock or something.

I had considered that, but for whatever reason chose not to do so though I can't remember why. In general I'm not a huge fan of forcing  combat challenges outside of dungeons, because something about it feels off to me, but that's just a personal issue. I might change it.

Also why was there an item over the lava river if you can't jump it? Is it possible to jump it with higher stats? If so then put a sign that references that maybe.

There are 3 (4 if you count something basically impossible to figure out,) ways to get across the lava. One way is in fact to level up strength and agility, which will increase your dodge distance. Another way is to sprint dodge across, which has very tight timing but is possible without leveling. The third way is to find the water gun in the dungeon and use it to create lava rock to walk across. The 4th and impossible to find way is to cast the ice spell which will also create lava rock, which if you're wondering how to cast magic, it's not taught at all in the game yet. Something I greatly want to focus on in the game is having environmental challenges that can be surpassed in a variety of ways based on the player's tools or level, though there's only a few instances of that so far. 

Once again, thank you very much for playing. I appreciate the feedback.

Wow this is great! Thank you for giving the game another go with your partner.

Was confusing that we couldn’t craft what the other had already crafted

Understandable. Just like with all the resources, the way it works is once you have something you just have it.

Generally the outline on items is barely visible (e.g. also in the loadout menu), making it often unclear if a click works/worked

I could make that more visible probably. I'll look into it.

Didn’t understand what the Sprint button was supposed to be on gamepad. Checked it out now in the bindings (it’s "Left Stick Button") and it works, fair enough. But on my pad at least it’s very hard to "press" the Stick at the same time as steering with it.

Yeah I've been trying to figure out a better visual for that. Still thinking on it. That being said, with the gamepad, the default control is it's just a click.

Bit confusing that I see some kinda "shadow" of the mouse cursor on my screen in some menus

Oh yeah, gotta fix that.

It was easy to get confused about the 2 screens, especially as there is no boundary line either. Specifically my partner had the problem, when accidentally looking at the right-side screen to control their character, that the mouse cursor was (obv) always treated as being to the right of their char, no matter at which side of their char they seemed to actually put it. So for a split-screen situation maybe it’s a good idea to confine the mouse player’s cursor to their screen, or else make it so that it works as expected no matter which screen the cursor is on, as long as the mouse player’s char is there. If you get what I’m saying.

Yeah, good idea with the mouse constricting thing, I'll look into that. I'll also make it so a certain setting is on by default that puts a sort of color arrow on your character on your screen, making it easier to tell them apart when they're wearing identical armor and the like.

About the reworked overworld I can’t say much, as I don’t remember the previous one clearly… Seemed to be similar… Maybe the old one was a bit more open? Larger and with more open spaces? But possibly it only felt tighter this time because of 2 players running around, and smaller because I already kinda knew the style. Anw. I really enjoy this exploring and finding things part. Didn’t play all the way to the end this time, as it seemed unchanged. But at least I found both maps this time.

Overworld is larger but more linear. It used to be a lot more open and easy to get lost in.

Thank you very much for the long video, I appreciate it greatly.

No, fresh water was never a food ingredient. You hadn't found enough things to craft anything at the bench. There was just one material you needed past that little cave that you barely missed to allow you to craft a sword. I think this all really is just me needing to find a better way to communicate some of this stuff, or maybe drop the materials that seem more like they'd be ingredients. Not sure.

Yes, it was a Dualshock 4. Glad you enjoyed the video.

Thanks for the reply.

Yeah, something I've had trouble getting across is that once you find an ingredient or material you have it forever, but I also want you to be able to find more to "increase the quality" so to speak, giving you say, better buffs for food.

Ah, yeah you need to rest in the tents in order to make them your respawn point.

Hmm, were you using the leiomano while hungry? If you run out of stamina, especially while swinging a weapon, it can take a bit to regen that lost stamina. That's something I need to communicate better too, maybe.

Thank you for playing.

Were you finding the leiomano slow to use, or the frying pan, because that's intended for the frying pan.

Yep, you're absolutely right about that. They just give experience.

Yeah, lava is dangerous. Can you tell me what you mean by being booted all the way back to the beginning?

Every ingredient and material can only be found once, including the meat. Were you having some sort of trouble that you felt the need to find more meat?

Hey, just watched the video. Not sure what bug you think you ran into, cause everything was working just fine. You picked up one ingredient while playing, which was the Hāpu'u 'i'i, which means Hawaiian Tree Fern. The salt is considered a material, and is used for crafting a number of consumables at the crafting table. I can understand your logic in considering it an ingredient though. Thank you for playing, you gave me something to think about more.

Gave Polymandering a go.

View the most amazing Torstein's Chronicle gameplay here!!!!!!!!!!!

