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on it boss

yeah, go ahead! it wouldn’t be useful if you couldn’t

Thanks for the bug report!! I just fixed both of those things.

Oh, thanks for the fix!! I feel so silly missing that, hahaha
I’ll update my pack in just a bit!

(Sorry for the English reply, I can’t speak any Spanish…)

i played through (what i think is) most of the first episode on easy and normal mode.
overall i think it’s pretty fun. i like the character designs especially!!
i’m gonna try to play through it some more times later on harder difficulties and different characters to get a better feel for it.
i definitely have a ton of quality-of-life complaints, though.
this comment is very long so i just want to reiterate here that i like the game a lot!!
again, most of my comment is going to be about quality-of-life stuff or bugs
i played with mal and gremile so far, so some of my points might not quite apply to the other two characters or on the harder difficulties
(i’ve played some on an older version and some on the most recent patch, so it may be the case that something i said here doesn’t apply anymore)

Potential bugs/errors

• you can grab multiple enemies at once, but only one enemy takes damage.

• on the train section in the second stage of episode one, you can fall off of the backside.
  the game otherwise doesn’t let you fall off of the stage, so it feels like an error

• i also experienced the glitch that i think someone else did where the first boss glitches out recovering from stun and infinitely spawns dust clouds and doesn’t do anything (on v1.1.5).

• with gremile’s jump B, if you touch the ground while he’s putting his guns away, he doesn’t snap to the ground like he does when you’re shooting.
  because of that, you still count as being in the air so when you try to attack you get aerial attacks.
  i mostly encounter this because i do jump B, then i want to land and start doing moves on the ground, but when i tap B i get j.B again.
  sometimes it’s happened to me when i run into king yama and it sort of boosts me into the air a little, or after a super recovery when you’re not quite on the ground yet but you can still perform an action

• the game flings you up into the air when you occupy the same spot as another character.
  depending on how much overlap or momentum there is, you can go really high, it’s a little jarring and hard to predict

• this is kind of an unhelpful bug report since i don’t know how it happens, but somehow in the middle of one playthrough my inputs suddenly became very glitchy.
  i thought it was my controller acting up, but i switched back to keyboard controls (meaning i quit the playthrough) and it didn’t fix anything.
  for some reason, any buttons i pressed wouldn’t count as being held for more than a few frames, and also the game would seemingly drop inputs at random.
  unplugging my controller completely resolves the issue, but now anytime i plug the controller back in, i have the same issue.
  i guess it’s somehow a bug with the controller support in the game? it can interfere with my inputs even when i don’t have any controller buttons bound and am only using keyboard+mouse. and in other programs, my controller wasn’t glitching out.

Gameplay

• i think the health system is a little weird. your health is displayed in a bar like you can take a wide range of damage, but in my experience you can basically treat it like “four hits and you’re dead”.
  that kind of seems to hold true whether you’re fighting bosses or normal enemies and whether you get hit by an up-close punch or a far away projectile.
  of course, there definitely are things that do more or less damage, but i feel like it’s hard to really feel the differece.

• i think it would be better for gameplay flow if you didn’t get knocked down from every single attack.
  for the most part, it didn’t really seem worth it to super recover unless you were about to get launched into a stage hazard or something.
  enemies don’t seem to be able to combo you on purpose, so the only benefit to super recovering on most hits is to get up faster which isn’t usually worth spending a super orb on, to me.
  i think having attacks that don’t knock you down would be better so that you don’t have to wait a really long time every time you happen to get hit. or at least, maybe you should be able to press something when you hit the ground to recover faster.

