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Thanks for the feedback, its always appreciated!

Yeah water controls are janky. The castle area has levers which need a charged attack to activate- they reverse all the traps in the area, so the fire pillars go the other way (and there's another lever in that room to get back out). The Twist ability needs you to hold up or down after you grab something, to move it back/forwards in time. Its all a whole game's worth of mechanics to dump on people in a short demo, so I didn't expect anyone to really figure it all out in one go, you've done some of the most of those new areas I made.

I don't expect picking up small objects to be obvious that you need to crouch first. Its a problem of gameplay necessity. Since it uses the same button as attack, I disable it if an enemy is nearby and for minor objects, but always prompt for solid physics objects which block you, or table height objects.

The demo was always bound to be totally overwhelming since its a whole game's worth of mechanics packed into 7 levels instead of slowly rolling it over the course of a game. I'd hope to be able to have a longer tutorial and a helper monkey to navi you whenever a new mechanic is rolled out

thanks for the footage, its indeed very helpful

/e also  consider as a point of pride you made it through the whole demo which is supposed to be made much easier by the ranged attack spells and debuff mechanics (spike/freeze in particular trivializes a lot of it). So you basically just did an Ironman+Despair run ^^

Hah thanks this was actually really helpful and exactly the kind of response I was looking for! Part of my experiment was that I didn't put in a lot of control reminders and I wanted to see where players would be tripped up by not knowing the inputs. And boy oh boy. All the way through 6 levels without pressing Q to cast a spell a single time, messing around in the scale room without realizing you can pick up objects from the floor by -crouching- first. Definitely would have benefited from gating a free early spell powerup that showed the 'press Q to cast' message, though I suppose thats not an issue for the real game (start with none).  Also I plan the game for game controller setups and balanced around it, but clearly needed a reminder for mouse controls that you're aiming in 8 directions with them. Although considering almost all the content I created since the last update is the 8 new spells (I made the new levels in one day prior to DD), its a bit of a shame people won't see them if they can't find the secret areas to unlock them. And it worried me you guys were going to immediately suicide by casting discontinuity when you found it, since its a risky spell

/e and the the levers are activated by charged attacks. Intending them for the first dungeon which is gated beyond the charged attack upgrade, so its really nonobvious in the demo, lots of people trying to crouch on them or press random buttons 

I definitely like the visual style, you nailed that. It was very non-obvious in the control scheme that rotating the camera with the mouse didn't affect movement direction, but rotating with WASD did. The normal shooter setup is for left/right controls to strafe while camera is entirely mouse driven, so I feel like I was making the main character's head twist around like the exorcist. Being able to attack by just left clicking, without needing to aim first, might also help it feel more fluid.

Thanks for the feedback! I've been busy and I'm still playing other people's games to give them some feedback so I'll have more time to type a detailed response later (thanks for your details!), I just wanna give a quick tip that if you're in the big metal factory level, a screen 'above' the save spot, you'll see a doorway in the wall on the left, out of reach. And all you've got around it is some grabbable rungs on the ceiling, a big metal crate on the floor and big jet flare fires underneath them

I can echo that the ladder controls could be streamlined a bit. I wound up drowning a kid before I figured it out. If the player is on a flat ground next to a ladder, and gives a command to a companion on a ladder to follow, they climb up to the player's Y axis, but if told to detach from the ladder they'll hit the wall instead of landing on the ground. A simple solution might be to make a companion on a ladder try to climb slightly above the player, instead of on level with them. Very cue minimalism overall

Thanks for the feedback, I got a whole ton watching through the VOD and taking notes. I changed how sliding works from the last build, its no longer a set distance by pressing the inputs, but rather its "hold down+left/right" to slide while you hold it, capped at a max distance per slide. Since lots of people reported wanting short and accurate slides, rather than overshooting targets.

