itch.io

Thank you!

Honestly, I'm still quite conflicted on how far the dash should travel, since it used to be about 1.5x-2x as long when I first implemented it. I think the current iteration strikes a decent balance between recovery time, distance, and iframe duration that I quite like, but I've also heard comments on the invulnerability being too short or the dodge feeling unresponsive, so it's definitely something I want to experiment with in future.
Camera is another big aspect I need to really dig into, but these are some good suggestions. The current camera code does a little bit of angling downwards, but it's not very strong and doesn't work well at further distances. Dynamic zoom isn't something I've tried yet, so I'll look into that too. 

Getting knocked down probably shouldn't feel good since it's a form of punishment for messing up. There's 2 types of knockdown you could be referring to here: getting knocked down by a specific strong attack, or getting stance broken when your meter fills up. There's a dodge recovery input for the first almost immediately once you hit the ground, but there's a bigger delay before you can do it on the second since you have to wait until you recover from being stance broken. Perhaps the animation poses aren't clear enough here? As for the input buffer, I believe it's still set at 0.2s  buffer time, so I'll have to investigate the case of attack buffering during stance break and see if it needs to be reduced.

Well-made, just a really good and simple arcade game.
Character controller seems really floaty. I think it's possible to get very used to it, but the speed feels like it suddenly ramps up from nearly zero to flying over a very awkward transition period. It's a decent fit for this kind of game, since it adds to the skill level of the game, so I'm not really against it. You could even lean into this as a mechanic for increasing punch damage based on speed to punch the crabs even harder. 

I didn't read the part about picking up stunned crabs at first, but it was fun enough with just punching. Definitely adds a lot more options and challenge with the throwing mechanic once I tried it. I would like it if you could also stun crabs by up-punching them as they're falling in the air, though. 

Game could also use a countdown to the next wave, since nothing else is shown on screen while waiting for the next wave to start. Just feels like an awkward moment where nothing seems to be happening.

Quick update:

• Blocking no longer ends immediately when releasing the block button, you get up to an extra 0.1s depending on how much deflect time you had left, so you no longer need to hold the block all the way through and can tap the button instead, much more like Sekiro and less like Lies of P. 
• Landing animation has been given a new transition directly to walking, this should make it feel less sticky when jumping.
• Added stance regeneration when holding the block button. This is a little over 2x the base regen speed as compared to not holding it. (subject to change, but this is for Sekiro feature parity)

Very cute and funny. The art style for this is really good, just needs levels to play around with. Not really sure how the bike fits into a platformer since you can't jump with the bike, but it's cute.

It's a bit strange to see "Start" and "New Game" next to each other, but it made more sense when I returned to the menu and saw that Start had changed to Resume.

Thanks for playing and streaming! It's really such a coincidence that mine was first because I probably would've ended up sleeping and missing it, but it was great hearing everyone's comments on it in real time. 

It's not what I originally intended, but after seeing you come to that conclusion live I think it's perfectly fine. I might try to make the AI try to close the distance more aggressively so that it's not as easy to just run away, though.

I'm glad that there's been such positive reception to my designs, makes all the time I spent designing and redesigning the characters feel worth it. There's definitely a lot of work that needs to be done in teaching players how to play this, so I'll try and focus on that in the coming months.

Wow, a Kamen Rider game? The core gameplay is seriously impressive, but I had some issues with getting my controller to work. That tends to happen with this controller with a bunch of other games, so I just played with keyboard. 

There's a bunch of other minor technical issues/bugs:

• The audio settings randomly decided to set themselves all to 0 after I cleared the first mission and went to level select. This was fixed after going to the options and saving a new settings.
• There's some text overflow issues like "Highscho-oler" getting cut off, 
• The henshin changing UI seems to have gotten drawn underneath one of the generator events. 
• The key to change also stopped working during the tutorial for the Pursuer, and trying to pause it just quit the level.
• Clicking on the level select menu seems to break the whole menu. It's probably something getting raycasted and taking focus away from your buttons?
• I somehow pushed an enemy into the boss room, fortunately he despawned once the fight started. 
• Attacking the enemies in the laser section pushed me back into the laser, I'm not sure if that's intended?
• I found the pixel font text in the dialogue to be hard to read at times.
• The main menu starting with Enter and then everything else being Space to confirm was kinda weird. Maybe just have Enter remain being an additional key for confirmation or change it all to use Space?

