The biggest update is the fact that it's November. But aside from that, there's a lot to cover here, so prepare your bones for an even larger text wall than usual.
First off, you gotta give your music people a raise, cos the new tracks for the sewer and the battle tower are a solid 12/10 at least.
...Which unfortunately segways nicely into the bug reports, cos the music is doing some weird stuff with the secret passageways. It fades out in seemingly random secret/layered areas, like inside the pipes in the sewer, inside the big tunnel of water, or if you try and get the chest in the room shown below. That last one in particular is a problem since it muted the music for the entire room, and I had to leave to get it back.
Another small problem with the music is that the battle tower music seems much louder than the music in the overworld.
A final small music nitpick here, but playing the default area music during the new cutscene at the apple boss was a little odd to me, it feels like something that deserves a custom theme.
Let's get back to bugs, cos they seem to have latched onto this update in particular. For starters, the chest in the room pictured above where the music broke doesn't let you open it.
Poor little Melvin the mushroom man now freezes the game if you try to talk to him, fortunately it's not a softlock since you can open the menu and quit.
Unfortunately, the softlocks don't end there. Apparently jumping from the small tree into the spot pictured below softlocks you fully. While the game still animates and runs, you can't open the menu, thus forcing me to alt-f4.
Look at them floating there. So peaceful.
That's everything I found in the old areas, since I didn't spend too much time running around them. However the sewer is a veritable fountain (haha) of traps, as the layering feature sometimes allows you to clip into walls. I've attached pictures of the ones I got stuck in, but there's probably many more.
This one happens basically automatically, just by swimming to the room's exit.
This one occurs via a 3-step program: Step 1 is to get into the water in the part where it switches to the layer with the big tank of water. Step 2 is casually jumping onto the outside of the wall that makes up the tank while still in that layer because that makes sense. Step 3 is to walljump so that the layer switches back and you get stuck in the wall.
And the sewer shennanigans continue. Some of the graphics layering can get a little funky, in particular, the water in some of the rooms renders on top of the soldier instead of behind. Shown below is just one example, but there's a bunch of them scattered around.
There's me peeking out from behind the water. :)
This also made me realise that this game has few if any foreground elements, depending on the amount of work you want to commit to, you might wanna consider adding some in here and there to really spice up your graphics. Examples would be small stuff like plants, flowers, mushrooms, etc, or big stuff like columns, vines, or pipes. Personally I think some foreground leaves or branches in the tree level would add a lot to its appeal, especially in the apple boss room.
Since we're talking about design, another opinion™ of mine is that you might want to make pipes that you can enter look different from pipes that you can't, or alternatively make sure that the only open-ended pipes in the level are pipes that you can also enter. This avoids the Mario Bros. effect of checking every single pipe in the game for secrets, which is especially a problem in metroidvanias where secrets are everywhere.
Something you definitely want to change about the pipes is to fill in the gaps around the edge with black pixels, since for the pipes that don't go to a new layer, you can see the soldier's little feets poking out of the side when you climb up them.
That's enough for the sewer, but the update simply doesn't stop, so let's check out the battle tower now. Thankfully, no issues with graphics or softlocks here, but something that did annoy me was the new stun mechanic. It feels like you get stunned for an unreasonably long amount of time now, especially if you hit the ground and bounce off. If you get hit once by the hellgoat, you get barely any time to jump out of the way before you're instantly stunned again, and I could easily see this leading to a stunlock-to-death if you get stuck between two frogs somehow. If it was up to me I'd just replace stun with something else, like only getting launched a massive distance, and maybe even regaining control in the air, since stun mechanics just aren't that fun. (see Dark Souls.) At the very least you should consider decreasing stun times, or letting you tech off the floor, or both.
Speaking of stun, the ultra-goblin on the last floor is probably a really interesting fight, but I didn't bother to find out, since it still dies instantly to the classic hit them up in the air and get infinite stun trick. This isn't ideal for a boss monster, as we've seen previously. Maybe let them jump away if they're in the air, since they seem pretty agile?
Something you might want to consider, especially if you're making the battle tower have 100+ floors, is mixing up the arenas from time to time. Hollow Knight's collosseum of fools is a really good example of this, it keeps the fights interesting and lets you as a level designer play to the enemy's strengths. It also lets you force the player to switch up tactics, which has been a consistent major weakness of this combat system.
The battle tower is a really good place to find other hitches with the combat system as well. Something I was getting supremely annoyed with was the launch you get if you slide into a wall. It's not useful at all in the normal game, since if you have ground to slide on, you just jump off of it instead, and in the battle tower it meant I would slide to stun enemies, and then not be able to do anything with that stun since I was busy flying uncontrollably through the air.
All that being said, I'm a big fan of the battle tower, even in its current alpha state. Unlike the rest of the game, it actually encourages you to try and not get hit, which is already helping to overcome some of the combat system's shortcomings. You have to get a little more creative than just running headfirst into an enemy and stunlocking them to death.
As a final idea for you, I think part of the reward for beating the battle tower should be the opportunity to jump off of the top of it, and fall all the way back down. It's basically a constant that in games with tall stuff, people have fun jumping off of the tall stuff.
There might be some other stuff I forgot about cos this update is just a little bit massive, but there's already plenty of stuff in my text wall. Hope you had a nice halloween! (:
Awesome awesome awesome! Thank you so much for diving in! I surprised you covered so much ground so quickly! I'll try to patch some fixes for the the weirdnesses after I take care of a bunch of errands <3
The bees were a real high point of this build, I can see the love that went into their writing. Big fan of Melvin as well, hopefully he'll get some cool unique spritework in the future? >.>
As with any new build, there's new bugs, and I'm proud to present what might be the easiest bug to fix that you'll ever get: the sound that plays when you pick up items/open chests appears to be tied to the music slider instead of SFX.
Unfortunately there's also a pretty confusing one, which is that every so often, the dialogue decides to look like this:
I'm pretty sure this was happening in the last build as well, but it only happened once, and it was so quick I thought I had just imagined it. I have no idea how to reproduce this one, I just got lucky and it happened for an npc where I was actually paying attention to what they were saying. I think maybe it happens when you skip through dialogue too fast?
(Honestly I find this bug hilarious I think having an npc that exclusively talks like this would be extremely funny.)
Something I just noticed this build is that you can basically stand on thin air in this room:
Since this is technically an exit to the room you might just wanna put a platform or something so it doesn't look weird.
You can platform-fall down into the well and clip through some of the textures. I assume this is because there's some planned "going into the well" features, but I figured I might as well add it to the list just in case.
I had a couple minor gripes with the inputs required for doors and shops. For the doors, I'm used to pressing up to enter, since basically every game uses that convention, so it was a little off-putting to press jump. Also, what happens if I want to jump and I'm standing in front of a door? I can't really think of any situations where I would be pressing up and not want to go in the door, I guess that's why so many games do it that way.
As for the shop dialogue, something that might improve the shop UI experience is making the yes/no option to buy something appear right after the shopkeeper is done saying "do you really want to buy this?" instead of making you advance the dialogue first. The reason for this would be that A. it requires less button pressing, and B. I originally thought that advancing the dialogue was equivalent to saying yes since there wasn't an obvious yes/no, and was a little confused why the question was being asked. As well as this, letting you advance/skip through dialogue with B as well as A would be nice, since it allows you to mash through the "did you want to buy this" screen if you accidently clicked something you didn't want, as opposed to having to worry about accidently pressing A too many times and buying the thing. It also means you can keep mashing B to exit the shop, as opposed to pressing B once and then mashing A to skip the goodbye message.
As always, don't feel like you have to make any of these changes, this is just one random person's opinion after all.
That's it for today, but make sure to always remember the wise words of the bee: "AnumbERof fo OLn arayinue, tOrS WhollbeE wli evEdtnA tplaWNma Were ANt Pandprea aY s praYerOnE PcOutdar." (:
Awesome awesome awesome, ty ty ty. I am very glad that someone was able to repro the really-weird text as well. i thought i had fixed that at one point, but apparently the issue still persists. probably some funky race-condition from heck. And while i have yet to fix all the issues you presented on ur previous post - they are def being worked on. I look forward to writing a technical post about why text is sometimes DUMB, because i've been hunting that one one-and-off for years.