You also found a glitch with how the mouse aiming was handled, I added a feature that lets you change attack directions in a grace timer at the start of each attack, and that was using the movement direction input even when mouse aiming was active, I'll just need to disable it when mouse aiming is on. And a few other things like making the lantern geist chain climbable, changing color palettes to fade out background/doodad/nonactive elements like that lavafall and non-grabbable chains. And yes the incel wizard is killed by taking a shower

Thanks for the feedback! I'll look to address some of that stuff

- The rewind indeed has a cooldown, but its arbitrary, I only need it to not be same-frame-as-last-rewind-ends to avoid any glitches that might ensue (and that might even work, I just didn't test around it). I put that in there as a sanity cap considering you could tank fps by spamming it and triggering all the code that swaps between one and the other, so I could lower the delay, its just set to 25 frames right now, I could make it ~10

-I can set rewind speed arbitrarily, and if you cheat and edit the save file you can set it to 2, 3, 5, 10, 100x speed if you want and try it out, but I feel like with fine platforming people wind up pressing the button more immediately and wanting to finesse into the point they leave off, as opposed to letting the guts fly for several seconds. I did a lot of testing at 2x vs 1x speed, I was never too sure which to go with

-I put in a 2 frame delay on the jump recently to allow a very very brief animation where you push off the ground. I may remove this, since it makes it harder to fine tune your jump height and makes it feel that very bit delayed. 

-The idle animation probably starts too fast, but it actually slows down as the player goes afk and catches his breath, until his full idle afk loop kicks in

-I'm always fine tuning the camera system, its really complicated with how it works for moving between different angles and doing a vector projection onto a line that might be triggering some ratchet safeguards that are supposed to keep it from jittering back and forth when movement is less than a minimum distance, I'll see if that's at play

-The signs are just for the demo, half the streamers I watched in the initial build ran right past every save spot and then got frustrated if they died and went back to the start, or went through a shortcut back to the start of a level. Would definitely not include such a feature in the final game, I hope that once a player is used to time rewinding they could just ya know, rewind time when they notice they went through a one-way door.

Thanks for the feedback! Yeah I need to do more testing with both gamepad and controller setups since I developed it on KB+M, some folks found other bugs I need to fix with that. The polish and content is all in place to build a large game out of it, so I hope I'll have something to show off in the future, thanks

Definitely got the GBA thematic down to a t. I wonder if there's  better way to allow the player to turn in place without making the brief delay before each movement, since it makes it feel a bit less responsive, though that's not a big issue if all the traps / tiles are strictly 'turn based'

There are some quality of life features from Diablo it certainly wouldn't hurt to copy. The obvious stuff like "clickable weapon text boxes when you hold alt" and "enemy health bars", but also some things like 'when the inventory or stat screens are open, shift the camera so the player is focused in the middle of the remaining side of the screen'. That helps gameplay be less obstructed even with a menu open. An often rather tricky thing to do without some exploits / glitches is to make sure equipping/unequipping items with +stats like +hp preserves your % HP instead of absolute value, so putting on a +2 max hp item makes me go from 60/60 -> 62/62, instead of 60/62. Of course, lots of ways to screw up the coding on that. Could use something on the control setter to warn/stop you if you map multiple functions to the same hotkey.

Also another very important one I noticed- left click lock-on! When you click on an enemy in a diablo game, it will act as if you continue to hold that click aimed on that enemy, even if the enemy moves. For ranged attacks you'll stand and keep shooting at it no matter where it moves, for melee attacks you'll follow it if it gets out of range. That becomes very noticeable and necessary when you have enemies that are moving around erratically instead of attacking, like the goat cultists

Overall looks great! didn't notice too many bugs. When I died and restarted my minimap wouldn't show

Thanks for feedback. Yeah the text boxes were done very ad hoc just for the demo, depending on your control scheme (and always the game end one), they can be either prerendered sprites or dynamic text which renders quite differently even with the same fonts, I'd only use sprites for the final game. I just made a couple variations for the default controls. 

Right now my setup is that you always highlight and can pick up solid physics objects, but minor objects like eggs/bottles that don't have collision can only be picked up if you're crouching. Maybe I should adjust how that works, but I don't plan on it ever being necessary to pick up non-solid physics.

Thanks!

Thanks! I dialed up the difficulty way more in the demo than I would in the final game since its too short to build up the curve properly

Thanks! I've got a whole series of traps and enemies already in place that will use time mechanics including for puzzles, stuff like "Not-wallmaster that drags you backwards through time while keeping you locked in position", and other such stuff. Working on adding an ability menu right now which will give the player control over such abilities. You can see one particularly complicated one if you unlock the cheater menu, pressing escape -> "Desynchronous Rewind (?)". That kind of stuff works in the engine already, so it will be fun to design around it

Thanks for the thoughts. Yeah The metroidvania gameplay would be in the final game, you can see the elements are there like minimap and save points and map reveals, but this was just a linear demo I slapped together quickly. I do want to do another pass to make sure traps are more visible and non-traps are less prominent like that lavafall, really just a matter of slapping some palette swaps in there. Thanks!

