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Very fun and extremely challenging if you're directionally challenged like I am. Platforming is fun and feels fresh, game feel is satisfying, and it has a cute premise. Also, has exceptional taste in easter eggs. ;)

I've taken note of your feedback during the stream, I'll try making the enemy spawns even clearer. Your continued support is much appreciated! :D

Thanks for playing!

I often found myself being tripped up by expectations of having all actions on mouse click and all switches on the keyboard.

That's a fair assumption, my reasoning for placing the mixing toggle on RMB is because I found it more comfortable to have your left hand free for QWEASD inputs. If mixing is bound to CTRL or SHIFT, you have to keep holding that while simultaneously inputting your chems. That being said, I do agree that it's a bit of an arbitrary control scheme, I'll playtest with your proposed bindings and see if they feel good after overcoming my muscle memory.

Falling down a bridge later on during the tutorial booted me back all the way to the title screen

That is intentional, I didn't want to teleport the player back up because a) it would make no sense in-universe, b) killing you for a mistake like that is fitting with the rest of the game's unforgiving nature, and c) it's kinda funny.

It's a bit unwieldy to switch elements on the fly, so I found myself just sticking to the healing green and swapping to a single offensive element here and there to finish off enemies.

That is a valid (and expected) way to play, at least for the time being. The first biome only tests your ability to determine/remember enemy weaknesses and exploit them, later stages should have trickier enemies that warrant more in-depth use of your abilities (e.g., having to use a certain chemical to make an enemy vulnerable, then using another that it's actually weak to).

Sometimes with all the dynamic lighting it's hard to tell the red explosive barrels from the orange non-flammable ones.

I think I'll add a decal on top of the flammable and healing barrels to make them undeniably distinct.

The elemental system in general felt very low-impact for weapons

If I understand you correctly, you're saying that the various status effects you can apply to enemies aren't very impactful. Is that accurate? If so, this is sort of by design at the moment. All the enemies are relatively weak trash mobs, there is no point in using status effects when you can just kill them outright. The miniboss fight is a nice parallel to this since, in my experience, applying Rust and Corrode makes the fight MUCH easier. Not only does it make it easier to keep your distance, you also increase your damage output in the long-run.

The scythe felt very situational, since so much in this game can quite literally blow up on your face.

Understandable, a lot of people get scared of going into close-quarters (and rightfully so). I will mention that you can easily take down the fire Mines with the scythe, one cryo slash will instantly apply Freeze and neutralize the bomb. 

I love the imsim-ish touches like how you can get manipulate enemies into attacking each other. It's just a shame most of these interactions are not particularly useful yet.

The infighting wasn't meant to be necessarily useful, it's just a fun thing that can occasionally happen. This is tangentially related but I have plans for a sort of "third party" enemy faction that is hostile not only to you but the rest of the roster, which is a way to a balance the ridiculous strength they'll have. Again, just something that sounds really cool and therefore I want to add it.

Some skill tree nodes look connected, like they're being presented as if there is a set path with prerequisites, but you can just skip to the bottom if you have enough currency. 

Good point, I'll remove the vertical connecting lines and make it clearer how each category is independent.

It is nice that you can respec, though if this ends up as a roguelike I assume that will have to be removed.

Why is that? I don't see any inherent issue with respecing during a run. I plan to delegate weapon upgrades to a special workbench that you come across between floors, that way you can't change your build in the middle of a fight, maybe that solves the issue you saw?

I don't like how the primary threats in this game are quick gank kills. I don't know what could be done about that when healing is so easy.

How about enemies that apply something on you that make you unable to heal or make healing hurt you? I could also nerf your healing abilities.

You can manipulate that large laser boss enemy into being stuck doing nothing by making it try to chase you through a gap that's too narrow for it to fit.

Perhaps I can make it so the enemy AI detects when it's stuck and begins blind firing.

Overall I found this a nice game, though quite a bit earlier in development than I had expected from footage.

I get that comment quite a bit, I'm not sure why. Is it because the visuals are relatively polished?

I see, thanks. I was expecting the super-effective dummy part to be the trickiest part since the game doesn't flat-out tell you what to do, so I'm not surprised to see it listed.

I think perhaps the difficulty early game could be adjusted a bit if this is going the roguelite direction in the end

It's funny because I culled the amount of enemies that spawn in this build but it might've not been enough. I'll fiddle with the numbers again.

I would try [the slowdown], put out a test-build and see how people respond to it. 

I'll try implementing it later today, I can send you a test build if I think it seems promising enough to test.

 I think maybe adding a "filler enemy" something, more or less not that dangerous and slow could be good to fill out early rooms before ramping up the difficulty.  Otherwise: stationary turret enemies, enemies that change their chemical setup, 

Stationary enemies are a cool idea, I might steal that one. Enemies that change their weaknesses are already planned and are reserved for later levels, it sounds like too much for the first biome.

I want a rifle-version of the gun.