Probably skill issue on my part, but the spikes and environmental hazards were really annoying to deal with in some places. I died to the 2nd stage boss, not sure if that's intended since it had a cutscene that put me into the next level but also gave me an F rank. Didn't play the last stage because I'm missing the tutorial for the 3rd form, maybe it's also a good idea to have a practice mode in the level select?

I don't have much nostalgia for this era of gaming since I didn't grow up having the game consoles that would have games like these, but I thought it was a really good game. Maybe the only other criticism I can give is that the enemy attacks come out really quickly and I'm not able to respond to it in time, but because of how lenient most of the game tends to be this doesn't feel like such a major issue. I figured it's one of those kinds of games where even having the enemy be able to attack is a mistake on the player's part, so it might really just be a skill issue on my part. Aside from that, really the only criticisms I can give are on technical issues, and maybe that there could be more work on the backgrounds but that can always come later.

Thanks for playing!

Yeah, a lot of souls vets I know had trouble too

As always with these kinds of games, the camera is an issue that I will have to continue to iterate upon. Definitely need a lot more telegraphing effects, especially in the sound department because it's more or less just a whoosh sound at the moment. I'll need to look around a bit more for ideas on how to design effects for combat state, but I guess there's always the good old red glow effect I can fall back on.

Thanks for playing, I'm glad you enjoyed it!

I never actually finished God Hand, but I heard of counter hits recently while doing research on existing mechanics but never found the time to try going back to the game (got filtered by one of the early bosses back when I first tried it lmao). Parries have a strength level to them which dictates whether or not you get interrupted. Most attacks are around level 2 or 3, and you only get interrupted if your level is lower. This works both ways, and the intent of it was so you could exploit longer combo chains by parrying multiple attacks for more damage by drawing instead of only being able to parry one hit and breaking the whole combo. The charged attack inputs and the leniency in combo input windows was meant to allow players to be able to delay and time their own combos to match up with the parry timings without having to stop attacking, but in practice this is too difficult to pull off (even for me)

Parries in their current state are extremely strong, but I'm not sure where to put it as far as the difficulty risk/reward curve goes. Some types of parries are very difficult, and they should be rewarding if you pull them off, but waiting for a specific attack you know you can parry shouldn't become the degenerate strategy. (Although I'm perfectly fine if someone is able to parry literally every single attack in a row without stopping because that's the most extreme level of learning the boss. Can't say I'll be able to make it totally possible, but I would like to see someone try. )

It's somewhat of an oversight that you can damage them while they're knocked down, but it actually affects the player as well since they're using the exact same code. (However, the player is able to dodge out of it while the AI does not.)

I still have a lot to learn when it comes to animating, but I'll try adjusting the speeds a bit more to make it feel different. Poise is a very problematic function to design around, because it's really hard to convey to the player without just showing a number, and it gets even worse when it's modified in any way. In the current build, Louise has 25 poise in base form and 50 when transformed, and most player attacks deal 10 poise damage, which means it goes from ~3 attacks to flinch to 5 when transformed, but I doubt anyone could figure that out exactly just from playing. I think some passive poise is necessary to prevent stunlocks, and there are some active poise (super armour) actions in the game already, but doubling it to 50 was probably too much considering how sensitive this mechanic's numbers can be to change. 

Could you elaborate on the part on responsiveness? Is this about the landing animation from the jump taking too long, or the step dodge being too short, or something about sprinting? I haven't played an Ys game, so I'll see if I can try it sometime soon to see what you mean.

Thank you for playing! (realized I never ended up replying to you and didn't want to leave you out even though it's been 2 days, sorry about that)

I think it's to be expected, most people have remarked so far that it's difficult, and I've had some say it's the hardest boss they've ever fought.

Interesting, but I didn't know where the laptop room was and got tazed a couple times looking for it, then I tried going in through the vents directly but got caught because the guard was right outside the door.

Also, I got stuck in a locker and fell through the world when climbing into the bin at the entrance. The character's sprite gets rotated in a weird way when lying down on the stairs.

I get that having the briefing reset on load helps to catch players up if they're coming back after a longer break, but it gets tedious to have to sit through the dialogue when reloading from getting caught, so I'd appreciate some kind of skip.

There's some stuttering issues with the initial load of the game, but I guess that's an engine-level issue. Overall, I really like the concept of it, just needs more work to bring out its potential.

Thanks for playing! 