I did not beat Yancy but I did play it.

Gave it a go. Didn't get far though. Lost controls after getting a game over.

Hey thanks for playing. I need to redo the opening area soon so it’s a bit more guided. The trees are bugged for you for some reason though. They shouldn’t be animating uniform like that. What platform are you playing on? Usually that sort of weirdness comes from people playing on Linux or something. 

lol good gameplay. Was pretty difficult to understand what you were saying with your mic quality. Thank you for playing though! I’ll give your game a go when I have a chance. 

The way it works with mouse and keyboard is just that it's a toggle. It'll lock onto whatever enemy is nearest to your cursor.

Hey, thanks for playing. What control scheme were you using and how were you trying to swap between lock-on targets?

Obviously this game needs a whole lot of work. The vibes are interesting though, I'll give it that much.

That first gun really is the best one I found of the two. The game is a little buggy, especially when looking up or down, but other than that it does feel like a solid start. You need a lot more variety in the visual aesthetics of the levels.

I ended up realizing fairly fast that the best choice was to just roll a bunch of dwarves, because they seemed to have higher HP/defense. The game was a little buggy in the menus when it came to selecting abilities. The fact that I could kill a large amount of enemies and lose the gold because they all died at once and ended the round sucked. The player should get all the gold left on screen at the end of a round. I also wasn't a huge fan of the tank controls nor the fact that the snake itself didn't really behave like a snake in the actual game snake where every node (character) followed the exact same path at the same speed. The tank controls might be more tolerable if there were an arrow pointing in the direction you move by the head.

The concept for this game is really really cool, and there's some very fun ideas in there. However, I couldn't figure out a way to power slide really, and crouch jumping didn't feel right for it? The level design needs a lot of work.

I found the game fun, but I did not like the transformation button being on the shift key. I'd have rather it been on C or something similar.

I use OBS to stream. I'm unsure exactly what caused the problems. I just know that in the setup I have that captured it to the full screen wasn't working. Sorry for not knowing much more than that.

The movement is a little clunky but that's probably appropriate for a mecha game. Personally I'd add a FOV slider, because it felt kinda narrow. As you know from the stream, there needs to be some voice work with the dialogue because it is too fast to read at a speaking pace most of the time. 

Very cool looking game, but I do think the tutorial needs work. At one point the game told me something about taking stuff to a stockpile, and I wasn't sure what it was talking about. I wish it had WASD camera controls because moving the camera by moving the cursor to the edge of the screen feels terrible for a non-RTS player like me.

ABJ69 is actually very nice looking. As you get into the game, I'm surprised at how intense it gets despite how slow the gameplay actually is. I don't know if it would be a game for me, but it is cool to see.

First time playing Nolgorb's Ordeal. Aesthetically it looks really nice, but it's definitely not fun. I know rage games like this tend not to be designed with that in mind, but other rage games have managed to have interesting mechanics, such as Pogo 3D.

First time playing Dirk. It was relatively straight forward, though I'll admit I could not for the life of me figure out how to use most items. I did get the fixed lute, but I couldn't figure out how to give it to the bard. I did however escape from the manor.

I didn't get very far, but the concept on its face seems interesting. Personally I would try to include a more quick and concrete goal early on to get the player interested in continuing.

Nice Fly Knight-like.

Seems kinda like any other rage bait jumping game, but I do like how well you've matched the aesthetic of Runescape. It's obvious that the sounds were made with SFXR. You could definitely use better sounds, but it's good that you have some in now. It would be worth it to have a pause and options menu.

Hey thanks for playing, and thanks for both taking a video and leaving such detailed feedback. I just finished watching the whole video.

At first I thought that everything (food, crafting material) would be consumed on usage, and thought the whole game was more of a survival-type thing. This could easily be improved with better phrasing and removing the "1/1" thingie from crafting (it implies there could be a 2/2 or 1/2) and so on

It is actually planned that you'll be able to find more of each material, but I'm going to try to communicate it like low grade, medium grade, and high grade iron, for example.

Unlocking crafting material somehow feels less sensible than just finding the gear directly. Especially the intermediate crafting step (rope from hemp) makes no sense, does it? It's not like I have a limited supply of hemp and could dedice to make something else from it. Maybe the whole thing should be more like a "tech tree" where you can see that "discover Iron in order to unlock Body Armour equipment option" and so on.

I really like this idea. If I can't figure out a better way to communicate what I'm going for, I'll see about pivoting in this direction.

Water pipe riddle felt a bit too involved, final part was trial&error on my part, did not understand it fully

You fight through the whole dungeon in order to find... a fucking lever?! I could've made that on my crafting bench!

Yeah, this dungeon was very much a test dungeon to see if I could make one. Also funny enough, you missed a few rooms and a map upgrade that let you better see the water pipes.