What do you mean by "rifle"? That could range from a Garand-esque single fire weapon to a machinegun. Either way, I don't plan to add any more conventional guns since they would massively overlap with the pistol secondary functionality-wise. My ideas for new weapons are less conventional, among them are: a firehose primary; gas grenade secondaries; a shield secondary that absorbs damage; a utility that spawns drones that damage enemies and heal you.   

Which parts did you get stuck on?

Messed with the settings on boot, the lack of fullscreen/borderless options slightly irks me.  It's interesting how changing some settings, like V-sync, causes the entire window to reload. I was faced with this after coming back to the main menu, not sure what's going on there. I restarted the game after seeing this to make sure I hadn't broken anything.

The ship controls fairly well but the changes in the camera position in the tutorial felt a little disorienting to me, the way it pans to the left or the right. Other than that, everything felt and controlled nicely. The toggle fire doesn't make sense to me, why would that be the default option in a game where every bullet should be carefully considered? A toggle incentivizes blindly spamming, not precision shots. 

Played through the first mission, I can confirm that I definitely don't like the camera movement. Having the camera centered on your ship or following your cursor makes a lot more sense to me, otherwise you're constantly having your view moved around against your will which makes it difficult to aim.  I took no hits but got a C grade, I suppose I used too much fuel. I don't get why the "damage taken" text is colored red when it says 0x100.

The second level took me a bit longer, I was a bit lost on what to do after picking up the badge (?) guarded by a laser. I probably should've read the mission briefing. Having your fuel and shop currency be one in the same is an interesting mechanic.

Died in the third level after getting hit by one too many mine projectiles. Played it safer the second time round and made it through with relative ease. I've noticed that I'm using the air brake a lot during these missions, the ship just moves too fast for the cramped environments. I'm having fun but I'm admittedly starting to question if the game will start switching stuff up soon, it feels pretty repetitive right now. A story could help you out here: you've already got all these nice characters, why not make them talk with you after a mission to establish a plot? Something like that.

Here are some thoughts I had playing the subsequent batch of missions:

• I've come to the conclusion that the drone buddies are RIDICULOUSLY strong, at least with the crew I have. 
• The stuff in the shop feels a bit lackluster, I was hoping you'd be able to buy different weapons and stuff but it's all plain stat boosts or drone stuff. 
• I'm not sure what the badge thing you can collect does, does it give you more money?
• I have a new ship now, I have no idea why. Is it something I bought in the shop? Oh, it's a submarine for the water mission. Sure, why not.
• The levels started feeling aimless, I'm just meandering through them while shooting whatever I see and picking up crystals. 
• I went into the tutorial shop level and my drone bought something that costed 5k credits on its own. What the fuck.
• The cat enemies are what's doing most of my health in, they're hard to see (especially when they hide behind parts of the foreground). On that note, how are we fighting animals like cats and crabs with ships? Are the ship and crew tiny?
• The first big open level was more fun than the previous missions, I got to cut loose more and explore.
• Got to the first boss and absolutely shredded it. 
• I see that you have different purchasing options in different biomes, that's a relief. 
• God DAMN there are a lot of characters.

Closing thoughts: the game gets a lot right but I feel like something's missing, or off. The gameplay is passively fun but feels really low stakes, there's no sense of urgency or danger when I'm going through a level. Missions don't have objectives that force me to take conscious actions, I just kind of fly through the level mindlessly while shooting things until I win. The "money is fuel" mechanic is cool on paper but not once did I risk running out of money in a level, it's basically superfluous. It's unfortunate because there's clearly a lot of love poured into every crack and crevice of this game, it just feels like it isn't reaching its full potential. The game seems to be far in development so I doubt you'll get much use out of my assessment but it's what I got, hopefully it was of some help.

The UI is properly scaled now. I'm playing on a different monitor than last time so I don't know if you actually added proper scaling or not, but I'm glad either way.

I looked like this in the cutscene after destroying the player tank clone in the tutorial, not sure if it's intentional but it made me chuckle.

Beat the first level with relative ease and watched the replay. I still don't understand the point of this but it's neat, I suppose. I would add an on-screen prompt for pressing ESC to exit the replay, I was lost for a second.

You misspelled "independently"  in the chaingun description. I picked the landsword (nice) rockets for the second mission, which I expected would replace the coaxial chaingun. Turns out that it goes into a separate secondary weapon slot that you are not introduced to in the tutorial. I had to go into the keybinds to find the binding for the rockets.

I beat the subsequent levels with the 40mm cannon and the rocket secondary. I don't know if you made the game easier or I'm just more well rested this time, but the game feels a lot easier.  The third-person view is fun but the sights option is simply superior for combat, I only find myself using third-person when I'm in one of those goofy "drive in circles around the guy" fights or when I'm just coursing through the map. 

The railgun doesn't seem to land exactly where I'm aiming, it goes slightly up and to the left. I don't know if you did something to the 90mm cannon but it feels pretty usable instead of just being a meme weapon. It's cool that you can play as enemy tanks, I find it a little lame that you still have access to the sci-fi repair minigame with them but I understand why you made it that way.

