very nice presentation, but the gameplay is a little bit basic. A lot of the enemies are near impossible to react to due to lacking any obvious tell or windup frames before their attacks. The ground movement feels pretty gimped by not allowing the player to move while attacking
This game has a lot of potential to be something really cool, the art is awesome and theres a lot of soul here
that being said, it has some problems
As it stands now, the pacing is poor; its almost impossible as a new player to tell whats going on before you get instagibbed by something. Having the player start out on a lower stakes floor would help a lot
There are perks you can collect, but because of how hectic the gameplay is, you have no time to read or think about what youre collecting. What if you slowed the game's timescale down when reading item descriptions for perks? This way you still have to be careful, but you have a little more reasonable amount of time to think about the item
The movement/physics feel at odds with the nature of the game. A game like this could really benefit from some more smooth fast paced movement IMO
Really surprisingly fun, and the levels have a lot of content
Sound design seriously needs work, but i suspect its still fairly early on with placeholders; repeating noises get grating and multiple enemies having the same hit noises can be confusing in combat
Movement is extremely fun despite being pretty simple, would probably be a lot of fun to speedrun this
Very fun game with a charming artstyle, albeit it can be hard for me to discern whats going on at times due to the relatively low contrast of the art
The difficulty curve was not very consistent from start to finish, some of the levels were exceptionally difficult but followed by relatively simple or easy ones.
Once I reached room 15 I almost became hard-stuck and gave up due to some weird control issues I had encountered. When you preform an input, that input will be performed repeatedly as long as you continue holding it down and it's the last input you pressed. For example, if you stand still and hold the jump button, you will constantly bhop until you press another button. The reason I discovered this on room 15 is because I was under the impression holding the jump button would make me jump higher, but what ended up happening was the instant i touched the wall on the right, i was walljumping into the spikes, which lead me to believe the jump was impossible. This was happening on the keyboard arrow-keys control scheme.
One thing i'd suggest is adding a tiny grace period for wall jumps, i often found myself wanting to move away from the wall and then pressing jump after i turn around, but this doesn't work as you aren't against the wall anymore. Might just be because I'm used to that input for walljumps from super metroid and my own game, though. Didn't prove to be a tremendous issue
I finished the game on easy mode, forget how many deaths
Disclaimer: This is an early gameplay demo, and is not representative of the quality or polish of the final game. Most of the content you see here are placeholders which will not be present in the final game. The intent of this demo is to determine how ready the game is from a mechanical standpoint, and to test out the general gameplay to see if it's good enough to begin planning and building the final game world.
Acrolyte is a 2D metroidvania game with a heavy focus on movement and combat.
my original intention was that pacing out save rooms and not letting the player heal inbetween could build tension, I was a big fan of how this balance played out in castlevania circle of the moon, in that game between save rooms is scary as fuck, but I think it kind of plays against the fast movement and almost punishes you for exploration in this case
thank you very much for the feedback. The reflections are actually done through normal maps on the tilesets, I didn’t have time to complete them but the tilesets react to light and reflect players and enemies, they have a seperate mask to determine how reflective each tile is
As for saving/loading, I’ve noticed a few small bugs with them, I suspect it’s a race condition but I’ll have to investigate further
My biggest takeaway from the demo besides enemy/boss balance and needing to add health pickups is just that things are a little too cryptic for most players without a more direct explanation. It’s 100% a fault on my end since I took a lot of things for granted that only I’d know about by default as the dev.
Some very useful feedback here, I’ll take this all into consideration. Mouse effecting the camera is something I planned to have ready for the demo, but my camera system is a little archaic and it ended up causing a lot of issues on the programming side so I held off
Thanks for playing. Very thorough, I appreciate it
Controllers are unfortunately not supported currently, some mechanical issues will have to be worked out first but it is planned
That infinite falling glitch has been bugging the shit out of me too, it happens very rarely and Ive yet to replicate it in editor, but if I manage to I should be able to sort it out
It's a mistake on my part that i didnt make it more clear, but you start out the demo with the kickslide and dash abilities. You can see how to use them in the equipment screen
Didn't cross my mind since this demo wasn't originally intended for public release, my private testers already knew how to use those abilities
Lots of fun despite the pretty simple gameplay, i think the way the game feels is great. I would suggest doing what you can to distinguish interactables/attacks visually from the background, as it can be a little hard to spot enemy projectiles. Id also suggest maybe an edge detect shader to help highlight corners and geometry in dark places where everything is the same color.
Very fun gameplay, and the pvpve multiplayer aspect seems really interesting, pvp in particular seemed very dynamic and fun, not something ive seen in a game of this style often. Bit of a steep learning curve for figuring out stats and item pickups, i found myself often not sure what slot an item would enter or what the stat boosts actually did.
I didnt think i would enjoy this as much as i did. Very cozy game, some of the ui felt a little unintuitive and the animations could use some polish, but overall there was a lot of great quality of life going on and i had a surprising amount of fun just dicking around and exploring. Excited for my future cow wife
Filesize was quite large, and i ran into a few wierd issues trying to extract the game from the 7z, but didn't experience any issues during gameplay despite that
This game has a ton of polish, and a great artstyle. The shell casing idea is a lot of fun. The controls feel a little unintuitive, and at times it felt like i had very little real control of what was going on besides where i was aiming. I suspect that it's a learning curve and over time this would be allievated with more levels, but trying the training level i could not consistently perform fast walljumps. Might be a skill issue, but having to go from holding into the wall to pushing away from it while simultaneously controlling the mouse was pretty challenging as a beginner. Really looking forward to seeing this further
Mouse did not appear ingame on startup, had to turn on the emergency cursor in the settings. Game closed instantly when i hit escape, and could not alt tab during gameplay.
Incredible game with huge potential. Even beyond a direct goal, the gameplay itself is fun and engaging enough to carry interest. Im a little concerned about how you might have servers set up for a larger scale release, maybe a server browser and hosting options could be ideal. Im seriously looking forward to wherever this project goes.
Not much game yet but your art assets are very well done. A nice consistent style, micro pixel art is something i think a lot of people underestimate. Poor performance when dragging the camera around in Brave browser, might be a browser exclusive issue
Basic movement feels good, control scheme isnt too bad but the trick keys being underneath wasd makes it feel a little difficult to continue moving while preforming tricks midair, the arrow keys to tilt felt a lot better than the normal tricks, and also felt a little more satisfying to execute. Ran into a lot of issues on grinding rails, where i would get stuck and be forced to respawn to leave them.
Lots of soul, i dont think ive ever seen anything quite like it. The gameplay mechanics are really unique, and its built on an interesting idea i don't think ive seen anywhere else, but in being so unique it's very unintuitive for a beginner, and outside of long text tutorials i don't think the game does a very good job of showing you how to play through gameplay alone. If you intend to add a more linear progression, the first few encounters showing you how to play step by step would make things a lot more clear for beginners.
