Tutorial on this is solid for teaching the player how the game works.
Level designs ultimately feel like big empty boxes. More terrain or destructible miscellania would be good for alleviating that feeling.
Engaging enemy tanks at melee range is extremely overpowered and allows easy kills through commander window.
Tutorial for equipping new weapons would be good.
90mm cannon is a lot of fun.
Tankgame starts at 2hrs 17mins:
https://www.twitch.tv/videos/2250376964
Since the last time I got a chance to play this, it feels like the performance has improved a lot.
Vision blocking from low ground to high ground feels new to me, even though it may have been in previous builds. This seemed to be the first map where it actually mattered in my time playing the game.
Finishing the first mission the game told me I completed it in 56590 turns, which I don't understand.
Stances on units are cool. Rocketbot was definitely the MVP in this playtest.
Dropship is convenient for ferrying items home.
Cloaked units were interesting to mess around with. Sometimes they worked great, other times it felt like they were just bodies adding to the pile. In either case, the shading effects on them look nice.
No weird crashes this time.
Encountered a bug where queued units were spawning hostile after attuning a coven.
Encountered a bug where friendly units wanted to attack coven structures when given attack commands across the map.
Good progress \o/
HyperCoven starts at 1hr 31mins:
https://www.twitch.tv/videos/2250376964
Having no idea how to play solitaire, I found myself a little bit overwhelmed during the first few stages of the game. The upgrade system seems pretty in-depth, but in my first playthrough I didn't understand most of what was happening with items and upgrades and spent more time just clicking all of the available cards trying to figure out what I was supposed to do.
Despite being mostly unprepared I finished Jack difficulty in around 20 minutes and overall I thought that the art presentation for the game was solid. Music could use some work to add more tension to what feels like a battle sequence.
Ended up unlocking 5 stamps for the first run, which was a neat touch. I like the layout of the collectibles screen.
Has promise! Looking forward to seeing this one next demo day.
Solitaire Battle starts at 1hr 2 mins:
https://www.twitch.tv/videos/2250376964
Hi,
Just finished watching your playthrough - thanks for trying out the newest demo!
Controller support should definitely help a little bit with the fine maneuvering that people feel is missing from the WASD controls. The main hurdle with adding controller support is that I hardcoded basically all of the UI so I am gonna' have to go back through every single button, slider, etc and verify that when you press Left/Right/Etc that it swaps to the correct next UI element. Not hard, just really annoying.
Dialogue is temporarily removed because it was a lot of text that was preventing people from trying the actual gameplay. It'll come back soon - but probably trimmed down a little bit. Even the dev team felt there was too much text.
Thanks again - we always enjoy watching people get mauled by floofy try out the new content
I know we already got a chance to talk about this feedback, but I want to make sure that I also leave a comment here for other visitors to make sure that they know we had a chance to address these points. Posterity and all that.
VSync:
With SDL2 when you initialize a window, a rendering context is attached to it. My understanding is that VSync being toggled on or off requires a reinitialization of the rendering context, which requires a reinitialization of the window. If this is something SDL2 can toggle without a full reinitialization every time though, I'll try to sneak it in to the next update. Will research.
Menu Glitch:
None of us have ever seen the visual bug that you took a picture of, but we'll be on the lookout for it going forward.
Camera:
The camera panning is inspired by the camera in Cave Story. We have a setting to turn this behavior off, but it is not currently accessible from the rudimentary settings menu. We've considered having the camera follow the mouse cursor but most of us find that disorienting so it's unlikely to end up being changed to work that way.
Toggle Fire:
The reason we added toggle fire mod is because in the harder missions, we found ourselves holding down the shoot button for several minutes at a time as we carved through swarms of enemies. In the easy missions, the toggle is overkill. Whether or not toggle should be on by default has been discussed multiple times and neither side is really winning out. One of the major plot themes of the game is corporate psychosis and the unrealistic double standards that it imposes - which includes penny-pinching about bullets, the cost of which ultimately only matters during the early missions before the exorbitant rewards from completing sorties start to eclipse taking damage or strafing opponents with machineguns. This will be pointed out directly in the game's story text, but we're not there yet.
Ranking:
Just like office jobs in real life, the grade you receive has no bearing on reality. Your rank at the end of a mission is random.
Resource Management:
Games like Starcraft are a heavy influence on us even if it's not really this game's genre. Resource management and weaving things like that together just feels right for sci-fi.