• I guess I could add more damping to this? It seems like there's an issue with walking towards the camera, which isn't something that I ever tested. I think I can try to implement a separate target object that follows the character rather than having the target be parented to the root, since I know some of  my root animations can be a bit jerky. 
• I had planned to add some kind of mouse-wheel zoom control before, but I couldn't think of a suitable mapping for the controller and it just wasn't a particularly high priority feature at the time. I think now that I have a settings menu set up I can just move it in there, though. As for this being the default zoom, that was a concern when I initially set it to be so close, although now I realize it's probably also an important setting to have for accessibility reasons, so this will definitely get some changes and settings. 
• Definitely, I don't know how I didn't think of this until your comment when I've been using alt-tab in-editor to free my mouse too
• I think there's some considerations for unwanted mouse movements and controller drift that I need to test out first before I add the device switching code to that input, but it should be possible. 
• Only the locomotion state is affected by the jump exit time, it shouldn't affect any other actions. But I'll try adjusting the exit time to be shorter, or add some interrupts.
• This definitely needed to be separate animations; there's the action where she's transforming (no halo) and the action where she's transforming out (red halo), and only the red halo can be interrupted. 
• It's about 4 healthbars if you count each stance break as one, but unlike Sekiro where deflecting is your main option, this game also has weapon clashing (parrying) that does a lot more break damage. If I shortened it down to 2 health bars, it's possible to beat her in less than a minute by using parries, so the problem here is that the game doesn't teach this mechanic at all right now.
• Yeah, this was a pain point I'm very aware of. I'll try and get a fix out for that by this week.
• This is intended behaviour, but I should probably add a setting for it somewhere.
• I think the interval between weapon changes are quite short, which should alleviate some of the waiting. There's definitely a crazy amount of attacks (I say that as the person who had to implement and animate them myself) and it's still missing some big attacks I've been putting off, so this aspect will probably only get worse. However, since blocking is quite lenient and the player's mobility is high, I feel that there's enough opportunities for a patient player to observe and learn the attack, even if there are a lot of them. (also padding for gameplay time haha...) 

Ultimately, I expect the kind of people who'll play this game to mostly be Sekiro vets looking for something even more challenging, so I think it's good if it's already managing to be difficult to seasoned players at this early stage. I'll definitely be adding another simpler boss before Louise, and maybe he'll be more like Hanbei the Undying as a kind of tutorial/practice character for those who aren't already familiar with Sekiro.

Thanks for the thorough feedback!

Thanks for playing! I'm not sure what you mean by the camera going left and right, but there's definitely a lot of work I need to do on the camera.

Wow, this was a really hard game. Although the tutorial does a pretty good job of teaching the main mechanics, it's really hard to actually manage swapping mixtures while fighting enemies. Still, it's a pretty unique mechanic and having to manage so many things feels quite addictive. I really liked how I could just drink water to extinguish the flames on myself, really cool that it works so intuitively. Definitely feels like the damage output of enemies could be toned down a little, especially in the first level. Things can get out of control really quickly because of the barrels, too.  I had a lot of trouble with the bomb enemies, especially around the 3rd or 4th level when a room would spawn 4 or 5 all at once and getting close enough to be in their collective blast radius was near instant death.
Also, they need to be BIGGER. And make them jiggle when you shoot water at them.

Updates: 

• Added lock on controls to the menu controls list. 
• Slightly reduced tracking on some of Louise's attacks.
• Fixed a bug that would allow her to start performing actions if you started the execution late into the stance break and it expired mid-animation.

Not much of a bullet hell/shmup player, didn't even manage to finish Touhou PCB back in the day, so this was pretty challenging for me. I managed to get to the 2nd boss, but died without any continues left when her fight actually started. I think the attack she has with the rows of ice is a bit too tight, but otherwise most patterns would probably be quite reasonable if I could see what my hitbox was.

Yes, that's intended. It's not a very easy concept to convey, but the idea is that she's trying to transform out of the armour because she'll start to take damage over time after a certain point, and if she can't do it in time or gets interrupted too many times she'll still force it which staggers her.

Yeah, the cover art is pretty bad for the purpose of conveying what it's about since I didn't have any other marketing materials prepared other than this pic I use as a profile pic and I didn't really want to use a screenshot either. I had thought about commissioning someone for it for DD60, but I figured it wouldn't be done in time and I wasn't going to try and rush it. 

