aaa so many comments
I do read them all, but I can't reply to everything or else I'll never have time to work
there's a lot of features I'd like to add but they may come later, such as a late-game unlock
Kamoo
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I forgot to update the text for the werewolf's ending in-game -- the new ending is only if you lose to her on the tile where she naturally spawns with the elite cat-girls.
I plan to give her a separate ending if the player loses to her before that point, either that or I'll put the special endings/scenes out in a way where you don't explicitly have to lose to the enemies. All in due time...
by the way, a Steam release won't happen until the game is finished and we'll have to hope Steam allows it, since they're quite fickle.
There's a bug in one of the recent test builds that meant if you progressed past 0-2 and then came back, one of the new corruption features would prevent the ending from happening. This bug shouldn't be present in any of the up-to-date game versions, however.
After that you just 'defeat' the cat-girls.
Last week, (It's mentioned in the latest Patreon update and on the discord weekly log) I rewrote quite a bit of the text around the fox->voice->fox part of the game, in preparation for while I'll be continuing the story once the player reaches the Parish. It's not perfect, there is an overall problem of the main character wanting to do their own (very vague) thing. Maybe I'll think of something.
For the shrine/ram-girl mission, I put in highlighted tiles to show where the player is expected to go next, it's the best I could think of for now. I could slap a big "area cleared" sticker on the quest board when it's done, then, besides the SFX.
The description for cowbell reads "Generates milk when hit by FORCE. Alerts enemies", but there is some overdue rework for cursed items. Earlier in development I made it so a lot of cursed items / transformations gave you skills but I'd rather make it more like how Draining Kiss works. It's surprisingly hard to design that sort of thing and make it make sense to the reader. Milk is also due for a rework, it's remained in the game since it's important for some existing content.
The debuffs have very similar effects on enemies as they do to the player, it's just been very hard to show it happening, Hypnosis is the big exception to that where it wouldn't currently work well if hitting enemies with Hypnosis did nothing until a certain threshhold. I do plan to at least let ram-girls kiss other enemies but it'd be interesting to have the player do something, too.
I started the project with no prior skills so there's a lot of jank that I've been cleaning up over time, I've been having to balance reworks and making new content. I really wanna add more enemies but I also have a lot of old content to fix up... In the latest test builds, I've improved the effects relating to corruption itself and I'm working on adding more Werewolf content.
Overall good! No big issues, so I wrote some stuff on a notepad while playing:
"Targets look too much like pick-ups, there's no feedback when you're on 1 health or about to run out of fuel or about how strong your weapon is"
"It's hard to tell what you got hit by, having a different SFX if you got hit by a bullet versus if you hit terrain would be good, if not an effect on what part of the ship got hit"
Weirdly, I usually get D~B ranks on the first clear of every mission, but the one time I missed a secret medal and went back to get it, even though I took very little damage and went reasonably quickly while still doing about as much as the first clear, I got an F rank. I assume ranks don't matter much but it could say "Next time, shoot less bullets" or "Use less fuel" if getting a high rank is ever important.
It should be "bring its corpse" instead of "bring it's corpse".
The combats and scenes I played near the start are about right in terms of length, I know other games can ramble on a lot more.
Narratively speaking, it's weird to hear characters called 'liches' and then have them be blinked out of existence like it's nothing, by characters that seem like mooks, without any special effects. I'd either have some special effects there or else make a point of them not being like the liches most people would think of as liches. Old man seems pretty decent in his fight but then he doesn't really do anything to protect himself.
The pre-battle preparations are a awkward to begin with, it's easy to forget you have to click an empty space and then Fight or it's easy to accidentally remove characters from the fight and not know what you did. It might be hard to improve that in an RPG engine, however...
The game prompts you to save after almost every choice except choosing to fight the skeletons, which is odd, since that needs you to save more than choosing to go with them.
I was surprised to see quite a bit of difference in just that first choice, not something indies do a lot. The RNG seems pretty consistent, too, it isn't easy to win the chase sequence purely by RNG but the RNG also keeps you from dying in one turn as well, so using the healing item is a consistent way to win. That's good.
The web version works for me too.
The tutorial explains everything now and there's SFX and music, so that's neat, the only improvement after a tutorial to help explain things would be to have a preview of what each action will do before you place it so you can play faster without having to imagine which way the rotational block will rotate a creature.