Damage Report:
Will look into 0 damage being red. Should be green. Might have overlooked that.
Airbrake:
Airbrake is a new addition in this update and people seem to like it so far.
Story Progression:
There was a very consistent pattern of feedback for a long time about too much story text with missions that were way too short. We were procedurally-generating the story missions as placeholders up until two demo-days ago, and we removed a lot of the story text (temporarily) between missions because clicking through all of the dialog was frustrating for players who wanted to just jump in and try the meat of the gameplay. Seeing feedback about that text being missing was funny. Anyway, story text will be back again soon.
Gunbuddies are OP:
Gun buddies are intended to take some combat pressure off of you so you can focus on your job of being a pilot. They are, however, being nerfed with each successive update as more of their functionality is partitioned off to various upgrades that the player can pay for. You should have seen when they were auto-targeting destructible walls for hidden areas by default lol
Shop feels lackluster:
The shop is a relatively new feature that has been fleshed out a little more with each update. It also competes for space a little bit with the in-level shopping features which are simultaneously being expanded upon. The reason we added these shopping opportunities was to give players other methods to recruit crew members, unlock ships, etc, because we just have so many crew members and so many ships that we can't give them away fast enough. As we continue to iterate I'm sure the shop stock will become more interesting.
Gunbuddies buying shopping items:
We were unable to repro this bug but will be on the lookout for it.
Floofy:
Yes. Floofy is a little murderer. Floofy is responsible for more playtester deaths than all other hazards combined. This is unlikely to change.
CH01-09 / Dump Adventure:
This map has been the benchmark for making sure that the game actually performs properly under pressure and I'm glad that you got to experience it for the first time after we'd had a chance to optimize a ton of stuff with physics. Lots of testers have struggled with this map due to performance issues in previous builds of the game and we're glad that those kinds of problems are no longer common for people.
Boss difficulty:
Yeah I have no fucking idea dude some people get to this boss and just get owned, and other people just twist it into a pretzel and leave. There has been prettymuch zero middleground on the first boss - people either can't do it, or immediately toss the boss in the dumpster and move on. I am very proud of the design of this fight though and I think that it's a good introduction to using your shield effectively.
Sense of urgency or danger:
In the first chapter there isn't much pressure for you to move quickly. Later missions may have countdown mechanics. We wanted the first chapter to give the player a solid grasp of movement, crew customization, and using their shield + boost.
Money is fuel mechanic feels superfluous:
It is. This mechanic exists to give flavor to the world and doesn't really have much of a meaningful impact on the player. Several other mechanics are like that too and will be pointed out or lampshaded in the story text.
God DAMN there are a lot of characters:
Yeah. Probably too many. We're looking to cut several of them and merge a few others. The sheer scope of creating side missions to flesh out the story for every character is intimidating. At the same time, it takes a lot of bodies to run a logistics company. Nearly all of these characters and story themes are inspired by our experiences working in call centers, office jobs, warehouses, loading docks, and logistics- so we had a lot of emotional baggage different ideas to work through to really flesh out the dystopian feel of this world-encompassing (yet somehow completely incompetent) corporatocracy.
Thanks again for the detailed feedback! We love this kind of stuff and we read all of it.
Hi! Thanks for trying out the demo.
I think you are the first person to point out the visual similarity between the targets and the powerups.
I will see if I can do something about that for the next build.
The ranks are functionally random and have little-to-no correlation with how good or bad you actually did.
There are lore reasons for this- the game's (very WIP) story is a commentary on the double standards and sociopathic facets of a corporate environment.
Glad to hear there weren't any other glaring issues or crashes.
Thanks again!
Hi - we're happy to hear you liked the demo so far!
Some of the decorative pieces are foreground and others are background - we're still fine-tuning which enemies should be allowed to hide in the clutter and which ones should not.
We've had mixed responses on the gun buddies being wall-sniffing dogs, but a lot of players who have trouble seeing the differences between normal walls and shootable walls have found them useful for the task. We'll probably put wall detection behind an upgrade in the future.
Thanks for giving the demo a try!
5 JULY 2024 PATCH NOTES: https://pastebin.com/wKp1fNJF
This demo completely overhauls the majority of chapter 1 for what we hope is an authentic look into the level of quality we're shooting for with the game's levels.
