itch.io

This game is weird in a good way.

I personally think that the personal dialogue with everything is a bit much but that's my opinion. 

Not sure if I really like the "brain room" or whatever, it's a bit zesty. I think the game having a serious aesthetic/vibe would be better but as it stands you're a bit too in the "quirky indie RPG" niche. 

The cyphers are cool if you know how they work. One way to help people with it is to allow the cypher columns to be rearranged on the UI so that the player can organize them without having to do it mentally or in my case, take a print screen and copy-paste them in the right order.

Speaking of, the second cypher clue word was missing, is that intentional? I got it by simply reorganizing them myself as there's only a couple of words it could have been. I am assuming it was either a bug and didn't show up or there's some clue in the level that I completely missed. 

The combat is very interesting. I think there's a lot you can do with it. Maybe even bribe enemies to leave. 

Overall interesting game that i'd be happy to play again.

When you're in a shitpost gamejam and your opponent is hardmeat. 

I like the MC design though he's kino. 

played on gamepad, my opnions: 

controls: not a fan of targeting lock being on a stick-down button, kinda ass I know some games do it

healing could be on a d-pad button, all 4 are just kinda sitting there doing nothing during gameplay and you could use X for something else 

general locomotion: this isn't a platformer, I don't expect there to be momentum based movement in a game, when I snap-turn (180 degree invert with momentum) it should nearly immediately correct the vector

combat: honestly the combat is begging for a block instead of a dodge button; parrying is cool but the timing is a bit OP 

the enemies that have a red glow that makes them immune to attacks is basically on a timer, so parrying it once takes the debuff off, but then if you parry it again, the red glow state can be reapplied as they are in a stun. most likely unintended bug

stamina: feels kind of superfluous right now. there needs to be incentives to maintain good stamina management, make it an active part of the game by either rewarding high stamina or punishing low stamina, etc 

the level and atmosphere is very good, the art looks great i'm a huge fan of this direction

the camera angles work really nice, i liked the last transition that kind of hid the last enemy; excellent attention to composition. the only thing I had a problem with was the starting camera angle at the very very beginning leads a bit too far ahead, otherwise it was fine 

cool stuff hope I get to see more of this later

I think my favorite part is the filter. It makes things in the distance seem dream-like and surreal. That's a very powerful thing.

I don't think the desert? level is working or it's rendered weird. The preview image is like a red desert but it comes out completely black, see pics below.

I think some basic interactions would go a long way in your game. Don't need many, they don't even have to be purposeful. It could be something as simple as clicking on a box and watching it change color. Just something that keeps the player looking for stuff to mess with. 

Ok we might have something here. 

Physics is fun. Breaking stuff is fun. Therefore, a game about breaking stuff with physics is fun. 

Controls feel pretty tight. Not sure about air velocity. I think having a bit of verticality would go a very long way in your game. I am imagining hold a balloon or something to make the robot lighter so you can cross gaps. There's lots of potential there for levels.

As for the actual property damage mechanic I have no idea what was "worth" more or less. I think the helper bots were worth a ton and it was fun to mess with them. 

I got destroyed when I aggroed the giant block robot that dude hurts lol.

The only bug I ran in to was when I first started the game and I was messing with stuff, I went over to the knife rack and picked one up and the game went into a bullet-time mode? I didn't really understand how to get out of it even after letting go of the knife it was still in bullet-time slowmo until I paused and unpaused and it got rid of it. 

Cool sandbox. I am sure you can find a way to make it work as a full product. 

Fun idea. Always wondered what a magicka roguelite would be like.

Not sure if I like having spells unlock with each level. I think maybe having them all available at the beginning would be better honestly. 

I feel like I just ended up spamming double light spell. The projectiles have basically no falloff and don't collide with terrain properly so they fly across the map and kill stuff way off screen. Maybe want to add a falloff distance or something or lower it. 

Stage selection needs a bit of work. At first I thought green stages meant "passive" advancement and purple were "combat" advancement but my last level was home -> purple arena "passive" advance -> shop -> shop and that was the end of the game lol. Didn't even get to use the last element I unlocked!! 

Speaking of shops, I had way more money that I needed to buy everything in every shop. Probably not intended but currency should be something that the player should make choices on. Gimmiko, another AGDG game, has a really nice currency and shop system as a roguelite . Might wanna check that out

I had a lot of fun though. The aesthetic is kinda cool, just needs more content and a bit of tuning. 

Very solid VS clone. Insanely cute art. 

Other people already said enemy variety I agree too.

Maybe other ways to get dopamine too, like finding abilities randomly in a treasure chest or something. Like a mimic. 

Not much to say, solid game, good luck with your release

first off, draw distance is laughably bad, please change this or make it an option or something; currently it looks like the scene is just one house in a giant empty scene until you start moving and then stuff starts getting rendered 

rendering, mainly lighting, also does not seem right; environmental light is very VERY dark 

movement felt really slow and weird and interacting with items and picking them up and grabbing them also feels cumbersome but I think the FOV isn't doing any favors in this department

I think the interactions with the TV might be a cool idea, I like the texture and videos swapping idea too although I didn't try it myself; it would be cool for streamer communities to make packs of tapes and have their streamer play and get to see the videos as the customers bring them in

I will say it seems your scope is ambitious 

the way you have to plotted is having a giant open ended scene with NPC AI, streets, basically an entire town

but I think a more realistic approach would be to have your little house as a scene, then have a "drive to work" button  at the front door or something where the main gameplay loop takes place in a different scene

and then maybe if you really want you can add a scene that lets you explore town or whatever for tapes/customers/putting flyers up or something

Glad I checked out this demoday because this game is really sick.

