Making a fangame is a weird fence to walk on - I don't want to include too many inside jokes or else it'll be offputting to others, but at the same time, the fans should enjoy it. I have yet to find the right balance between including these things but not having people feel left out.
Your feedback is highly appreciated and helps me understand the writing from an outsider's point of view much better!
Apologies for the camera bug - it's definitely getting some tweaking in future iterations.
This is on another level entirely. I feel if you like Metroidvanias, you owe it to yourself to try this!
The good: Incredibly polished, the game felt AMAZING to control, advanced movement techniques like the (assumedly) Richter inspired slide kick jump let you ZOOM around the map, the different weapons all felt unique and rewarding to obtain, I personally love the feeling of the double jump, the graphics are on another level. I had a few issues such as the game dropping my inputs if I was holding a movement key, picked up an item and finished the dialogue, I would expect to keep moving after but I have to stop holding the direction and hit the same button to restart movement. The tooltip when I first picked up an additional weapon implied I could swap using the number keys on the keyboard, which didn't seem to work for me. The menus not working with a controller made me immediately assume controller support wasn't in, after looking over a few other reviews, it seems it is however? I didn't go back in to try.
I think the first boss was a ton of fun but after that the difficulty drops off a cliff and you become an unkillable god, even common enemies no longer pose a threat as you slide kick and jump past them (which does damage to them and not you) with ease. There's a lot to like here, I really like the physics based grenades in opposition to the normal missiles you get in Metroidvanias that lean more on the Metroid side. Being able to grenade jump feels excellent, being able to slide kick up sloped surfaces feels great, wall jumping feels a teensy bit puny but when combined with all the other movement, it lets you move like no other game I've played. My one suggestion would be offer to let the player's camera move to the aiming reticule, I got hit from off screen on the boss a few times when I otherwise could have avoided it.
I didn't play overly long because I wasn't enjoying myself a ton due to a lack of challenge, I cleared the first two stages and called it quits, one of my issues is that the player feels quite overtuned. Staying aggressive and sticking to a boss makes them practically unable to attack since they lack contact damage. The game feels good to play but seems strongly geared towards the same level speedrunning design that Inti Creates loved with Mega Man Zero, which was one of the flaws of those games in my opinion (this is just a personal preference and I've seen lots of people who really like that aspect of the game).
The graphics are gorgeous and the two transformations you gave the player at the start seemed different enough to be fun and enjoyable to play around with. I think more stage environments and hazards could go towards breaking up the pace and making the player slow down a bit, encouraging replaying levels for a higher rank after you know each level better. Super great presentation, and tons of potential, would just love to see a difficulty bump!
Your game is beautiful, snappy and just the right amount of punishing! Your alien bunny is adorable, too. This reminds me of Super Meat Boy in that the levels are short, sweet and difficult enough that you'll rarely complete one on the first try.
I was able to collect all except for one star in the last level and I like the idea of the level gauntlet as well! The music accurately conveys the urgency and the graphics are gorgeous. Simple color palettes with options to swap the whole palette are always nice to see.
The gun feels excellent to use, being able to quickly turn around while you're running and shoot to boost yourself even faster feels amazing. I very strongly like the game and I think the level gimmicks you have so far, like the water and star gates work incredibly well. I'm very excited to see more!
VERY fun and SUPER cool presentation. A cool, stylistic twin stick shooter in the vein of Hotline Miami.
I will say that the graphics hurt my eyes a little after a couple minutes. The train boss was BRUTAL. One small issue I ran into was when I walked towards the train boss (to the left instead of going right through the fires) I was pushed inside one of the train car rooms and couldn't escape.
The music in this game is excellent and I love the difficulty, which might not be for everyone but I had a great time!
Nice and cute and short. The game is fun to play, I thought the boss was great and it was clever that you had the bullets spawn from above to keep me from double jumping over everything like I did in the first phase, though the boss was a crazy difficulty spike over the rest of the game, it took me two tries to beat it.
The powerups were simple and intuitive and worked well for a small bite sized Metroidvania. My only two gripes are that I don't feel like the pet deer did much or changed how I played significnatly and the cutscene song felt like it was ripping into my brain with the high notes, otherwise the music selection was great and gave me a bit of a Ragnarok Online vibe!
Very cute! I love the character's model and they feel super smooth to control. I think some music or a few more sound effects would go a long way, as well as another move or two.
What's there right now feels very snappy and responsive, my one issue that left me scratching my head was the wall jumping, it took me a bit to figure out how it worked and I still wasn't 100% sure how to get up the max height platforms consistently.
I couldn't find one bone no matter how hard I looked, but I look forward to seeing more in the future!
I'm new to agdg so most of this flew over my head!
I'm astonished at how much is in this demo, though a lot of it definitely feels like it's throwing darts at a board to see what sticks, which is fine!
The strength of this game will come with tailored level design and tightening up the responsiveness and feedback of the weapons.
Keep at it, there's a lot of great ideas here that just need more love.