I had no framerate issues, whether that's due to optimizations on your end or not is a mystery to me.

Good fun, I hope to see more in time.

Thanks for playing!

In actual combat I think holding down the mouse-button to change your setup could benefit from this either slowing down or "freezing" the game.

Maybe something like a second of time slowdown when you enable mixing? I suppose that could help but I'm afraid it would lead to players spamming RMB to exploit the slowdown. I'll experiment with this.

This is an early comment but I I probably still have not figured it out. See that as either a detriment towards the tutorial or me as a player.

It's probably the game's fault! This is the first time I've tried making a tutorial so it's probably not great. I can answer any mechanic related questions you may or may not have.

Hey, thanks for playing again! It seems I can always count on you for DD feedback. I'll play your demo first chance I get.

It's very easy to accidentally add an element you don't want by trying to move too early

I agree, I've done that a few times myself. Unfortunately I don't see a way to fix this, we'll just have to be more careful when mixing stuff. In my opinion this pales in comparison to the issues brought on by the past alchemy control schemes.

Forcing you to stand still while mixing elements makes things harder which I assume it's intentional but it also makes it harder to go for bigger combinations.

It is intended. The player can choose between quickly making simple mixtures on the fly or taking the time to hide behind cover and make a more powerful mixture. I might buff the high tier chems to compensate for this indirect nerf.

I'm not sure if the super effective damage is better or simply more evident...

If memory serves me right, I did make the damage numbers more obvious. It could also be due to the tutorial showing you what super-effective damage looks like. Either way, I'm glad it's clearer now.

... the rest rarely deal enough damage to kill you when you can chug healing like nobody's business.

Funny that you mention that, I'm thinking of adding "hard damage" to Hard mode. That is, when you take damage, some percentage of that damage takes away from your maximum health. For example, if you take 40 damage and half of it is hard damage, your maximum health would lower to 80. Your max health would regenerate over time or upon clearing the room. What do you think of that?

Upgrades are interesting, the scythe damage one is great, but I spent all the other points on the alchemical tank ones since they're always useful and the rest seem situational.

That's fair. Keep in mind that you can only play 1/3 of a run at the moment, you'd have enough scrap to get those more situational upgrades in the full game.

You can press the M key to cheat in money for upgrades.

Changelog:

• Full tutorial
• Finalized alchemy controls
• Weapon upgrades mechanic
• Visual clarity overhaul
• Gameplay balancing

Read the full devlog here.

Interesting idea! Your suggested scheme would probably help with ergonomics and would be more familiar to players who come from Magicka. Being unable to move while mixing is a non-issue, you can't do it effectively with the current controls either. That being said, there is the drawback of relegating the secondary fire input to a less intuitive binding, which might make no difference in the DD57 build but could (and likely will) prove to be problematic in the future. 

What if I moved dash to space then used shift as the alchemy key? You'd hold shift, use QWEASD to mix your stuff, then let go of shift to return to normal controls. The alchemy key could also be a toggle, similar to the old mixing menu, but I fear this would muddy up the user experience by adding more buttons in the way of combat. It could result in some frustrating experiences where you forget to turn off the alchemy mode and try to fight an enemy, only for you to not move and for your mixture to get all messed up (picrel).

Additionally, the alchemy key could clear your mixture for you, removing the need for the "clear mixture" binding. This would free up the tab key for other stuff.

There might be situations when the player wants to just remove one chemical without removing all of them, so they would use the "opposite" chemical.

Sure, but those are very rare situations compared to the amount of times you accidentally add an opposing chemical and mess up your attack. Not only that, I want to discourage players from holding onto one mixture for too long (mixture turtling if you will) and forcing them to rebuild their mixture to get rid of a chemical should help with that. Still, I'll think about it.

Ideally all combos should be made with one or two taps with your fingers in correct positions

Just to be sure, when I say "combinations" I mean permutations of individual chemicals (mixtures), not products from reactions. It's simply infeasible to have all unique mixtures in reach of such few inputs, attempting to achieve that would require heavy neutering of the mechanic. You don't need to create complex combos all the time, most mixtures for dealing damage take very few inputs (especially in the next build since you're able to fill your tank with a chemical by holding down its key). 

I finished the demo on hard.

I'm damn proud, good job.

There are many status effects and chemical combos that don’t feel that useful, but that might be because the game does not have that many enemies, and you just have them ready for later.

That is precisely the case, the only enemies in the game right now are trash mobs that are only meant to test the player's ability to figure out and exploit basic weaknesses. It doesn't help that they're all from the same faction and thus have basically the same weaknesses, meaning a lot of the available combos just have no purpose right now. Future enemies should be more varied and complex, hopefully warranting the use of more varied chemplay.  

I could switch to different chemicals with fire against them, but honestly given the tricky control scheme, I found it easier to just shoot multiple times instead.