Thanks for the feedback! This is really just a tech/asset demo on some levels I cooked up just to make a demo, so its very linear and threat-dense instead of the more exploration focus you'd expect of a castlevania. After all, I've got hundreds of enemies and traps implemented so I went heavy on including a sampling of them when I'd expect the final game to spread that out, and ramp up the difficulty more slowly. Likewise there's also a whole host of time manipulation mechanics not seen here, which I'll be able to use for puzzles, so it will go beyond just being used for rewinding deaths. Thanks!

This demo is largely unchanged from DD49, just some tweaks to animations/movements/attack. If you didn't see it before, take a look

Thanks for the video commentary. I'll reply as I'm watching through it

I definitely see a lot of people struggled with aiming the attacks since its bound to tilting up/down intended for controllers, but I added in mouse aiming in the latest revision like you were attempting. And lots of people similarly didn't realize you needed charged attacks to permanently kill rewindable enemies, I'm testing adding a system to kill without them anyway, but man its tough to watch people struggle with that bit. Some people killed the bosses in a few seconds, some took several minutes to randomly hit a charged attack at the end and have no reason why they killed it.

I had a 'camera peeks up/down while holding up/down' feature, you can even see the MC tilting his head up when you hold it since I animated it, but even with some tolerance lagtime I found it too distracting if you were using up/down to angle attacks, so its just commented out in the code. The later revisions also slow down movement significantly.

Noticed very few people tried attacking to reflect projectiles. Definitely should make the non-dangerous lavafalls in the background be a more desaturated color so people don't think it will kill them.

The bossfight you think you skipped was just the three skeletons in the rotating iris area, wasn't meant to be hard. Definitely should let the AI for some platform enemies like the big electro robot bossfight move to different floors for an open shot, I didn't configure its jump nodes properly. 

Thanks for the detailed feedback. Yeah that first turret could use some improved visibility, that's one I'll touch up first. The nuts it fires are exploding into clumps of flowers, its even less easy to see on ground with flowers already on it.

I think I'll rework how the held object system works significantly. Right now it tries to block your movement by giving an additional hitbox over the player's head checking multiple points along the size of the object, to a priori stop movement. If you jump up and down, you'll notice you bonk into ceilings like you're that much taller. But if you do clip into a surface anyway, it dislodges it and you drop it. And that keeps physics objects from ever clipping into walls and getting stuck. But I could either just allow it- and try to recover physics objects if they do get stuck, and force them to be kept held even if the player clips into a wall. No reason the player should drop an object being carried without an input (or being hit, or I also make it dislodge if a huge physics force is applied to it like an explosion or another object hitting it)

You're the second person to say something about the climbing animation and I'm curious what people see in it, I know its a bit different than other animations because it mean the whole body of the player had to sort of tuck over into the crouch animation and flip in place which was awkward to animate, but also because its playing at 60 FPS whereas other player animations tend to be 15 or 20 FPS. That probably makes it seem "too smooth", but without it, either the climb is unresponsively slow, or he looks like he's teleporting. For comparison, the idle standing loop is 16 frames at 15 FPS in a 60 FPS game (4 gameplay frames per 1 animation frame). The ledgegrabclimb animation is 16 frames at 60 FPS.

If you want to test out a faster rewind to see if its more to your liking, try activating the cheat debug menu, go to "edit save file" and change the "rewindspeed" parameter from 1 to whatever you want. Hell, you can rewind at 500 fps if you want, the game engine is STABLE. I had it set to 2 for a long time, but I think the precision platforming lends itself to 1x rewind speed, I dunno, its not set in stone.

I'll test out 'release charging = normal attack', good idea, I'll see if its better

Important bit about the chain scale platform in the castle level: All the traps are reversed in time. If you see that lever in the middle area next to the fireball spitting gargoyle, if you hit it with a charged attack, you'll reverse the flow of time and make the traps all go forwards. Every trap can be forwards or backwards, its the planned dungeon gimmick for that area (3 main dungeons with 3 gimmicks, ex all the volcano area rotates 90 degrees gravity at a time). So the chain scales in forwards time act like you'd expect, but in reverse time, adding weight to them makes them go up! Because, uh, reverse-time physics

Thanks! Metroidvania can definitely be confusing in direction and encourage more open ended exploration, something not really in this linear demo, but in the final game. I'll have to make sure to test out methods to keep people on track, one reason I made sure to add in the scripts that pan the camera around and show you areas.

