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Thanks for playing!

The level 3 thing was a bug (or rather an oversight on my part) which I fixed just now. The lose condition is when:

• all heroes are dead
• you take too many turns to defeat all enemies

As I mentioned in the description, all heroes being on the board simply ends the current turn and not the game. Heroes attack when they bounce against enemy blocks. Them being left on the board essentially makes them pawns to be used by the next Hero that bounces them and re-activates them .

Thanks for playing! Can you show me a screenshot of the shop? I can't seem to be able to reproduce it.

As for balls going out of bounds yeah, that's the one big bug I didn't make in time to fix. it shouldn't be gamebreaking since the out of bounds ball still comes back when the turn ends.

• thanks :blobblush:
• it's on my list. I avoided adding it because I was afraid of breaking stuff. another idea was to make the balls in the party turn to look at the ball bouncing in the board
• that's fair. I can definitely see it being a lot to take in. some semplification would help.
• also true, I've had this issue too. 
• yeah I agree, it felt E M E R G E N T when I realized you could do that
• true, I need clearer visuals kind of like with the shockwave to display the radius
• oh yeah lol I should fix that. I made it to prevent balls taking dmage contantly if they bounce very fast against it but there needs to be a cooldown of some kind after which the ball takes damage again
• by 'round' do you mean between different levels? if so, I agree. I'd like to have a shop where you buy upgrades and such
• that could work, maybe as a hard mode though. cuz at least in my experience I beat most levels with 1-2 heroes alive
• I agree. I was thinking of adding a turn limit or at least a grading system that rewards you based on how many turns you took to beat the level. also, another idea I had was a sort of 'stamina' meter for the heroes, where they consume a bit of stamina evey time you shoot them  out, so you can't just shoot a hero-hit enemy-hero coms back-repeat because once they run out of stamina you can't shoot them anymore until the next turn. but we'll see
• thanks :blobblush:
  

Thanks for playing! Let me address your points:

• you are completely right. I added a way to make the cannon rotate slower by pressing shift. mouse aim and scroll wheel controls would definitely help a lot too
• that's also true, it's a relict of the old system I had in place. I reduced the number of bounce predictions to alleviate that (but I should probably have a system in place that predicts the trajectory based on the ball's speed more accurately)
• I guess the 'turn' mechanic is not very clear. I should have explained it somewhere in-game or on the itchio page
• I admit I didn't spend a lot of time (or effort) in level design. the general idea is that, like in brickbreaker, every block you destroy changes the paths that are available to the other balls. so even the easy target enemies still serve a purpose.. at least in theory!
• I also didn't spend a lot of time balancing stats so I can definitely agree with you, that the balls and enemies don't feel very different fro each other. ideally each ball would have diffrent stat distribution that make you play differrently based on your party formation. ideally...
  • the ball hit skills are definitely an underbaked mechanic atm. in this build most of them just provide temporary stat changes. but without visual cuse it's hard to tell what happened
• I think creating fun combos and chain reactions is one of the most fun parts of the game but I agree that it's not easy to set them up intentionally. The one I recorded happened kind of by luck too!

I do like the idea of each ball having an 'on stop' ability. And yeah, having a turn limit is definitely in the cards. I didn't add it for this build because I didn't have much time to test/balance the levels.

Thanks again for playing and for the feedback!!

Thanks for the feedback!

I definitely understand your point about stats and abilities being overwhelming. Even more I understand your concern about moves feling random and chaotic. It's one of my bigger concers with this whole idea, as I want to strike a balance bewtween the dynamic fun of balls bouncing everywhere and the 'strategy' of planning your moves and strategizing. It's quite a difficult problem I think.

You can sow down the cannon by holding down Shift to aim more carefully.

Thanks for playing! You can actually slow down the rotation of the cannon by holding Shift.

Very cool stuff! The controls feel nice and solid, and the dialogue between missions is nice (love me some anime girls)

At first I didn't realize the levels had a 'best time' so I took it slow, thinking there was some extra objective I was missing.

Maybe I'm wrong but it feels like the fuel meter wasn't working?

Nice menus and presentation! iirc you said a graphics rework is planned so I won't talk too much about it.

The ball feels a bit too slippery and bouncy, in the tutorial level I made a big jump and bounced off a corner and flew out of the course which was unexpected. But overall I didn't have too many problems controlling it.