Indeed, you can easily roll with the same mixture to kill everything in the build you played. I've since rebalanced the enemies, making weaknesses and resistances more extreme to force players to switch mixtures. Most notably, I made the poison Mines resistant to corrosive and the big Watchers resistant to fire.

I also think it would be a good idea to limit chemicals to 3 slots rather than 5 (not counting combos), that is one of the changes that Wizard Wars made to the original Magicka to make the game more fast-paced and I think it worked very well.

I've received this suggestion from multiple playtesters, maybe it's about time I give it a whirl. I'm a bit against it due to it limiting the amount of combinations you can make, but now that I think about it, I could make it so you can expand your tank size with an item/upgrade during a run. I'll give it some more thought.  

I experienced some fps drops the first few times when using chemicals/destroying barrels. I imagine it is caused by you instantiating things before you pool them. I think it would be beneficial to pre-instantiate some more used game objects into your pools at dungeon generation.

I'm not doing any pooling right now, I should probably get on that soon.

I think I found a bug, or at least I think it is not how it should work

That is a bug, thankfully I don't have to fix it. A playtester pointed out how destructive/circular reactions are pointless and only serve to mess you up when you fat-finger the wrong key, and I agreed. I've since made it so chemicals that cancel out cannot be mixed together at all, e.g., the hotbar will flash red and error if you try to add a plasma to a water, and removed all circular reactions. I may rework this again. 

Thanks for playing and for the extensive feedback! Pleasantly surprised to see it given that it's been a while since the DD ended.

The most annoying thing were how far away 5 and 6 are from WASD.

A different playtester suggested using a modifier key, like CTRL, to access the bottom row of chemicals. For instance, you'd press 2 to add one fire and CTRL+2 to add one ice. What do you think of that idea?

And I didn't know where to put the weapon switch key. Let me change weapons with the scroll wheel and I will use the scythe, ty.

Heard this from other people as well so I'll add it. I've always hated accidentally bumping mouse scroll and switching weapon in other games so I never added the binding haha. You mentioned that there's no incentive to use the scythe in the stream but there actually is one: damage. If memory serves me right, the scythe deals ~80 damage to an electric Watcher with a 4x fire swing. You're basically trading the safety of range for high burst damage.

Another thing is, I usually just went for full charges and just mashed the number keys. But often I wasn't sure of if I hit it 3 or 4 times. For these reasons, I personally would prefer if there were 3 charges, or even 2, that would make it feel less annoying input wise for me.

What about instantly filling up with a chemical if you hold its key down for a bit? I don't want to reduce the maximum number of charges since that would reduce the amount of combinations you can make by a large factor.

I would have liked a sort of training room with dummies or something to test stuff out. I like to experiment with mechanics normally, but I don't feel like you have too much room to try out stuff while you're fighting against dudes in the wild.

A tutorial that includes this is a high priority and should be in the next update. 

Thanks for playing and for the stream! I'm surprised you almost beat a run without knowing you can heal yourself with your utility.

Hey, thanks a lot for playing and for the extensive feedback. I'll watch the VODs as soon as I can.

"Enter the Gungeon" but you start with all weapons unlocked except there are really complicated hotkeys to activate them. 

 I've never played Enter the Gungeon so a lot of your comparisons fall on deaf ears, sorry. There will be more weapons the player can unlock in the future.

Also there are exploding barrels EVERYWHERE
Gunplay/movement alone is more complex with all the barrels

I've received this complaint from a few separate people, I'll reduce the spawn rate of the explosive barrels and make them more visually distinct. The thought process behind the barrels was to allow the player to use the environment to their advantage, but most people just end blowing themselves up. 

So your game, in the first level, is already thrice as complicated as EtG

The game is very difficult by design, yes. 

Getting to the second level rewards you with: More of the same. I think the individual aspects are honestly fine (maybe fun), but it would really help if you focused on one gimmick alone. At least at the start.

The repeating level is a temporary measure to pad for time since I only have one dungeon biome made at the moment, the real game would feature different environments and enemies. On that note, I might reduce the total number of levels in a run from 9 to 6 (2 levels per biome) to avoid redundancy.

For all I care, have the final levels be super complex (like the first one is now). But for the first ones, honestly, my wish and expectation would be that there are e.g. some rats, and I should use fire/poison to kill them, and then some robots, and I should use electro to kill them. And these enemies alone be simpler than the first enemies you encounter in EtG.

I plan to add a tutorial which does just this as level 0. This is arguably the biggest problem with the game in its current state (in my opinion), people are just dropped into the game without any instruction on how the game works.

It also feels very unrewarding right now to combo elements. The mental effort of e.g. first drenching and then electrocuting enemies... and then it does a puny 8 damage… I suppose it does more damage if I stack the elements higher; but the game really makes you hate stacking 3x-4x because then it takes like 4 seconds until you can shoot again. I suspect the stacking better be removed completely (or limited to 2x). And going drench->electro should INSTAGIB on the first level, else it’s ridiculously not worth the effort.