Loved the demo, there's really only the visual/audio polish and some quality of life features that still have significant room for improvement, the core gameplay is already really good. I made it to level 17 and accidentally died with the healer that transfers HP, and it was a pleasant surprise to have all these different healers show up after clearing the tutorial.

I found shift-1/2/3 to be a tiny bit unwieldy for controlling the characters, maybe using the row of keys below WASD could be worth considering? Probably the only somewhat lacking features in the game was in commanding units, it'd be nice to be able to control units individually, or at least split them into groups like frontline/backline so I can avoid attacks aimed at my backline without interrupting what the front is doing. Individual-level micromanagement of focus and movement is probably too much to handle for me and most other players, so I'll be happy if I just get a couple of control groups. It could be useful to be able to call up specific abilities?

Visuals are definitely the weakest link of the game, environments are repetitive and dull, and while the character models are nice, they're reused a bit too much. On my first run where I didn't understand how party formation worked I ended up with 3 pointy hat characters, each with slightly different colours. Also, having more enemy variety would be nice, especially if they could better relate to their abilities, because it's hard to pick out who's what when there's a whole group of enemies bunched up together. I don't know if it's easy/feasible to do in Godot, but a more distinct outline for selections might be nice. Attack visual effects are also quite dull, especially the ones where it's just a circle with a noise texture on it. To be fair, a lot of these kind of stop mattering once the gameplay gets hectic enough that I can only look at the health bars, so it's not exactly a major deal breaker.

In general, the UI is functional, but the design and fonts used have some room for improvement. I'm personally not a fan of the fantasy font text, and the backgrounds for a lot of the panels don't look very good.

Metaprogression with the tavern is interesting for giving more choices, but simple bonus stats for everyone seems a bit bland, though I don't really have any better solution. I do think that the initial run through the earlier levels can get boring if there isn't going to be significantly more enemy and environment variety, so maybe some way to skip to a deeper level could be worth exploring.

The 5 minute timer feels a bit short, but it could just be that I'm too inexperienced with the game and its levels since I've only managed to beat the timer once. I also think there's some untapped potential in making it closer to some kind of dungeon crawler and having more non-combat/exploration-related abilities or items, but I'm not sure if the way levels work currently will support that very well.

It starts out decently well when the dog is teaching you movement, but there's a lot of bugs I found after that.

• Most UI didn't work. I couldn't exit the settings menu, and the pause menu is also broken in the same way.
• Sometimes, the jump spin doesn't play or is not available.
• Fans don't work sometimes.
• Falling in the big fan room only slowly killed me (took about a minute), but when I fell down later on at the other end of the room I was reset to be on a fan immediately.
• Shift occasionally gets stuck in a very low speed state that only stops after about 5 seconds.
• After picking up the hammer, it dropped the water gun, and I tried to pick it back up only to drop the hammer and no longer be able to pick it up. 
• The AI for the boss stopped doing anything after the first move.
• The button interaction around the fan room didn't work. 

• There is a lock-on mechanic on middle mouse click, sorry that I forgot to mention it in the menu. 
• Definitely one of the next features I'll be adding, didn't have time to even make a victory screen either lol
• I'll look into it. The root motion animation is just a straight line, and rotations are locked during that action, so I'll have to figure out how to make it turn around (hopefully without having to modify the animation) 

Thanks for replaying!

Really impressive, but it's definitely too early for me to play as someone who doesn't play this genre. I think there needs to be better information on what each resource does, and some refinement on what each unit's UI says, like making only the ones that can produce anything have the "idle" status. I'd also like to see more of the /pol/ humour come through, since it's mostly just in research topics and the initial starting settings for now, maybe like how events pop up in games like Frostpunk?(never played that or civ, just remember seeing a screenshot of it). It definitely stops feeling like a game about that after a few turns in when the novelty of seeing gems wears off, but I'd also understand if there's a lot of things there that might not be appropriate to put into a game.

Thanks for playing! I've had a bunch of other friends try it, and even they've been struggling with it despite being souls/sekiro veterans lol. I'll probably have to prioritize making the tutorial for the next release.

Thanks for playing! 

The game is very much intended to be played with lock-on (which I forgot to add instructions for in the pause menu lol), but I'll check on that "line up perfectly" thing. Compared to mainline Souls games, the enemies I'm adding are a lot smaller in size and mostly a lot faster, so it might not be viable at all to play unlocked, but I'll see if I can add some kind of aim assistance when playing unlocked.