The characters and themeing are cool.
With how the power gauge meter is, it seems like the kind of game that wants to give the player more information about their shot. In that case, it'd be nice to see:
- Any pucks highlighted that are within a straight line of your aiming angle, so you can understand how wide your puck is as the perspective makes this a bit tricky.
- The aiming angle staying around while you power up your shot, in case you forget where you're actually sending the puck.
On the tactics side of it all, I wonder if it's a bit too easy for the attacker to clear the board, especially because the outer edge of the board is worth so little. You can't play defensively by splitting to the left and right when a single shot to the middle will outvalue every single puck you have. I can't tell if I'm just bad or if it really is that hard to set the pucks up so the opponent can't just clear them all. So often it feels like I win/draw on defence simply because the opponent chooses to only take 1 point with their last puck instead of the easy 3/5 zone, but that should be fine for the lower difficulty characters...
I've just updated so I thought I'd show up with a certain couple of other devs for this demoday.
Itch.io has the horrible habit of ranking jam games based on itch.io popularity and not jam popularity so I'd advise you scroll down on the jam page to find anons who still need their games playtested! Seriously, give them attention or else they'll have a meltdown in the thread.
Updates usually end up being every 3 months publically / 1 month on Patreon, but I'd really like to update more frequently. I'm working on content regardless of how often I update but it seems if you update more frequently, it helps boost popularity...
So there'll either be a small update soon or a bigger update later.
When you touch water specifically? That doesn't sound like a RAM issue, stepping into water wouldn't cause more to load...
There'll be a new update soon and I'll tell people to check if they get any crashes with water, I haven't experienced anything like that myself. It might be something that has been fixed in the indev. (I remember there being an issue with how the debuff bar handles itself and touching water adds a debuff)
I beat the hardest difficulty, all you really need to do is pull all the resources and then sell them, then run the 2 power -> $25b until you're done.
I do get all the other mechanics but some buildings are just worth more than others, like steelworks produces $5 of effective sell value over the raw resources but making data from it produces $7, which could be fine... If it was hard to make data. It's incredibly easy to fulfill data's requirements.
So I'd say:
1. Make raw resources worth a lot less. You can remove the $1 selling cost and just make resources worth less so the math is easier, too. This means the refined/merged resources are actually necessary. Same with drawing, the $1 cost could just be taken away from the sell value of raw materials.
2. Make some buildings have much harder requirements. Data making's requirement of 3 same-quality materials is basically free and
3. when you can keep drawing to fill up the board the other requirement is too easy too, it's not really satisfying and there's no suspense of waiting to see what you'll draw next, because you'll just draw everything. So there needs to be a reason you can't just draw everything. That would be stability but that ramps up way too slowly and also, I'm not sure about stability when I saw it... Doesn't it just force you to interact with a resource? That just forces the player to do what the game says. "Sell this now or swap it out". Maybe if stability interacted with specific resources, like it could lock down areas and you need to use iron or steel to make the area usable again... I don't know, that's a tough design problem.
I'm here because someone just mentioned the control scheme and shift to jump, so I'm gonna give feedback on that.
SPACE - SET STATS : is setting stats something you do frequently, that it needs to be on the biggest bar on the keyboard? If you press space by accident then press it again, the menu doesn't go away. You have to navigate until you find the other control that closes it again. Whack. It's true that I do need to bring it up to see the controls so there is a reason I'd want to bring it up for the first few times. Oh, ESC works as well so that's nice. Seriously though SPACE to bring up the menu SPACE to hide the menu.
ARROW KEYS : this is fine.
Z/X : Japanese games seem to love this scheme. Guess it's fine.
TAB - INVENTORY: Every time I have to try and close the SET STATS screen I try to use this to get out, but it's actually Z to get out. huh. There could probably be a better button for this if you're using a Z/X scheme, somewhere around QWEASD. Maybe even C.
LEFT SHIFT - JUMP: It works but I'm not really feeling it, ZXC-SPACE feels more comfortable for a jump. Also, the fact that you can't jump unless you take the 1/5 chance of selecting the right stat is a dangerous choice because most people will think the game is broken, you don't even acknowledge that the player is pressing the jump button. You need the jump button to do something, even if it's useless. I'd say something about how STR should affect jump height and AGI should affect something else like how much you can move while jumping but that's a slippery slope into a D&D rant. The most important take from this is, in game design, you should always react to the player's inputs and actions even if it's to show that the input is currently useless, so the player knows it isn't broken / it may be possible in the future.