The camera could really use finer controls instead of 90 degree snapping (especially wit how slowly it rotates)

I expected there to be a jump button but I guess you're meant to build up momentum instead. That's fine.

Enemies are a bit too... sturdy? I thought it would be easier to bump them off the stage but they ended up bumping me off most of the times.

I don't really get how to use the pushback ability well. It's very short range.

Still, I enjoyed the demo. Good job! 

I died just as I was about to kill the boss goddamn it! 

I also found the menus pretty weird in terms of controls but the game itself is nice. 

the hitboxes felt a bit off (referring mostly to the sword slash VFX not matching where it coulld actually hit). maybe it's just me not being used to this genre but having to check in the corner for my ability cooldowns was a bit of a pain. some clearer visual feedback when you get hit (like flashing or very light screenshake) could help, as I died several times because I didn't notice that my hp was so low. (also pls clamp the HP to 0 so it doesn't go in the negatives)

all in all, I had fun! 

Vey cool idea, and very good presentation. personally I'd make it so LMB drops the piece instead of space.

meow

brain 2 small 2 multitask

the timing for the jump attack is a bit finnicky, and falling in the abyss while doing the spinny float jump is takes forever. other than that it's pretty fun.

Thanks for playing. Looks like you discovered  one of our carefully crafted speedrunning strats.

Thanks for playing! I intend to add a proper tutorial to teach the controls and mechanics. I know right now a lot of things take some time to make sense.

And yeah I'll replace the driller sound as soon as I can find a better one. I suck at sound design!

Thanks a lot for playing and the feedback!

• I would often accidentally move the knight against a wall or a void tile and use a hammer which was not desired, especially annoying while in "block placement"-mode

I get what you mean. In the fist prototype I had it so you had to hold down a separate button while moving to use the hammer to avoid this kind of mistake, but I removed it because some people found it unintuitive.

• switching between the two modes is very awkward: I want to move the knight and think where to go, but the blocks would start falling again automatically

this might not be what you want, but in the options you can make the tetris pieces not fall automatically. if you have suggestions for how to make the switching less awkward I'd love to hear them.

• when pressing the trigger to quickly drop a block, it would rapid-fire and place several blocks

that's odd, as I set up the code so that you have to let go of the button before being able to drop another piece. what platform were you playing on? maybe it's a specific issue to the web version... still very odd and definitely unintended.

• the first level is overwhelming in many ways as too many things need to be learned at once

hmm I tried to make the first level easy and short but I guess I failed. I should revisit the idea of a tutorial mode.

• the red block helper doesn't show items & enemies which is a little annoying when rotating, because I have to think about how to rotate the base shape, look out where the walls are and then know where the items/enemies will be placed

that's fair. originally I did it like this because I didn't want the players to only look at the projection of the piece, but I'll do something about it

• would have been nice to have the controls on screen while playing, instead of needing to go into the menu

true. I'm not sure where I could put them as the UI is already pretty busy. this is another thing that a tutorial mode would help with maybe. 

• only after I was done playing did I discover the "separate" control scheme, which plays a lot nicer, especially in order to learn the game. Would have loved to have this as the default.

hehe that's fair. this used to be the only control scheme in the first few version. I added the new control scheme a while ago to simplify the controls and the game itself since with 'unified' controls, you only have to focus on one part of the game at once.

again thanks a lot for this, and I hope you'll look forward to the finished game!

Nice! It takes a while to get used to the mechanic but it's a very interesting interpretation of the theme.

Brilliant idea! very nice look and sounds. I wish you could interact with the menu buttons with they keyboard, but that's a nitpick!

great job!!

Thanks for playing and for the bug reports! 

I updated the demo with a few changes, including the removal of locked doors (I also experienced that bug a couple of times but couldn't recreate it at will and couldn't understand the cause so for now this is my best option), locking the mouse cursor (partly to get rid of that UI glitch, partly because you don't really need it), and adding a couple of graphics options including V-sync. I couldn't really notice a difference while testing, but maybe you will (or maybe I didn't implement it right lol). 

If you feel like giving this new version a try, that'd be great.

Thanks for playing!