Your demo appears to be caught in a time loop of perpetual July, might wanna look into that. ;)
On a more serious note, I'm a big fan of the new aerial combat, it feels so much more dynamic than the previous build. Unfortunately you might want to take another look at the part where you allow infinite aerial attacks, since the tree boss can now be killed by just hovering next to his weak spot and constantly pressing the stab button. Maybe stop having attacks bounce you up after the first full combo of three?
Due to both not having played the game in a while, and the new combat system, I managed to get a semblance of the new player experience, which pretty much boils down to: You press the stab button and weird new moves happens sometimes. The controls feel a little bit like they're meant for a fighting game now, rather than a metroidvania, which isn't inherently a bad thing, but it does mean that I pretty much have to look at the build notes to figure out how to do stuff consistently, it doesn't really happen naturally. A notable exception to this is the "Soaring Typhoon," which, due to the simplicity of its inputs, and amount of time I spend in the air, is really easy to figure out how to do. It's also a pretty cool movement tech, you might be able to hide a cheeky secret that forces you to use the typhoon to reach it.
The biggest offenders for moves I would never have figured out without the patch notes are "Vaulting Stab," since nothing else uses diagonal inputs, "Polespin," since no other combo uses the kick button, and "Parry," since I just chalked up the weird noise/animation to be end-lag that got put in so you don't immediately stab out of blocking. I think the other moves could probably be figured out given the timeframe of an entire 10-hour or so game, just not in this demo.
The new combat system has also highlighted an interesting feature of the trident gremlins, which is that if you sit just out of their range, they're perfectly happy to just sit in front of you and whiff stabs over and over. I discovered this while trying to figure out how parrying works. Maybe it'll get changed when the more aggresive enemies come out?
There's unfortunately a couple more new bugs. The first one is that if you die or quit to main menu, the last checkpoint you sat at will be gone when you respawn. Maybe this is a new mechanic idk, but it doesn't seem intentional to me.
The second bug is that if a bomb-plant dodges back and then immediately shoots bombs, it won't be affected by gravity until the bomb launching animation finishes. This also could be intentional, but it really doesn't seem that way.
The standing kick takes energy to use now, pretty sure this one is a bug, especially since none of the other kicks do, and it's not mentioned in the build notes.
I've been noticing that I don't really have to think for any of the bosses except the tree, (as long as I don't just hover with its weak spot like I mentioned earlier,) and I think it's partially just because I know how to play the game, but also because you get enough health that you can pretty much face-tank all of the other bosses, since they die pretty quickly. If you're not trying to make a super challenging game, this is totally fine, but if you do want the player to struggle a little bit on the bosses, I'd suggest giving them more health and/or making them do more damage and/or giving the player less health.
On a final note, the new down-stab moves immediately made me think of a cool cinematic moment you could do where you've got a massive boss that you can walk around on, kinda like Shadow of The Colossus, and to finish the fight you have to do a Downstab/Falling stab directly into a weak spot. Just gonna throw that idea out there for if you think it sounds cool. :)
Lookin forward to the new more aggressive enemies, hopefully sometime soon we'll get something other than gremlins to parry.
Awesome awesome, as always ty so much for the feedback <3
"On a more serious note, I'm a big fan of the new aerial combat, it feels so much more dynamic than the previous build."
:D
"Maybe stop having attacks bounce you up after the first full combo of three?"
I could introduce a bunch of endlag to the 3rd aerial hit to offset that. OR i could taper the aerial-bounce the more attacks a player does in the air...
"The controls feel a little bit like they're meant for a fighting game now, rather than a metroidvania, which isn't inherently a bad thing, but it does mean that I pretty much have to look at the build notes to figure out how to do stuff consistently, it doesn't really happen naturally... I think the other moves could probably be figured out given the timeframe of an entire 10-hour or so game, just not in this demo."
I think what i'll probably do for the final game is make a lot of these moves upgrades they get throughout the game so they're a bit easier to take-in over the course of the game.
"if you sit just out of their range, they're perfectly happy to just sit in front of you and whiff stabs over and over"
Arg, i worried bugs like this might show up. I should write a utility function that calculates the correct attack trigger range, given an attack asset *takes notes*
"The first one is that if you die or quit to main menu, the last checkpoint you sat at will be gone when you respawn"
the main-menu quit to lose progress is intentional, the die and lose checkpoint progress is not. i'll give that a lil fixie...
"The second bug is that if a bomb-plant dodges back and then immediately shoots bombs, it won't be affected by gravity until the bomb launching animation finishes."
I've seen this occasionally, but have trouble catching it. I should try to get a consistent repro for this so i can get to the bottom of it P:
"The standing kick takes energy to use now, pretty sure this one is a bug, especially since none of the other kicks do"
this was intended by design, but it is inconsistent with the drop-kick attack.
"If you're not trying to make a super challenging game, this is totally fine, but if you do want the player to struggle a little bit on the bosses, I'd suggest giving them more health and/or making them do more damage and/or giving the player less health."
It is true that the demo isn't designed to be too hard, but I could probably stand to buff their attacks a bit.
" Lookin forward to the new more aggressive enemies, hopefully sometime soon we'll get something other than gremlins to parry."
Don't you worry, I've got plenty of funky, aggro jerks in the works that'll make u tear ur hair out :]
Let's start with the bugs, cause unfortunately there's a couple. After the floating magician shennanigans from last time, I made sure to try and knock them in the pit this build, only to discover that they are now unkillable. After you deal what I presume is the amount of damage it would take to knock them off their broom, they just stop taking damage. If this is just due to a bug, sure, whatever, but if you're trying to pull an immense brain move where they're the same magician you fight later, and you're not supposed to kill them in that room, I'd suggest having them fly offscreen once you deal enough damage, so it's obvious that you beat them, but *they'll be back ooOOoo.*
As well as this, the apple(?) boss at the top of the tree has sort of the same problem that the tree boss used to, if you kill them while their fireballs are onscreen, the fireballs will stick around during the cutscene, and be able to damage the player as soon as it ends. While it would be a lot harder to take a cheap death here, the possibility remains, and almost happened to me.
Now for the new stuff, all of which I love. In particular, the ogre and tree minibosses are now fun and interesting, as opposed to being a minor annoyance. If you want to emphasize throws you might have to tweak them some more, but for now I think you've hit the sweet spot. Something that did happen with the ogre was that on my second run through it seemed like he only did the shoulder charge. Since both his attacks cover pretty much the same area you might want to add an attack weighting system or something to ensure that he varies his attacks a little more.
I noticed the ceiling got raised in the boulderman tunnel, big fan of that change. Also that the ground slam attack doesn't teleport up walls now, which is nice.
Making the trident gremlins shake is a real clever solution to the problems I was having last build, although it can still be a little hard to see them through my attack animations. However, since they're a really minor enemy I doubt that my inability to see is a big enough deal to merit more effort.
Inputs don't feel sketchy anymore, which is great. In particular, with the buffering I've never missed a wall jump in this build, which means climbing the tree is no longer annoying. The EX moves also don't feel like random chance. I'll probably give more in-depth feedback on them once the energy bar UI gets figured out, since it's gonna take a little while to get used to them in my gameplay, but I did a little running around with them and they felt pretty good to pull off in combat. I gave the kicks a little bit of love as well, and they feel a lot better to use since the last time I tried them, which, admittedly, was like 4 builds ago. I've been particularly enjoying kicking bombs back at the monkeys.
There's an options menu now, which is neat. I like that you put the music volume a little below full by default, a lot of software I use starts out at full volume and is still too quiet. While the sound volume you've got right now is fine on all fronts, I do think you should give the same ability to make SFX and Master louder than default, just in case someone like me who's picky about audio might want to.
Really looking forward to the full game, that cat looks almost too cute to stab!
Awesome awesome awesome, ty so much for testing the waters. im glad the buffering changes are to your liking and im super glad the game is feeling much more consistent :)
[also since i'll probably keep polishing this demo up, i should look into maybe renaming the game page.... ( '3')]
They'll just sort of walk around at the bottom of the screen if they fall down there. This doesn't seem like intended behavior.