But yeah anything this punishing to players is definitely going to be niche

Yeah I should have tweaked the foreground tileset to have fully blocked out ground and saved it as a separate file, I was just copying a doodad tileset for it, no biggy. 

One thing about the time dash is it actually has some uses even if you're not moving. It jumps you and any platform you're standing on and any physics object you're holding/throwing all fast forward through time. You can see it if you stand on a platform. It also means you can use it to dispel timed debuffs earlier, or other such effects. I figure it shouldn't be a big issue if players derp and use it for no reason, since you can just rewind time and be refunded any spent time juice.

I'm still not sure about the air control. I feel like a precision platformer benefits from having more air control instead of less. In that last update I changed the acceleration (240->200 ground, 240->120 air) and deceleration while held (380->500 ground, 380->250 air) and a bunch of other parameters. I feel like if air control was too locked into your starting speed, it would be harder to land on moving platforms. I do want to strike a balance with it, so thanks for the feedback, I'll test it out

He's allergic to beestings, canon preserved

Just walking over a save spot automatically saves. A lot of people think saves/maps/warp doors shouldn't slow down the player, I'll test that out, I thought it added the feedback to people to know their game just saved, maybe I could add an indicator in addition to the big glow & green trace of the player's previous movement

thanks!

also HRB was a hoot

Yeah these are all just small previews of content for a much larger game, the six main biomes I have fleshed out. My intention is that it will ramp up through the game, getting to the crazy hard platforming like that laser room that requires abusing time travel to brute force it- but ~then~ I can start introducing the more complicated gameplay elements: Enemies and traps that manipulate time too. Some more direct like 'drain or disable your rewind', or others that can drag you back in time, or travel forwards in time regardless of your rewind, or fire projectiles that travel back in time and kill you in the past...

Crouch slide is getting a lot of attention from me to tweak it, definitely the most maligned. My last update made it respond only to how long you hold it, but I think it might still need a different input like you said. I am not sure about ledge grabbing, I made it ignore ledges if you hold the down button now, but I wonder about making it require you to hold left/right

Thanks for the feedback. Trying to get the right balance of movement where some people say its too twitchy, others too slow. The final area of the game was just a joke to make it intentionally ridiculously hard, but the rest should show that brute forcing can work against even difficult areas like the laser maze. I am still debating some kinds of "add a red outline to hazards" sort of modern approach, to see how it stacks up against the art. Since yeah like an IWBTG kind of game, I could argue its okay to let people be confused about what killed them and then rewind time trivially. But its about striking a balance, thanks!

hold attack to charge up a blast

Yeah its planned to be a full size game, think super metroid map size, with 6 primary tilesets / areas, so this was a tasting of each zone's assets. But movement definitely needs some refinement, that was one of the big takeaways

Thanks, I may test out the 'add red outline to enemies/traps while they're a collision danger' kind of system that a lot of modern games have, I kind of avoided it to keep the art more organic but it might be worth a try

Thanks for the checklist. Yeah this is just a demo sampling of a larger game, not even a fraction of the content I've already created, I didn't want to throw in the most complicated stuff. Coyote time in particular is something I think I'll have to try out, should help the slipping-off-ledges. And killing rewindable enemies with normal attacks is my next task, using a 'need to deal X damage before they finish rewinding' system.

Thanks! Crouch slide definitely needs the most work of anything, and the rest of movement parameters. Yeah the metroidvania elements are in place for a larger game

Definitely going to tune up the movement with a lot of feedback I've gotten. And trust me, not only are there time mechanics in some areas of the demo that aren't obvious or easy to understand, but the final game will have some truly nutty stuff (think 'going forwards in time while everything else goes backwards' or 'getting killed in the past')

Does geriatric alucard feel it every time he dies? What a horrible fate.

Tweaking movement parameters is a top priority for me, I'll definitely remap the dodge/lunge, and try to allow crouch sliding and walking for finer movements. Might also want to use a different set of enemies in the final area, the skull barons confused a lot of people since they were only introduced at the least opportune moment and they're meant to be annoying hazards ala castlevania medusa heads, so that was kind of a dick move to ambush the player at the last moment.

Thanks for the feedback!

Thanks! The MC animations are made up of 6 layers, all manual pixel art sprites- cape, lower body, upper body, staff, flare, gauntlets. No rendering from skeletons, just a lot of aligning sprite sheets. I do find that balancing the game will be hard given the intersection of 'very frustrating instadeath mechanics' and 'trivialize threats by rewinding time' and 'traps/enemies who manipulate time too'. So it sure helps to get feedback.