Here's the thing: elemental weaknesses are dictated by an enemy's faction and their elemental composition. For example, the little guy that shoots a fire beam is weak to acid (because it's a robot) and ice (because it's a fire enemy). Robots are nigh immune to electric attacks, so that combo is ineffective against them. At its core, the game is about being adaptable and exploiting enemy weaknesses rather than creating cool general-purpose combos. That being said, I think you're right that there's very little incentive to trying out complex combos just now. Once there are more varied and complex enemies, those combinations should hopefully shine

- Zip comes with "DoNotShip" folder (Linux)
- Game crashed my GPU at first because framerate uncapped by defaul

Whoops, I'll look into that.

- Why do I want to kill the boss? Apparently it is not guarding the portal.

The miniboss room gives you a bigger chest with a lot more purple drops, which will be important when the game is more complete. There's no purpose right now.

The chests are a joke. I get a couple healing orbs (not even full health) when I can infinitely heal myself? No clue what scrap is for. At least make the chests always heal you to full; or put something actually exciting in them and let me do the healing myself.

The healing orbs are a convenience to speed up gameplay. It can take a while to fully heal yourself from low health, even more so in hard mode since it reduces the amount of healing you receive, so the healing orbs help to reduce the monotony. The scrap will be used to upgrade weapons in the future, it isn't implemented right now.

Again, thanks for playing. I will try your demo out as soon as I am able.

A fellow alchemy-centered game? You bet your ass I'm trying it.

I'm surprised that you're able to spin the camera around to your liking, I would assume that a game in this "style" would lock it to one angle. 

The combination between pixel art and lowpoly 3D graphics doesn't look great to me, it's especially off-putting when you fetch a herb and a giant pixel icon drops onto the overworld. Maybe reserve pixel art for the UI if you really want to keep it? You have a bad case of mixels in the loading screen, by the way.

The alchemy tutorial is unintuitive. The player is very unlikely to remember everything that's spewed at them through a textbox, you should instead guide them through the process--show don't tell, right? Maybe add some text pop-ups as you're performing alchemy, that way the player can follow along and learn. This is a recurring theme in this game: a lot of bland exposition in big chunks. The introduction to the village comes to mind, I ended up just blazing through the dialogue until I was freed.

It seems like you've got a lot of complex systems under the hood, the alchemy crafting itself could have a whole manual. You just need to find a better way to ease your player into these mechanics.

I played a full run with the witch character last time I touched this game so I tried the other characters this time, starting with the bomb elf. Her main attack is interesting but feels pretty lackluster, it requires a lot more effort than the witch's spam fireballs without much reward. This is not only frustrating but makes the character feel unfun. You could increase the explosion radius and make the bombs deal a lot more damage when hitting enemies near the center of the explosion, as it would still encourage players to have good timing while also bringing up the overall power of the character. There should also be some sort of indicator for your bomb charges, I recommend something like circles representing your bombs around either the cursor or the character sprite.

The cyclops character is just boring, it's the most passive gameplay imaginable. Maybe it's entertaining to VS lovers but I don't see it. I would give something for the player to actually do on top of having the drones, like charging up the drones and having them fire a beam in the direction the player is aiming, then putting the attack on a long cooldown.

The blonde character has an interesting mechanic and it does scale fairly well, not many complaints there. Just make it more obvious you're losing health when you have the damage aura.

The enemy variety is nice but the environment is lacking in both visual and gameplay substance. It would be easy to make some tile variations to spice up the floor, e.g., cracked and mossy tiles. There's only a handful of props with fixed spawns, maybe make more stuff periodically spawn in. I still think your choice of VFX style is poor and doesn't fit the game but you don't seem interested in changing it, so I will leave it be.

I found a bug: pausing and unpausing during the upgrade screen will cause the game to return to x1 timescale while the player is still selecting an upgrade. 

There was no campaign mode when I last played this IIRC, so I will try that first. The VN-like parts are neat but please let me click through the dialogue if you're not going to have VAs, it's just wasting my time otherwise. On that note, I didn't pay attention to the in-level dialogue at all while playing. I'm not gonna stop playing to read whatever's happening, I suggest either giving the characters voicelines that I can listen to as I move or cutting the feature entirely. I see that you added new sprites for the character view, but, uhh... the damage sprite isn't good. It deviates from the style so much that it's offputting. 

The game is very easy, you can strafe around enemies and use the two main weapons to take care of nearly any threat. Like GorriDev said, it feels underwhelming and doesn't force the player to use the mech to its fullest. Frankly, I don't even know what the items do nor how to use them. The only point where I was close to death was when I first encountered the sniper enemy: it's a little bullshit since its aiming laser is not indicative of where its bullet will actually land. It also seemed to instantly fire at me when I first saw it but I might be misremembering, if that isn't the case then give it a warmup period.