Many performance tweaks have been made for a smoother experience - we're still finalizing optimizations for our level loader, so some missions might have a slight delay to enter.
Telegram if you want to come hang out: https://t.me/lofty_abj69
JUST LIKE MAKE GAME
Hi! I'm still catching up on demo day stuff but I wanted to reply to this feedback and clarify things for posterity!
Credits are indirectly tied to shields- if you pick up additional fuel that you can't carry, you receive credits instead. To prevent permanent invincibility, gems aren't used to power the shield directly. The green fuel bars also represent how much boost (or cloak) you can use, so there is a tradeoff between moving quickly and playing defensively.
Going back and replaying missions that you've finished is a feature that is partially implemented. Our plan is to make story missions replayable once you finish a chapter, in the same way boss fights are replayable after they are finished. The cheat code for this is AIRCRACKNGROOFTOPCANTENNA.
The team is in unanimous agreement that there is way too much reading between missions and it screws up the pacing a lot. We'll compress a lot of that text as we get around to it- hasn't been on the prio list, is all.
Visual clarity is an interesting topic for this project in general, and it's something we've been steadily improving on over the last several demo days. Adding F1 to highlight the ship in this build is one of those steps, and we're likely going to be adding some dynamic enemy highlights too (suggested from DD55 feedback, if I recall correctly) - I need to rewrite the highlighter to support that, though.
A lot of our enemy designs in the current build rely on their small size and coloration to blend in with their surroundings, and we've received a lot of mixed feedback on that decision. Part of what we are trying to accomplish with enemy designs is creating believable adversaries that look like they actually belong in their environment, and part of what we're going for involves using bright colors + motion to make enemies visible when they are dangerous.
Other clarity steps we are considering include some changes to gems on screen (automatically fade/hide when enemies or bullets are nearby), some changes to bullet graphics, and adjusting background colors to make certain moving items easier to see.
As for the crash screen, when I saw you arrive at that on your recorded video I was kicking myself for keeping that placeholder mission on map 2. My intent was for players to try out the red-difficulty missions on map 1 after completing the Garbage Worm fight. Those red missions showcase the other biomes available for procedurally generated missions, along with their different music tracks and etc.
Thanks again for the detailed feedback and we'll probably see you guys next demo day \o/
I like a lot about this demo so far.
There's a lot of feedback to provide on this one- it's difficult to try to organize it all.
Command card options should all have hotkeys. Extra points if those hotkeys are customizable.
Shift Queue for moves and attacks feels a little weird and doesn't always seem to resolve correctly.
Determining the edge of the map from the fog of war is very weird - I'd recommend different colors for this.
Losing an entire coven's production uptime for upgrades is very harsh.
Populations being per coven is extremely weird to keep track of - needs some kind of UI in the corner like SC2.
Witch King doesn't appear to benefit from any upgrades which makes him slow and clunky as you upgrade harder.
Unsure if upgrades have an upper limit.
Ranged units bodyblock each other a lot.
Evil Eye is cute.
Getting an explanation of what the upgrade does only after investing in the upgrade is weird.
Being able to sacrifice upgrade structures for more powerful units would be cool.
Select all army hotkey would be useful instead of doing it through command cards.
Select all army through command cards seems to be limited to only units from that particular coven, feels weird.
I hope the pixel artstyle is the winner in this battle of styles.
It feels like this game rewards passive play instead of active, aggressive play? Waiting for units to spawn hurts me - can I sacrifice Witch King HP to turbocharge my summoning rates or something?
Maybe I simply missed it, but it's kind of unclear what benefits any particular artifact bestows upon a particular coven.
Some kind of jump between bases with the camera hotkey would be cool.
Summoning Circle rally points do not seem to take effect for the currently-summoning unit; only the next one?
Effectively scouting the scrolling worldspace as it wraps in on itself is extremely weird.
Main screen with options is absolutely adorable but not being able to adjust music volume in-game feels bad.
Probably more stuff - I recorded a blind play! It'll be over here when it's done processing:
Gave this demo a shot and ran into a bunch of interesting technical issues during play, including graphics corruption and what appeared to be drift or lossiness on mouse sensitivity. The graphics corruption was similar to what I encountered when attempting to play No Man's Sky, so it may simply be that my 750ti can't handle what your game is trying to do.
