Hey Sam!
Glad you're loving the new demo, as for the bugs:
If you the pure black and frozen state happened after you selected continue and haven't saved in Demo 3 yet, it likely tried to load an old save from Demo 2 then couldn't find the room to load and bugged out. I'm aware of the bug but haven't had time yet to fix it, it shouldn't happen as long as you either: haven't had a save of NiTL when you player OR have saved at least once in Demo 3.
One sided door: That's intentional, rooms reset after leaving. Bit of a troll, I know, but intentional.
About the scrolling on the map, that's intentional and also kind of an optical illusion of sorts because:
If you look at the grid, then yes it's inverted.
If you look at the map tiles, then it follows the input.
As for the save and elevator stations,
I plan on updating them to have an "charging" animation so players are aware things are happening, the actual delay is 1 second but it only counts down if you stay still. It's something I noticed over the weekend while I was presenting the game at the Cancer Society Games Fair in New Zealand.
There were some other bugs, one of which was game-breaking (resulted in not being able to shoot or drop bombs) but it's been fixed and the build got stealth updated about 20 hours ago with the fix and a couple others things. So if you run into that just redownload the demo.
Demo 3 isn't fully finished yet, but enough of it was there to make a release, planned are:
Hey Kiryhnn,
The first energy tank in the jungle area is actually the 4th in order in the demo, sounds like you did a sequence break to use the elevator to get to the jungle area earlier.
As for losing your morph mode and missiles, there's no bugs or mechanics in the game that disable them, you likely just hit the debug keys by accident. On the keyboard number row, you can press '1' to toggle the the missile ability on and off, enabling it this way maxes out the capacity to 255, if you press '2' on the keyboard, it toggles the morph mode ability. You can open the README.txt file included in the demo zip to view the rest of the debug commands.
Other than that I hope you're enjoying the demo, playing with a controller is highly recommended. You can rebind input for both keyboard and gamepad to your liking if you don't prefer the default control scheme.
There will be an update next month near the end of April with some level design changes, proper audio sound effects, and the actual name of the game. I hope you like it enough to check it out again then.
Feel free to post any other feedback you have with the demo!
Hello Dinar87,
-There's sprite issues like when pressing down while midair the character sprite is upside down.
This isn't an issue, it's a recycled sprite and is intended because pixel art is really expensive.
I've left it in for so long because it seemed fun and used the art budget at the time on other animations.
-Some annoying collision issues like the floor sided doors being slightly lower than the surrounding collision blocks meaning you have to jump to get over them
The doors is intended as a workaround to a collision bug in Unity/PhysX where if you have two separate colliders next to each other, even if they're exactly lined up perfectly, other colliders (i.e. the player) will get snagged where they meet, causing them to stop moving.
-cannot aim diagonally
Controls are included in the README.txt located in the .zip bundled with the game, these controls include the keys for diagonal aiming.
They're shown here in the Controls Menu, although I apologize for not expressly naming them "Aim Diagonally Up" and "Aim Diagonally Down". I will include this change in the next update. Should probably remove Inject Tank as well since that's a disabled feature.
Also included in the next update coming soon is automatic diagonal aiming if you hold the left or right movement keys along with up or down.
-moving on the map screen feels bad because of the inverted controls.
If you look at the map tiles, you'll see they follow the controls, they're not actually inverted. Might look that way because of the grid.
-charging animation is not clear when it's finished charging.
This is fair, the next update coming soon has a color tint that flashes on the player to indicate the charging is complete.
Hope you enjoyed the game, and stay tuned for more!
"This isn't an issue, it's a recycled sprite and is intended because pixel art is really expensive.
I've left it in for so long because it seemed fun and used the art budget at the time on other animations."
Ok. I assumed you made the pixel art yourself.
"The doors is intended as a workaround to a collision bug in Unity/PhysX where if you have two separate colliders next to each other, even if they're exactly lined up perfectly, other colliders (i.e. the player) will get snagged where they meet, causing them to stop moving."
I see. I have not used the Unity engine before.
"Controls are included in the README.txt located in the .zip bundled with the game, these controls include the keys for diagonal aiming.
They're shown here in the Controls Menu, although I apologize for not expressly naming them "Aim Diagonally Up" and "Aim Diagonally Down". I will include this change in the next update. Should probably remove Inject Tank as well since that's a disabled feature."
Strange. I was aiming the joystick diagonally. I also tried my left and right triggers but nothing happened.
"If you look at the map tiles, you'll see they follow the controls, they're not actually inverted. Might look that way because of the grid."
It was still confusing though. I recommend you change it.
Hello Kiyoshi!
Glad to hear you loved the demo!
1) Adding a dot for minor items and circle for major items on the map.
That will be in the next update coming soon, I've already added it to the game it's just not released yet.
Although it's just a empty + sign for items not acquired in general and a simple dot sign for when they're acquired.
2) Make wall jump a power up to prevent early sequence breaks.
I would but having seen so many people playtest and not realize it exists led me to not putting it as a separate ability.
There's also the fact that I feel like that would just be padding out the abilities needlessly. The game doesn't explicitly tell you at any point how to do it or that you even can do it.
So for sequence breaks I'd say it's fine, it's more of a level design issue honestly. Since this is just a tech demo instead of an actual game demo I wouldn't really worry about it too much.
3) Rest of game when?
I work on this entirely in my very spare time and on a shoestring budget so it might be a while.
I'm aiming for the final Tech Demo 3 update to be released roughly end of July, start of August, which will contain a lot of updates along with the game's name reveal. After that's released I'm looking to start working on the actual game, which would mostly be work on levels, enemies, and audio since most of the player mechanics are done at this point.
Currently I'm applying for a game development grant to be able to potentially work on this full-time for a while, but there's no guarantee I'll get it.
4) Future randomizer.
I'll think about it, thanks for the idea.
Nice, I'll look forward for future updates. Good luck in the development and hope you get that grant.
