itch.io

Oh hey, thanks for responding. I'm fine with the game being a love letter to Melee, I think it's a really unique vision to have for a game like this. We've obviously seen countless multiplayer fighting games aspire to recapture Melee's magic, but applying that to a single player beat em up ROUGELIKE? Conceptually brilliant. 

My main concern is that I felt like a singleplayer game like this will just inherently attract a much broader and more casual audience than just Melee fans, I mean I checked it out because it was a roguelike (one of my absolute favorite game genres) with an exceptionally unique gameplay hook featuring gameplay inspired by one of my all time favorite series, being Smash, of which I've played every game AFTER Melee, more than anything. Singleplayer games just naturally attract casual players due to the lowered stakes, and Melee's controls are pretty notorious for being really difficult for casual players, especially those who've only played the newer Smash titles (which consists of the vast majority of platform fighter players), to get used to, so I was suggesting that it would be beneficial to add optional changes to the gameplay and controls to give those players something more familiar to them, thus expanding the potential audience of the game and reducing the amount of people that become alienated by the controls. I explicitly wanted them to be optional for the exact same reason that Celeste's accessibility options are, so that you can maintain your current vision of high technicality and precision while still giving more casual players a way to play the game in a way that, while untrue to the game's purpose, still allows them to enjoy it and experience it in a way that's comfortable for them. Then, maybe once they've gotten into the game with the easier controls, they can commit to learning the real controls and experience the game how it's meant to be played. 

Ultimately, it's your game, and you can make it however you like, I'll still buy and play it regardless. I just felt I should report my personal experience, my personal issues as a consumer, and offer a suggestion on how to remedy them in a way that makes the game more accessible and easily appreciated by more people without forcing changes that ruin the game's appeal and compromise your artistic vision.

I literally said I really liked the game and admired the direction it was going in, I was just voicing feedback as a consumer that the game's basic movement (running, jumping, general traversal, etc.) could feel better, because, in my opinion, to ME, it does not feel very good to play. The game very frequently does not do what I want it to, even though it feels like it should. All I ask for is an optional buffer system, better air control, and a smoother transition from air to ground, maybe something akin to the accessibility features in Celeste. I don't want the game to be dumbed down, just made smoother to play. I don't mind having to learn a game's advanced controls, I just want the basic traversal to feel good without having to devote tons of practice to it. No other platformer or platform fighter I've played has felt this awkward to control as a newcomer, save for the ~10 minutes of Melee I played about a year ago before abandoning it out of frustration with the controls, it's the exact same feeling of awkwardness, hence why I compare the two so much. I just want this game to feel like every other game I've played, and since it's an alpha demo deep in active development, I felt I should voice my issues in the hopes that they get remedied in the final product. 

I'm simply voicing a subjective issue I had with my first impressions of the game, the controls do not feel good, they feel unresponsive and clunky. I want a PLATFORMER's fundemental movement mechanics to feel intuitive and silky smooth from the getgo while allowing for further technicality that is slowly taught over the course of the game. Celeste, a game that is listed as a primary inspiration, does this wonderfully, it feels good to control from the start and slowly guides you into progressively harder maneuvers. Making it a chore to just move around from the very start is not how I think a game like this should be designed, fundemental movement should come naturally, then you make the other techniques hard to perform. All I ask for are OPTIONAL changes to the game's controls to make it more accessible and feel less shitty. Input buffering, better air control, smoother landings, and a general increase in basic fluidity. This isn't Melee, the controls can be modified from that original, unpolished, archaic template to feel more intuitive, accessible, and modern. This game clearly has a high skill ceiling, and I want it to have one. It just needs to lower its skill floor a bit so Joe Schmoes like me can sit down and just play a game after school for a couple of hours without having to constantly fight the controls. Every other ball-bustingly hard game I've played (whether it be Super Meat Boy, Celeste, Enter the Gungeon, DOOM Eternal, ULTRAKILL, etc.) does this, I only ask that this one follow suit. 

Also, as an aside, no game should strive to recreate Melee's controls exactly one to one. Having no buffer is bad and archaic, plain and simple. Rivals of Aether is inspired by the same game, has a six-frame input buffer, still maintains a high skill ceiling, and feels leagues better to play to the point where I can have fun just playing training mode and messing around with the controls, because they feel good. That is not the case with this game, and RoA isn't even a dedicated single player platformer like this, a genre whose entire appeal is centered around fluid, responsive controls. 

I played it for a bit, and it's really fun! I do have some criticisms that I would like to voice, though.

My main complaint would just be the relative stiffness of the controls, I felt like I was constantly dropping inputs, inputting things I didn't want to, going through some sort of lag every time I landed on the ground, and generally like an element of fluidity is missing from everything, it doesn't exactly "melt into the hands" like how platformers should, and often times I felt like I was fighting the controls more than the game's levels themselves. It felt like my brief experiences playing Melee with all my Smash experience coming from every game after that one, it just felt sort of clunky and unresponsive. I think if you made the transition from air-to-ground smoother and significantly raised the back-and-forth air acceleration it would feel a lot better, alongside some other tweaks to generally make things flow better, though I'd have to play the game some more to further diagnose where else the stiffness is coming from. Maybe you could add an input buffer to make it feel like fewer inputs are being dropped, provided it isn't already in the game already. You could even make it adjustable, so people who are used to Melee's lack of buffer can play without, whereas the people like myself can have an experience more like the more accessible modern Smash titles, or even other platform fighters like RoA. Also, I'd appreciate it if the weapon wheel slowed the game down, as switching can be a little awkward when everything else moves around you in real-time. 

That's really my only issue that isn't just a result of lack of content (which is understandable considering it just released yesterday), as all my other nitpicks revolve around the theme of "more x." More room layouts, more enemy types (please add enemies that aren't just easily beaten by parrying them over and over again), more special moves, more normal moves, more weapons, more story, etc. Maybe you could reduce the amount of platforming and target rooms in favor of more combat arenas since that's where the most fun is had, but I can see these things as just inevitable additions, so they're not really that useful of criticisms. 

I really like what you've got here, it looks incredibly promising. The art style is great (though perhaps it could use just a bit more color), the animation is really good, it's just such a brilliant concept in general. I'm excited to see how it grows throughout development, and I'll make sure to pick it up when it releases.