Alt-tabbing directly after killing the tree miniboss, (and presumably after other bosses,) causes the block destruction noise to continuously play until you refocus the window. You might want to consider muting all sounds while the window isn't in focus, if possible.
It's taken me this long to realize that there's a boss at the top of the tree, which probably explains why I didn't think fastfall was doing anything last time. (oops.) While I appreciate the fact that you can't attack them from the front, they still have a very easy strat where you hit them from the top, since none of their attacks seem to cover that area. This has caused their rolling attack to become my favorite since while it doesn't totally prevent hits from the top, it does make them much riskier.
The bouldermen are now very enjoyable to fight, although I have a couple complaints. First off, the slam attack that makes the ground ripple isn't stopped by walls, which feels a little weird. When I fought the boulderman in the big open room I was expecting the very tall ledge on the right to be safe from the slam attack since that's how walls usually work. Secondly, the spin attack's animation comes out too fast to react too, especially when you're dealing with the end-lag from a sword swipe, and doesn't do anything significantly different from the roll attack. A potential idea for this might be to keep the spin attack's short wind-up, but to only have it slide the boulderman in one direction for a little bit before stopping, instead of locking on to the player, since right now even if you react in time, the lock-on instantly snaps to wherever you jump. Finally, the rock throwing attack basically never shows up unless you're out of its range, which is a shame since I think it would add a lot of interest to the fight. All that being said, the slam attack is easily my favorite, since the animation makes it very obvious what's about to happen, and it clears anyone doing melee from any side, which almost no other monster can do.
While less infinite-able, the tree miniboss still isn't very interesting, because the strat for them has gone from: "hit them from the front" to "hit them from the top." Their attacks are only interesting if you're far away, and since this is a melee-focused game that doesn't happen very often. I would recommend allowing the bomb-fruit-thing attack to happen more often if the player is directly above them, as it forces the player to retreat for a second, allowing the fireball attack to actually see some use. It's also got a long enough wind-up that even with end-lag from attacking the player will be able to react to it at close range, while still forcing a retreat.
The ogre can still be infinitely stunned by just spamming B next to a wall. Dunno if you actually changed anything about them but that's still a thing.
I like the blocking mechanic for the trident gremlins, but it's sometimes difficult to tell apart the blocking and attacking animations. It also feels a little odd to have the trident blocking at chest level while being unable to hit them with a downwards slash from above. This could potentially be improved with a different blocking animation where the trident is held in front of the area that's being blocked, making it obvious where not to hit.
I've started using the warptag a lot more for bosses, having gotten the hang of it after playing this game for a while, however, I still never use it for the basic enemies, and thus didn't notice any of the warptag reactions mentioned in the patch notes. This is mostly due to the fact that the basic enemies still don't necessitate any warptagging to kill easily.
The "dodging" that the trees and apes do doesn't really feel like it correlates with attacks, since it doesn't always happen. It just ends up seeming like they sometimes jump around randomly when you're near them.
Even at full energy the EX moves remain too inconsistent on a controller for me to attempt to use them in combos. It might be easier on a keyboard, but keyboards are also disgusting and incorrect.
A minor annoyance that I've discovered is trying to jump while in front of signs, which happens somewhat frequently. A suggestion I would have is to make the "read signs" button be something like bumpers/menu since it's very unlikely you'd be using either of those for anything next to a sign. Alternatively, once keybinding becomes a thing, allow people to set a specific button for reading signs.
Something I've been noticing is that everything that uses energy takes some multiple of 4 energy to perform. Would it be better to just give the player 4 energy instead of 16?
On a related note, the energy and health bars are a little too small and out-of-the-way for me to easily read during combat. This is fine for health since it's not super important, but seeing as how energy is needed for both EX moves and warptagging, it would be nice if it was easier to read. (aka larger.)
In summary: keep doing what you did for the bouldermen because they have become like 10x more fun. Also, I've decided to continue filling the comments section instead of replying to older stuff since scrolling through a massive comments thread every update to add feedback sounds annoying.
If you manage to hit the ogre before it can start an attack, a combo as simple as B>B>B will freeze the game. Music and animations will continue to play, but no inputs are registered. On an unrelated note I'm now very good at speedrunning to the ogre room.
Dying and respawning at a checkpoint resets all progress on the map. Unsure if this is intentional or not.
After learning that fast-falling was a thing from the build notes I tried doing it for a bit and didn't notice any significant usable difference from normal falling.
Walljumping feels slightly better, but also feels like it eats my inputs sometimes. I'm pretty sure this is because I'm used to input buffering from games like Celeste rather than being a fault in the new build. In my personal opinion I think input buffering for the walljumps would be a good idea, but I'm also just a random internet person so do whatever feels best to you.
Doing a big lateral walljump in the spot shown below and immediately walljumping off of the wall that you hit causes you to do a really high walljump for some reason. Personally I think this is an excellent mechanic but it still felt like something you might want to know about.
EX moves feel less consistent to pull off. It's debatable whether I've gotten worse at the game or something's actually changed. On the other hand, I'm a big fan of the warptag being usable on any hit of a combo, and it feels easier to do than before.
Now that backflips are consistent my preffered method of travel has become backflipping across the map. Big fan of this change as well.
Hope some of this is helpul! As a side note, since I'm hoping to keep giving feedback for future builds, should I put them as replies to this comment in order to avoid clogging up the comments section?
thank you for informing me about the borked ogre. i'll see if i can repro this on my end. we you able to trigger that freeze consistently?
the map progress reset is a known issue and shouldn't be too hard to fix
the fastfall atm doesn't have too much utiltiy in the demo besides getting down the from the tree a little faster. it's more of a fine-movement tool for more elaborate levels (plus some other novel uses i plan to add in the future)
im still experimenting with different input buffer options. I can also run some experiement on buffering standard and wall jumps, but given its currently functional in the current state, this won't be a big priority.
huh that's super interesting regarding the fast lateral walljump. i'll see if it can repro it and may-or-may-not fix it depending on what designs it can break lol.
ex-moves now take up 8-12 energy to use, do if u dont have the energy, it won't come out. i have also decrease the frame input window for those down to 3-frames last time i checked.
glad the backflips r working well and are fun to execute :)
feel free to put your comments wherever. if you feel better about just replying to this comment, go for it!
And thank you so much as always for your feedback <3 getting folks to regularly test this means a lot and always helps a TON
ok good news - i managed to repro the ogre freeze and the weirdly-high walljump
the weirdly-high walljump was triggered because i forgot to reset the neglect-gravity timer when entering a vanilla wall jump
the ogre-freeze triggers when the ogre is hit without being noticed by the player. the crashes on an AI codepath that assumes an actor target has been assigned (which should be the player), but didn't happen because i mixed up 2 lines of code lul
big surprise - SetTargetToWhoeverHitMe doesn't really work if the buffer that contained by last hit got cleared (thanks to ClearLastHitReceived).
So, those fixes have been addressed locally on my end. And I'll roll-out those fixes on Saturday/Sunday with these fixes plus several other AI tweaks to general enemy behaviour. so that'll be fun to try out ( '3')
I like metroidvanias. I like platformers. I like pixel graphics. Thus, I like this game, and wanted to give some feedback on it so that it hopefully becomes even better.
- Combat: My biggest problem with this game is that there's about 20 different combat mechanics that I could be using, but there's no incentive to do so. Every single enemy in the game can be killed very easily by mashing the sword button and sometimes pressing directions, including the bosses. This is especially noticeable during the minibosses, since by just rushing in at the start and then doing stab>stab>launch repeatedly you can indefinitely stunlock them and never have to deal with a single attack. During my entire playthrough I never used any of the following:
Kicks
EX moves
Sword throw/projectiles
Warp tag during combat
The strat of mashing stab>stab>launch, while easy, is not fun, and will cause many of the people that play this game to miss out on the fun parts of the combat system. I think much of this problem could be solved by rethinking some of your enemy designs. Right now, of the enemies you have, there are: Things That Shoot Projectiles, and Things That Exist To Die, because they can't get an attack in before they get infinitely stunlocked. Some ideas I would suggest are:
Give an enemy a shield that can block attacks, and will force players to come in from a different angle than straight on from the front, which right now is the optimal approach route for every single enemy in the game.