I definitely prefer tight controls and high responsiveness when piloting vehicles in games, so the somewhat sluggish mech controls for this game were out of my comfort zone. The hover at the top of the jump feels good though and I'm glad that it activates at the top automatically.
I got beat up on the first map and wasn't able to defeat the enemies that were present. I'm not sure if this is because I'm bad or if it's because all of the graphics were starting to break down or if it's a little bit of both.
Left mouse firing weapon on right side of the mech feels very weird- I'd recommend adding a setting in the options menu to invert weapon pickups so that left click fires left gun.
One of the weapons I picked up appears to not do anything. Unsure if that's intended. I didn't find myself using the sprint at all and I have no idea what fortress mode is supposed to do. All enemies seemed to be continuously pathing directly to my location.
Lots of hiccups and performance drops as things were loaded. Loading screens should probably have the word "Loading" on them somewhere. The music seems nice.
Overall it feels like a good starting point; still very rough- but that's what demo day is for. I would focus efforts on refining player input - from the mouse sensitivity and camera responsiveness to the different ways left and right click are handled (I can hold left click to keep firing, but that doesn't work for right click, etc).
Full playthrough video here:
CheersDid a blind playthrough of the current demo and uploaded the result over here:
As other players have mentioned, being able to return to main menu from the defeat screen would be good.
Being able to pay 1$ to receive a resource pull that was guaranteed to be at least 5$ seems like a debug or testing feature, or placeholder values. Perhaps as planet stability decreases, the cost can increase. I have a feeling I read something about that on the page or during the tutorial somewhere.
I'm not sure what the emotional support checkbox does in options but I enabled it during the playthrough.
Cheers
Hey there,
Thanks for trying the demo! I can clarify some details on these different points \o/
-> All of the ships have different firing positions for where their weapons are mounted. Each ship has a unique feel for that - as you unlock better ships and upgrade crew members, your arsenal quickly becomes stocked with autoturrets and support drones that take a lot of the pressure to fire at targets off of the player in favor of simply focusing on your task as a pilot.
-> It's definitely a collectathon, just in a less traditional way. We added collectable frogs this patch, the shops have various upgrades, there's over 50 characters in the roster to unlock alongside 20ish ships (and even more gunbuddies), and more stuff is probably going to sneak in before release. The task of figuring out how to even give the player the mountain of stuff there is to unlock has been a daunting one to work through- with ten story missions per chapter, if we give you a new character after every single mission we'll still have leftovers to hand out. It's a process lol
-> Hitboxes vary from ship to ship but in most cases the hitboxes approximate the shape of the ship at a scale of about 90%. Certain features like tailfins/spoilers or hanging antennae are not included in most hitboxes. The feedback we've received on this choice has been about 50/50 in favor of tiny hitboxes or large hitboxes, and the opinions across the devteam are split this way, too.
-> FPS and framecounter are in the Settings menu. In the release version of the game they won't be enabled by default, but performance feedback is important to us! I hope the game gave you no troubles with framerate ♥
-> The resolution defaults to 1280x960 @ 4x zoom. If you are using a big TV or 4K monitor then it is possible to adjust the video settings manually in your savedata folder. If you are asking why the window cannot be arbitrarily resized (while keeping the same zoom factor, similar to games like Starbound or Terraria) - that is my fault; a lot of the game's UI is positioned manually and it would be a lot of work to correct it this late in development. It's on the list of overhauls that will probably come after the initial release, though. Depending on how controller support implementation goes, it might get fixed during that process anyway. We'll see.
-> I made that font myself \o/
-> Instant Text in the Settings menu makes the process of moving through dialog a lot faster if you want to skip through it.
-> I think one more demoday after this one should be sufficient for a demo to feel like a complete, playable test of the first chapter of the game for players. After that we'll be grinding out the remainder of the mission content and fixing up bugs and QoL to launch the game. We know it won't be perfect, but we also know it's important to finish things instead of letting them sit in development hell forever.
Thanks again for playing and for your detailed feedback! We read all of the comments we get ♥
New features from user feedback include being able to highlight your ship with the F1 button, so you can see yourself against dark backgrounds.
Complete the first 3 missions (and boss) to check out the new Thicket and Summit content.
Newest patch notes are over here!
https://pastebin.com/Rjfr54xw
As always, any feedback is appreciated. JUST LIKE MAKE GAME
Hi!
Geometry Wars is definitely a huge influence on Amazoom's gameplay (and the planned controller support will mimic that control set).