The aesthetics are brilliant. The demons definitely stick out but I kind of like that because it gives them that otherworldly feeling. Music is really fitting too, major props. I know a lot of people are big fans of the psx aesthetic, myself included and it does work here.  Portraits aren't that good but they are definitely placeholder art so I am sure you're aware of that. 

I did not use the tank controls. I don't know why anyone would use tank controls. That being said, camera relative movement is nice but the weird turning that happens when you are using stick feels really bad. I know this game has combat so it's kind of relevant but it just kinda of feels weird to me.  Fixed camera angles are a fun thing to work with but I wouldn't do anything more than 90 degrees (across transitions that is), even with axis correction it feels really weird. 

Combat feels not particularly interesting and I think it's mostly because of mob AI. The best mob in the game I feel is the seahorse creature because dodging it's line attack gives you a window of opportunity to really nail it, but also the seahorse's melee attack is really fast and I could never get out of the way in time. 

Outside of combat, everything does feel really slow. The cutscenes don't let you advance with a button, you can only skip, which I think is really irritating to me because I am sitting there for several seconds doing nothing after having already read the dialog every time a new dialog pops up in a cutscene. If the cutscenes aren't going to be voiced I feel like it's only fair that you do not hold the player to your dialog speed. I don't want to skip it either, i'm interested as hell in what is actually happening but the dialog......goes....like..........this........... 

Anyway yeah this game kicks ass. I hope you're able to really build on it because the foundation is rock solid and it would be a shame to rush things and waste it all. I am seeing December 2024 but that's hopefully placeholder? Either that or you've done a lot more than what is shown. +1 wishlist 

music was charming puzzles weren't too difficult but not sleepwalker tier 

can't say much else, didn't play very far

maybe allow people to mine as long as they hold the button down in the mining minigame?

honestly, cute little game with a bright future

An exceptionally promising metroidvania.

Total play time around 1hr10m, no bugs to report. 

Massive skill issue detected: I may not be the target difficulty for this? I wouldn't say it was hard but I did have issues with just this small demo. I would count it mostly on me, but I didn't really expect to die much for just a basic demo. I died 3 times: Once when I was starting out and just kept running into more and more enemies without really having a good grasp on how to deal with them; two times on the final boss (more on that later). Losing progress each time because I didn't get to a save point sucks. It's a design that I have to respect. The only thing I could think of is adding more but then it feels goofy. I would chalk it up to skill issue. 

Movement feels good for the most part. There are some things like wall kicks that felt kind of awkward. I think the go-to these days is to have your character slide down a wall if you want to incorporate wall jumping, giving the player more forgiveness.

One thing I will say is this game will benefit greatly from sound effects. I think all my complaints can just be summed up as "this doesn't have sound yet so it felt weird." I feel that sound is pretty integral in a game like this, especially if you want to have stuff off screen. 

Level design felt good but can be improved. There were some platforms that might have been at a weird angle but most of it was ok. Once you get the hang of movement the level design makes more sense. I will say overall, the game felt hard to me in the first 5/10 minutes and I would say tweaking enemy spawns and room layouts accordingly would probably help if that was the issue, but again, I may not be the target difficulty here. Another thing is that I don't know if save rooms have visual tells or not, but I ended up going to the final boss instead of the save area the first time and had to redo ~15m of gameplay from a death. If I were to see a long, narrow hall or some foreboding thing, I might have been more hesitant to turn back and explore somewhere else for a save point. 

Enemies: I don't like the flying guys who rapidly zoom to you when you hit them, feels weird. Maybe they're too fast? The charge monsters felt brutal at the beginning when I was first learning it but I got better and also grenades are badass against those guys.

Bosses: Something that applies to both of them is that they have a bit too much health IMO. The speeding up mechanic is ok, but having some kind of visual to indicate the next "stage" would be nice, like sparks flying off the robot drone or the tentacle metroid thing changing color. The Frenzy mechanic also seems to kick in 1/3rds? Which seems way off scale. Maybe second phase at 50% and the last phase 80% or something, but trying to fight a boss in it's last frenzy phase should be a brief experience, but not overwhelming. A small shot of adrenaline is all you need to make something memorable and not frustrating. 

The first boss was fine, but again, I was surprised at how much health this dude had. Seemed like an insane amount of time for just a basic beginner boss.  A very fair boss otherwise. 