Make the plant enemies, (including the miniboss,) have roots in the ground so you can't launch them. In fact, make it so that if you try to launch them, they counter, forcing you to approach them with a different strategy.
Make an enemy that stays in a protective shell, and then flys out of reach when you hit the shell. This would force you to use the warptag and/or some parkour skills to hit it. You could also cause EX moves to break the shell for added options.
Make certain enemies be able to break out of their stunlock, either by pushing away the player without damaging them to break the combo, or by just not letting them be hitstunned, but lengthening their attack animation so the player has time to react to attacks and get out of the way. A good candidate for the second approach would be the rock golem, as it would make sense that they wouldn't be stunned by a mere sword, but they would also be pretty slow to attack.
Cause kicking to launch certain enemies sideways, and allow launched enemies to deal damage to other enemies. This increases the viability of the kick, and also allows for comedy value.
Building off the previous point, if you allow kicking to launch enemies, you could make certain enemies explode on death, forcing you to kick them away to kill them, but also turning them into a viable weapon in certain scenarios.
Implementing some of these ideas, or some of your own, would help to make the enemies feel like interesting and unique challenges, as opposed to the indistinct cannon fodder they are now. Right now the only differences between enemies, including the minibosses, are the way they attack.
That said, I'm a big fan of the tree boss. It still didn't actually make me use anything except the basic sword combo, but it was certainly memorable.
- Tutorials: The tutorials could probably be handled a bit better. The might just be due to this being a demo and needing to dispense information as quickly as possible, but as a Professional Gamer (tm), I can't read, and thus found the signs trying to teach me how to do stuff extremely tedious. Here's some ways I think these tutorials could be improved.
-- Movement: Most people who play metroidvanias, and in particular indie metroidvanias, already know how to run and jump in a video game. If you really want you could have a prompt come up to press the WASD keys/left stick if the player doesn't move after a while, but in general this one shouldn't need a whole sign to teach. I would suggest having a starting area that forces you to move left/right, jump, and fall through a platform, which covers all of the stuff that the sign was trying to tell you without requiring any reading.
-- Kicks and Stabbing people: My reaction upon seeing the signs for: How To Kick and: How To Sword, was "Ok, I have two options for combat, and one of them has a larger and more useful hitbox." I then proceeded to never learn how the kick works since I was too busy using the sword. I would suggest separating these two tutorials by not giving the player a sword at the start of the game. This will force them to use the kicks for combat, making sure that they know how, and also allow for the cool moment (tm) of finally getting your sword and doing a heroic pose. You could also put some static objects in your levels that exist solely to kick-jump off of, keeping the kick useful while also adding some fun gameplay.
-- EX moves: My suggestion for these would be to have a (block/enemy/something) that can only be hit with an EX move, and a simple prompt that comes up and says something like: "Attack+Kick at the end of a combo -> EX move." Less reading means I can get to the actual gameplay faster, and theoretically the player is going to discover that different directions = different EX moves on their own by nature of using them in their combos.
-- Warptag: As with everything else, force the player to use them at least once and the tutorial pretty much writes itself. I never used the warptag, and never bothered to actually figure out how it worked, until I had to use it on the spider to reach the upper tree area. This, along with barely skimming enough of the tutorial to see what buttons it used, allowed me to figure out how it worked. I would also strongly suggest making the warptag necessary immediately upon pickup, like you do with the walljump. If you tell someone how to do something, and then they don't actually have to do it, it doesn't stick in memory very well.
The wall jump, wall run, and ceiling run tutorials, on the other hand, felt pretty good. It might be because at this point I was used to skipping all the dialogue after learning the buttons to use, but the text didn't feel as overbearing. These tutorials also forced me to use the skill to leave the room, which meant I got some immediate reinforcement on how they worked.
- Nitpicks: This is a list of tiny annoying stuff that happened where I thought: "hmm, I don't like this." Take these with a grain of salt as some of them are very subjective.
Falling down a 1-tile gap next to a spider causes you to get hit by it, despite not visibly touching the spider. This could be pretty easily fixed with level design, by just not having the gap there.
Certain rooms have enemies that spawn right next to the doors. This has the effect of making me perform a quicktime event when I enter that room in order to not get hit, and feels a little unfair.
You can't actually close the game without alt-tabbing and closing the window, unless I'm missing something obvious.
The wall jumping feels very inconsistent, someone mentioned this earlier in the comments when they said that wall sliding doesn't do anything until you get the wall run. My new player experience with this was that sometimes my wall jump was just: different and worse, for no discernable reason. The massive launch that you can sometimes get makes this especially annoying, as I still have no idea how to do it, but sometimes it would just happen, and mess up my jumping.
As cool as the backflip looks, it's A. not consistent on a controller, and B. seemingly useless, except to cause my jumps to miss at random intervals and cause me anger.
Mantling over walls, much like the backflip, feels unecessary, and like it only exists to make the movement less consistent. Part of this is just my bias against mantling in video games, but it's mostly that it doesn't really add anything to the game. If you removed mantling, and did the necessary level design adjustments to compensate, there would be exactly 0 people who would say, "Hmm, this game is good, but it really needs mantling to be perfect."
The tree boss cutscene becomes instantly annoying after the second time listening to it. It might be a good idea to immediately start the fight after the first death instead of running the cutscene every time.
Certain enemies, like the monkey and the trident gremlin, have very erratic movement patterns. The problem is, this doesn't make them any more challenging, this just makes them more annoying to hit.
The window to perform a warptag hit feels unecessary, it might be better if you're just allowed to hold the warptag button instead. The only effect this would have on the game is that instead of sometimes missing a warptag input, I never miss a warptag input.
It's possible to die after killing the tree boss and losing control of your character, by landing in the death spores and having your health eviscerated. This is one death that feels especially cheap, and has happened to me multiple times, even from over half health.
And Finally...
- Things I like:
The art and music is dope. Big fan especially of the music in the cave and the tree bossfight, as well as the art for the tree boss.
The combat system does feel very nice to use, even if I barely used any of it for my first playthrough. Fighting the tree boss was very satisfying.
It's a melee-based metroidvania, and is therefore already a 9/10 game.
Sorry about the massive text wall, but hopefully some of my ramblings are useful to you. I'm looking forward to see how this game develops!
Thank u for the very verbose post! There's a lot of super-useful information here, and most importantly it confirms a LOT of current beliefs about how all this can be improved. Especially ur points about having a very large arsenal of moves and techniques, but not enough incentive to use them. There are some really cool dopes ideas here. And yeah the kick techniques atm feel a bit like an afterthought, but one idea i've been considering (and you've alluded to this as well) is making the kick have more of a launching/space-and-repositioning type of role, while the sword is ur primary damage dealer. Since there aren't that many 2d metroidvanias with large emphasis on detailed melee and movement options, I have to spend a LOT of time experimenting w/ that dicotemy from scratch. It's a novel, flexible set of tools, but rest assured I really wanna polish, justify, and really make worth them worth mastering (hopefully without having to make requirements for a certain technique on a certain enemy feel too contrived, though maybe I'll have to break that rule initial to teach players more effectively)! I already have plans to revamp the stagger/juggle system so it isn't a free combo on say larger enemies (i have a notebook w/ like 20 different ideas on how i wanna approach that, but i think i have a good first candidate to integrate in the coming weeks~).
For now, I'll spend some time this weekend fixing A. the potential to die during a cutscene, B. making the walljump height less finnicky, and C. easier backflippin + backflip midair control. But rest assured, I'm putting all your points and bullets into a handy-dandy .txt TODO list and will use that to continue polishing this demo, and of course the final game. You're love for the genre is very clear - otherwise you wouldn't have written a very thorough post for me.
Thank you SO MUCH for your support :D I look forward to updating the build and polishing the heck out of Warp Soldier.
Hii, I've made a video about the game and wanted to give you some feedback about it, hopefully it is useful for the development :D
-The concept in general si pretty interesting and well executed.
