itch.io

I'd like to point out a few things:

• The lights/sections of wall flickering on and off depending on distance as you move around can be quite harsh visually, and might benefit from a bit of a fade effect?
• The tutorial gate timing is really rough for when you just boot up the game for the first time. Took me 10 tries. Either lower the cooldown for Q while in the tutorial, or nerf the gate by half a second.
• The inventory item tooltips flicker as you mouse over them. Quite a harsh transition from item to item and since that's something you do a lot, consider giving the tooltips a bit of a fade time. 200-500ms or something. This would mean smooth transition from tooltip to tooltip. Much cleaner.
• The Bear trap being 3D while being set by a 2D character feels off. It doesn't make sense to me "conceptually". I fully expected a sprite. I don't know if this one makes sense, just something that came to mind.
• Many iron bars I had no idea how to get to the other side of. Are there hidden switches? If so, what's the interact key? Are they display pieces? If so, best practice would be to make sure that you have a slightly different texture for iron bars that CANT and CAN be moved. This will improve and solidify the gameplay and readability of the overall game for the player.
• Not being able to jump on tables and tiny boxes put me off a bit at first, but I think overall it makes for a much cleaner gameplay experience.
• You might be able to detect the users native desktop resolution upon launch and scale the UI accordingly. I found the default much too small.
• TAB being default for camera and I being for inventory feels clunky. Unless there's gameplay reasons I'm not aware off that encourage switching between first person and third person often I'd suggest moving default controls for the camera to V for "View" and TAB can become Inventory, since its much closer to the other controls and the player (presumably) needs it more often than the Camera toggle. I rebound the keys a few minutes in and it made my experience much smoother.

All that being said, this is by far my favorite game I've played on DD57. It needs polish sure, and I wish the dungeon was randomly generated for infinite replayability (I'm guessing its not, because its much too well designed to be random), but honestly I've only gotten as far as the yellow area, and the bandit mine, and only on one single Lvl5 fighter. This means my knowledge on the gameplay loop and progression systems is very limited so I wont comment further on it. The animations, atmosphere, music, SFX, enemies, combat are all great, and I'll be playing this demo more in the future.

Good job, Archtower: 82%

Hey, small suggestion - I know its not officially supported, but your game -IS- perfectly playable using Firefox on Android devices. It just needs a clickable "R" button to rotate the pieces.

Please add it somewhere on the UI, If you will. I know I'd be playing far more.

Not a lot of content just yet, but  What IS there is a very solid skeleton. I especially like the enemy design and the wall textures in the first mission are solid. Movement and the jumping feel just right, and I've had a copse ragdoll/expand all over the place randomly from across the level, and I could spot a few enemies spawning while in my line of sight.

SMG is really satisfying to fire, I'm guessing the sound and fire rate have a lot to do with it. The other gun is a bit weird because it doesn't return all the way down after the recoil, causing me to have to lift the mouse, move it upwards and drag down the weapon after every few shots not my favorite thing.

Anyway - Solid build, keep it up! 

Visually a very nice game, loved the polish that went into the levels since previous Demo Day, and the animations and movement now seem much smoother.  Level Design feels solid and they mostly flow well. There's a few rock textures not quite placed properly, and as such, aren't tiling properly, but I'm sure you knew that. The main thing that felt off was the level that forces the player to glide under rocks - It came a little soon. Not saying its too hard or anything, but just came a little early, as I was still familiarizing myself with the Controls. I think you might need a "softer" reset mechanic then death. Think blowing wind, rushing water. Something that lets the player practice without feeling like they've messed up, before you make them do it over the death-pitfalls. 
Controls felt great, although terrain collision needs some work here and there. Characters can get stuck mid-wall, etc.. The boss was a little on the Easy side, but fun.

Overall, huge improvements since last time. Keep it up!

So this shit wont let me post my full review... so here it is.

Review

Pros: Very solid gameplay. Shows lots of promise.
Cons: Art looks like its from newgrounds.

6/10, IGN

Hey! Thanks for the input. I'm well aware the game is slow. I needed to work on hangar screen, so there wasnt much time to rebalance the game around a faster speed. The plan was (and still is) to have weapon types of various firing speeds and projectile speed (and range), lasers being the fastest, then going down to ballistic, missiles, photon, and finally mines. But as you might imagine i ran out of time to really implement much of that into the demo. Enemies don't really have an AI yet either, so they just kinda randomly fire.

The update I'm working on ATM speeds the game up somewhat, but its gonna be a while before its ready.

Not bad/10

• Vertical movement feels a little floaty compared to the horizontal which feels like it "snaps" the character still as soon as you let go of the button.
• Jumping and Attacking have some weird interactions where attacking mid air will stop the player character mid jump, etc. The other way around - Jumping while mid attack sorta just does a weird half jitter. Should probably just not allow jumping while mid-attack.
• Inventory is serviceable, but its awkward to switch to the mouse when you want to use it, when everything else is keyboard driven. Make it so player movment is locked while inventory is open and you have an active select box that you can move with arrow keys. When you hit Enter or what have you the item is highlited, and you can move the select box to antother item, and hit Enter again to swap the items. (alternatively you can make the mouse cursor snap to the grid and keep both systems) Bonus: Moving all the way up allows you to select the various tabs and move trough them, moving all the way to the bottom left allows you to highlight the BUY or SELL button and pressing Enter activates it.
• Bonus feature idea: PC is a frog - why Make jumping interesting - tapping jump gives you a short jump, enough to clear a fence maybe. If you HOLD jump, it locks the player in place. The longer you hold Jump the higher the PC will jump once released, allowing you to cover longer distances. You can even have him go in a sitting, frog like pose when the button is held.

Shows lots of promise. Keep it up. If it were up to me I'd turn this into a mixture between Stranded Kids/Survival Kids for GBC and Harvest Moon/Stardew valley.

Heres my vivid imagination when I play this: Imagine a tropical Island where you've washed up. You pick up a stick and a rock and combine them to make a shovel. Eating raw berries you eventually find some seeds, grow food and settle down in a hollow log. There's a few areas available to you but a huge boulder blocking off the path to the rest of the island. Eventually you're able to grow bamboo (need to water it, need to make watering can, need to give it nutrients, have to hunt/gather specific stuff to turn it into fertilizer etc. Progression based on your farming. Once you have bamboo you can use a stick of it to stick it under huge boulder, move it and get further inland. You find more wild animals to hunt, wild tomato plant that you can grow using bamboo to support it, etc. You get a few more areas, but to the east is a fast river with a waterfall that you cant cross. Gonna need to make/grow something to cross it. You eventually build a home out of the hollow log, build more outposts/farms in the new areas of the island, eventually you find a cove with strong wood and start building a boat. The end goal is to leave the island.

I'm sure you know what harvest moon is, but maybe take a look at Survival Kids. I'd kill for a game that combined the two.