• I can't be sure this is what you're talking about, but maybe the knight wouldn't move because he was out of Action Points? Was he playing an animation shaking his head when you tried to move him?
• Good point. I forgot to add that.
• Also a good point. I kind of wanted to have both but that wasn't really an option. I wanted the player to have an idea of each enemy's total HP though so I went with this. I do understand what you mean though.
• I made the HP bar on the left animate when you're long on HP but I guess I can make it more visible, or maybe give the knight a pained animation to represent this.
• ty
• It is intentional and the game does end in that case, but only if the tetris board also fills up. This is because, in theory, by playing tetris and changing the layout of the dungeon, eventually you may create a path for the knight.

Thanks again a lot for playing and for the feedback.

Thanks for playing!

That visual bug and the lag of the web version are news to me, I will run some tests but I am honestly not sure what could be causing them.

The endless rotation is 'intended' in the sense that it isn't a bug, but I agree that it trivializes the game a bit. In the previous version I had a 'move counter' where after a number of moves/rotations, the Tetromino would fall down by 1 on its own. I should re-implement it.

The other problem you mentioned is also something I plan to address: aside from the fact that in the final game there would be a reason to want to collect as much loot and level up as much as possible before going for the exit (and thus, a reason to let the Knight move around), I want to add an 'enemy turn' when a tetrom- pentomino is placed. In this phase, all the enemies will take their turn and move across the map regardless of the knight. This, together with aggressive AI that actively looks for the player, should pressure you to actually move the Knight and fight enemies before you get surrounded.

Edit: upon closer inspection, I realized that I set up some of the controls wrong on the gamepad. I'm sorry about that, and I'm uploading a patch that fixes this issue.

Seems like you put some of your comments in the wrong section...

Main menu:

 -You have controller support, but only let me use the analog for moving through the menu. Why? Why? Is it a Unity default thing? Bought an asset for it? DPAD my nigga

Seems stupid to have D-pad control only for menus, and I'm planning to use the D-pad to assign different weapons to it anyway.

 -At this point I switch to a keyboard and what a surprise: WASD doesn't work. Why? Buy more assets if you need them or hire someone pls. It's the current year, pls.

You can blame liq for this. I had both WASD and arrow keys for movement but he suggested I move the main controls to ASDZXC. (That said I'm sure you would have hated whatever control scheme I came up with so...)

 -You're delaying my selection until the key animates, what are you even doing with this UI? nothing about it is good. Please let me move through the buttons as fast as I can.

See the first sentence.

 -No Enter or Space for selecting menus. Can't say I'm surprised, seems deliberately garbage at this point. And what do you know, it's fucking X. Nope, that's BACK. It's actually C, how did I not realize that.

Yes this is a legit complaint and I'm fixing it. I should have had the option of using 'obvious' keys at lest in the main menu. My bad.

Game: 

-Letters appear 1 per 1 second, I'll kill myself before I read it like that, thanks

Yes I went back and checked. Turns out the value I put had been reset when I lost my prefabs some time ago, and I never realized. My bad. That said you can mash the {{{{{{{{{{{{{C}}}}}}}}}}}}}}}}ONFIRM BUTTON to fill the line instantly. 

 -Game looks fantastic and moves smoothly

Thank you. Finally a good thing.

 -I'm switching to a controller and it's not any better with the UI 

-The menu smoothing is too jarring 

 -Why can't I quit the menu with B, why start only? That's it I'm not gonna spend more time saying the UI is trash, because I've not seen worse UI implementation even in Jam games. I hope the UI is a literal asset you have not put any thought into it. Drop UI entirely if you have to, don't expose people to this cancer.

 -Fucking "Read B". B is {{{{{B}}}}}ACK

See the first sentence.

 -Music is nice and relaxing

You're the first to say this...

-If you leave a character in the previous room (you shouln't be able to)

Yesyou should. It's intended behavior and you need to do this further on.

 and come back, then the screen transition trigger messes up.

Yeah that's true, I forgot to fix it. Will address asap.

 -pls don't do damage if I run into spikes

Why not? They're spikes.

 -killing one character feels liberating -- I want them dead -- not good

You spent several paragraphs sperging about UI and you just drop this line and nothing else? please elaborate.

  -the area exits aren't clear, highlight or signpost them somehow

I think they're clear enough but I see what you mean.

 -those dark rock textures are the most pleasing shit

Thank you.

-on the other hand the cave one is too saturated and makes the player hard to see

True, I kind of rushed the cave room, should have spent more time on the lighting and post process and tweaking the colors.