-The gameplay mechanics are really well done and the combat system works really great, it's really fun to fight enemies around the levels. There's only room to improve them by polishing them and making them more solid and easy to get into (simplify the wall jumping, and polishing the flow of the movements in general as sometimes giving the game many inputs made the character get like frozen for a little moment).
-Visually the game looks amazing, but adding some red particles to the mix when you slay enemies and fight them might give it a nice touch.
-The game enemies are quite nice and the bosses interesting to fight.
In conclusion, the idea is great and I hope you keep working on it. Hopefully this is useful for the development :D, also if you could subscribe that would help me a lot :)
If you make it across the broken bridge, you can fall off the right side of the map and end up in a soft lock. You transition to this screen and the player character is nowhere to be found.
Hey there! Tried it out and reached the end of the demo.
A few thoughts (using a gamepad):
-I usually felt that I was disincentivized from warping. Having to press the right bumper and the attack button at the same time, rather than being able to hold the right bumper, made it cumbersome to get charges on enemies. And there usually didn't seem to be an advantage to doing it, other than remaining in the air longer to attack the Tree's weakpoint. Having to pick a direction relative to the enemy to warp, whereupon you seem to lose aerial mobility, also discouraged me from using it.
-Wall-sliding before earning the wall-jump doesn't seem to have a purpose. Initially, I thought it meant that I already had the wall-jump, but when I realized I didn't, it just made descending slower.
-I wasn't able to consistently do the backflip jump. The input might just not work as well on the controller.
-The fast-fall doesn't seem very helpful. I kept trying to aim attacks down, and fell more often than not.
-After a certain point, I found myself ignoring the basic enemies and just rushing through the level design. They didn't seem to be able to stop me, so I might've finished the demo faster than expected.
-Using the sword-throw + down-kick, I was able to make it to the other side of the broken demo bridge :D Not a problem, just a fun detail.
- yeah rn there aren't enough incentives to warping around an enemy - the tree fight is built to encourage that, but i do think it is a mechanic i should and sell to the player more :P
- an interesting point regarding the wall slide. omitting it prior getting wallrun/walljump is something i should definitely consider. or just giving folks the walljump for free. i think i'll hash-out the rest of the mechanics before revisiting how i want to handle this.
- yeah rn there's a 100ms window on doing certain inputs like the backflip (which i'm surprised you found/figured out! that's not explicitly taught or mentioned anywhere lol). I could either make the window more generous OR create an additional animation state , similar to what mario sunshine does for its pre-side-flip input.
- at one point i mapped fast-fall to double-tap down, which would help the latter problem. but yeah the in demo the fastfall is more of a nice-to-have and less something with immediate utility. (i was also thinking of giving it some combat utility by making it launch/flip nearby upside down enemies)
- yeah a LOT of the AI isn't very aggressive atm, esp some of the minibosses which you can mince easily atm. i think in the final game i'll opt for a combo of more obstrucctive/aggressive enemies and more miniboss checkpoints that lock-you-in to encounters
- oh that's quite impressive! i didn't even consider that as an option! i can tell someone's been paying attention to my tweets and mechanics more than i am :P
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oh funky, good catch, i'll try to fix in the next couple days~
okay, i found what was causing the issue. i'll test an updated build tomorrow and make sure no other major issues have regressed
The biggest update is the fact that it's November. But aside from that, there's a lot to cover here, so prepare your bones for an even larger text wall than usual.
First off, you gotta give your music people a raise, cos the new tracks for the sewer and the battle tower are a solid 12/10 at least.
...Which unfortunately segways nicely into the bug reports, cos the music is doing some weird stuff with the secret passageways. It fades out in seemingly random secret/layered areas, like inside the pipes in the sewer, inside the big tunnel of water, or if you try and get the chest in the room shown below. That last one in particular is a problem since it muted the music for the entire room, and I had to leave to get it back.
Another small problem with the music is that the battle tower music seems much louder than the music in the overworld.
A final small music nitpick here, but playing the default area music during the new cutscene at the apple boss was a little odd to me, it feels like something that deserves a custom theme.
Let's get back to bugs, cos they seem to have latched onto this update in particular. For starters, the chest in the room pictured above where the music broke doesn't let you open it.
Poor little Melvin the mushroom man now freezes the game if you try to talk to him, fortunately it's not a softlock since you can open the menu and quit.
Unfortunately, the softlocks don't end there. Apparently jumping from the small tree into the spot pictured below softlocks you fully. While the game still animates and runs, you can't open the menu, thus forcing me to alt-f4.
Look at them floating there. So peaceful.
That's everything I found in the old areas, since I didn't spend too much time running around them. However the sewer is a veritable fountain (haha) of traps, as the layering feature sometimes allows you to clip into walls. I've attached pictures of the ones I got stuck in, but there's probably many more.
This one happens basically automatically, just by swimming to the room's exit.
This one occurs via a 3-step program: Step 1 is to get into the water in the part where it switches to the layer with the big tank of water. Step 2 is casually jumping onto the outside of the wall that makes up the tank while still in that layer because that makes sense. Step 3 is to walljump so that the layer switches back and you get stuck in the wall.
And the sewer shennanigans continue. Some of the graphics layering can get a little funky, in particular, the water in some of the rooms renders on top of the soldier instead of behind. Shown below is just one example, but there's a bunch of them scattered around.
There's me peeking out from behind the water. :)
This also made me realise that this game has few if any foreground elements, depending on the amount of work you want to commit to, you might wanna consider adding some in here and there to really spice up your graphics. Examples would be small stuff like plants, flowers, mushrooms, etc, or big stuff like columns, vines, or pipes. Personally I think some foreground leaves or branches in the tree level would add a lot to its appeal, especially in the apple boss room.
Since we're talking about design, another opinion™ of mine is that you might want to make pipes that you can enter look different from pipes that you can't, or alternatively make sure that the only open-ended pipes in the level are pipes that you can also enter. This avoids the Mario Bros. effect of checking every single pipe in the game for secrets, which is especially a problem in metroidvanias where secrets are everywhere.
Something you definitely want to change about the pipes is to fill in the gaps around the edge with black pixels, since for the pipes that don't go to a new layer, you can see the soldier's little feets poking out of the side when you climb up them.
That's enough for the sewer, but the update simply doesn't stop, so let's check out the battle tower now. Thankfully, no issues with graphics or softlocks here, but something that did annoy me was the new stun mechanic. It feels like you get stunned for an unreasonably long amount of time now, especially if you hit the ground and bounce off. If you get hit once by the hellgoat, you get barely any time to jump out of the way before you're instantly stunned again, and I could easily see this leading to a stunlock-to-death if you get stuck between two frogs somehow. If it was up to me I'd just replace stun with something else, like only getting launched a massive distance, and maybe even regaining control in the air, since stun mechanics just aren't that fun. (see Dark Souls.) At the very least you should consider decreasing stun times, or letting you tech off the floor, or both.
Speaking of stun, the ultra-goblin on the last floor is probably a really interesting fight, but I didn't bother to find out, since it still dies instantly to the classic hit them up in the air and get infinite stun trick. This isn't ideal for a boss monster, as we've seen previously. Maybe let them jump away if they're in the air, since they seem pretty agile?
Something you might want to consider, especially if you're making the battle tower have 100+ floors, is mixing up the arenas from time to time. Hollow Knight's collosseum of fools is a really good example of this, it keeps the fights interesting and lets you as a level designer play to the enemy's strengths. It also lets you force the player to switch up tactics, which has been a consistent major weakness of this combat system.
The battle tower is a really good place to find other hitches with the combat system as well. Something I was getting supremely annoyed with was the launch you get if you slide into a wall. It's not useful at all in the normal game, since if you have ground to slide on, you just jump off of it instead, and in the battle tower it meant I would slide to stun enemies, and then not be able to do anything with that stun since I was busy flying uncontrollably through the air.
All that being said, I'm a big fan of the battle tower, even in its current alpha state. Unlike the rest of the game, it actually encourages you to try and not get hit, which is already helping to overcome some of the combat system's shortcomings. You have to get a little more creative than just running headfirst into an enemy and stunlocking them to death.
As a final idea for you, I think part of the reward for beating the battle tower should be the opportunity to jump off of the top of it, and fall all the way back down. It's basically a constant that in games with tall stuff, people have fun jumping off of the tall stuff.
