I think mainly you speed up when descending and slow down if you turn too hard, but the max speed is set a little low currently (relative to acceleration) so it obscures things a bit. Dunno about the UI stuff though, I'm freeing the main menu scene when I switch (except for when I show the manual page) so I'm not sure how that would happen. What button were you able to press?
Thanks for trying out the mac version, sorry to hear that it didn't seem to work properly. I feel like it could still just be an issue with the game since didn't find anything searching for related bugs in Godot, but right now I can't really verify it. Going forward I will have to get some way to test the OSX builds to support it.
This was a really fun concept that it is executed very cleanly! Drawing the triangle glyph was very satisfying to release the missles upon the enemies. The core concept is awesome and you should do a lot of playtesting to really hone-in and what is fun, but there's something good here :). Keep it up!
Other comments:
- The tutorial text shouldn't be in the background, i would move too fast to read it
- I didn't understand the time dodging aspect. I followed the instructions in the tutorial and time didn't slow down.
- Furthermore, I didn't really figure out how to properly dodge enemies.
- Make proper health bars for the UI, make the UI more intuitive. This video helped me out a lot: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sc3h5JXtIzw
- Scrolling is very smooth and helpful. Scroll out to see glyph design, scroll in to be more exact. Nice
- There should be smaller glyphs I should draw when enemies are attacking your base. A small loop to fire off 2-5 missles would be helpful, and the large triangle glyph for big missle attacks to keep enemies far away. You need a variety of both. I didn't have any good defense mechanism against my base when enemies would start attacking, it took too long to draw the triangle.
- The snail lore made me chuckle and helps outline what this game is about!
I agree that I need some quicker attacks to clean up smaller groups of enemies. I was thinking to add a weak non-spell gun to the plane, but haven't thought through whether it would be better to have a quicker spell instead (or maybe have the power of glyphs scale with size in some way). Don't know if you tried, but currently it's possible to cast glyphs faster by drawing it smaller (there are controls for adjusting the size of the guide, though when it gets too small it's easier to not use the guide since it's easier to adjust for mistakes).
What did you try for the time slow? In the tutorial I forgot to mention that you need to hold the input, so maybe that was the issue. Dodging is currently kind of hard without time slow, other than very coarse dodging to avoid most of the shots. Releasing your drifts when you're about to be hit can help by making the enemies overshoot.
The other points are fairly straightforward so I don't have much to comment on them. Thanks for the detailed feedback!
Ah I didn't realize that you could dynamically scale glyphs with size. And I would use Shift or whatever to active the time slowdown, but I either only notice it for 1 second, or I don't notice it at all.
If I can be frank, I think there are too many mechanisms at play. "snail based" flying and glyph drawing is a novel idea and it can become something really cool, you have the basics of it down. But IMO you should remove everything else. No dodging of enemies, no time slow downs. Just a plane trying to protect the base, which they do by glyph drawing. I would automatically accept any size glyph without the need to manually downscale (larger glyphs make more missles, smaller make less, etc. But accept any size). Different glyphs can make different attacks.
I would watch someone play your game live, and follow what seems intuitive to them. My game got ripped to shreds by trying to add in too many mechanics instead of focusing on the core mechanic. I think that feedback is right for my game, and right for this game.
I hope I wasn't too harsh, I really did enjoy this game. Best of luck :)
I hadn't thought about paring away the dodging aspect so I'll need to think a bit more on that one. It's mainly there to add some spatial constraints so that it matters that you have to draw the glyphs instead of some other casting method, but it's true that it doesn't really mesh well in its current state. I still want to make it work, but I'll consider leaving it out if I can't.
Part of the reason I submit is the streaming, so I'm looking forward to seeing some live feedback there. I guess I should look for people who I can watch play it more regularly.
Drawing symbols for magic attacks is a cool idea. At first it was pretty frustrating trying to get it to work, but I think I started to get a feel for it with a bit of time. Pulling of a symbol without the guide to help felt quite satisfying! I was pretty bad at Defence Mode tbh, felt like the height limit was too low relative to how large the symbol had to be, but maybe I just need to get gud.