  -managed to press retry in the amazing UI, now the game window is black and my GPU is screaming

Can you elaborate? I've tested that plenty and never had issues with it.

I'm sorry my UI triggered you to the point of making you unable to enjoy or finish my demo.

Thanks for playing! I was afraid of something like this happening ahah

You can revive your companion by going next to them to 'Rescue' them but if you're separated in different rooms you're screwed. I'm not sure if such a condition should just trigger a game over or what other options I have at the moment. But anyway, I will have to find a solution.

Thanks for the feedback.

Thanks for playing and for the detailed feedback. Let me respond to each point:

>friendly ai stopped moving after a couple of 'retry's. couldnt replicate it

odd. will test tomorrow. I admit I didn't run many tests regarding retrying, only as far as checking if everything runs correctly (which I guess it doesn't but still) 

>retrying spawns extra bunnies in starting area

a bug I noticed when it was too late to look into, but now I can take it easy and find a solution.

>camera doesnt reset on retry

Noted. I thought I fixed this but I guess I didn't.

>navigating item menu glitched out, moving the stick in certain directions wouldnt move the item selection

I did notice this bug (you were using a controller right?) and fixed it on some menus but not all of them it seems. Will fix.

>flower petal enemy should rotate so it shoots one petal towards target

The current attack and movement is 'as intended' but your idea sounds good too. I might make a variation on the same enemy with a different behavior.

>when right next to evil bunnies, they do not rotate to make an accurate attack swing they just keep swinging in whatever direction they were in when they closed in

True. I forgot to fix that. Will address asap.

>when exiting the 5 crystal room to the bottom left, and then exitting that room back into the crystal room, I got teleported to another part of the game entirely

Fixed, thanks for reporting it.

>could sequence break the nail section with either character by running through a 'hole' at the left of the nails

Same as above (even though it was totally intended haha)

>one button that shows all controls at once in a neat list, maybe select, would be nice

I wanted to add a list o controls in one of the menus but didn't have time. There is a 'controls' page on the main menu.

>after getting hammer, i skipped through the dialogue (xd), so im not really sure how to use it. i tried different buttons but could not find anything

That'll teach you! Jokes aside, press once to lift hammer, press again to pound. Same button as the sword, you just press Select (<) to swap weapons.

>witch blink could use a telegraph of where she will end up

good idea

>i would prefer no charge time for witch ranged attack

there is no charge time! the charged spell is only the more powerful one. the standard attack can be performed instantly, with a quick tap of the attack button.

> a short direction indicator coming forward out of the witch for her attack would be nice

I actually had this, then lost it when I messed with prefabs, and forgot to re-add it. Will fix.

> i would prefer passive mana gain for witch, and replacing the mana gain ability [...]

I've been thinking about that for a while, and you may be right.

Thanks again for the feedback. Oh and yes, co-op is definitely something I would love to add eventually.

Thanks for playing and for the video! I'm glad you enjoyed it.

I'll go check what those bugs are about, especially the first one. Actually I think I'll add a way to skip the intro cutscene.

Also I just noticed the title of your video lol

Thanks for playing and for the video! I'm aware of its bugginess, I tried to fix some of them soon after releasing the game but it wasn't enough. I'm sorry if it ruined your time with the game. 

The game is not in active development at the moment but I'm toying with the idea of going back to it in the future, either updating it or making a SquareTown 2-kind of thing, with new features and a bigger scope. No promises though.

thanks a lot for the feedback! nitpicky notes is what I need the most since I'm already aware of the major flaws.

btw you actually can revive your team mate, but because I didn't adjust the colliders (I meant to but it slipped my mind) you have to stand very very close to them to trigger the interaction prompt.

Thanks for playing.

• I'm aware of the clipping problem with the enemies, unfortunately I realized it when it was too late so all I could do was mitigate it as much as possible. Of course I'll look for a definitive solution to this (it's Unity's fault, because the navmesh the enemies use to move and to spawn gets created inside the ground meshes).
• The bees have a sort of windup or tell, they stop in place and rotate towards you before attacking. I do want to make it more clear though. And yeah, being able to block their attacks will help too.
• This is a great idea. I sort of thought of doing this but then it slipped my mind and I forgot to implement it.
• Yeah I should definitely add a pause menu, it's something I was meaning to add from the start but then I just forgot to and more important things (like implementing gameplay stuff) took over. I will get to it though, I know how annoying it is not to be able to close the game or to go back to the main menu.