Not sure what's up with the Abovespace level, we Getter Robo/Gurren Lagann now? Anyway, the campaign is alright but feels aimless. The level design needs some more intricacies to be engaging, there's only so much mileage you can get out of wide long hallways. Some more objectives would be nice, e.g., protect this thing, stay alive for X amount of time, etc.  

It feels like you're getting ahead of yourself to me. I think you should perfect the gameplay core, i.e., the mech movement and combat, and only then start making mountains of content. Either way, I'm eager to see where the game goes.

Most importantly, I didn't see my game's thumbnail anywhere. You can consider yourself my enemy now.

Starting the game in a window with a predefined resolution is silly, at least make it a native-sized window. Please make the UI scale with screen size, I have a 4k monitor and the menus are absolutely teeny. Also, dropdowns for resolution and aspect ratio don't seem to work when in fullscreen. 

Started the tutorial and sensitivity feels way too high right off the bat, had to lower it to 50% for it to feel proper. It's a little odd that zooming in doesn't decrease your sensitivity, you would think such a feature exists to aid in longer range precision but it just makes the aiming more unwieldy (I would later find out that the sights view fills this role). It's weird that you have this elaborate weakpoint system while having such a fast player tank, seems contradictory but maybe actual combat will enlighten me. The healing and self-destruct minigames are pretty difficult to do with the unscaled UI, I have to lean in to see the arrows clearly when doing the former. Other than that, the tutorial is pretty good. I like that you get to shoot at your tank unit to see how it works. 

Played the first level, I mostly just circled around the enemy tanks and shot at them until they died. One of the trucks went outside the level bounds but it didn't count as escaped, so I just took long range potshots until I nailed it. The replay system is interesting but feels pointless, especially when you're just staring at sprites move around rather than an actual 3D environment. Changing the playback speed didn't seem to work.

Tried the second level with the 47mm cannon, got destroyed pretty quickly due to poor planning. Had some nasty frame drops when shooting buildings from afar. The level got a lot easier once I remembered the sights view exists since hitting weakspots is much easier with it. This just serves to confuse me on the game's identity more, am I supposed to be speeding around or taking calculated shots? Maybe a mix of both? I eventually finished the level, then tried again with the BIG DICK cannon. It's fun and feels awesome to shoot but obviously it has its drawbacks.

It feels to me like you've yet to nail down what your game is supposed to be, maybe this is my inexperience with vehicle games seeping through. Other than that, the tank models are nice and I assume the environment is just a case of debug art. I look forward to future builds.

The melee weapon felt weaker compared to the gun

The melee weapon does a lot more damage but puts you at greater risk so most people roll with the gun. 

A basic tutorial will be helpful, it doesn't matter if it's only text, it will help new player a lot.

Indeed, I plan to make one ASAP.

Thanks for playing! I will try your demo again as soon as I am able.

thx bestie xoxo

having your attack dictated by your element reserves is much clunkier, you're constantly keeping an eye on the UI and it's distracting and limiting.

I'm considering getting rid of the chemical stock/ammo mechanic and just letting the player use them infinitely (like Magicka), do you think that would be better? I would naturally have to make the enemy weaknesses/resistances more extreme so you're forced to switch mixtures instead of being able to roll with a combo that nukes everything.

The silencing mix didn't seem to stop the watchers from attacking

That's because the Watchers don't use magical attacks, none of the enemies in the game do yet. Magical attacks from future enemies will be very obvious. 

the tar didn't feel worth the hassle just for some crowd control since the electrical thing does pretty much the same

You can combine the two :) If you do tar + electric + fire, it will chain explode everything.

shield spell/element: being able to make your own cover would make the fights less dependent on random enemy and clutter spawn.

Unfortunately that goes against a core philosophy of the game, that being "chemicals don't affect the behavior of your weapon". That said, a chemical that gives you a barrier status effect might be cool.

I would also like something around your cursor indicating what elements you've selected so you don't have to look down at the UI every time.

Aye aye.

Thanks for playing, I will play your demo as soon as I can.

Quick summary of additions and changes:

• Improvement to dungeon generation: better floor progression; new room types 
• Currency mechanics: currency drops; chests 
• New visual assets across the board
• Optimizations galore

Read the full devlog here.

yeah it's funnier that way

look ma, i made it. I was that anon btw (proof) but please keep the filename as it is :)

The game feels pretty good, the controls are responsive and the UI is well made. I played one full run with the starting character and it felt very easy, I wasn't at risk of dying at any point. Maybe I was just smart/lucky with my build, I dunno. I was admittedly a little bored by the end of the run, but that might just be because I'm not much of a VS-like lover.  I then tried out the two other characters for a bit, but I didn't play full runs with either.

The game sprites are very charming and all look cohesive together. That being said, I'm not a fan of the the VFX: they don't match the game's art style at all. I would try doing something closer to your hand-drawn sprites, the default-Unity-looking explosions and trails are kinda soulless. On that note, the post-processing effects like chromatic aberration and bloom don't fit in too well either. The environment could use a little more visual interest as well, and as others have mentioned, the sound design leaves a lot to be desired.