• i think the attacks in this game seem pretty committal, which is kind of unusual for a game in this genre (not that that makes it a bad thing!).
  even though a lot of enemy attacks are reactable, i think often times when you notice one happening it’ll be too late if you’ve already started committing to an attack.
  there’s no dodge mechanic or anything, so i feel like it might be nice to have more jump-cancels on things so you can bail out. otherwise your only invincible option is a grab attack. perhaps supers could be more invincible so that you have more options to deal with that kind of situation? especially since you have to use a super orb, i think it’d be fair and not a choice you would always make

• it might be nice if you could pick different grab attacks, at least on normal enemies
  like if you had one grab attack that did less damage to the single target that you grabbed, but it deals AoE damage, or something like that i think since it seems like your primary finisher, grab attacks currently feel a little repetitive because there’s only one animation on normal enemies (as far as i can tell), they last a long time for how often you might want to use them, and they also only work on one enemy at a time.
  the length and special camera angle end up breaking the flow when you use grabs so often. you also lose track of the other enemies because of the camera change, so it’s kind of easy to get smacked in the face right after landing one if there are other enemies around so it might be nice to have grabs that give you extra utility like crowd control or repositioning or something like that. or at least make the animation a little snappier somehow.

• an actual pause button would be nice, mostly if you have to go to the bathroom or something, but also because it would let you change your controls and stuff without having to quit back out to the menu

• in the train sections, i think the hitbox for the laser stage hazards seems really tall.
  every so often, i think i’ve jumped clean over it and then i somehow get clipped by it when it doesn’t seem to visually collide with my model.

• the collision detection on the water slide section should probably be changed so it’s not so slope-y.
  it’s not very fun when your character is constantly flying off of the sides of the raft, you just feel like you have no control

• i don’t think enemies should be able to fall off the stage on their own.
  it kinda just feels weird how often enemies end up doing that, especially when the player can’t fall off the stage

• related, knocking enemies off the stage should probably just KO them.
  it is kind of easy, but it’s a simple pleasure in a lot of beat-’em-ups and i think blasting enemies off the stage only for them to just reappear with a little bit of life lost is a little unsatisfying. maybe it could at least hurt enemies more?

• gremile’s A+B+C has a deadzone right in front of him. i dunno if it’s on purpose but i just think it feels kinda bad
  actually, in general i think the super feels underwhelming. aside from the deadzone (which is also a big deal, imo) it doesn’t seem to have great damage output or accuracy, and you’ll instantly drop it as soon as you jump or get hit.

Aesthetics

• the game can get very visually busy, so there are some extra touches that could improve visual clarity a lot.
  like, if characters had colored outlines that always rendered on top of everything, or if effects are rendered on top of characters, you could still see the character through the effect like it’s partially transparent, or something like that.
  one time i had a goblin place a bomb near the front of the screen, so probably a good 60% of the screen was totally concealed, and i couldn’t tell if i was near any stage hazards, or see that a second goblin had placed a bomb next to me that was also hidden by the explosion and about to explode! likewise, on the car fight in the tunnel section of the second stage, a bomb blowing up in the front can obscure the landing zone of a bomb that’s going to land behind the explosion

• the camera should probably be able to go a little further out of bounds.
  it’s hard to see what’s going on with your character if you’re right up at the bottom edge/corners of the screen
  especially on the racetrack stage, you can go totally off-camera!

• there’s not really a lot of hitstop on attacks (if any?) besides grab attacks, so i think a lot of normal attacks end up feeling pretty underwhelming even if they do blast enemies across the screen.

• gremile’s gunshots should probably have bullet trails or something.
  it’s hard to tell exactly where you’re hitting and it would also help give them more impact, i think

• there could probably be a little more slowdown/zoom-in when you land the final hit on a boss (like guilty gear XRD/strive, i guess) before it goes all rainbow and melty.
  the screen going rainbow is too sudden when the camera angle changes at the same time, it’s really hard to process what exactly you’re seeing when you KO a boss. to be honest, i might just suggest not making everything go rainbow-y? it just feels out of place somehow.

• i feel like the boss’s name should probably be shown somewhere near the health bar?