Thanks for the feedback.

Thanks for playing! Let me say first that I literally just put out an updated version of the game that fixes a lot of bugs.

Now onto your feedback:

• I didn't have a lot of time to work on the level design so I admit I overlooked some of the details.
• The AI thing is fixed now. I don't know how it slipped through my testing.
• Yeah control schemes is something I really suck at. I think your best option is to play with a gamepad for now. If you have suggestions for a better keyboard control schemes, let me know.
• The knight will have a shielding ability eventually, but I'm also going to balance the enemy AI (like making a global attack timer so you don't get targeted by 10 enemies at once)
• I'm glad you liked the art. I agree that I should refine the grass texture, it was supposed to be placeholder but I kept forgetting to actually redo it.

If you still feel like playing, you can re-download the game now. It should work fine. 

Anyways, thanks for the feedback. I hope you'll look forward to the next demo!

Thanks for playing! 

• How can walking into spikes and getting damaged not be intuitive? Same for touching enemies (though you're not the first one to complain about this, so I'll probably limit this to specific enemy types)
• The 'getting killed during cinematic' thing should be fixed in the latest version, if you have that and it still happens I will need to look into it further.
• Yeah I forgot to throughly check the UI on different aspect ratios. I did one quick check early on but forgot to do it once all the UI was in place.
• Um the controls are listed on the game's page and on the game's initial dialog? But you have a point, most people don't look at those. I wanted to add button prompts on the HUD but ran out of time.
• Thank you!
• Agree on aiming not being easy (I need to make turning snappier and more responsive) and the animation being not very good. 
• That's one thing I will be working on from now on. Making the characters distinct, giving each one strengths, weaknesses and skills that become useful in different situations is one of the main focuses of the game.
• Damn, I figured that could happen but I hoped it wouldn't. All that part of code is due to an overhaul so it's okay though.

Thank you very much for the detailed feedback. I hope you enjoyed the demo at least a little bit and I also hope you'll look forward to the next one.

Thanks for playing!

• Sometimes attacking seems to stop the character from moving, and sometimes it doesn't? Same with holding the attack button

Yeah this is something I don't get either lol, technically attacking should stop you but most of the times it doesn't. Will obviously look into it.

• Should probably either decrease witch-chan's rate of fire or remove invincibility frames for enemies when they get hit, because you can unload a clip into them and most fireballs just bounce off

Yep. Together with the first point, I'll go back and fix these.

• My controller worked in-game but not in the menu

This is odd because I used the same controls for everything. Will look into it.

Thanks for the feedback, I hope to deliver with the next demo.

Hey, thanks for playing!

• The speed different is intentional. The knight should feel heavy, slow and powerful while the witch should be weak but swift. I do agree that right now the knight does feel a bit too slow
• Yeah, those are things I need to fix. For some reason both knight and witch can spam their attacks while moving even though I thought I made sure that wasn't possible. And for the enemy i-frames too, first I'd like to actually show that they're invincible making their meshes blink, and second making projectile attacks go through them rather than stopping

Thanks for the videos as well. I think I have an idea of what happened in the first video, as I've run into something similar myself. But I have no idea about the crash in the second video. I can only assume that spamming the magic attack somehow caused it, as I'm not using object pooling yet. Still, it's pretty weird, I'll investigate further.

Thanks for playing! I'm glad you like the look and the sound of the game.

Yes the combat is something I worked very little on. I wanted to add more depth to it for the demo but didn't make it in time.  Same for the companion character. In the future they will fight on their own, flee from danger, etc. This is another thing I wanted to have in the demo but had to scrap temporarily.

Try downloading now (the previous download had some bugs I fixed)

Sorry about that. It's fixed now.

Thanks for the in-depth feedback. I was aware of some of those bugs but didn't have time to fix them. I think I'll make a 'final' version of the game with all those issues ironed out. The last bug has been reported by someone else too but I was sure I fixed it, I need to look into it again.

As for the second oversight, I guess the description wasn't very clear but you need to have a certain amount of villagers AND to have a certain amount of in-game days spent managing the town. I'll fix the text to make it more easy to understand.

Thanks again for playing and for the feedback.

uhhhh shuddup

it's true that I started early but I also submitted very early so it's all good okay? b-back the fuck off