itch.io

Thank you for playing! I'm glad it works.

Gun Mods are fun, I wish there were a few more of them appearing.

Yeah I haven't added a lot of different, interesting ones yet at all. A lot of people seem to enjoy them though so I'll definitely flesh it out more.

I don't particularly like, that when I choose to upgrade, I loose the Runes before seeing what the upgrades are

I don't think I'll be changing it so you can see what you'd get on a level up. Rather add more ways to earn runes so you can reroll more. If you manage to pick up most that drop you should often be able to afford at least one. But yeah there should be more ways to get runes I think, right now for example you get +25% if you finish a level without taking damage (however this isn't currently explained anywhere ingame...)

I like the new Sprites, the Mummies especially are cute.

Thank you, I'd like to think I've gotten better. Don't know if you got to a Plains level that have all new enemies too.

The Portal from the Hub shouldn't take so long to activate I think, I often just waited around for it to activate.

I'll make it faster.

I like the Idea of the Hub itself tho, to select new Characters, potentially change starting loadout or various Relics to alter the Runs or whatever.

This is another thing I haven't had time to really flesh out yet either, will be more stuff like that to do some day! For example, looking at stats of enemies/guns you've encountered.

If I wasn't so bad, I could see this as a Game where you just do a run in the Evening when you don't know what else to do or are waiting for something. Since I'm so bad, that's not happening, but it still is addicting, and has me thinking that I could do one more after I died, because it's always pretty clear that it's because I'm bad, not because of some unfair Thing the Game throws at me.

That is great to hear, its just what I'm going for. There are probably some things that feel like bullshit I'd imagine, like the boss. But I'm going to remake it entirely I think. Thanks again.

Sweet :^)

I got it working properly on my craptop so the new upload should hopefully work for you as well.

Thank you for playing! I'm glad you played for a decent amount of time even if its not your usual genre, its meant to target people that are familiar with the genre so its got some difficulty.

POS laptop from 2011 is close to my target minimum req. actually, I have a similar laptop that I test one.

Yeah its walls endlessly getting destroyed and spawned. Luckily I managed to replicate the error on one of my machines just now so I should be able to figure it out. I'll let you know here when its fixed, thank you.

Another thing is you might want to increase the brightness of the cursor in some way. I was playing with the monitor at a bit of a distance and I lost it some times because its so dark against the similarly dark background.

i think this was mostly due to the Afterlife Gladiator helmet buff - i sort of don't want to hamper silly builds like that too much. instead i'll look into adding an AOE-slam ability or something to give you more fun options so you don't have to rely on just one thing.

Oh yeah that might've been it, even found two of those helmets. Sounds good.

Hadn't really planned on playing it all again, kind of just happened.

Here are the saves, one next to the immortal skelly and one at the end of the game.

https://files.catbox.moe/j0pwg8.rar

Finished the remaining part too, nice with a new area. Felt like the difficulty was picking up a bit again with the warmothers doing a lot of damage. Although I hadn't bothered upgrading my equipment for a while and I was overflowing with potions. It feels kind of silly spamming the charge attack honestly, maybe it should be tied to attack speed of the weapon or something? I dunno.

No idea what spells it thinks I casted? Should be 0 I think.

Got the itch to play some more, continued from the start of skeleton town from last time. There's more footage although I don't know if you find it useful. Had to go to the burrows to get more potions and then backtrack to finish the last part of skellytown. Stopped a bit into the armory. Some ramblings:

• You can't look at the entire map when scrolling it with the arrow keys.
• Buying an item, going up and down stairs - item is back in the shop.
• Still feel like there are so many items that have int reqs, scythe 20 int :(
• Doesn't seem like many new items drop from about burrows 2 onward, guess its not finished though. Must've seen 20 drops of enchanters helm.
• Maps after palacamp feel a bit empty and repetitive, and the passage is so large with the same enemy clusters everywhere. 
• New enemies in the armory are cool.
• Can you hit faster with weapons if you swing with a slow one and swap quickly between a fast one and back? My tests were inconclusive.
• Feels like the game gets way easier when you get into the burrows, often come out with a backpack full of pots. Probably best to go there and then skellytown most of the time.
• Charge gets really strong when you have the mana for it, I wish the SFX and FX on hit for it were more impressive. Throwing your weapon is good too but it flies so slow and its so easy for it to get stuck that it doesn't feel worth using it often.
• I got a pretty nasty bug with an immortal elite skeleton that couldn't be targeted right next to a golden goblin. I first encountered him in the video @27:03 and you can see me dance around him trying to use the goblin in @1:27:50. He did some crazy damage too.

