itch.io

Still a really solid game! Keep it up.

Thanks for playing!

What would you suggest? Typically most if not all obstacles cast full shadows + are a dark color.

Thanks for the explanations.

About the climbing animation, I think it feels like the whole sprite is contained within a square, and then it goes right side up left side up etc. deforming the insides, rather than looking like someone who's actually climbing. I think coming up with a few keyframes would be better.

I only played for a short bit. My general impression is that it's really rough, here's some notes:

- Text rate is pretty slow.

- I don't like how attacks happen in the movement direction not the camera's, but I also don't like how you attack towards an enemy if they have a target on them even if you're not locked on.

- I was messing around in the internals menu for a while but it is hard to understand. I installed some parts but I couldn't tell if anything was happening ("basic movement").

- The combat felt really floaty, and the UI is hard to look at during a fight to see whether you actually got hit or not.

- Please don't bind inputs to mouse wheel click.

It looks nice, and it feels like it's got a ton of dev time put into it, but I am very confused. Some notes:

- In the first level, the plant that attacks by shooting some brown balls, the balls merge with the environment too much. They're the same brown and all.

- The character will constantly drop grabbed gears when platforming around for seemingly no issue. Seems like it has to do with hitboxes. Similarly the times when I can pick it up or end up hitting it instead seems to not be very consistent as well.

- The climbing animation is sorta bizarre. I notice it still adheres to the pixel grid properly and all, but it feels oddly smooth in a stiff way.

- I don't think you should be slowed down every time you walk in front of a gate.

- Rewinding feels too slow.

- If I release a charge attack before it finishes charging, I think it should do a normal attack instead.

- In the metallic cogwheels room with the balance platforms on a chain, I seem to be making them lighter by standing on them?

I am overall very confused, and the whole thing seems to just be a death trap requiring me to rewind every couple seconds rather than an intricate puzzle that makes use of the time mechanics in some interesting way. Many of the enemies seem to do attacks that are very poorly communicated and as a result I'm just going "what?" every other room. I also don't understand why some enemies get rewinded while others get killed, and sometimes rewinding an enemy rewinds them out of existence... it all feels very random.

Well, I mean it's definitely SP1+. Oh well.

I don't run linux sorry.

"The procedure entry point CreateFile2 could not be located in the dynamic link library KERNEL32.dll."

I guess my OS is too old, though I didn't think that was going to be a factor.  I'm running some not completely updated version of windows 7.

Let me know if there's anything I should try to get it to run.

- Ship turning feels like it needs some tuning. Sometimes I move my far away move target slightly and the ship just slams the brakes and slows down to a crawl to do a 2º turn, whereas other times I set the target to be more or less perpendicular at a fairly short distance and the ship just goes to cruise speed and spins out into orbit.

- The new game menu for Outlaw frontiers gets cut.

- I don't understand Outlaw frontiers. I hit "Tutorial", but nothing was taught. I didn't even realise my hp carried over until the last level, because I didn't get hit until the previous level, which was a massive spike in difficulty with 10+ ships that got me down to 10% - and I can't seem to find a way to heal outside of cargo container drops. Cool Mariachi cutscene though.

- Outlaw frontier stats seem quite bugged:

As I said at the beginning, I think the game is fun and there's a solid base here, but it's an accessibility hell at the moment. Many of these small tweaks would improve the game drastically. I'm looking forward to the next update!

Some assorted feedback. I think the game is generally good, but I think many things could be made snappier and clearer just slightly and the game would improve drastically from it.

- The level select screen blinks the UI when changing the selected level, I found that to be a bit annoying to the eyes.

- In the modules menu, clicking on a slot opens the UI on the right, which makes sense as the slot (frame of reference) is still being displayed on the left. For the turrets UI, this doesn't make a lot of sense; my intuition tells me to press the top left button to go back for one, but also the 3d view of the turret isn't really the same as the slots. Personally, I'd open the gun selection UI over the current UI on the left side, and zoom in on the spot where the turret goes smoothly. Instead of having arrows to switch slots, I'd keep a mini version of the top down view so you can choose which one to switch to, or at the very least I'd smooth the camera transition here too so you can keep track of where you're actually placing the turret (just the slot name being a number really isn't enough to keep track).

- The scrollbar in "missile massacre" is really slow.

- I'm not sure if the missile ammo upgrade values are temp or if I just can't appreciate how 25k is a good price for what seems really minimal.

- I'm not sure why some options on the pause menu have a set of % buttons but map scroll has a slider. Either way it did not seem to affect zooming sensitivity ingame which is far too low.

- The "Menu" button in the pause menu should probably say "exit to menu" or at least be colored red, since it aborts the current mission. Also to my surprise, Reset reset the map and not the settings.