There might be some other stuff I forgot about cos this update is just a little bit massive, but there's already plenty of stuff in my text wall. Hope you had a nice halloween! (:
Awesome awesome awesome! Thank you so much for diving in! I surprised you covered so much ground so quickly!
I'll try to patch some fixes for the the weirdnesses after I take care of a bunch of errands <3
Soon it'll be July in Christmas...
The bees were a real high point of this build, I can see the love that went into their writing. Big fan of Melvin as well, hopefully he'll get some cool unique spritework in the future? >.>
As with any new build, there's new bugs, and I'm proud to present what might be the easiest bug to fix that you'll ever get: the sound that plays when you pick up items/open chests appears to be tied to the music slider instead of SFX.
Unfortunately there's also a pretty confusing one, which is that every so often, the dialogue decides to look like this:
I'm pretty sure this was happening in the last build as well, but it only happened once, and it was so quick I thought I had just imagined it. I have no idea how to reproduce this one, I just got lucky and it happened for an npc where I was actually paying attention to what they were saying. I think maybe it happens when you skip through dialogue too fast?
(Honestly I find this bug hilarious I think having an npc that exclusively talks like this would be extremely funny.)
Something I just noticed this build is that you can basically stand on thin air in this room:
Since this is technically an exit to the room you might just wanna put a platform or something so it doesn't look weird.
You can platform-fall down into the well and clip through some of the textures. I assume this is because there's some planned "going into the well" features, but I figured I might as well add it to the list just in case.
I had a couple minor gripes with the inputs required for doors and shops. For the doors, I'm used to pressing up to enter, since basically every game uses that convention, so it was a little off-putting to press jump. Also, what happens if I want to jump and I'm standing in front of a door? I can't really think of any situations where I would be pressing up and not want to go in the door, I guess that's why so many games do it that way.
As for the shop dialogue, something that might improve the shop UI experience is making the yes/no option to buy something appear right after the shopkeeper is done saying "do you really want to buy this?" instead of making you advance the dialogue first. The reason for this would be that A. it requires less button pressing, and B. I originally thought that advancing the dialogue was equivalent to saying yes since there wasn't an obvious yes/no, and was a little confused why the question was being asked. As well as this, letting you advance/skip through dialogue with B as well as A would be nice, since it allows you to mash through the "did you want to buy this" screen if you accidently clicked something you didn't want, as opposed to having to worry about accidently pressing A too many times and buying the thing. It also means you can keep mashing B to exit the shop, as opposed to pressing B once and then mashing A to skip the goodbye message.
As always, don't feel like you have to make any of these changes, this is just one random person's opinion after all.
That's it for today, but make sure to always remember the wise words of the bee: "AnumbERof fo OLn arayinue, tOrS WhollbeE wli evEdtnA tplaWNma Were ANt Pandprea aY s praYerOnE PcOutdar." (:
Awesome awesome awesome, ty ty ty. I am very glad that someone was able to repro the really-weird text as well. i thought i had fixed that at one point, but apparently the issue still persists. probably some funky race-condition from heck.
And while i have yet to fix all the issues you presented on ur previous post - they are def being worked on.
I look forward to writing a technical post about why text is sometimes DUMB, because i've been hunting that one one-and-off for years.
Your demo appears to be caught in a time loop of perpetual July, might wanna look into that. ;)
On a more serious note, I'm a big fan of the new aerial combat, it feels so much more dynamic than the previous build. Unfortunately you might want to take another look at the part where you allow infinite aerial attacks, since the tree boss can now be killed by just hovering next to his weak spot and constantly pressing the stab button. Maybe stop having attacks bounce you up after the first full combo of three?
Due to both not having played the game in a while, and the new combat system, I managed to get a semblance of the new player experience, which pretty much boils down to: You press the stab button and weird new moves happens sometimes. The controls feel a little bit like they're meant for a fighting game now, rather than a metroidvania, which isn't inherently a bad thing, but it does mean that I pretty much have to look at the build notes to figure out how to do stuff consistently, it doesn't really happen naturally. A notable exception to this is the "Soaring Typhoon," which, due to the simplicity of its inputs, and amount of time I spend in the air, is really easy to figure out how to do. It's also a pretty cool movement tech, you might be able to hide a cheeky secret that forces you to use the typhoon to reach it.
The biggest offenders for moves I would never have figured out without the patch notes are "Vaulting Stab," since nothing else uses diagonal inputs, "Polespin," since no other combo uses the kick button, and "Parry," since I just chalked up the weird noise/animation to be end-lag that got put in so you don't immediately stab out of blocking. I think the other moves could probably be figured out given the timeframe of an entire 10-hour or so game, just not in this demo.
The new combat system has also highlighted an interesting feature of the trident gremlins, which is that if you sit just out of their range, they're perfectly happy to just sit in front of you and whiff stabs over and over. I discovered this while trying to figure out how parrying works. Maybe it'll get changed when the more aggresive enemies come out?
There's unfortunately a couple more new bugs. The first one is that if you die or quit to main menu, the last checkpoint you sat at will be gone when you respawn. Maybe this is a new mechanic idk, but it doesn't seem intentional to me.
The second bug is that if a bomb-plant dodges back and then immediately shoots bombs, it won't be affected by gravity until the bomb launching animation finishes. This also could be intentional, but it really doesn't seem that way.
The standing kick takes energy to use now, pretty sure this one is a bug, especially since none of the other kicks do, and it's not mentioned in the build notes.
I've been noticing that I don't really have to think for any of the bosses except the tree, (as long as I don't just hover with its weak spot like I mentioned earlier,) and I think it's partially just because I know how to play the game, but also because you get enough health that you can pretty much face-tank all of the other bosses, since they die pretty quickly. If you're not trying to make a super challenging game, this is totally fine, but if you do want the player to struggle a little bit on the bosses, I'd suggest giving them more health and/or making them do more damage and/or giving the player less health.
On a final note, the new down-stab moves immediately made me think of a cool cinematic moment you could do where you've got a massive boss that you can walk around on, kinda like Shadow of The Colossus, and to finish the fight you have to do a Downstab/Falling stab directly into a weak spot. Just gonna throw that idea out there for if you think it sounds cool. :)
Lookin forward to the new more aggressive enemies, hopefully sometime soon we'll get something other than gremlins to parry.
Awesome awesome, as always ty so much for the feedback <3
One whole month of demo!
Let's start with the bugs, cause unfortunately there's a couple. After the floating magician shennanigans from last time, I made sure to try and knock them in the pit this build, only to discover that they are now unkillable. After you deal what I presume is the amount of damage it would take to knock them off their broom, they just stop taking damage. If this is just due to a bug, sure, whatever, but if you're trying to pull an immense brain move where they're the same magician you fight later, and you're not supposed to kill them in that room, I'd suggest having them fly offscreen once you deal enough damage, so it's obvious that you beat them, but *they'll be back ooOOoo.*
As well as this, the apple(?) boss at the top of the tree has sort of the same problem that the tree boss used to, if you kill them while their fireballs are onscreen, the fireballs will stick around during the cutscene, and be able to damage the player as soon as it ends. While it would be a lot harder to take a cheap death here, the possibility remains, and almost happened to me.
Now for the new stuff, all of which I love. In particular, the ogre and tree minibosses are now fun and interesting, as opposed to being a minor annoyance. If you want to emphasize throws you might have to tweak them some more, but for now I think you've hit the sweet spot. Something that did happen with the ogre was that on my second run through it seemed like he only did the shoulder charge. Since both his attacks cover pretty much the same area you might want to add an attack weighting system or something to ensure that he varies his attacks a little more.
I noticed the ceiling got raised in the boulderman tunnel, big fan of that change. Also that the ground slam attack doesn't teleport up walls now, which is nice.
Making the trident gremlins shake is a real clever solution to the problems I was having last build, although it can still be a little hard to see them through my attack animations. However, since they're a really minor enemy I doubt that my inability to see is a big enough deal to merit more effort.