Thank you for that, didn't give me much to go on unfortunately.

Its still fucking cool.

Played from the start a bit into the part where you play as Sarah. I wish there were more autosaves, annoying to save yourself all the time I think. A fast forward button in battles would be nice, sometimes you get slept with one party member for example. A slight grace period after skipping through dialogue before you can select an option would probably be good, I was skipping through a lot of dialogue in act 1 as I've seen it before and accidentally selected dialogue several times. Some battle animations are pretty slow, like curse. Checking someone's browsing history is indeed wrong... Would be cool if a battle song continued where it left of the next time it starts playing again in another battle. Hit-/interaction-boxes are really small and wonky sometimes, like rabbits and some enemies - although I guess I was sprinting the entire time. 

There's a lot of stuff and I never play RPGM games so that you can keep my attention must be a good sign. Although I'm not sure if I'll play more until you've finished the game, don't think I have all that much constructive to say anyway. 

Muzzleflashes are really off from the gun somtimes:

I somehow managed to dupe the ladder at the start, no idea how it happened unfortunately:

I was blorbing the entire time.  Played through it all, except for the bonus stuff. I pretty much ignored the blorberries too. Moving platforms were a bit wonky and laggy. Really nice that all levels have their own tilesets.

If you blorblieve in yourself blorbdev you can blorbcomplish anything.

LET ME RESIZE THE WINDOW.

Other than that I wouldn't change anything, good job. I "rescued" the princess.

Haha yeah it did feel a bit odd.

First time I went into the settings I completely missed the other panels in the top right, seem to be missing some keys though still. Should probably center the buttons more so blind people like me don't miss it. Please add an invert mouse Y option. Jumped straight into arcade without going through the tutorial, seemed pretty straightforward though, except for the items. Quite a bit of stuttering when objects are first loaded in. Map feels really close quarter. I personally prefer more cumbersome, slow mechs - would be nice if it had more weight to it, slow to turn etc. But that's just me. Weapons are on the opposite sides from the mouse buttons, feels weird. The mechs spawning in looks pretty goofy. The character portrait seem sort of oddly placed, looks more like its in the middle of dialogue (like in the tutorial I played through after arcade). Would make more sense if it was one a screen. I'd generally like to see more feedback; on getting hit, enemy mech corpses, etc. Looks like there are a lot of different enemy mechs already, nice. 

Performance deteriorated completely after playing a while and it pretty much got unplayable. Also the chaingun stopped shooting bullets too eventually, I don't think there was any ammo? Yet? Looked like it was trying to shoot too, its at the end of the video. 

Great work, can't wait for the world spanning campaign.

Thanks for playing again! I've been meaning to remake the ending level but haven't had the time to yet. Maybe a survival situation there too instead of the pillars, I don't really like them. They're probably invisible for you, which is a bug I thought I fixed. I'll look into it again.

You can dodge the mages' projectiles consistently, but you have to know how to first of course which isn't the easiest to learn in a roguelite of course. They're a lot easier to dodge in close range for example which'll seem pretty counter-intuitive. I'll look into making them fairer. But there are many ways to handle them!

His ability is pretty short so you won't get stuck in low movespeed too long but it's absolutely not set in stone. There's supposed to be more character specific powers too, right now Logan only has one.

That looks so much smoother to my current one, I had trouble getting the gif under 3 MB when I tried it ages ago. I'll definitely look into LICEcap to make it nicer like yours. Thank you.

Its pretty early for the game so I don't have much to comment on at all. I really like how it looks though, the camera is weird. Not sure what I think of it. Anyway here's a minute of me jumping around:

I forgot to ask if you played on Windows or Linux?

Anyway, I uploaded a test version if you have the time to test it. Can't replicate the issue myself. If you're on Linux I'll have to upload one for that too. Alternatively you could try and toggle v-sync and restart too.

Well shit. Looks like walls are getting destroyed and new ones generated infinitely to me, I'll see what I can do. Thank you.