Dodge invulnerability is short so that players have to parry or deflect instead, but after looking it up just now I found that most souls games are at about 20+ iframes at 60FPS while this only has about 8, so I should probably extend it a little more.

What hardware specs are you using and what FPS did you get?

Thank you for playing! I'll have to work on adding some rebindings so that accidental lock-on doesn't happen. Really appreciate the full video for it.

Couldn't figure out where to go after the first checkpoint. I got the dice that turned the character purple, but it teleported me away and I didn't know what to do after that.

Completed the demo, looks great and plays pretty well. Was a lot harder than I'd expect from the casual game-like art style. Shop UI doesn't seem to be working 100%, balls can occasionally get stuck in walls or fly out of the map, but at least that is somewhat solved by the recall system. There should probably be a warning about "quit game" actually quitting the game, because I ended up losing 2 stages of progress when I wanted to check the map. Maybe add a way to return to the map mid-stage?

Seems like there's only really one interaction she has at the moment, and there's no apparent way to get more points other than just waiting. Probably needs some kind of rewards for interacting.

There's not much else to talk about for the current state of the game, but as far as the idea goes I'm not very keen on it. The kinds of apps that offer this kind of functionality that I know of are either "cosy games" like that one cat cafe game video on YouTube recently, pets that just crawl all over your screen (alternatively, chibi anime girls that walk around), or literal desktop strippers.

IMO, you either make it an R18 game (which should probably make for an interesting video later down the line) or expand on customization and interactions to make it into something like tamagotchi.

Frankly, it seems like an overcrowded genre to go for if you're not going to add significant changes to the formula because there's only so much screen space a weeb can allocate to things like this, and I've seen so many of these desktop idle games already. I've even seen NFT companies try something similar at conventions before.

 It's also not going to be able to compete against gacha games like Azur Lane, Brown Dust or GFL2, and that's probably where the main audience wanting anime girl interactions lies in, because it already provides something similar to what you have here with a much higher quality, on top of having the rest of their respective games' gameplay and characters/story/etc. (Disclaimer: I don't play any of those games, but I know people who do and the clips they post sometimes are pretty insane)

However, if you still want to make a game like this, then I'd actually recommend targeting the female demographics with anime men instead, because your only major competition in that department would probably be Love and Deepspace and that has been wildly successful.

Also it would be absurdly funny if you actually turned yourself/any of the team into a hot anime guy for it, you wouldn't even need to pay another voice actor to do the work.

It's good, but I feel like I want to be challenged a bit more by the enemies in ways that aren't just swarms. The moon laser level was the only one I died in, but that was more because I was trying to just focus on the big laser instead of dealing with anything else at all.

Generally feels pretty good, sounds could use some work though. The sprint behaviour is either a run (expected), run that stops immediately (not expected), and turning around 180 degrees (very unexpected and also disorienting). There aren't really any scenarios in the game that necessitate the quick turning at the moment because everything moves quite slowly, so maybe bring that onto a separate key? Also, landing doesn't feel like landing, it looks like I exploded but sounds like nothing happened.

I get that boosters lock you into the direction, but I'd appreciate being able to turn it off. As it stands, there's no real option to use it for anything other than travelling that exact distance, even if you just want to go up by a little bit.

It took me until the Moon level to realise that the 2 semicircles on the HUD were weapon statuses.

Actually liked the briefings and dialogue a lot more than I expected  to. It's short and sweet.

Whoops, forgot to add that control to the page lol. 

She takes reduced HP damage and deals more damage while her armour is up, but stance damage taken remains the same. If you stance break her, it immediately dispels the armour. 

Yeah, this is pretty rough for a first encounter. I'm planning to make her be the first boss after an easier tutorial boss that actually teaches you the basics.

The art for this is really nice, but the gameplay seems to have a lot of softlocks, or at least cases that seem like softlocks and I just don't know how to progress. 

After the initial tutorial on setting up the mission to reach Lagrangian, I did the research as part of the tutorial and didn't know what to do afterward, probably because that flow of Research -> New Ship is never really shown beforehand. Anyway, after figuring that out I managed to start the mission to orbit Galduen, but it failed and now I don't have any new contracts to take.

Thanks for the art!

Yeah, the tutorial is going to have to carry a lot of weight for this one, since I'm probably not going to implement some skill tree to slowly drip feed moves to the player.