Heyya! After playing the game for a bit I wanted to collect some of the thoughts I've had regarding rooms.
How about you give the rooms unique names? It would not only make bug reports to file a bit easier but also give the game more charm!
Also, how about a timer to each room to give players an incentive to actually use the harder shortcuts and replay the content?
I ended up liking the game a lot. Keep up the great work!
Hello, thanks a lot for the feedback, the challenge room names is a great idea actually, I'll write it down and start thinking of names for the challenges, I'll see if I can figure out an unique name for all of them.
As for the timer, you can actually turn on a "per room" timer in the options menu, that timer will count up from the moment you enter a room to the moment you exit it.
Another timer option you have to time things is the free timer mode, which you can reset at any moment and will count up until you reset it again or you turn it off.
Thanks again for sharing your thoughts with me, it means a lot!
"As for the timer, you can actually turn on a "per room" timer in the options menu, that timer will count up from the moment you enter a room to the moment you exit it."
I tried it out and it's really cool that it's already in the game! Here are a couple of things I've noticed if you don't mind me sharing:
-If you choose the "Exit Room" option while you're dying (during the screen fade), nothing really happens and you continue to just normally be reset instead. You have to wait to be able to move again before you can exit the room.
-This is probably intentional? The timer doesn't reset once you die. So you manually have to re-enter the room to reset the timer. I feel like there should be some kind of "Reset" option ("Retry" is already in the game but it only puts you back to the last spot you've touched the ground at, useful in the case you get stuck or something?).
-Sometimes the Sound bugs out, as there's either no BGM or no SFX playing. I'm not sure what causes this, as quitting the game and rebooting it seems to do the fix. It might have something to do with hitting the "Main Menu" option at the 'wrong time'. Or not, who knows. I can't reliably reproduce the issue.
Maybe the following is helpful, maybe not: I remember having no dash sounds very early in the game when I quit the game while speaking to the NPC that appears after you've been inside (⚠ spoiler alert ⚠) the Locked House mid-dialogue (the game didn't give me an option so I tried to escape this way, thinking the NPC would catch up on that lol). Also, looking through the footage while trying to get a good time in a challenge room the sound bugged out there quite often as well. In one case in particular I hit the "Main Menu" option instead of the "Exit Room" option, and when I would load into my save file my dash SFX were gone (switching rooms, reloading save files etc. didn't do the trick, had to hard quit). I can provide you with the footage of this happening if you think it can help.
"Hello, thanks a lot for the feedback, the challenge room names is a great idea actually, I'll write it down and start thinking of names for the challenges, I'll see if I can figure out an unique name for all of them."
I am glad you like the idea! I'm a huge fan of what Dustforce was going for. I had a lot of "oh, so that's why it's called X" moments.
Additionally, the game could save the best times logged to that challenge room and display it in the little popup window when you're in front of a challenge room door. I personally think the movement is sick and has a lot of potential and that you could definitely market your game as "speedrunner friendly" this way.
Thanks for the neat game!
edit:
More thoughts I've had while grinding out a few challenge rooms:
-The music's really neat, it would be pretty cool if it kept looping when you reset your attempt.
-Additionally to the suggestion to add PBs to the challenge room popup: make them only count if Assist Mode is turned off.
-Not sure if intentional, but the character faces the direction they entered the room with.
Hi, thanks once again for your comments, let me try to answer all of them.
"If you choose the "Exit Room" option while you're dying (during the screen fade), nothing really happens and you continue to just normally be reset instead. You have to wait to be able to move again before you can exit the room."
This is intended, and the same will happen when you are warping to another place or using the normal exit to the room, while doing anything that requires a screen fade out, you can't exit the room or retry. Because it leads to some problems, but if I ever figure a way for said problems to not happen, I'll definitely let you exit the room while in the middle of a fading action.
"Sometimes the Sound bugs out, as there's either no BGM or no SFX playing. I'm not sure what causes this, as quitting the game and rebooting it seems to do the fix. It might have something to do with hitting the "Main Menu" option at the 'wrong time'. Or not, who knows. I can't reliably reproduce the issue."
So there are still audio bugs!!! Yeah there are some problems with the audio when either dying or watching cutscenes because the gameplay audio bus (which manages the player sounds and some other things) is faded out, so if something happens that prevents the audio bus from fading back in, it will stay silent. Which I thought I fixed, but I'll have another look at it.
"Not sure if intentional, but the character faces the direction they entered the room with."
Yes, it is intentional, the same thing happens if you fast travel, just a small detail to add to the immersion, it shouldn't affect anything as turning around is done instantly and doesn't lose any time!
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Now for everything timer related.
When making the game, I made some decitions based on the idea that I didn't really want to make it look like I wanted people to speedrun the game and that taking your time with the challenges wasn't a bad thing. I wanted to enable the option, but not really make it look like the goal, that's why I ended up scrapping a "reset room" option in the menu which would make you start from the beginning of the room and restart the per room timer.
For that same reason I also scrapped the idea of saving the best times for rooms, which was planned at one point.
I don't know if that was the right decition of course, since having a best time and the option to quickly reset challenge rooms would lead to more replayability, but it was something that felt right at the time.
My assumption that there being a best time or the option to reset the room would give that impression may as well be wrong, so I can play around with the idea.