Also, have an exclamation mark when an interactible object is present so you know you can press Z.
I've seen you posting progress for quite a while so good job of making it into demoday (again)! It's always nice to see the games in action.
Oh, I see! Yes not having character customization for the demo seems like a good choice.
I was cutting within the circle and completed the quest (wasn't it 2500 grass cut though, not 10,000?) and I didn't see the grass being cut down at all. I didn't change any of the settings from default but there's the faintest possibility I might have some old settings carried over from an ancient version of the game. I can try again later if you'd like, I've gotta go do some things now though.
Yo, it's been a while.
Character creation:
The "hips" slider number is bugged and constantly shows 0.0 after sliding it.
Adding character creation is really cool, it's probably super important for a game like this, even if it massively affects the scope and a lot of the models can clip.
I'm thinking what should happen is there shouldn't be a selection between Adam and custom, especially because I was hesitant to try the customization since it said "you can import your own model"... Of course I don't have a model on hand so I wasn't actually sure I'd get to customize. I tried anyway and was pleasantly surprised. I'm thinking, Adam should be the default and shouldn't be expressly called out as Adam or have any special treatment. The player should feel like they are 'the one' no matter what they pick (even default Adam) and having a character that is blatantly "you are missing out on dialogue if you don't pick him, he's the real character" isn't ideal.
The tall grass isn't updating when I scythe it. I don't know if that's just not a thing or not but it feels weird for the tutorial since the grass becomes un-cuttable.
In any case, good to see progress! It's probably going in a good direction, I just hope you can handle the scope.
Though it's raw right now but the game has potential!
Like another commenter said, there's something about "intuition". The lose condition isn't intuitive and the winning condition isn't the most OCD-satisfying one, like how in Tetris the winning condition is to make a satisfying row which then takes you further from death by removing a line of blocks. Instead, the win condition here actually takes you closer to losing!
For example, seeing new objects like trees or ponds show up feels like a positive thing, creatures dying and turning into grass feels like a positive thing. Making something new from shapes that are trying to eat each other feels like it's positive. I didn't read the tutorial the first time around so I was surprised when filling up the whole board was actually the lose condition and not the win condition because filling up the whole board seemed like the OCD-satisfying choice.
Then, given there are 5 lose conditions (no moves, any of the 4 creatures are extinct) I just can't keep track of it, it feels like you can lose out of nowhere if you're trying to make creatures eat each other. The best play is to just not let them eat.
Also... If creatures can go extinct, it feels weird to let the player place them willy-nilly. It doesn't feel like the creatures can intuitively go extinct if the player has an endless supply of them in their pocket. If you had to create more creatures from existing creatures, that feels like it'd make sense. The player would know that if all copies of a creature disappear there'd be no way to bring that creature back to life.
Once you have enough effects and polish, plus it's more intuitive, you won't even need a tutorial and players can figure it out and explore the game on their own.
Clicking the level cleared retry button doesn't do anything, I had to guess that 'R' would retry and that worked.
Other than that, everything's great so I'll post some individual level feedback:
The solution to level 3 is to ignore the game's mechanic. I don't think rolling itself is bad and it's okay as a sort of "you can just roll!" tutorial but the rolling feels too slow for it to be a good solution.
Level 8 gives you no reason to actually go for the apples, it's just a waiting game. Again, too slow.
Level 11 doesn't seem to be anything new, it just reminds me of an earlier level that's much the same but it's somehow even simpler with the same "build up momentum because you'll get all your meter back anyway". Maybe it could swap places with that earlier level? But then level 12 is the same concept again... Not sure what to do about that.
Level 13 should have apples on both the lower and upper routes. It's still better to go the upper route but it means you have to ask yourself which route is better instead of having the game set it out for you.
Level 15: This one is frustrating because you have to wait to make the dash and then the entryway often deflects you, it wouldn't be as bad if the opening was curved inwards to be a gentler slope. You still have to work out the solution even if you make it easier.
Level 16: The 3-star is a bit too generous.
I stopped doing 3 stars after level 21, too much fine tuning with the timing.