Second boss: Going back to the whole sound thing is that this dude would have been a lot better with them. A sound for when it's going to spawn little guys(DPS phase) A sound for when it's going to use it's divebomb, etc. Near the end it just felt kind of like I was playing a fighting game and all I could do is mash because I could never read my opponent.  There were visual tells, but the thing is: the speed-up or frenzy mechanic or w/e it's called in combination with the no-sounds means later phases the boss is flying across the screen, out of sight, and then getting ready to do another thing that I can't hear or react to. I was basically thinking of Eye of Cthulu from Terraria when fighting this thing and I realized how much I rely on sound cues for that boss. Mechanics aside: Very fun fight and nice design.

Overall very promising. It feels like a complete demo that i'd play on a GBA display in a K-mart back in 2001. I really like the art direction and aesthetic and I hope to see more from you soon. 

First time playing. No bugs to report over ~28m of playtime.

Only played single player.

It's a very neat little game. The movement definitely takes some getting used to. I'm surprised that Steering/control are stats you can boost. I would prefer the movement be smooth at the beginning and have options to make my steering worse in exchange for a big power spike or something. After some time with it though, I was used to it for the most part. 

The different types of shrimp being just [element] shrimp is definitely an interesting design decision. There are lots of different types of shrimp that you could easily form entire archetypes around. Ghost shrimp being the dark type, pistol shrimp being the fire type, etc. Heck why limit it to just shrimp? Could make crabs, jellyfish, etc. I guess "shrimp, crab and jellyfish game" does not have the same ring as "Shrimp Game" though. 

The elemental fusion is fine, I guess, but it didn't seem like I really had much control over it? Maybe I missed something but it really was just up to whatever elemental rock spawned and that's what my fusion was. It is neat that there's different ultimate abilities for each fused element though. Speaking of I don't think ultimates had tooltips on them but maybe I missed it. 

The weapon drop icons need to have a minimum UI size because at a distance, they look like XP blips, then I get close and realize "oh that's actually a weapon". It's also kind of lame to just have them drop weapons. I wouldn't say just copy risk of rain or whatever but as it stands now, it's not engaging.  

The weapons themselves were very fun. I liked the properties changing and such, I think I had more fun changing weapon types than I did changing elements. 

Fog being the same color as the ground makes it hard to discern between the two, but this might be a stylistic approach that I can appreciate. Not sure if you're optimizing and hiding stuff at certain distances or not but it would be clever to do so. 

It has potential for sure. If it stays as a pure arena-based roguelite I think it'll need a lot of features to be competitive, but the aesthetic and concept are a great foundation. 

First time playing. Oh man this is one of those games I feel guilty playing because it's so complete and polished already.

No bugs to report over 1hr 5m of playtime. 

The combat is interesting and I love the idea of removing enemy collision hurtboxes when you get some hits on them. Feels very rewarding. Didn't find myself using the charge attack much. Projectile deflecting was cool but sometimes it did this weird interpolation and fizzled out before hitting the mob. Not sure if intended.

Levels felt fine. I don't know if it's a good idea to introduce alternate gravity (walking on walls, ceilings, etc) that early into the game but it felt natural. The one room I had a problem with that just felt wrong was the room with the key in the futuristic mecha base. The angles it puts you in just felt so disorienting and wrong. There was also a rope a bit too close to a swinging platform in one of the earlier rooms. They intersect at a point and its like weird. Other than that it was fun. 

I was kind of sad when I got to a new area and there wasn't a teleporter within the immediate vicinity. I know that's a really big lame boring design thing but in a game like this I want to immediately go back and explore when I reach a new area and when there's not a checkpoint I get into "I'll go back as soon as I get a checkpoint" mode and then oops I cleared another zone. The maps DID help a lot with finding stuff when I actually got used to reading them, so there's that. 

Art is charming. I love any game that lets me be a badass wizard guy. I noticed a lot of things didn't have sounds but I honestly think the game is better off with minimal sounds because the visuals are chaotic as there are many things flying around like rocks and pumpkins and wooden chests all over the place, and adding sounds onto those might just be overwhelming.

Not sure if i'm just getting old or what but I did find it hard to see enemies sometimes in comparison to the background but it wasn't too bad. This goes the same for objects that you can hit versus objects you can't, as well as little critters that are just there for flavor vs a landmine and such. Found myself hitting the air many times.

The gimmicks work out great. The initial shock of dying in one hit quickly vanished when I realized you can literally just rewind before you got hit. Even if that was the only mechanic in the entire game it would be enough to make a clever little game.

BUT obviously there's a lot more to work with than just the rewind! I unlocked almost all of the spells except for one? I think? Guess i'll give my random thoughts.

Coil: I think stuff recoils too fast and it makes stuff like the reverse-conveyor-belt-fire-trap-thing hard. Granted, I don't know if that was the 'intended' strategy for that puzzle but it definitely might be nicer if it was a bit smoother. I like that I can use it as a projectile though when fighting enemies.

Surge: Never really used this to make stuff faster, just kind of used it as a chain lightning thing (this got me killed many times from charged enemies)

Spike: The most broken one IMO. Slowing down stuff makes traps much easier to deal with, but that's kind of needed I guess. Pretty much carried me in the entire last secret level. 

Backtrack: Didn't really see myself use this except once at the beginning. Maybe i'm not big brain enough to use.

Twist: There were definitely places where using this would have been better than the other spells but I didn't use it much. I think not being able to jump while using it kind of sucks.