Maybe a button to "return home and start the next day"? Sometimes I felt I should just suicide to save time rather than walk back home. (Guess makes sense only with the XP preserving food)

Not a bad idea. I'll see about replacing the quit button with something like that, and putting the quit button else where.

The difficulties swinging your weapon in corridors, visually make no sense. I understand it's a neat little mechanic, but it's also annoying..

I absolutely need to make that more visually obvious what's going on.

Leveling is another system that is in the game. I could not feel an impact of the choices I made. (Or did it enable me to do the stunlock?!) I guess the system in principle is nice to enable progress even if you keep dying to the same enemies, making you able eventually to overcome them by sheer damage numbers.

Leveling didn't affect your ability to stun lock, you just hadn't been doing consecutive swings most of the time you had the sword. I need to find a way to tutorialize the fact that swinging the sword can be done constantly unlike the frying pan.

Why is ammo capacity limited in addition to bag capacity? Would be nicer if it was balanced just through how much bag space arrows take up, so you can have more build variety/trade-offs.

This is something I'm planning on having be an upgrade. Furthermore, I want to disincentivize cheesing with ranged. Funny enough, in ancient Hawaiian culture, which this game is based off of, it was believed a warrior could acquire the mana of their fallen foes, kind of like a leveling system in an RPG, but they could only do that if they were close enough when the foe died so they hardly used ranged weapons. I've been seriously considering making that how it works in Moku as well.

Food choices could be pre-selected from previous day, or even locked in like the equipment loadout (even if that's a bit of a flavour fail, maybe?..)

Good idea. I'll implement that.

Respawn point is not automatically set to new tents you discover, this felt unintuitive

Fair enough. I'll think about changing that.

Hey, thanks for playing. No, I didn't make any of the music. All of it is free use music that is likely temporary, though one song in particular, The Fourth Color by King Gizzard and the Lizard Wizard, is particularly remarkable. If you happen to like it, I recommend checking out the whole album, because they released it to the public for free with a fairly open license.

Hey, thanks for playing.

I appreciate the feedback and the fact that you got all the way to the end. I'm not sure about changing the size of characters and what not, but I do want to address all the other complaints as development progresses.

Hey, thanks for playing and for streaming.

You're right about an equipment tutorial being needed. Most people seem to figure it out, but that initial confusion could be dampened.

And yeah, crossbow is OP, haha.

Hey, thanks for playing.

 I'm not sure about the implementation of it. Your new system of "craft consumable once then you can equip them as many as you want" is not well explained (brimstone streamer had a problem with this and I had to tip him). Nioh has a similar system with magic/ninmpo(you prepare them than you recharge them when you rest at bonfires). You can refer to that for some more insight

I can't remember how Nioh explained it really, if at all. But I agree it could be better tutorialized. I haven't worried about it too much because players figure it out pretty quick normally.

 I understand the idea to have a first zone like the great plateau, but with your stamina degeneration system makes it very very punishing. Since if you explore badly you can descover the crafting items for meat for last. And if you don't have meat your pacing is very reduced (again see rimstone stream)

Yep, absolutely agree. In the future I'm going to be modifying things so rations are for sure one of the first things you craft.

 I am sorry to say that this rebuild of your tutorial/first zone seem a step froward and one back, because it's pacing it's entirely random on where the player will explore. Maybe at last meat craft should be part of the super corridor start of the tutorial zone.

Yeah I get that. Part of it for me at least is letting the players find tutorial tips through natural exploration. I'll be modifying placement of pamphlets for sure.

Thanks for playing. Yeah it's not the easiest game for sure. If you give it another go, there are difficulty options. And yeah, environmental art is actually something I'm working on now.

The starting screen doesn't say what button to press. I got thoroughly confused for a solid 30 seconds wondering if it had froze or something before hitting enter. By default on the main menu, for my PS4 controller, hitting left and right made the selection go up and down instead of the up and down buttons. In the options menu it's not at all clear how to change things, and there's no visual feedback for when you select something to change it.

Getting into the game, I do not enjoy it. The game definitely needs a tutorial, because I feel I must have been missing something. I figured out how to jump, attack, dash, and swap and use the animal attacks, but the game just did not feel good to play. I got around half way through the first level before losing interest.

Gave the game a go, and got to around level 7. The completion ranking system is cool, but in a lot of levels it incentivizes the most boring way to play, IE, rolling instead of shitting. Your ranking system might be better if it's based on time instead of amount of fuel saved.

You're definitely right that in certain ways it doesn't. All of it is royalty free music, so once I find better stuff or start working with a musician, that should change.

Thanks for playing. That's not at all a bad idea. I'll start thinking about how to redesign it so it's easier to understand.