Cant wait to see what the game become as you flesh this idea out!
I'm not sure if I made it clear enough in the game, but you can draw the symbols at any size and they will have basically the same effect (there are controls to change the guide size, but when it gets too small it's easier to do it without). Might still be good to raise the ceiling though, since defending the base I think accomplishes the ceiling's original purpose of keeping the player from running too far from the enemies.
Notes:
- Story is awesome. It hits a great balance of cool/weird/silly. Time Snails are an excellent MacGuffin.
- Ok, so the feel of the player movement is excellent. It is just fundamentally satisfying the way you can move, drift, and change direction. However, the control scheme obscures that, badly. I strongly recommend you rethink the control scheme. My suggestion: 1. M1 should be your acceleration, not W. The ship is following your mouse, so it is very intuitive to have the mouse button control acceleration. 2. You should always be drawing a trail, you shouldn't need to hit a button for that. 3. Space to drift is fine.
- I'm not convinced of the glyph drawing. I hate to say that because I can see you put a lot of effort into it. But when I try and draw glyphs, it just feels frustrating. Which is a big contrast the the great feeling of the movement. I remember Jon Blow tried to make something similar, but eventually abandoned the idea for various reasons. And his was just with the mouse, you didn't even have to fly around.
- Drawing symbols is something we are so practiced at. Forcing players to do it clumsily just doesn't feel great. This feels like a great core mechanic (the movement) in search of a game.
- Take this all with a grain of salt. It's completely possible, even likely, that the graces of the system were lost on me, and won't be lost on others. If you have a vision for how this will work and you believe in it, keep going.
On the movement points
1. I just pushed an update like AutomonDev suggested where throttle is controlled by how far your mouse is from the ship; let me know how it feels if you get the chance to try it.
2. Having a continuous trail sounds like a good idea, if I can automate figuring out the start and end of a shape. I don't know how to do that yet so it's currently an implementation limitation. I'll note to look into it when I'm trying to improve the glyph recognition in general
My motivation was literally to find a game these mechanics work in, so you're right about that. I think what's really needed for it to work is some deeper interplay between how you try to draw symbols and other parts of the game like dodging, enemy attack behaviors, etc., but the current demo doesn't really achieve this. I'm not really convinced that drawing this way has to be clumsy though, since I was able to get used to it after a while - maybe it needs a better onboarding process from when people start out to where they feel comfortable with it.
I like the idea of attacking by drawing shapes, but the controls are a bit unwieldy. I keep forgetting that I need to hold W to keep going, maybe drawing should let you maintain your speed? I didn't understand the time shift thing at all, didn't notice any change when pressing RMB. Hitting the ground was devastating, it costs a few seconds while enemies are ramming bullets into you. It really sucks when the game doesn't register a big shape too.
Consider trying mouse controls where the ship follows your mouse and the further it is, the faster it goes. Maybe add a button to slow down instead of speed up because from what I could tell, you pretty much want to always move?
I can imagine this game being really fun in the future with some refinements
Thanks for the feedback - I really like the suggestion for mouse-based throttling since I wasn't sure how to give more fine-grained speed control with the current control scheme. It didn't occur to me to have moving as the default either.
The shape thing does need some work, I've been trying to tweak it but it gets kind of biased in what is considered a "good" shape and I had trouble making it more lenient without it accepting shapes too readily. Short-term I can probably adjust the thresholds for the more complex symbols, but I think I will need to look more into the handwriting recognition literature. I've also experienced the pain points of losing momentum, so I will have to figure something out there too.
Time shifting requires that you have some time meter (indicated by the spinning shell) which you get by destroying enemies, and it gets stronger the more you have stored. As a visual indicator there should be kind of a fog that appears when you use it that scales with the strength of the slowing.
Hopefully I can address some points before the submission period ends
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