Gems can be picked up using the shield- but we've received a lot of feedback from people hinting that our pickup range for gems without the magnet is probably too small (it's 3 tiles from ship-center at the moment- a lot of people bonk the nose of their ship on stuff trying to get their center of mass closer to the gems).
The tutorial map is set up to introduce the player to basic navigation, and over the course of the rest of the missions in the first world map you're steadily introduced to different mechanics that help ease the burden of doing everything yourself.
Gunbuddies, autotargeting, autoshielding, and other stuff that unlocks as the game progresses delegate tedium to automation so you can focus on driving, dodging, and exploring- I'm glad that getting a chance to take one of the endgame ships for a spin did a decent job of breaking the ice on that haha
Right now, what we've poured most of our time and effort into as far as levels are concerned are procedurally generated maps for different themed areas. Story missions like the tutorial will have static maps with more areas to explore and lots of incentives to go looking for stuff. One of the big goals for this project is to make sure that there's some replayable elements for players to come back to if they decide to pick the game up again after a break, so we're fine-tuning the procedural bits first and then laying out the story missions. For now, story missions are mostly procgen placeholders with static values for cave length and enemy density.
Thanks for trying out the demo!
We discuss all the comments that show up on the AGDG demos- a lot of optional features like ship highlighting mid-level were added because of feedback. As more stuff gets polished up and finished off with the procedural cave generation and we get more time to focus on the story progression, I'm sure a lot of the stuff you mentioned here will get smoothed out before release.
Cheers ♥
Hey there,
We appreciate any feedback we can get! Thanks for taking some time to give the demo a try.
Bullet speed is influenced by the total stats of the ship that you're using and the crew members that it's loaded up with.
We'll probably be making tweaks to air travel time with the bullets before final release- there are also other weapon types like lasers that sidestep bullet travel time.
"It's basically a static png" is one of the things that different ships handle in different ways. Some 2D shooter games have animations for the player that make it look like the ship is banking left or right as the player moves up and down- we ended up deciding not to do that with this project, but we totally get why it might feel weird if your experience with this genre is rooted in games where that art choice was made.
Thanks again, cheers!
Most of the new content for this demo is inside the Thicket biome.
Complete the tutorial to unlock a Thicket mission.
You can also complete the other remaining story missions to see some other Thicket tests we've been working on.
Patch notes over here: https://pastebin.com/TWrzJrgV
Thanks for the feedback- glad to hear that you liked it!
The tutorial is something we've tried a bunch of different things for, and we'll probably be redoing that a couple more times before the game's full launch. A lot of people have commented that there are too many targets to hunt down to remove that barrier, so we'll likely be reducing that or making the area a little smaller so it's easier to find the targets.
Cheers \o/
Putting this here because I forgot to when I submitted:
Patch notes: https://pastebin.com/w3JG1sRu
We appreciate the feedback, thanks!
To answer some questions:
- Most enemies count toward the yellow bar that fills up to increase your weapon's damage output. The 1x/2x/3x/4x/5x isn't a score multiplier- it's how much damage each bullet does.
- Enemies have a higher chance of dropping gems and certain powerups depending on the ship/crew loot configuration, which is the bottom stat with the gem icon.
- "Make gibs for all enemies" is on the TODO list
- "Attach explosions to defeated enemies" is also on the TODO list
- Floofyboi is indeed precious. The plan is to make one of the enemies from each major tileset into a playable character so they will likely end up in the final character roster too (the experiments with tribal-themed dump kobold-like creatures just aren't coming out how I wanted)
- If you spend all of your money before you start a mission it just means you can't hire contractor crew members. Your weapons still work if you have 0 gems.
- The Garbage Worm's HP hasn't changed, but it is likely to get buffed significantly. When the Garbage Worm fight was designed, we didn't have damage multipliers yet or even a shield to deflect bullets with. Adding these two things has prettymuch trivialized the fight, so I'm planning to make him tougher- if not in the initial encounter, there will at least be a harder rematch later.
Found a lot of typos and grammar problems in the startup sequence- definitely recommend spellcheck.
I pressed ESC to pause and it closed the game lol.
After moving the character in the first room, when selecting "wait", the UI gives you the options "Config" and "Objective". Seeing this every single turn seems exhaustive and just results in a lot of unnecessary extra clicking.