Remnant: Didn't realize what this did until the end. Thought it would be used for dual-switch puzzles or something. 

Discontinuity: The only time I ever got a game over was when using this lmao. The potential for puzzles with this thing is nuts but it's definitely scary to use which I think is a good thing.

Dash: There were definitely times I used this in conjunction with other stuff, but the weird angle it puts you at when going from above is a bit awkward. 

No idea where the other spell was. I might go back for a bit and play some more and explore more stuff because it's very fun.

Sorry if it's a lot to read. Don't bother addressing anything I just wanted to share my thoughts. You made a very special game and it really deserves recognition. I hope you can get into early access ASAP! 

Incoming stream of consciousness I just write stuff down because i'll forget it if I try to type it later

Only played single-player. Windows. Didn't find any bugs over ~35m playtime.

Controls feel solid. I could not get my gamepad to work but mouse and keyboard felt fine. It definitely felt like a Conker game right out of the box. 

Obviously the game will rely a lot on cutscenes, humor, etc. I'm not going to say much about the cutscenes or script itself, but I will say that it's pretty big shoes to fill if you're shooting for that kind of writing and comedic flair. Then again I was like 12 when BFD came out and I thought it was the funniest shit but looking back its like :/ ya know?

Anyway uhh after the initial cutscenes your jump gets REALLY tall? like wow that's huge, probably 3x more than it was? I guess it's fine but looking around the map things are way more vertical than they need to be, probably because of your newfound 3x jump height. Just keep this in mind when it comes to level design, maybe you find it comfortable, I dunno. I get that him getting energy drinks is like Conker's beer pick-me-up so maybe that can be Ash's gimmick.

The first key I went for was the barrel. Felt VERY weird for it to "snap" onto it. Not sure how to alleviate that. Barrel control felt kind of too smooth? I dunno, didn't feel like much of a challenge but that's ok too.

Had no problems doing the platforming key. 

The throwing projectiles thing felt really hard to aim without a reticle, but if you're clever with design you can make a pseudo iron-sights that players can use to aim with. 

The sheep thing felt kind of dumb. The idea is funny but crashing into a wall killing me felt uber lame. Maybe just taking some damage and making me restart the chainsaw would have been less lame.

Oh yeah there's like little wizard enemies that do fuck-all. I... don't even know why those are in? Their AI is really bad. It's nice to have disposable grunt guys I guess but these just sat there doing nothing, even after triggering their chase sequence they just kind of sat there. 

The rotating disc thing was not immediately apparent to me what it did but then I put it together and realized it was a timed gate thing. Maybe try to frame the camera if the player is standing on it so that the gate is also visible. Would help a bit. You really do not get much time there btw, it took me 3 or 4 tries before I had a perfect run and that was just enough time.

Slide felt good. 

Dragon fight was....eh. The projectiles go too slow really for something like that.

Honestly it's a good prototype. Again, a very ambitious game, especially if you want voice acting for all characters but the gameplay system foundation is solid enough I would say. 

Music was exceptionally grating, tried clicking options, didn't work

Menus sometimes popped up when they shouldn't have

The gravity / forces in general did NOT feel like a good billiards game; balls are way too heavy and need to be way lighter. Balls barely have any movement when colliding. 

There needs to be a hit strength indicator somewhere besides the visual of the stick

I like the concept but the execution needs a lot of refinement. Focus on making a good billiards game before implementing the rest of the deck building mechanics. 

I don't usually play boomer shooters so keep that in mind.

I appreciate the elevator music and goofy sfx/themes, otherwise it might be kind of unnerving. The level design is pretty complex and I think that makes it good. 

I chose Medium difficulty and got pretty far but died right before yellow key room which looking back I probably would not have made it out of. I switched to Easy and was able to breeze through everything. 

I only figured out the beginning secret, but it seems like the game has multiple, which is cool. It definitely had me keeping my eyes peeled for hints and checking for fake walls.

Most of the enemies are cool I don't really like the flying dudes leaving lava behind I think this has been said a lot already though. I liked hitstunning some of the mobs, but it seems you can't stun the ones that actually desperately need to be stunned which are the rush-type enemies that melee you. 

Weapons felt good to use and I liked that they had their own pros and cons. 

It has charm and lots of good things. I enjoyed it.  

A fun little game, albeit a bit difficult. 

I didn't play much but I think I got a good feeling of it. 

The controls are definitely a bit weird but I ended up using WASD. What really felt strange to me was that every single orbit field felt the same.

Ideally, most orbits would be lower gravity, but some of the more dense planets with larger orbits should have stronger gravitational pulls. I don't know if this concept exists in later levels. 

Alternatively, if you wanted to keep it simple, most fields could just have no pull, but you could introduce different colored orbits or whatever that do have gravitational pulls. 

That aside, I think the concept of "skipping" is really rewarding, but some of the cloud "barriers" felt off. It felt like a coinflip when colliding with one if it would send me back in or send me spiraling out. Not sure if intended.

The first comet field area was actually kind of a huge spike in difficulty. If i'm not mistaken those are all just 1-shots? I think it was just a "bonus" stage so that's fine. Took me a couple of tries.