I would often get the wrong description when hovering over an upgrade, and sometimes the description wouldn't update at all when I hovered over to another icon.  That was the only bug I noticed.

The game looks promising overall, I have no doubts you can polish it more and end up with a very fun product. :)

The character art in the intro cutscene is pretty good, but it gets a little inconsistent later in the game (especially when the characters aren't in standing poses.) The difference between the cutscene art and the game sprites is a little jarring, as well. The background art is lacking both in cutscenes and gameplay. The dialogue is awkward and has a few grammatical inconsistencies, like only sometimes using quotes when a character is speaking. 

As for the game itself, it was boring. I was just wandering the map without much purpose while killing any vampires that showed up. Items don't have interactable prompts so I spammed E on everything I saw until I found the things I needed to progress. I ended up going in circles a lot because everything looks so similar, you should make your environments more distinct and/or add a map.  Enemies not chasing you through different rooms coupled with the player having a lot of health removes any tension from the game, it doesn't feel like you're being chased and in danger. Also, it's odd how your stamina resets when you enter a different room   

I'll be frank with you, I don't think this game is anywhere near being worthy of a Steam page. In its current state, it's far too barebones to catch anyone's attention. If I were you, I would polish the fuck out of the mansion level and then, and ONLY then, try to garner some attention. You're just shooting yourself in the foot by showing a half-baked product. Best of luck, I'll check in if you ever submit to another DD.

The little suit-up transformation sequence was cute, hope you animate it properly sometime (or get someone to do it for you.) 

I'm not sure I like the weapon subsystem as it is: I accidentally picked up a subweapon I didn't want halfway through the plant level and was stuck with it until the end. I would make it so you can cycle through the subweapons, with the ammo you pick up going to the active subweapon. 

The vertical drift as you move horizontally is a bit annoying, made me hit a projectile or two. It's not a necessarily bad addition but I don't like it very much.

The crushers are a little buggy, sometimes I get crushed when I should have lived and survive when I should've died. I also got pushed into a wall by a crusher at one point.

I don't really get the setting of the game yet, why does RoboTemplar need to kill some blobby plant dudes again?  Feels a little underwhelming, I was expecting aliens, monsters, or other robots who were threatening Earth or something.

Challenge rooms were cool, I took an embarrassing amount of time to complete the first crusher one.

Still eager to see how the game shapes up. Anyway, here's some quick art.

Fun stuff. I love the concept of a robo-paladin with a big shield, I only wish I could use it to block/deflect/absorb projectiles with it (but I get how that could go against the direction you're taking the game in.) The controls feels tight and responsive, about what you'd expect from a game like this. The art is charming in an amateurish way, I'm a fan. The demo was very easy, but that's to be expected given that it's just a tutorial. I'm eager to play some real levels of this game in the future.

P.S. remind me to never attempt this level of detail ever again!

A very promising start, the gameplay is already fun despite being so stripped down in terms of content. With that out of the way, here are my findings.

Pits are very unwieldy in this game. The player's fast movement combined with their character being instantly teleported back to the playing field makes the experience jarring, sometimes I didn't immediately notice I had fallen into a pit during combat. You should add a falling animation that takes something like half a second, that way the player can understand what's happening and get a brief moment to think of a gameplan going forward.

You can get jumped before being able to reasonably react when you enter a combat room, specifically when there is an enemy right next to the entrance. I suggest adding some sort of "wake-up" period for the enemies where they can move towards you but not attack. You could also add brief wake-up animations but I find it unlikely for you to do so given the speed of the game. 

The game isn't too hard but it could use some balancing, specifically the slime enemies. I, too, was softlocked in the room with endlessly spawning slimes. Despite constantly attacking and using my willpower move on clumped slimes, I could not thin the horde down enough.

I have some other minor nitpicks, most of which were mentioned by other playtesters: there should be a way to restart/quit to menu when you die; attacks dissipate into walls sometimes; there should be prompts for interactables.

Everything else I have to say is positive: the music is awesome, the art is charming, being able to parry melee attacks is cool, and the gameplay is quite replayable. That being said, your environments are super bland. Consider adding some visual flair. All in all, I'm eager for updates. Keep up the good work.

P.S. welcome to the robed mask-wearing protag club :3

Feels like a late 2000's ROBLOX game (this is a compliment.) The shooting feels pretty good despite its clunkiness, the mech interface looks cool, and the game's artstyle is already shaping up pretty well. That being said, there is a lot to improve on.

The movement needs a lot of polish. The player character somehow feels slow and clunky without having that feeling of weight you'd expect from a mech game: walking and jumping has no inertia, and you just abruptly stop in mid-air when you're hovering.  The choice to instantly turn the player 180 degrees when back-dashing is bizarre and completely goes against the idea of piloting a giant hunkering machine, it just feels wrong. I also got stuck on geometry a few times, being unable to move at all. 