It is strange that we are told to bring a 'collectable sword' but then in the next fight we are equipped with a 'short axe'.
The transitions between the topdown view and the side view for an ongoing fight are extremely weird.
Enemies seem to be able to walk out of the terrain sometimes, too.
Overall I didn't get very far in this demo. The turn-based movement feels extremely clunky. This one isn't for me.
I appreciate the detailed feedback!
There is a balance we are still working out with enemy visuals which is especially relevant in the dump tileset.
Most of the enemies use colors already present in the tileset because it makes sense for the enemies that live in the dirt to be the same color as the dirt, so we are relying heavily on the motion of the enemies to make their presence obvious. Certain enemies like the cats rely on their coloration to blend in before pouncing, which puts some pressure on the player to keep alert.
Some ships are definitely larger than others, but we've tried to make sure that all areas are navigable for all ships. There are a few spots with especially-tight squeezes that will probably be getting minor updates in the coming weeks.
Different tilesets have different ways that they express the shapes of their terrain, and the tight, claustrophobic feel for the dump is definitely intended. As more tilesets move toward completion hopefully some of that feeling of being compressed too tightly will be alleviated \o/
Enemy health scales with mission difficulty, which can make longer caves feel like the slog you mentioned without backup firepower. The gunbuddy powerup adds an autonomous drone to provide support during missions and you can have up to five of those at a time. We're still working on adjusting their drop rates so that they show up often enough to be relevant but not so often that they make the player useless. For a taste of what they feel like though you can punch ACUTEKILLINGMACHINE into the cheats menu a few times.
I'm glad you like the art! Some of it's still kinda' rough but we're constantly iterating.
Thank you for trying out the demo ♥
My first run ended at about 2430.
I dig the concept here a lot - the visuals remind me of games like oldschool Asteroids but the pacing feels like it's going to hit something more in the neighborhood of Geometry Wars as difficulty ramps up.
Do you plan on adding any other modes to the game? I was sort of expecting the missiles to go flying off the edge and come in again on the opposite side instead of ricocheting and feel like a "borderless" mode might shake things up a lot.
( If enemies that appear at harder difficulties already do this, then I guess I just need to get good :P )
This feels like FEZ and Super Meat Boy at the same time. HOW DO I PURCHASE
This install is kinda' huge for what it is. Is that a Unity thing?
Quit To Desktop button does not work for me in 1-1
The dead body of purple cubes in 1-3 can be used to push sawblades around
Cannon controls in 1-3 might be reversed.
At the beginning of 1-4 you can tilt the dash UI while the camera is spinning.
Particles emitted by pigs in 1-4 seem to be huge red squares.
In world 2, it is unclear which enemies are supposed to be killable and which ones aren't. I thought purple meant killable and red meant unkillable but I can kill lots of red enemies, especially in Easter.
Leading slow pig to puzzle cube does not kill it. (Easter 3)
I encountered a few deaths (mainly from the homing spotlight pig) where pressing R to retry did not save my progress in the level and started it over completely.
Certain parts of the map trigger sad/danger emotes even if the enemy that would cause the danger is dead already.
It is unclear what the pumpkin does. Pig no-detect?
Sometimes you can roll through your friends without completing the level. (Easter 1)
HOW DO I SAVE HIM
1-2 occasionally lets you fall forever.
Waterfall noises are a bit much. Maybe lower vol.
Might just be my keyboard. Sometimes tapping shift to roll to defend myself feels too slow or like the inputs for other directions are messing with it.
While tabbing in and out I managed to completely break/freeze the input handler and had to forceclose the game. (Easter 2)
Enemies defeated by puzzle cubes respawn when the player respawns.
Pressing 1/2/3 etc to go to the different levels is still turned on.
Learning to use the dash to cross gaps takes some time to sink in. I'd def recommend fleshing out that section of the tutorial to make sure the player understands that they'll be using it that way.
Music is on point, mostly: the boss fights are too short. The track always kicks in right as the boss dies.
Anyway I'd love to keep going but I have other stuff to do. This looks awesome so far, good luck finishing and shipping it!
Thanks for giving it a playthrough!
I am still finding the right balance for tight spaces and open spaces. Different tilesets will express the terrain with different shapes, too, with some being more vertical than others. Dead-end cavern branches are coming soon, which should shift the game's focus a little bit more toward exploration.