If you can, you could upload the Player.Log for me, its located in %AppData%\..\LocalLow\Northwood Gameworks\The Gun is Good\ for Windows, Linux I'm not sure.

Thank you so much for the nice words!

Yeah the wizards might be a bit too tough, their shots are homing so you have to make a conscious effort to dodge them. Also the meteors can be used as cover.

No huge amount of additions and changes since last DD, most interesting ones are probably a nicer gun UI and different map generation for the blue caves with a new enemy type.  I have barely done any playtesting for this version myself so if you find anything  of note please let me know.

Changelog since last:

Update 55-1: Bullet and paintbrush - The Gun is Good - DEMO by SPECXHT (itch.io)

 And various other things from my notes:

fixed portable shield not working

fixed walker gfx bug

huggers and alpha huggers can toss chasers

reworked cave map generation

one new enemy

tweaked pathfinding for some enemies to be more interesting

some new enemy formations

fixed bug with using fortify and stimpack at the same time permanently lowering rof and reload speed

fixed bug with some guns' secondary showiung ammo cost

fixed bug with shield gun moving things that should not be able to be moved

dmg taken by items will now be reduced by player dmg res

fixed ability not looking ready in ui on new level

fixed placeholder objectives in boss level being invisible

fixed plasma guns doing much more damage than intended to dense groups of enemies

crashfix for multiple meteors colliding at the same time

You should absolutely focus on the main project. Could be fun if this was something you could play inside that game in some capacity.

Ok I lied I kept it running in the background a bit while I was trying to get my game to build. It seems like the spawnrate did pick up a bit after a while, but I could stand AFK and still kill everything:

Generally I think the game needs more spectacle, too slow buildup and most of the skills are pretty dull. So more of everything basically. Most skills are too lowrange to be really useful. Way too easy to get stuck between enemies and beaten to death (if jump is on cooldown) which just isn't fun, a knockback on enemies on getting hit or getting a bit of free movement after getting hit would alleviate it. Skill upgrades are too incremental, you barely feel the difference one upgrade makes. Skills need a lot of balancing, really all you need is speed, lightning, and shield. Which are all too good compared to the other skills, kiting enemies with some movement speed is way too easy. There should be (more?) handcrafted wave spawns and not just spawn in one enemy at a time in a random position around you. If you have too many different kinds of skills they don't show up in the list:

I can't really comment on the performance though because I had a lot of stuff running in the background. Got a strange bug eventually, where the skill upgrade screen wouldn't go away:

Which did make me die eventually actually, probably to some boss getting stuck on a chest and shooting me to death. Although I couldn't see anything. 

Alright I'll consider this beating the game, I don't think I can die anymore.  It seems the longer you play the fewer the enemies spawn. So if you play long enough there are barely any regular mob spawns. See video. It might be because some of them spawn out of bounds and get stuck, I did see some stand around outside the walls. Often games like this will teleport enemies near you if you get too far away from them.

When I stopped playing:

Few spawns:

That does sound really weird. Not easy to find, grats on finding and fixing it.

It seems cool but I can't really play with mouse controls and not having the cursor captive to the window. Trying to steer sends the cursor to other monitors. Feels like the gears need to be changed way too frequently. Having you need to change gears but not having a R one and reversing with S is very confusing (what is gear -1 anyway).

Cool magic system. I wish the enemies wouldn't harass me while trying to read the tutorial. Enemy spawns are way too close, feels completely unfair late game when they constantly spawn in your face. Its a bit too easy to get stuck in between enemies. I think melee should be an auto-attack, or at least an option to set it to, there's enough things to keep track of with all the spells you can cast. Sometimes when spamming melee and channeling a spell at the same time the channeling gets stuck. Some spells do not have a name. No way to heal? I think there should be more utility spells like the steam burst, like an ice wall to block enemies for example. It takes quite a bit of time to actually die after hitting 0 HP.

I feel like the magic system is wasted on a game like this though, I think it would be a lot more interesting as a more linear level based game. Like Magicka for example.

Played classic mode. Very nice aesthetics, good audio too.  Needs audio settings, playing in a maximized window makes the pointer not follow the cursor: 

At first glance there's no strategy at all and you're just hoping you get a good roll, but as you play more you notice you do have quite a bit of impact. I wish you'd get a new skill much, much earlier though as it gets quite dull with just the one you start with for so many battles.

