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The Deep End Of The Pool

A story-focused, chill VR RPG diorama, about a duck that is out of his depth · By naam

Nice!

A topic by Kavan Bahrami created Aug 24, 2024 Views: 104 Replies: 4
Viewing posts 1 to 2
(8 edits) (+1)

Great to see it in action!

First Play I played through to the battle with the guards in the kitchen, then the game seemed to freeze on me. The idle and music were going but after selecting an action with both ducks the game just hangs out in that state screenshot attached no buttons or drags seemed to progress the battle to the next ‘round’ of action.

Per gameplay before that point, personally, It would have been nice to have either more ingredients ‘marked’ at a time, or in faster succession. There seemed to be big gaps where I was moving the duck around waiting for the ability to grab an ingredient.

I’m going to try to play through again and see if I can get past this point.

Also: a pause / restart menu etc would be welcome, great reflections on the mag glass!

Second Play -The ingredients don’t seem to be as much an issue when I’m using x to fast skip/close conversation bubbles, perhaps they’re triggered by those and that was was delay I was feeling on the first play through. -The battle went smoothly the second round through. -Nice use of the slight scale change for the upper bedroom -I wasn’t able to hit the spider, not sure if that’s a test level issue or not, character could just get hit and move around.

Thoughts on battle mechanic:

  • since there is a ‘turn based’ aspect, I personally would prefer a fixed turn based rather than a continuous real time turn based. Issue that leads me to this: As I pick the character up to grab a potion the enemies are still hitting me over and over, before I can play my ‘turn’.. that and other such actions take time to perform (grab, click buttons, select the thing you want, move the selected item to who you want to use it on, etc.) which you seem to be penalized over faster grab and release attack actions in the current setup.
  • Since you can select actions that don’t immediately occur, throw a potion on a friend, etc. It would be nice to have an ‘undo’ .. I, more than once, hit a friend because the grab drop selection allowed for it in tight groupings and then just had to wait and watch them hit rather than undo the selection and select someone else.

Dialogue glitch with spider:

Great work so far, it’s been inspiring to watch things develop. Best,

Developer (1 edit)

Ooooh thanks so much. Nice and detailed feedback, much appreciated.

battle freeze:

…that is weird! Happened to me once a long while ago, thought I fixed it : ( Sorry!

ingredients:

There should always be two ingredients ready for grab. You can use the magnifying glass to seek them out : ) When you hold Dunk, there’s only a subtle hint as to where they are. Also, yes: only after the bits of dialog does Dunk add the ingredient to the chopping queue, and is the next one spawned…

pause/restart:

…during storybits you mean? I was thinking to maybe pause time whenever you grab the magnifier, but as long as you don’t progress the dialog, nothing state-changing will happen, really. But yes it feels chaotic with the grub lady continually passing through and the actors seemingly go about their business ^^ I kind of like that chaos myself, but duly noted. …what did you feel you needed a restart for?

spider:

Yeah didn’t look into that, the testing rooms are pretty random, depending on old bechanics still here and there. I’ll put it on the list!

battle mechanics:

Thanks so much! Excellent points. At the risk of sounding defensive, a few clarifications:

  • Time should freeze when you’re holding a character, giving you space to make a tactical decision. Are you sure it didn’t for you? I think it does continue when youre dropping the character but still holding the potion. Making a note : )
  • oooh an undo, that would be sweet! Will have a hard think on how to do that gracefully, might be hard
  • …yes it is still waaaay too easy to accidentally hit your party members, or drop potions on enemies ^^. I desperately want to keep that open, thinking about mechanics like: needing to hit a friend to cure confusion, or dropping health potions on undead to make them hurt : ) I should make it more visually clear which character you’re actually targetting, in the least. It’s way too hit’n’miss now.

Thanks so much!

Re: restart, when the game froze in the battle and I was going to play through again was the only moment I was wanting an in game way to restart - rather than take off headset and close - run the exe again.

Re: battle pause, it’s very possible I didn’t notice the pause when holding - perhaps extend the pause when holding a potion to use as well? Idk, all these things are so subjective and subtle changes can make a big impact.

Great work so far. Thank you for sharing

Developer

Yes same thought wrt the potion-holding : ) also I should really add a time-slows-down and time-speeds-up sound effect in there!

Cheers!

Developer

Added sound indicators to time freeze, this should be much clearer, no?

https://x.com/_naam/status/1831052085212959021