Inputs don't feel sketchy anymore, which is great. In particular, with the buffering I've never missed a wall jump in this build, which means climbing the tree is no longer annoying. The EX moves also don't feel like random chance. I'll probably give more in-depth feedback on them once the energy bar UI gets figured out, since it's gonna take a little while to get used to them in my gameplay, but I did a little running around with them and they felt pretty good to pull off in combat. I gave the kicks a little bit of love as well, and they feel a lot better to use since the last time I tried them, which, admittedly, was like 4 builds ago. I've been particularly enjoying kicking bombs back at the monkeys.
There's an options menu now, which is neat. I like that you put the music volume a little below full by default, a lot of software I use starts out at full volume and is still too quiet. While the sound volume you've got right now is fine on all fronts, I do think you should give the same ability to make SFX and Master louder than default, just in case someone like me who's picky about audio might want to.
Really looking forward to the full game, that cat looks almost too cute to stab!
...almost...
Awesome awesome awesome, ty so much for testing the waters. im glad the buffering changes are to your liking and im super glad the game is feeling much more consistent :)
[also since i'll probably keep polishing this demo up, i should look into maybe renaming the game page.... ( '3')]
New update! \o/
First of all, floating magician:
They'll just sort of walk around at the bottom of the screen if they fall down there. This doesn't seem like intended behavior.
Alt-tabbing directly after killing the tree miniboss, (and presumably after other bosses,) causes the block destruction noise to continuously play until you refocus the window. You might want to consider muting all sounds while the window isn't in focus, if possible.
It's taken me this long to realize that there's a boss at the top of the tree, which probably explains why I didn't think fastfall was doing anything last time. (oops.) While I appreciate the fact that you can't attack them from the front, they still have a very easy strat where you hit them from the top, since none of their attacks seem to cover that area. This has caused their rolling attack to become my favorite since while it doesn't totally prevent hits from the top, it does make them much riskier.
The bouldermen are now very enjoyable to fight, although I have a couple complaints. First off, the slam attack that makes the ground ripple isn't stopped by walls, which feels a little weird. When I fought the boulderman in the big open room I was expecting the very tall ledge on the right to be safe from the slam attack since that's how walls usually work. Secondly, the spin attack's animation comes out too fast to react too, especially when you're dealing with the end-lag from a sword swipe, and doesn't do anything significantly different from the roll attack. A potential idea for this might be to keep the spin attack's short wind-up, but to only have it slide the boulderman in one direction for a little bit before stopping, instead of locking on to the player, since right now even if you react in time, the lock-on instantly snaps to wherever you jump. Finally, the rock throwing attack basically never shows up unless you're out of its range, which is a shame since I think it would add a lot of interest to the fight. All that being said, the slam attack is easily my favorite, since the animation makes it very obvious what's about to happen, and it clears anyone doing melee from any side, which almost no other monster can do.
While less infinite-able, the tree miniboss still isn't very interesting, because the strat for them has gone from: "hit them from the front" to "hit them from the top." Their attacks are only interesting if you're far away, and since this is a melee-focused game that doesn't happen very often. I would recommend allowing the bomb-fruit-thing attack to happen more often if the player is directly above them, as it forces the player to retreat for a second, allowing the fireball attack to actually see some use. It's also got a long enough wind-up that even with end-lag from attacking the player will be able to react to it at close range, while still forcing a retreat.
The ogre can still be infinitely stunned by just spamming B next to a wall. Dunno if you actually changed anything about them but that's still a thing.
I like the blocking mechanic for the trident gremlins, but it's sometimes difficult to tell apart the blocking and attacking animations. It also feels a little odd to have the trident blocking at chest level while being unable to hit them with a downwards slash from above. This could potentially be improved with a different blocking animation where the trident is held in front of the area that's being blocked, making it obvious where not to hit.
I've started using the warptag a lot more for bosses, having gotten the hang of it after playing this game for a while, however, I still never use it for the basic enemies, and thus didn't notice any of the warptag reactions mentioned in the patch notes. This is mostly due to the fact that the basic enemies still don't necessitate any warptagging to kill easily.
The "dodging" that the trees and apes do doesn't really feel like it correlates with attacks, since it doesn't always happen. It just ends up seeming like they sometimes jump around randomly when you're near them.
Even at full energy the EX moves remain too inconsistent on a controller for me to attempt to use them in combos. It might be easier on a keyboard, but keyboards are also disgusting and incorrect.
A minor annoyance that I've discovered is trying to jump while in front of signs, which happens somewhat frequently. A suggestion I would have is to make the "read signs" button be something like bumpers/menu since it's very unlikely you'd be using either of those for anything next to a sign. Alternatively, once keybinding becomes a thing, allow people to set a specific button for reading signs.
Something I've been noticing is that everything that uses energy takes some multiple of 4 energy to perform. Would it be better to just give the player 4 energy instead of 16?
On a related note, the energy and health bars are a little too small and out-of-the-way for me to easily read during combat. This is fine for health since it's not super important, but seeing as how energy is needed for both EX moves and warptagging, it would be nice if it was easier to read. (aka larger.)
In summary: keep doing what you did for the bouldermen because they have become like 10x more fun. Also, I've decided to continue filling the comments section instead of replying to older stuff since scrolling through a massive comments thread every update to add feedback sounds annoying.
Keep up the good work! :)
awesome awesome awesome, lots of stuff for me to work on and fix and improve and stuff. thank you thank you thank you \o/
I'm back :)
I found a bug :(
If you manage to hit the ogre before it can start an attack, a combo as simple as B>B>B will freeze the game. Music and animations will continue to play, but no inputs are registered. On an unrelated note I'm now very good at speedrunning to the ogre room.
Dying and respawning at a checkpoint resets all progress on the map. Unsure if this is intentional or not.
After learning that fast-falling was a thing from the build notes I tried doing it for a bit and didn't notice any significant usable difference from normal falling.
Walljumping feels slightly better, but also feels like it eats my inputs sometimes. I'm pretty sure this is because I'm used to input buffering from games like Celeste rather than being a fault in the new build. In my personal opinion I think input buffering for the walljumps would be a good idea, but I'm also just a random internet person so do whatever feels best to you.
Doing a big lateral walljump in the spot shown below and immediately walljumping off of the wall that you hit causes you to do a really high walljump for some reason. Personally I think this is an excellent mechanic but it still felt like something you might want to know about.
EX moves feel less consistent to pull off. It's debatable whether I've gotten worse at the game or something's actually changed. On the other hand, I'm a big fan of the warptag being usable on any hit of a combo, and it feels easier to do than before.
Now that backflips are consistent my preffered method of travel has become backflipping across the map. Big fan of this change as well.
Hope some of this is helpul! As a side note, since I'm hoping to keep giving feedback for future builds, should I put them as replies to this comment in order to avoid clogging up the comments section?
hi!
And thank you so much as always for your feedback <3 getting folks to regularly test this means a lot and always helps a TON
ok good news - i managed to repro the ogre freeze and the weirdly-high walljump
the weirdly-high walljump was triggered because i forgot to reset the neglect-gravity timer when entering a vanilla wall jump
the ogre-freeze triggers when the ogre is hit without being noticed by the player. the crashes on an AI codepath that assumes an actor target has been assigned (which should be the player), but didn't happen because i mixed up 2 lines of code lul
big surprise - SetTargetToWhoeverHitMe doesn't really work if the buffer that contained by last hit got cleared (thanks to ClearLastHitReceived).
So, those fixes have been addressed locally on my end. And I'll roll-out those fixes on Saturday/Sunday with these fixes plus several other AI tweaks to general enemy behaviour. so that'll be fun to try out ( '3')
Hiya!
I like metroidvanias. I like platformers. I like pixel graphics. Thus, I like this game, and wanted to give some feedback on it so that it hopefully becomes even better.