- It seems the stat values for turrets count up really fast when switching from one to another or so; I think just straight up changing the value to the proper one would be better for the sake of comparison (same stats = no visual movement).

- Middle mouse click is generally a terrible input that should not be used; I did not find a way to rebind it. I've had to play with arrow keys for now, but I think you should make it so having the mouse at the screen edge moves the map too, as well as wasd.

- I think more emphasis should be put on the mode switching tutorial, I didn't notice I wasn't in the right mode and played normally anyway.

- The first comms with the Auspicious in the second level left my camera totally out of focus. The second brought it back in place, but I have no clue what went on in the meantime. The effects in that first bit were also quite annoying. Try pixelating just the UI maybe?

- The missile massacre animation is really cool, but I think my camera was completely thrown off afterwards (I think if you're in planning mode).

- Railguns seem to shoot out into outer space every single time, I'm not sure what's going on. I think it would be good if you could see the aiming angle ranges/distance ranges of the guns while holding a key.

- I think camera should snap back to the previous zoom level when switching to target mode than back to planning.

- I don't like that I can only see hp bars while in target mode. Also, clicking on the on-screen target switch prompts is really annoying when I'm just trying to lead some missiles on the enemy.

- All five missions were fun, but I feel like I need something a bit more complex and involved, they all seemed fairly straightforward. The outlaw frontiers mode was that in some regard, but I also have no clue what I'm doing on that one.

The systems are fun, and the story is interesting so far. I want to see where it goes!

Thanks for playing!

We'll do a polish pass soon and level end button tooltips are on the list, amongst others.

An update has been made to fix the end of demo screen showing up in an incorrect level as well as an enemy not working in it. If you played earlier and thought that was the end, there's more!

Thanks for playing!

The game's almost finished but we've definitely got to do a round of polish around that stuff before it's out.

Glad you dig the concept, Ty was a fun PS2 game I personally played a good amount of back in the day, so I'm happy the zany Australian aesthetic bleeds through a bit.

In terms of the gems, we have tossed around the idea of having them be used as currency, but as it currently stands we're planning on implementing unlockables based off of the treasure you can get in each level, which is the reward you get for getting all gems.

We have noticed for a good amount of players the boomerang can be a little bit unwieldy when it comes to "sticking" to the fan, so we will experiment with working on the magnetism and trying to find a good sweet spot in that regard.

Thanks a ton for trying out our demo, we'll try our best to make it as fun as possible!

Thanks a ton for the feedback, it's very nice to hear that you like the presentation visually!

A big issue we've noticed when it comes to people playing the game is helping them get into a good sense of understanding on how the boomerang controls and general movement. You're definitely not the only one when it comes to taking your time with throws, so it's something we're slowly experimenting with. In terms of locking the mouse to the center of the screen, that's definitely a good idea, and we'll see if that's worth utilizing and experimenting with as well.

Thanks a ton for your time and your feedback, it means a lot!!

It's a tricky game for sure, but we thank you for your time and getting so far into world 1!

Very nice demo, the levels were very decent for a puzzle game and the various slides were extremely charming. I'm looking forward to future demos, though please don't kill its charm once you redo the sprites! I'm sure you won't, though.

Pretty great game! The puzzles and mechanics were interesting, and I dig the way the fires are animated!

The only issue I had was that holding inputs down would easily "overshoot" and do one action too many. Other than that, I think it'd be good if the controls to do an action were displayed along its tutorial in the corresponding levels, even though I know they're always on the top left.

Oh, also, the steam link didn't open in my actual browser but rather some weird game window?

Looking forward to the release!

I played for a while, but I couldn't figure out how to progress any further, so here's what little feedback I have to offer for now:

- The camera feels pretty weird, any time I turn it it has to re-center itself on the character for some reason.

- The arrow trap seemed pretty punishing but it seems sometimes (and only sometimes) you can hug the wall to avoid them.

- I wish I could switch the levers outside of first person mode too.

- Exiting FPMode can be done at any time by pressing RMB, but you need to stand still to be able to enter it.

- By the end of my session, I couldn't use my weapon anymore with LMB in third person mode.

I'm not going to talk about things needing to be communicated better to the player, as it seems clear at this point in development a tutorial isn't in place yet, but maybe you should mention holding LMB to interact in the game's page!

Thanks! This demo experience might be a bit harder at the moment than the final product will be, we're still working out how to introduce the player to the mechanics better - maybe a testroom and/or a tutorial with visual instructions.

Some more polish and one more world left to be made before release, but we hope it does well too!

Thank you for the kind words! We hope so too!

Thank you for trying out the demo! We understand that a very core issue with the game currently is helping players understand the gameplay mechanic, that being the center of the boomerang's movement, and how that relates to traversing and clearing stages while keeping the rotation in mind and working around that as the challenge.