It's good? I think? I'm getting older so I am not as much of a gamer as I used to be, so maybe intended audiences will be more taken with the game. The art is great and there's LOTS of good dopamine-hit stuff like points, gems, etc. Keep at it. 

I think this is a pretty good idea but I am not sure about how big of an audience you'll pull in.

Just as soon as I thought I understood it and it felt good, the second stick came in and then I basically felt like I was relearning the game all over again. I understand frustration is a core element of these types of games but it feels downright sadistic. I struggled so hard with just the basic "walk across this thing" minigame. 

I honestly feel like simply allowing for both sticks to pass each other would be enough to rectify the difficulty curve. It's hard enough to mentally visualize the movement with both sticks, but adding extra restriction like that is taking the difficulty from a 10 to a 20. Maybe make it an extra option? Like an extra challenging mode?

The art style is simple and nice, I like the aesthetic. 

The chatter-text audio bits from the NPC was kind of grating. Not a fan. 

I did not get very far before I lost interest. I am not a fan of Getting Over It, but I imagine fans of that kind of game would be very interested. 

I dunno why jump is on left trigger for some reason felt weird to use that when the face buttons are right there and the only time I saw them used was to interact with something, which means you have 3 other face buttons there. 

Oh yeah one other thing: Not sure how to explain it very well but when your character is on stick and you go to (0, 0) input in that stick, trying to go back to the angle you're currently at is VERY frustrating and can result in unintended movement. I don't know how you could rectify this but it's definitely a problem considering the nature of the game and how even slight movements can move your character. 

I got a bit past this but got pushed all the way back, didn't want to play more, but I can appreciate the effort and ideas that are in this game. 

A very ambitious project honestly. This was a good showing of a prototype though. 

Lots of Z-fighting and some of the grass was floating. The grass shader is interesting but needs a bit of work because sometimes grass blades "morph" around the player and it looks weird. Overall solid art style though. I like the texture work. 

The dash felt kind of pointless. Maybe if it gave a burst of momentum leading into a run like in Nier: Automata? Just kind of didn't do anything for me. Never used it. 

Smoke bombs are OP but I guess they are a limited resource so it's OK. 

NPCs don't really do anything after I hit them with a sword combo, they just get immediately get hit by the following attack. 

I think other have said it but you can do takedowns on "prone" enemies in the field but not the guys in the castle.

I entered the crawlspace and guards still saw me? Not sure if it's a glitch but usually, a crawlspace would have more shadow and be harder to see things under it so maybe add invisible colliders so guards can't raycast down there. 

Speaking of which the AI had a hard time figuring out exactly what to do when they noticed me under the crawlspace, leading me to think it was just a glitch. 

Otherwise, the AI is actually pretty advanced. I was impressed they seemingly reacted to cries for help and also investigated bodies. 

The ledge climbing was a bit weird since the transform of the character snaps to the "final" place but the animation is doing it halfway. You probably already know of this. 

Overall I was pretty impressed. I don't usually play games like this but I had fun with the small amount of time with it. 

Alright, pretty addicting arena shooter I have to admit.

The concept of putting down turrets, but also being able to use them as your own weapons and retaining the upgrade is brilliant. It is a very solid concept for an arena shooter.

It took me a couple of waves to understand everything, like how to upgrade weapons, swapping them out, and then it took me another couple of waves to realize that by standing next to one it "repaired". A mini tutorial wouldn't hurt or maybe just a "how-to" in the main menu with some animated gifs.

There are some really nice risk-reward factors like the bonus waves, perfect waves enabling a 2x wave, etc. 

It was kind of hard to tell what enemies did what. I was running past enemies that I didn't really know what they did most of the time, just dodging stuff. I liked the outline that melee mobs did before attacking you though that is a good telegraph. 

I think the art style is charming but more color variety would help

Some of the upgrades might need to be a bit more detailed. I picked the artillery card and I did not like what it did. 

Speaking of which maybe let players remove upgrades they don't like for a cost. 

Music is fantastic I dunno if it's an original composition or what. 

Only 1 playthrough, didn't mess with melee stuff because I feel like that never works out in these kind of games, but I might revisit this later again. Fun game!

Thanks for putting up with the technical issues. I am glad to at least find the source of the problem. 

I am using a render capture overlay on a separate camera to render the inventory. Only inventory items are rendered on this screen. I probably need to come up with another solution because I didn't think the performance dip would be that bad. The main inventory can be accessible from the pause screen, but it probably would have lagged anyway, and really only serves as flavor text in the demo, and to tell how many health packs you picked up. 

I planned on adding signs for each area but ran out of time. Signs next to the door to show 'maintenance' or 'employees only' or something would have been nice to indicate.  I don't know why your gamepad was attacking constantly, that sounds like a bug, but the camera recentering sounds like a problem with the camera itself. I'm supporting keyboard and gamepad in the next versions I think. It shouldn't be too hard. 

There's caveats to both camera systems I guess. The third person system gives a lot of agency to the player, but detracts from the experience. A fixed camera can make for engaging sequences, but can sometimes be frustrating if the player wants to look at something, or maybe there's an enemy around a corner and they can't see it. 