Right now enemies are two classes, either they die normally to attacks, or they are rewindable- enough damage makes them slide backwards in time, and they can only be killed with a charged attack at low health or rewinding. I'm going to try a new system where normal attacks can build up a lethal damage on enemies while they rewind, ie once they start rewinding, you hit them a few times before it ends and it finishes them off, which would be an alternative to the charged attack (which I'll probably make do 3x instead of 2x damage, to compensate). That will be a bit of work so it won't be in this demo, but hope it makes the combat easier to grok

Don't worry you played the whole demo then, nothing left but a 'you win' screen if you kill the axeman. Thanks for the help, I know this demo tried to cram a bit more ideas into the game to show off mechanics then what I'd want in a learning curve for the real game. I plan to have a lot of 'normal' platforming in the earlier game, ramping up as you encounter more time-manipulating traps and enemies that make it more challenging through your ability to rewind time. But cramming those in early can be very confusing- the imps rewind time if you hurt, but don't kill them, the clump of skulls rewinds you if you touch them, skeleton archers can sometimes shoot arrows that travel backwards in time and kill you in the past, and those big skulls in the 1-1-with-a-twist level rewind you through time if they touch you. So yeah, a lot of cluttered ideas for a demo and that's not even 1/10 of whats in store.

Most people seem to agree the movement is too fast and especially the lunge/dodge/slide need a rework, that's a top priority. Making it more precise and slower.

Thanks for all the feedback, and good luck!

Thanks for the feedback, its been helpful and I've been assembling to-do lists based on everything folks have said. Yeah I was at the last minute putting resources internal to the .exe and didn't sort out music/sfx in time for the demo, so they're left dangling. The windows sound API and runtime independent playback means just having two copies of each sound is the easiest way to play in reverse, just swapping them and their positions. No reason I had to keep that save tile template in there though, that's just an oversight

I see everyone agrees that yeah I need to tune up that temporary menu and more importantly the player movement parameters, I'll add some more decel-when-not-held and terminate crouch slides if not held, should allow for finer movement.  Tuning up the movement is my priority now, that's definitely a sticking point. Thanks!

Thanks! There's a lot more unused traps and enemies that interact with time travel in crazy ways, things like desynchronized rewind (try pressing that button in the debug menu if you want to see). The current setup is that enemies are either 'rewindable' or not, and those rewindable can only be killed by a charged attack, otherwise they just rewind. But I think after feedback here what I'll do is add a system that kills them permanent if you hit them with multiple normal attacks while they're rewinding, like 'build up 3 glyphs around them and they explode', so you could just kill them by spamming attacks.

I'm going to adjust some of the platforming, people seem to agree its too fast and the double tap input for dodge sucks, I agree.  And I'm just glad to see people banged their heads against that 1-1 with a twist level even though I intentionally made it stupid. Thanks for the feedback!

Thanks for the detailing feedback! I'm adjusting a ton of the stuff based on what people have said, I can adjust platforming parameters by just changing a few values so I'll decrease max speed, increase deceleration, decrease air acceleration, change the dodge/lunge inputs, etc. Everyone seems to agree its too fast/jumpy. Water jumping is a good point, I'll try to increase the input buffer or the range you can jump on a surface, and especially the crouch slide

I might reupload the demo with some basic signs at forks in the road saying stuff like 'portal to start of level' or 'turn left for a save point', a lot of people had issues with that.

Even with the mario level being intentionally obnoxious, I think you're right I should adjust some hitboxes, I'll change which parts are chain and which are blade

Thanks for the feedback! I see you got the first clear prize. I'm going to definitely be using a lot of the feedback people have given, and a lot of people seem to agree the movement is too fast, jumping and overresponsive especially the max speed and input for double tap dodge/lunge. I'll be adjusting the parameters.

And yeah I constructed these areas to be pretty short just for a demo, there's all kinds of unused assets in place for a bigger game, I wanted to keep it a fast demo. Wasn't sure about boss difficulties with the combat, but most people seem to agree they were too easy. Thanks a ton!

Pinnacle of artistic vision in art design and music and above all else, physics

On first load it indefinitely hung on 'loading...', but just restarting and trying again it worked fine each time, so I hope that doesn't trip anyone else up. Had silky smooth fps on a 2060 and I played long enough to be killed by some very aggressive placeholders, looks good