Its really unclear on what things can be clicked, would help a lot for first time players if it was clearer.

These dice need to be much larger, didn't even notice them at first and just clicked around on stuff:

I have no idea what these things are:

Played until the game crashed while trying to use the split die skill:

Very cool game, the destruction is superb. Nice juice already. UI looks really good too, except the font scaling is off, some words I can't even make out.  No borderless/fullscreen mode.  Some utility and counterplay things to use would be nice, like smoke and flares against missiles. 

The problem is that its way too hard to make things out, hard to see yourself, enemies, even bullets. I'd suggest to slather some color on the mechs and aliens, make the ground a lot darker generally.

I had fun, completed both levels. Keep it up. 

it might just be a mapgen thing, or an item drop chance. some runs are easier than others if you find a lifesteal ring early on.

Yeah good point, this run the only ring I got was for faster spell casting haha. Still, difficulty could probably be toned down a little bit in the start and harder later.

i worry about this. im afraid that if an enemy is 4.1 units away and the max range is 4 units, the player will see the swing and assume he is hitting. when nothing happens it's a clear indication of "oh i need to move closer". some enemies outrange the player, so i worry about a player standing their ground and wondering why their attacks dont hit.

For me I guess I'm just expecting it to work just like in Diablo.

the idea was to make it use the one-handed arts (just no shield). kinda didn't end up being fun, so i'm still wondering how to improve it. 

Spears are hard to make interesting I think. Maybe you should be able to wield it either 2h or 1h with reduced damage? I don't know.

maybe it would make sense for 2H weapons to benefit more from STR. in general, though, i have a fine time playing with 2H weapons, so it's hard to gauge

The damage seems fine for 2H, was just a general thought.

no specific order.

Oh whoops hah, I always thought the ordered mattered for the weapon type. I often rely on the goblin to get a usable weapon.

skeletonland is currently marked as my "too hard" moment

I think I find it more tedious than hard, have to kite a looooot... Unless you have a shield yeah. Not sure what solution I'd propose, well I guess it would be new enemies. One way could be more melee variations of skeletons, recolors and with different weapons for example, some elemental effects. 

again, thanks for the feedback as always! glad to hear youre feeling better and i will see you in the fest soon

Thanks, I still find it fun to replay it. There are a million things I'd like to have done before the fest but I won't manage any really hehe. I'll just have to get over myself and put up the demo I think, don't think there are that many people checking these things out anyway. See ya there.

Played a bit into level 3 until I got sick of seeing the same things. I'm guessing its pretty early days for this game.

• Needs an invert Y mouse option.
• Graphics are a bit inconsistent, with weapon and enemy sprites being cartoonish while the environment is less.
• Enemies need to be more aggressive, walk around a bit.
• No real reason to kill enemies, I assume there'll be XP and such later?
• Combat feels a bit too simple, will you add skills/spells too? Would help a lot I think, blocking etc.
• Sometimes an enemy's HP will say 0. You could always round their HP values up instead so it won't happen.

Nice demo, keep up the good work.

Feedback part 1 of ?

Breaking it up in parts because I actually died at a point and need to replay some things and I already have a lot of footage. But I still want to see the new content. No commentary though just gameplay. I didn't play all in one sitting so there's plenty of cuts. 

• Generally feels harder than before, although it might be because I was trying to play with just two-handers.
• Shift clicking on enemies out of range should still swing your weapon.
• Felt like the first level didn't have many drops at all, even some empty chests. Still think it could benefit to have a higher drop rate here.
• At some points I could see and hit enemies through walls (always next to doors I think?) and sometimes enemies hit me when I couldn't see them.
• Aren't the cauldron spells icons wrong and should be the other way around? Really confusing when the health one is blue and the hand is on the opposite side of the orb.
• Kinda lame that the only AoE option for two-handers is a ranged one. Where's the big hulk smash?
• The charge could use a larger hitbox for enemies, feels pretty bad when you charge and stop right in front of them without them taking any damage. Some effect on hit for it would be really nice too.
• I think both charge and throw could have -1 mana cost.
• Spear weapon arts seem pretty lackluster, don't see myself using the -HP one until maybe very late game.
• The door icons on the minimap are a bit strange actually, I think it always looks like there's two openings. 
• Enemies got stuck on scenery a couple of times.
• I always forget which order you're supposed to put the item into the goblin. I think generally I do it in the opposite way that you're supposed to because there are two braziers next to the goblin so I think in my mind that means you're sacrificing two items and then putting the last one in to change it. I saved right before using it and did it the wrong way of course, when loading the save again the goblin disappeared, whoops.  Going down a floor and back up fixed it.
• If STR gives a flat damage bonus, isn't it always better for faster weapons than big slow ones? Not sure if it should change somehow.
• Being able to see hit chance on enemies is really useful, not sure if I've used it before.
• I saw traces of an enemy seemingly out of bounds at one point, but maybe there was a hidden room that I hadn't found. I can dig up the timestamp if you want.
• Items that change up weapon arts - love it.