Right now, there's a single clickable mission on the "world map" that generates a 12-segment cave (at approx 5 enemies per segment) with the Jungle tileset. The plan is to generate missions of various lengths across different tilesets, and different missions may also generate with constraints or modifiers such as time limits or higher/lower enemy density, so terrain pressure will not be the only thing to consider when the game is complete. Underwater missions are currently on the "maybe" list, too.
Ship drift on the x axis is something that's been suggested a lot but I think you are the first person to suggest also slowly drifting down on the y axis. I'll play around with gravity and see if anything sticks; ship drift might be an interesting opportunity for crew members with engineering/piloting perks to tighten or loosen controls.
I've found one lockup so far and instead of fixing it I wrote detection for it and plan to hook it up to an achievement.
I appreciate the feedback, thanks again!
Attempting to play the game in the browser WebGL panel, I was able to get to the control display for shift and ctrl. The play AND quit buttons became greyed out and the menus stopped responding so I gave the downloadable version a try instead.
Music's on point. Good job on that.
The inability to slash while the shuriken is airborne is very strange to me. It sort of feels like you are forced to warp if you want to use spells. Maybe practicing at the game will make this feel more natural for players, but while I'm learning the controls it feels easier to just not use the shuriken in combat.
Putting dash on C meant that I simply wasn't able to use it while moving with WASD. Perhaps I am just baby idiot noob who needs to get good.
Z / X / C as default inputs is painful. I'd recommend putting them somewhere like Q, E, R, T, or F so that they're within easier spiderhands distance from WASD while moving, or assigning them to keys like J / K / L / ; so that players can move lefthanded and input righthanded (in addition to arrowkey input righthand and zxc lefthand)
Being able to shuriken out of the map is pretty OP. The doors seem to correctly block shuriken OOB glitch so hopefully the next demo treats walls that way too.
Enemies popping into existence as you enter a room is neat but could use a little bit more polish and fluff so they don't just immediately jump you.
I like the pointy screen transition on level exit, that's pretty neat.
Some SFX or manual-interact to open chests might make that a little more visceral. It seems that the item you get from the chest is dropped onto the ground in the same spot each time, too - it may be better to simply drop the item on the player and display the pickup over the player's head or something. Right now running into a chest then having to run a circuit around the chest to pick up what was presumably inside it feels a little raw.
The control /tutorial screen seems to be finnicky about which controls it shows based on whether or not you are using KBM or a controller.
Volume controls / options menu would be cool.
Visual clarity is pretty good but the brightness in some areas made it kinda' hard for me to tell what was what when it was all moving at once. I'd recommend taking screenshots of the game and reducing them to grayscale so you can see how bright things are relative to one another. It may help make the action more fluid in more difficult areas later.
Overall has promise, very fast paced though. Needs some kind of tutorial to familiarize with the movement mechanics and allow players to learn how to effectively move, because the current difficulty curve is "welcome to the real world" which might turn off a lot of players.
Thanks for the feedback!
Visual feedback when taking damage is on the to-do list.
Each ship has starting HP and max HP. Certain crew members increase your start HP, so it is possible to begin a map with more than your max - these are the blue blips on your HP bar (similar to LifeBlood in Hollow Knight), and they are not recoverable if you take damage.
Heart pickups do refill red HP blips though.
Gave the demo a try!
Some observations:
- The game doesn't seem to use the mouse. Maybe hide the mouse cursor while the window is active.
- It would be nice if the game showed the How to play / controls screen/esc menu on your first run
- Some of the obstacles seem much larger than they visually appear. Darkening the tiles beneath obstacles so that it's clear what's walkable and what isn't might help the player better judge distance.
- Font on score screen is really hard to read
- Jellyfish can spawn on the player
- Anchor making the player slower until they pick up sushi feels kinda' rough, maybe time limit on that
- It is very unclear at first whether or not the shrimp gun has X shots or X time. Maybe add countdown
- Unclear if any of the enemies do anything differently
- Auto pause on window focus lost would be cool
- Can only punch 1 jellyfish at a time even if they are stacked
- Sparkling pearl quits flashing after one animation cycle. Not sure if intended
- It'd be cool if pearls that were obscured by powerups could be shown as transparent silhouettes above the powerup
- Fish enemies can walk offscreen using the bridge
- Extra life at 1,000,000 points would be neat
- Warp tunnel idea is cool
- Not sure how to exit the game
Ended up with a high score of 1276350