The enemies need work. Getting to any sort of elevation trivializes the game, as none of the robots can seem to shoot upwards. All the enemies seem to do the same thing: walk towards you slowly and shoot a rocket prefab at you every couple of seconds. The exception is the spherebot, which seems to do nothing at all. I would try to make some more variety, maybe have the small walkers use guns while the big ones fire missiles.

The player's arsenal confuses me, none of the consumable items seem to do anything (missiles pass right through the bubble shield, for one. Maybe it only blocks bullets?) I don't blame you too much on this one since the game's early in development, but maybe consider making some kind of screen that explains what each item does in the future (or dedicated tutorials per item.) 

The game does show promise, it just needs love put into it. Keep it up. :)

Had a surprising amount of enjoyment playing this game seeing as I'm not a VN guy at all. The dialogue was entertaining, with both main characters having an alluring degree of insanity. I have little idea what the plot is thus far, there's a lot of exposition scattered around and I didn't have the strength to parse through it and piece together a story. Maybe I'll play the game again seriously sometime, without being in a drunken stupor. Poking around in the files was also fun, I'm excited for the torture chamber point-and-click adventure section to appear (if it isn't in the game already and I somehow missed it.) The other playtesters addressed most of my criticisms already, such as obnoxiously loud music and some awkward wording here and there, so I don't have much to say on that end. Keep it up.

Anyways, dongcopter.

Thanks for playing! A tutorial is definitely in order, but I might not have it done by next DD. I wanna implement all the core features before making it.

Cool, I'll check the VOD sometime soon.

Thanks for playing again! I made the levels smaller so it makes sense that runs felt shorter. As for the game feeling easier, that may just be a consequence of the manual letting you know what's effective against what.

Thanks for playing!

The dash feels unwieldy

Could you elaborate on this? Is it because you can slide after doing it?

Getting poisoned seemed like a death sentence

There is an antidote chem that you can use on yourself to clear most debuffs.

What's new:

• Key-based alchemy mixing (deprecated menu-mixing for the time being)
• Manual menu: lets you view information on game entities after unlocking their entries
• Persistent player data: session data and unlocks are now permanently stored
• New chemickals: Blearing Fog and Silencing Agent (latter doesn't affect anything right now)
• More gameplay balancing

What's next:

• Weapon upgrade system
• Run buffs system
• More enemies (finally!)
• Improved dungeon generation
• Visual improvements

Thanks for playing!

Hey, thanks a bunch for playing and taking the time to do this! Sorry for not replying to you last time, I had the intention of doing it but forgot... I'll address some points you made in the commentary now.

Mixing menu breaks the flow of gameplay ... you could use number keys for mixing and a corner UI to make it better.

I've received this specific piece of criticism/feedback many times. I experimented with this idea a little more shortly after this DD ended, but it felt really clunky to me. Having to take your hand off WASD to mix stuff renders you completely defenseless, not to mention you have to stretch your hand all the way to the 6 key. To me, this could only work if the time slow-down also happened when you're mixing with the number keys, but then it might still break the flow of gameplay. What do you think?

Secondary fire doesn't do anything.

That's just because the current weapons have no secondary fire, sorry.

It would be nice if rooms had indestructible environmental pieces.

Absolutely, other people have also requested this. I'll add some pillars and stuff.

It's not clear when the room is cleared ... you could have a progress bar on top.

I agree, I'm working on sorting this out. I'm going to add a distinct "room cleared" sound effect, and I'll also add an objective display on top of the screen which will change depending on what room type you're in.

Is there a reason for [the mixing menu] to be timed like that?

Yes, the mixing menu slows time down but lets you walk around. If there was no timer on the menu, the player could stay in slow-motion forever, using it to easily dodge everything and only coming out to occasionally attack. I can make the timer last longer, but the timer stays.

Maybe you should be able to use your utility while in the mixing menu?

Good suggestion, but then again, that encourages people to stay in the mixing menu for as long as possible.  I'll try it out and see if it feels balanced.

Right-clicking in the mixing menu causes you to dash if you use your utility (if dash is bound to right-click.)

Wow, nice find. I'll try to fix it.

It gets to a point where there's a lot of down-time and you don't know where you're supposed to be going, so you could use a full map.

Good point, I should add that. It could be a fog-of-war kind of thing where you can't see the entire dungeon at once, only rooms you've visited and nearby rooms.

I expect the second level to have different enemies with different colors.

Yes, that'll be the case soon. There's a miniscule amount of content in the game right now, so it just repeats the same stuff.

I would expect healing to get rid of the poison.

That was the case for a while, but it made healing way too strong and too versatile. Instead, that functionality is relegated to purifying wash, which you make with water and healing.

If you stand still, the enemies stand still. They should move, even if just by little a bit.

Good point, I'll try that.

Really fun game ... I'll see you next DD.

I will be there for sure. You didn't find any of the cool combos you can pull off, I'm tempted to record a video to show them... Anyway, thanks a lot for being so helpful!