When it comes to the camera, most of the levels are designed around exploring and figuring out how to  progress through the stages, so seeing the whole stage ruins that experience in our eyes. That being said there are definitely some areas in the game where it can be confusing where exactly to go, but we feel that does incentivize playing through levels again to get better times since they'll know the proper path to take.

The lives system in the settings menu disables lives as a gameplay mechanic, mainly for "purists" but also to let people play through the game to get the levels' treasures, which requires going through the stage without losing a single life. In the future we will definitely make that more clear to the player, or possibly change that system in general.

Handling the boomerang's spinning and rotation is definitely the trickiest part of the game, a gameplay tip we'd like to teach players intuitively is that if you keep on moving the boomerang you have less of a chance to hit a wall when stationary, because if you let the boomerang sit still for too long, you're basically expanding its hitbox to the entire rotation. We definitely understand that it's a very weird mechanic to get used to.

And yeah, we have noticed through playtesting and people playing the demo most people don't realize the game revolves around moving the boomerang and not the guy himself, but we found for most people they understand that within 15 seconds of the game, but I will agree it's not very clear.

Once again I'd like to thank you for sharing your thoughts on the game! Airstralian definitely isn't for everyone, but that being said it means a lot that you tried out the demo and gave us some good observations and feedback. Thank you for the wishes and we hope we can make the game as great as it can be!

-T

Thanks for playing!

The game has a lives system that is on by default, but you can turn it off in the settings if you prefer. What the lives system does is that every time you hit an obstacle it sends you back to the last safe spot you threw the boomerang from so long as you have lives left. You can see how many lives you have when you hit an obstacle - they show up above the boomerang, and the one you just lost blinks out. Essentially, you can hit obstacles 4 times before being sent back.

Obstacles are generally black and cast a long shadow, as if going all the way up to the ceiling. We've noticed shadows might not display if the graphic settings on the launcher are set to lower than Medium, so I recommend setting them to anything above that, or straight up Ultra - the game shouldn't require too much to run at these settings, but let me know if that's not the case.

I don't understand what you mean by "kind of hovers at random points", could you elaborate?

Thanks for trying the demo out!

Obstacles are generally always black and have a long shadow, but we've realised these might not show up if the game is being run on a graphical setting lower than Medium. We recommend playing on Ultra as the game should not require a high end PC to run.

Thanks for playing the demo!

- About obstacles, the main way to recognise them is that they're always black and have a long shadow - these might not appear if your graphic settings are set to below Medium, so we recommend setting them above that. Ultra should be fine, as in theory the game does not require too much to run well.

- You should be able to see the ammount of lives left on top of your boomerang when you hit an obstacle; was it not there for some reason?

Thanks for playing!

The boomerang constantly rotates around at a constant speed; this is intentional as it helps you line up throws around obstacles, and keeps you on your toes indeed. If you stand still, you can see what the radius of the rotation is, but we might add an option to display it.

About the rocks, one tip is that obstacles always have shadows - big ones. These should always be visible as long as you have the quality settings set to Medium or higher (the game isn't that performance-heavy I believe, so we recommend just setting it to Ultra).

Thanks for playing!

Hey, thanks for playing!

I wanted to ask a bit more about some of the things that you listed and try to answer some of the issues:

- Could I ask which areas were too dark for you? I know we don't have a brightness setting in the game, but I feel as though World 1 has no real dark areas - or at least it shouldn't.

- Did you try adjusting the camera zoom slider in the settings? By default it's set to the halfway point, because that's what we thought might be most comfortable for people, but if you set it to 12 you should always be able to see the point where your boomerang will end up in any throw. You can throw again while the boomerang is moving if you need to avoid hitting walls, too.

- The goal in each level is to reach the finish line. Which levels caused the most confusion? Exploring becomes more commonplace in later levels, as you get more comfortable with the game mechanics, but as a tip, you can always look for the gear chains to find the objectives.

- You can use slowdown from the first level, but I suppose you mean the tutorial should be there too.

- If you find the lives system more annoying than helpful, you can disable it in the settings. I'm not sure I understand your comment about completionists though.

- Some new mechanics are introduced as early as level 8.

Thanks again for playing! We're considering looking into a phone version after we've made our pc release.

-J

At first I was surprised by the dice mechanic, but after a couple throws it felt pretty natural and the concept turned out to be really fun.

One thing that stuck out to me right now is how overpowered the plunger seems, but I think it doesn't need a nerf so long as the levels are designed with it in mind and the ammount is always kept low. Enemies could also have ranged capabilities later on so that using a free pass on close range enemies doesn't invalidate any difficulty the level might have.

-J