- Combat:
My biggest problem with this game is that there's about 20 different combat mechanics that I could be using, but there's no incentive to do so. Every single enemy in the game can be killed very easily by mashing the sword button and sometimes pressing directions, including the bosses. This is especially noticeable during the minibosses, since by just rushing in at the start and then doing stab>stab>launch repeatedly you can indefinitely stunlock them and never have to deal with a single attack. During my entire playthrough I never used any of the following:
The strat of mashing stab>stab>launch, while easy, is not fun, and will cause many of the people that play this game to miss out on the fun parts of the combat system. I think much of this problem could be solved by rethinking some of your enemy designs. Right now, of the enemies you have, there are: Things That Shoot Projectiles, and Things That Exist To Die, because they can't get an attack in before they get infinitely stunlocked. Some ideas I would suggest are:
Implementing some of these ideas, or some of your own, would help to make the enemies feel like interesting and unique challenges, as opposed to the indistinct cannon fodder they are now. Right now the only differences between enemies, including the minibosses, are the way they attack.
That said, I'm a big fan of the tree boss. It still didn't actually make me use anything except the basic sword combo, but it was certainly memorable.
- Tutorials:
The tutorials could probably be handled a bit better. The might just be due to this being a demo and needing to dispense information as quickly as possible, but as a Professional Gamer (tm), I can't read, and thus found the signs trying to teach me how to do stuff extremely tedious. Here's some ways I think these tutorials could be improved.
-- Movement:
Most people who play metroidvanias, and in particular indie metroidvanias, already know how to run and jump in a video game. If you really want you could have a prompt come up to press the WASD keys/left stick if the player doesn't move after a while, but in general this one shouldn't need a whole sign to teach. I would suggest having a starting area that forces you to move left/right, jump, and fall through a platform, which covers all of the stuff that the sign was trying to tell you without requiring any reading.
-- Kicks and Stabbing people:
My reaction upon seeing the signs for: How To Kick and: How To Sword, was "Ok, I have two options for combat, and one of them has a larger and more useful hitbox." I then proceeded to never learn how the kick works since I was too busy using the sword. I would suggest separating these two tutorials by not giving the player a sword at the start of the game. This will force them to use the kicks for combat, making sure that they know how, and also allow for the cool moment (tm) of finally getting your sword and doing a heroic pose. You could also put some static objects in your levels that exist solely to kick-jump off of, keeping the kick useful while also adding some fun gameplay.
-- EX moves:
My suggestion for these would be to have a (block/enemy/something) that can only be hit with an EX move, and a simple prompt that comes up and says something like: "Attack+Kick at the end of a combo -> EX move." Less reading means I can get to the actual gameplay faster, and theoretically the player is going to discover that different directions = different EX moves on their own by nature of using them in their combos.
-- Warptag:
As with everything else, force the player to use them at least once and the tutorial pretty much writes itself. I never used the warptag, and never bothered to actually figure out how it worked, until I had to use it on the spider to reach the upper tree area. This, along with barely skimming enough of the tutorial to see what buttons it used, allowed me to figure out how it worked. I would also strongly suggest making the warptag necessary immediately upon pickup, like you do with the walljump. If you tell someone how to do something, and then they don't actually have to do it, it doesn't stick in memory very well.
The wall jump, wall run, and ceiling run tutorials, on the other hand, felt pretty good. It might be because at this point I was used to skipping all the dialogue after learning the buttons to use, but the text didn't feel as overbearing. These tutorials also forced me to use the skill to leave the room, which meant I got some immediate reinforcement on how they worked.
- Nitpicks:
This is a list of tiny annoying stuff that happened where I thought: "hmm, I don't like this." Take these with a grain of salt as some of them are very subjective.
And Finally...
- Things I like:
Sorry about the massive text wall, but hopefully some of my ramblings are useful to you. I'm looking forward to see how this game develops!
:)
Yo!
Thank u for the very verbose post! There's a lot of super-useful information here, and most importantly it confirms a LOT of current beliefs about how all this can be improved. Especially ur points about having a very large arsenal of moves and techniques, but not enough incentive to use them. There are some really cool dopes ideas here. And yeah the kick techniques atm feel a bit like an afterthought, but one idea i've been considering (and you've alluded to this as well) is making the kick have more of a launching/space-and-repositioning type of role, while the sword is ur primary damage dealer. Since there aren't that many 2d metroidvanias with large emphasis on detailed melee and movement options, I have to spend a LOT of time experimenting w/ that dicotemy from scratch. It's a novel, flexible set of tools, but rest assured I really wanna polish, justify, and really make worth them worth mastering (hopefully without having to make requirements for a certain technique on a certain enemy feel too contrived, though maybe I'll have to break that rule initial to teach players more effectively)! I already have plans to revamp the stagger/juggle system so it isn't a free combo on say larger enemies (i have a notebook w/ like 20 different ideas on how i wanna approach that, but i think i have a good first candidate to integrate in the coming weeks~).
For now, I'll spend some time this weekend fixing A. the potential to die during a cutscene, B. making the walljump height less finnicky, and C. easier backflippin + backflip midair control. But rest assured, I'm putting all your points and bullets into a handy-dandy .txt TODO list and will use that to continue polishing this demo, and of course the final game. You're love for the genre is very clear - otherwise you wouldn't have written a very thorough post for me.
Thank you SO MUCH for your support :D I look forward to updating the build and polishing the heck out of Warp Soldier.
- Mr. Thee
Hii, I've made a video about the game and wanted to give you some feedback about it, hopefully it is useful for the development :D
-The concept in general si pretty interesting and well executed.-The gameplay mechanics are really well done and the combat system works really great, it's really fun to fight enemies around the levels. There's only room to improve them by polishing them and making them more solid and easy to get into (simplify the wall jumping, and polishing the flow of the movements in general as sometimes giving the game many inputs made the character get like frozen for a little moment).
-Visually the game looks amazing, but adding some red particles to the mix when you slay enemies and fight them might give it a nice touch.
-The game enemies are quite nice and the bosses interesting to fight.
In conclusion, the idea is great and I hope you keep working on it. Hopefully this is useful for the development :D, also if you could subscribe that would help me a lot :)
Regards
;w; warp soldier... I can finally play a bit of it... :'D
lmao i got u homie, my b
a pretty ez fix, and also interesting result. ty so much for finding this <3
Hey there! Tried it out and reached the end of the demo.
A few thoughts (using a gamepad):
-I usually felt that I was disincentivized from warping. Having to press the right bumper and the attack button at the same time, rather than being able to hold the right bumper, made it cumbersome to get charges on enemies. And there usually didn't seem to be an advantage to doing it, other than remaining in the air longer to attack the Tree's weakpoint. Having to pick a direction relative to the enemy to warp, whereupon you seem to lose aerial mobility, also discouraged me from using it.
-Wall-sliding before earning the wall-jump doesn't seem to have a purpose. Initially, I thought it meant that I already had the wall-jump, but when I realized I didn't, it just made descending slower.
-I wasn't able to consistently do the backflip jump. The input might just not work as well on the controller.
-The fast-fall doesn't seem very helpful. I kept trying to aim attacks down, and fell more often than not.
-After a certain point, I found myself ignoring the basic enemies and just rushing through the level design. They didn't seem to be able to stop me, so I might've finished the demo faster than expected.
-Using the sword-throw + down-kick, I was able to make it to the other side of the broken demo bridge :D Not a problem, just a fun detail.
- yeah rn there aren't enough incentives to warping around an enemy - the tree fight is built to encourage that, but i do think it is a mechanic i should and sell to the player more :P
- an interesting point regarding the wall slide. omitting it prior getting wallrun/walljump is something i should definitely consider. or just giving folks the walljump for free. i think i'll hash-out the rest of the mechanics before revisiting how i want to handle this.
- yeah rn there's a 100ms window on doing certain inputs like the backflip (which i'm surprised you found/figured out! that's not explicitly taught or mentioned anywhere lol). I could either make the window more generous OR create an additional animation state , similar to what mario sunshine does for its pre-side-flip input.
- at one point i mapped fast-fall to double-tap down, which would help the latter problem. but yeah the in demo the fastfall is more of a nice-to-have and less something with immediate utility. (i was also thinking of giving it some combat utility by making it launch/flip nearby upside down enemies)
- yeah a LOT of the AI isn't very aggressive atm, esp some of the minibosses which you can mince easily atm. i think in the final game i'll opt for a combo of more obstrucctive/aggressive enemies and more miniboss checkpoints that lock-you-in to encounters
- oh that's quite impressive! i didn't even consider that as an option! i can tell someone's been paying attention to my tweets and mechanics more than i am :P