• i’m not sure if i missed it, but there should probably be some indication of how long a boss will be stunned for
  like the armor bar should probably be recharging or something while you beat ‘em up
  i don’t think it’s super fun to just have to estimate how long a boss is stunned and how much of that time you think you’ve already used, especially because once the boss gets its armor back you can’t land a grab attack which massively increases your damage output for that cycle.
  extending a combo on a stunned boss feels like a risk the game is forcing you to take because there’s no on-screen indicator, rather than a risk you can take of your own accord if the boss is about to recover

• related to my complaint about grab attacks, to avoid repetitiveness and flow-breaking i think maybe the KO slowdown and voice line should only happen when you clear a wave, rather than for every single enemy that you KO?
  it also becomes jarring when an enemy gets KO’d by a stage hazard, because then your game slows down at an unexpected time since you probably weren’t paying attention to that enemy

• i do hope more optimiation or options to help improve performance get added in the future, like maybe rendering resolution scaling or something like that.
  it is part of the aesthetics of the game, but if someone is running on a weaker machine they might also appreciate the option to have corpses disappear? they didn’t really serve any gameplay purpose as far as i can tell
  i could mostly run it fine on a not-especially powerful machine, but it would be nice if there were options to make it run a little better

Controls

• the turning radius for running feels like it’s implemented strangely. of all of my complaints, this is definitely the biggest issue to me
  you can’t run in one direction and then directly backwards without taking a huge arc.
  i’ve definitely run head-first into so many attacks (especially stage hazards and projectiles) just because of this, and in general i think it makes following enemies in combos harder than intended

• keyboard and controller bindings should probably be separate.
  i was definitely very confused when i saw that there was controller support but it didn’t seem work at all in the game.
  so i played on mouse+keyboard, and basically right before i wrote this comment i found out that the controller still works in the control binding menu anyways.

• it seems like you want to be running most of the time, so it would probably be better to make running default and change shift pedal to be something that slows you down (like maybe a guard that reduces your damage or something).
  otherwise you’re going to spend 90% of the game with your finger on the run button which is a little straining on your run-button finger.

• i think there might be too many button combinations?
  basically, if you’re playing on a controller then you’re going to have to deal with at least one uncomfortable button combination for most layouts. you can add macros to combat this (and there are macros for A+B+C and B+C+D), but i think maybe changing the fundamental control scheme would be better
  the current controls make the shift pedal feel kind of underused. instead of just making you run, i think some of the things you do with button combinations now could be done with shift pedal + button instead.
  or you could maybe add a second button that’s purely to modify the function of ABCD (basically the same suggestion, just making a new button instead).
  there could also be button-hold and button-release commands, maybe? like, mal and gremile have a B,B,B,A+B combo, but it could be B,B,B,hold B or just B,B,hold B instead. it’s just an idea, though
  in gremile’s case, he doesn’t have a B,B,B,B attack like mal does, so i feel like there isn’t really a reason that he should have to press A+B to get the fourth attack besides the fact that it seems like a universal chain (which is fair enough, but just a little odd in my opinion)

• i also think button combinations with the jump button are kind of awkward if you’re using mouse+key board with the default controls.
  you have to coordinate pressing spacebar with one hand at the same time that you click with a different finger on the other hand, which is slightly difficult, and if you mess it up, you’re probably going to get a jump instead of an attack.

• the detection for button combinations needs to be more lenient.
  my first experience of the game was getting to the practice room before the game starts and wondering why i couldn’t start the game when i pressed B+C+D, and it was because i just didn’t press them close enough for the game to count it.
  of course, i got more consistent over time, but i still fail them every so often when i tend not to in most fighting games since they have a little more leniency.
  you should definitely add button macros for A+B, B+C, and A+C since i feel like there’s no reason not to and would help with freedom in mapping controls

Oh, I didn’t know about that!!
Thanks for the info, I’ll be sure to fix it for the next update. 🐣

It should be, I was testing it most of the time in 60fps.