Played normal difficulty, 2h. Had to play very carefully and died in skeleton land as soon as I got a bit careless. Think I mixed up dex and agi in the beginning. I'll return to it a bit later. Will take a bit of time I guess for youtube to process the HD vids, in 2 parts because DaVinci was being a bitch: 

You fixed the stuttering! The game feels almost finished at this point to me, well done. Can always use more content and polish of course, like more levels/backgrounds and music. I like the enemy mouse pointer, much clearer to see what he's doing than when I played before. I'd like to see some things happen in the background occasionally, like I don't know a horse galloping getting chased by bandits or something etc - for some added soul. 

Pretty fun, deeper than it looks at first glance. Only missed being able to set audio levels.

Here's the world latest reply. Thanks a lot for the feedback, a lot of good thoughts.

Thank you very much!

I have some ideas to try and make the cursor get lost less. You can try lowering ingame resolution to 960x540, it helps a lot for laptops. It will basically look the same except for some blurry text in the UI that I have not fixed yet. Performance will be improved in later versions.

Thanks for the quick test again! It looks like it worked too, although I'm reminded that I still need to figure out why the bullet casings going left are black for you. Have even less of an idea why that happens.

The problem had to do with the way I handle animations, in short its all flipbook animations handled in shaders in an attempt to optimize it for the CPU. Now this is all speculation but it seems like trying to fix what I think the problem was fixed it; the way I had it set up with handling different properties for different projectiles created a massive amount of branches that caused the slowdown. How shader branching is handled seems pretty dependent on hardware, drivers, etc so its possible that how its handled on some systems caused it. Could be because of some difference between Linux or Vulkan or something, not sure.
So I made a change to avoid branching that is much more convoluted and probably ~80 more instructions per frame but if it works...

I don't use Discord much but I'll add you for sure.

With a computer like that there shouldn't be any perceptible slow down at all, very strange.

Anyway, here's another test request when you get the time. Same procedure as last time, you can press F5 to instantly kill all enemies.

https://file.io/WTYIzVPWkkms

Wow that was fast, thank you. Still not looking good though, really odd. I was trying it out on a laptop with an integrated graphics card and it didn't go below 90 FPS. Must be something else going on too, I will look into it! Have a nice weekend.

Hello again friend, I always appreciate you taking your time to do this.  Answering some of your thoughts:

There is a new version of the jolly purple horned lads that you can encounter later, basically the same thing but stronger.

I see you struggling with the awful gun tooltips, for example the one for frags do not even list the released projectiles so not very easy to know how strong they are... But I am currently working on improving them and I think its going well.

The different heals have gotten a bit confusing know that there are several, the ones in the shop are actually a lesser one that heals for less and it differs how many there are you can buy. The Ration one is a bit less than the one you can get in the Interstice as you can take it with you. I'll put in exactly how much each one heals, hadn't really thought about there coming up situations where you can choose between multiple ones for example.

Mass isn't really explained anywhere, but its just physics. So increasing your mass will slow you down a bit but also make you more resistant to being pushed around by enemies.

And then onto the slowdowns, I looked into it and apparently its a rendering issue. Most likely because of an inefficient shader I haven't bothered to improve. I don't notice anything at all on my dev machine, so its great you found it.
I think I have it sorted out, if you would like to do me a favor and help me even more here is a test version where Logan starts with a Sawed Off with twice the regular projectiles. If you clear the first level you can hold down the button by the portal and see if its still bad: https://file.io/XLkd3bnt0xeJ

Either way, thanks a lot for your time.