Overall, I would like to come close to the fidelity of SH3, both camerawork and graphic fidelity. I think designing levels having a lot of fixed camera angles in mind would be a good thing, but for areas with a lot of dimension, I think it would be nice to let the player have some agency. So I guess in the end, it comes down to how I design the levels, ideally with very few areas that have larger dimensions. This build in particular had two larger areas to get a better feel of the camera. 

This feedback helped me think about things a lot. Revisiting my references shows me that i'm a bit far off my mark, and I can use this information in the new refactored version. Thanks again. 

First time trying this game. There's an insane amount to cover, but i'm not capable of writing any of it elegantly. I recorded my thoughts a bit in realtime as I was playing and I am going to paste it down below. 

I picked custom character because of course I want to try the cool custom options. 

i made a max height character but every door is too small, camera collides with everything

the biggest meme about the game is the grass so i immediately took out the scythe and started chopping grass

it is in fact, very well made grass, very cool

ok so i go to the tutorial area now and it shows me to go to an area and cut grass........except i cut it all, oops lol at least i can skip this tooltip

when watering i would like to see important info like water level instead of time to harvest, which i assume would be a visual thing

scale just feels off in general

why do i not get all my stamina when sleeping

very hard to interact with certain things due to the way interactions are 'chosen' 

character looks goofy running with maul

town is massive, confusing, layout is terrible, the only bed you can sleep in is in a strange place

I legitimately feel like it is an SCP backrooms situation for how big and empty the place is

there's like 10 NPCs and the town could fit like 500 people in it 

like for instance, why is there a giant asian temple in the back of the town that serves basically no purpose

why are things like that in the game before even cementing a purpose for all the other things

If you had to give everything in this town a purpose, you would not finish until many years

a lot of houses just don't make sense from any angle on the inside, it seems like things are just kind of placed arbitrarily without any sense of reason

like at first I wanted to play the game because cute life farming sim but now I want to keep playing because of how strange and weird the city architecture and layout is and why is it so damn empty and big; I spent so long just walking around the city finding new weird buildings to explore

as I walk through it, ideas pop into my head. 'oh there's a giant bell in the center with a rope, maybe there would be a quest to ring it' or something, and i'm sure these ideas have been planned or thought of as well, but there's just too much of it with no purpose 

I think the main town needs to be 90% purpose and 10% filler but currently it's like 95% filler and 5% purpose

the rest of the map can have filler, but just make it seem purposeful; like an abandoned ruin or broken windmill or something 

before you tell me to open the map and use the funny guide feature: that's not the point. you should not have to have these things in your game. the player should actively be excited to go exactly where their comfy bed is at the end of a hard day of collecting and stuff, and thus, it should be in an easily accessible and notable area

likewise with NPCs. their houses should have defining traits like a gardener would be in a giant greenhouse, an apothecary might have cauldrons and fumes spewing out of it, etc, i think that idea is present here, but not quite compatible with the way things are placed in the city

graphically, it's pretty rough

the aesthetics are fine, but using one directional light and using unlit models without any secondary layer like vertex lighting looks abhorrent

i did see some weird stuff that was like baked shadows? but it didn't seem right, more like a glitch (included a picture below)

it's sometimes hard for me to tell when im going up stairs, when im turning a corner, etc because the textures blend together because there is no light data there

I would recommend vertex lighting if you want to go with this type of style but you might want to rethink your realtime direction lighting if that is the case 

anything would be better than the way it is now though 

found another NPC and shes glitched into a chair (included a picture below)

THE SUN IS GIGANTIC HOLY SHIT everyone on this planet would be dead if the sun was that close lmao 

WAIT THERE'S MORE STUFF UP HERE??? THERE'S AN ENTIRE FARMHOUSE AND LIKE A SMALL BARN AND A SILO

BUT IT SERVES ZERO PURPOSE AND IS COMPLETELY EMPTY

the actual crafting systems are incredibly detailed

now as I understand, this is the 'catch' of the game and it is very true, it is absolutely bottomlessly detailed

i personally find it offputting in a game that is meant to be a 'comfy life sim', and i have played many modpacks in minecraft that have vast expansive crafting/harvesting systems 

but, as said in the game's screen, it's not for everyone, and i respect the decision and it seems well made. you can tell a lot of thought and careful consideration was put into it and it does kind of scratch a type of itch

my closing thoughts are that this is a very endearing game but the eyes are entirely too big for the stomach and it has spiraled out of control

if nothing else, the entire city needs to be redesigned or pruned. even for the most die-hard fan of an intricate life sim like this, they would be put off by the excessive unused space. likewise, the not die-hard fan of intricate life sims would not find ANY appeal in this game because it's too complex AND hard to navigate

it feels like there are two parts at play: there's a person who wants to design this intricate, bustling city and it's outlying areas, filled with content and NPCs; and there's a person who is struggling to realize their dream farming game with insanely detailed crafting mechanics 

and those two people are not communicating or working together, but rather doing their own independent things 

I think a lot of people would like to see you succeed and I am one of those people.

if you want more feedback on something let me know, I look forward to playing your game next demoday as well.

First off I want to say the aesthetic is legitimately very cool and unique. Major props.

For the actual game, there's some things to go over.

First, it feels just like... well just like playing a slot machine. Yea you can build up your machine and stuff, but you don't really have much control over anything really until you do so. Competitors like Slay the Spire are very much about your choices and decisions, so the clash of the two can be kind of ugly at times. That being said, I think that you can definitely find a way to make it work smoothly and give the player more agency. 

The minigames are a great idea. The pinball is pretty standard. I do suck at pinball, so I never got anything more than 1 coin the times I played. I am not sure if I am bad or whatever, but if the amount of points you got from pinball scaled with the coins you got, then that would be cool instead of just trying to release the items. I did notice a chunk of coins was one of the rewards on one of them, but I feel like a classic pinball 'points go up, reward goes up' formula would work well too and provide a secondary goal. 

The grid layout feels kind of...unnecessary? I almost kind of want there to be ONLY occupied cells and not empty ones that let you traverse all over the place. It feels like I was able to walk everywhere I wanted and not be punished and in this genre, it seems almost wrong. I know that the bouncers are a thing, but I feel like there needs to be more nuance to the grid than just that. 

I am going to play more I think and maybe update with more feedback. The game is actually really interesting and I need more time with it, but I thought I would give my initial impressions for now. Very cool game. 

This game felt very finished and clean already. 

There's a lot going on, but it's not too bad to keep up with. There's some arbitrary concepts like caltrops and defending cards, but you implemented tooltips to go along side things which I think is nice. Having to click instead of just hovering over stuff is kind of weird I guess but at least it's there.

I do feel like the AI can be exceptionally punishing. Like they really just completely eat the entire board sometimes, but they don't use their SP. It's kind of weird. I am not sure if it's intentional but yeah I got my ass kicked.

I think in the beginning I was learning how to check tooltips and I clicked the enemy's attack card and it attacked me. Not sure if coincidence or what, but it's kind of weird to show the enemy's attack cards in the exact same place as your own, even though it's their turn. 

Overall very nice, well put together demo. I would like to see maybe a bit more interesting base archetypes instead of the usual 'do 3 damage... and then draw a card' or whatever. Maybe advanced characters that you unlock after some time with the game.

Pretty neat thing. I played for a small amount of time. The spells felt kind of OP. I went through like 20 areas and still was 1-shotting stuff most of the time. I went full wiz build. 

I don't think coins should need to be picked up, or even in the game at all. I never found a use for them, but regardless, it would be entirely cumbersome to pick up currency like that, especially when there's a big delay after picking something up. 

I assume enemies are just randomly colored because I initially thought red enemies were immune to fire damage, green were immune to poison, etc, but that wasn't the case. With low-fidelity graphics I think color becomes especially important so keep that in mind when making enemies. 

The dash felt cheap to use and that's not a good thing. I am of the opinion that people use a dash like that as a band-aid fix to uninteresting or bad locomotion and it comes off especially strong here. I could have gone the entire game without using it and I feel like my experience would have been the same. 

I saw in the inventory that there's a second weapon set but didn't know which button it was to activate it. 

Speaking of the inventory, I was kind of surprised when I picked up an item and it said my bag was full. Maybe I didn't look well enough but I didn't even know my inventory had a limit at first. Perhaps incorporate a 'progress/fullness' bar at the bottom to indicate a full inventory if you don't want to have the inventory size be manifold with itself. 

Overall a very solid start to a top-down ARPG. I didn't run into any bugs that I could tell. 

So after doing some more profiling I managed to get my main CPU thread response time down from 10ms average to 4ms average. It was most likely a glitch associated with URP and rendertextures not wanting to properly render under certain circumstances. I also did a bit of restructuring so that the inventory is not constantly being rendered and only renders when needed. I am not quite sure if this contributed to it (it probably did a lot lol).

I also added an FPS counter too. It will probably go unresponsive during interactions and stuff but it should work in most of the game. 

And this is like, probably the actual final thing i'm going to do for this demo. I never really meant to have all these silly problems come up. I am due for a massive refactor, but I suppose if I want to move forward with game development I need to be able to recognize and realize optimization issues and rendering glitches that hit performance hard. 

I reuploaded with the new changes if you want to give it one more shot. Thanks Tomo. 

Cool game. I dunno if it's just me but I feel like the melee doesn't really fit right. The feedback and stuff is fine, but the timing feels off? 

My game got stuck after interacting with a thing that poked his eyes or something. I restarted it twice and it got stuck there both times so I gave up. 

I like the artstyle and sound design too. 

I'm not sure about FPS issues on the main menu, but I uploaded a new build which will hopefully fix framerate issues in the actual level. The new file is "ProjectSoSEmptyLibrary". 

I'll revisit the deadzone. In areas where the player is allowed to control the camera,  it should try to naturally align with the player's direction, but it shouldn't be moving at rest. 

I'm not very good with profiling. I ran into no framerate issues but I have a stronger rig. I did a bit of snooping and i'm pretty sure I know what it is and I uploaded a new build. Uh, let's just say that this library doesn't have a very diverse selection to choose from right now.  The new file is "ProjectSoSEmptyLibrary"

I'm usually not as callous with my level design but this time I was kind of panicking from not having a lot of time.  I used a simple diffuse specular workflow and in total, there are only 7 realtime lights, 5 of which are hardly ever rendered in the scene. If it's not the stuff I removed then it's something else and i'll just have to kind of let it go this DD.  

I always enjoy your feedback, PHI! Thanks so much for playing!

I feel guilty having only put so much effort into this one demo. I spent a lot longer on a prior version which features a much smaller, intricate level with a lot more interactions and was more 'complete' vision of the game. This build was more or less just a way for me to mess around with camerawork, seeing what works and what doesn't.  All this feedback i'm getting is actually super helpful and will help me find best practices to use when framing cameras and designing levels.

Deadzone is something I will check on. I think the values are probably too low. 

I will look in to a framerate counter in build. I think in actuality it's the fog planes being animated out of sync with the camera rendering, making the entire game look like it's dropping frames, but there's a possibility that there is something else i'm not catching actually causing framerate issues. 

Pausing was an indev feature, so it's not complete (it wasn't even meant to be pushed to this build lol)

There's a lot of difficult design decisions i'm going to make moving forward, like you were talking about with the combat needing to be simple but not too easy. It's turning out to be a pretty challenging project to manage but I am having fun and I hope you will check it out again in the future! 

A very interesting concept for a puzzle game

I enjoyed it, despite it's weirdness. There are very few games that toe the line between charming and weird and this is one of them. 

Nothing really to criticize. Pacing felt great, didn't run into any bugs. Fun game! 

This game is just awesome. 

It definitely feels like a dreamcast-era game. It took me a bit to get the hang of it but it's very rewarding. 

The perspective can be a little disorienting at times. A pause feature that lets you look around the level a bit might be a good idea. Some of the areas I entered bonus time and had no idea where to even go. 

The music and visuals are top notch. The whomp-like enemies might want to be a little bigger(or maybe just their shadow?) and closer to the ground so that it's easier to see them. 

Absolutely charming. Glad I got to try it out!

There is a combat section. It's actually required to beat the demo. I am not sure how far you got before stopping.

I definitely think I am going to limit my fixed camera angle distances in the future. I can still do wide shots, but they have to be done alongside cuts to closer ones near by. It's a bit more work but yes, it does make it hard to see when the camera can be so far away.

"Some camera bug in the room immediately after this hallway room, when standing in a certain spot would make the camera start rapidly spinning" I actually put a collider above the camera's allocated track specifically that this wouldn't happen. If you notice, you can't get close to the wall in that part of the level, because if you do, the camera would spin out of control. In my testing, I didn't run into it again after putting that collider. I probably need to make the collider wider then so it really has no chance of doing that behavior.  Thank you.

Pausing was actually not intended to be in this build, as it's an indev feature, along with all other features and interactions relating to it. Sorry.

Thanks for playing! 

Ah, yeah. I actually went through the level and did try to make sure all entrances were visible or had a direction in mind. That one does seem really hard to spot due to it being parallel with the wall. I should probably have put that exit on the opposite side, away from the camera instead of closer to it. Good catch. I also didn't really want to put the roll/dutch as you move to that side of the area, but I kept it in because I didn't mind it (I did noticed the clipping a bit though) 

Also unrelated, I think I probably will switch from a raycast checker for interactions, to a 3D overlap check, like you suggested. It's something that was bugging me, because raycasts assume everything will have a collider, else the raycast clips in to the interaction zone. 3D Overlap check would help alleviate this. 

Thanks again! 

Thanks for trying it out! I will admit that the art and level itself were absolutely rushed as hell, so thank you for understanding and playing ProjectSoS!

Hello again, Qwott!

Pausing is an indev feature and I wasn't meant to push it to this build. Oops. All associated features with it are also indev, and will not function properly.

All placeholder animation transitions and other stuff broke, but I didn't have time to fix before deadline.

I also noticed the camera jerking forward in the open area, I have zero idea what is causing this beside the camera collider script misbehaving, probably due to some flag not being checked properly.

And thank you for your input regarding the other camera functionality also. It is my #1 priority for this project right now. 

I know you played the last demo; In the last one, movement across camera transitions remained until you your axis float became 0. In this demo, I used some maths to auto adjust the vector across transitions. Were you able to notice a difference? Did it feel smoother compared to last time? 

Thanks again!

Some of my animator stuff broke so there's a high chance you run into animation bugs at some point. Thank you for your patience!

Thanks for trying it out. 

I do plan on continuing this project with higher input quality, advanced user options, etc. It's a very exciting world to design, despite it's dull appearance. I am glad you enjoyed the monster, I had fun making him. 

If you see it next demo day feel free to give it another try. Thank you again! 

I killed zombie (really cool enemy) and skeletal but I couldn't get the spooky box and wasn't able to progress further, if there's anything else. 

I like the idea of the combat but maybe an indicator to know when your attack is fully charged would be good. Visual or audio, either would help, I let go of my attacks too often and they weren't fully charged. 

Overall neat idea. I like Dark Messiah and King's Field and this game seems to take inspiration from both. Hope to see your game again soon.