Lovely game. I have 2 little problems that I'll share.
I find the lack of inertia when stopping movement a bit abrupt. Since it's parkour I'm thinking I need to go fast and smooth, but as soon as I let off a movement key, my character stops. I wish there was a bit of end momentum so I can change directions more smoothly. Maybe it's less present on a controller.
And then, I find the jumps to have too much inertia compared to what is used while on ground. The amplitude of air control seems fine, but the early part of the air jump looks too sensible to me after what ground level anchored in muscle memory. I would not be against a slower early curve of the air control sensitivity before reaching full air control speed.
Oh and I'm thinking, playing with noise around, but I'm not sure I heard a sound when climbing ledges. Is there any visual or sound feedback? Maybe I missed it, but would be cool to have some sound and a subtle "naruto speed/deja vu drift" effect around the screen.
Thanks for the kind words, I appreciate you playing the demo! Lot of good feedback here; we've actually added a *wee* slide when the player stops; hopefully this adds a little weight to the movement.
Will be taking a closer look at the air control during those jumps, getting the movement right is a priority. As for the climb there is a sound effect but there's a good chance it's getting drowned out, so I'll try to squeeze in a sound pass when I can. Thanks a million for giving it a try tell your friends and keep an eye peeled, should be some exciting stuff on the way!
Love the art. Gameplay is fun but it feels a little directionless. I understand you are skirting the line between parkour & shooter but it still feels rough. the red graffiti in particular feels completely useless outside of combat-based challenges. the pink graffiti is unwieldy. green is fun but only in a couple specific contexts.
Your difficulty curve starts way too high and you introduce too much at once. you could literally get away with having your entire first area (which you should engineer from scratch and place before the rooftop area) could have just plain combat or just plain parkour with only 2 or 3 of the graffiti accessible
You might not like to hear this but I think you should do away with the “”“open world, hunt for side quests””” philosophy and move towards menu-based challenge selection with a separate free roam mode. At the very least you need to do more streamlining of the process of repeating the same challenge. for example the grabbing tags challenge kicks you out to free roam mode when you fail. you could instead pause gameplay and prompt the player “try again y/n.
Some of your challenges have multiple trophies where platinum gives 3 records and some just have one all-or-nothing challenge with no better versions. I think it’s pretty easy to step your game up here to give people more. when people set personal records for challenges they want to share them too. you should record user’s best scores and make them easy to tab through and screenshot
nitpicks:
jumping feels great but walking feels really strange. a tad slippery to get up to full speed (fine just not to my taste) but you stop instantly. you should try and bring your acceleration and deceleration math to be more similar.
I immediately noticed the lack of +speed on shift (common for fps games with extreme movement speed to have shift-to-stop-sprinting) though I would only worry about that if you have precise platforming
Add bunnyhopping but never expect the player to use it
some of your symbol usage is just too hard to follow. the X means exit challenge when you are in a challenge, but quit to main menu when you are in hub mode
I want to install this through the Itch launcher, can you check the Windows box next to your windows build in the Edit game section to make it easier to play?
Shows a ton of potential, love the style. So I wrote a ton of notes while playing
Gameplay:
I did a "grab the grafitti" challenge and then a combat challenge as my first two and honestly didn't enjoy either at all, but then I did the "race across different buildings" challenge and liked it quite a bit! (Could have an indicator for what the next building to move to will be, though.) My favorite stuff in the game is definitely traversing larger platforms and not doing any precision stuff. Just bouncing and flying around the "open world" is super fun, but that seemed like the only challenge to lean into that.
The player should probably decelerate some in the air if they're not holding any direction input, the movement can feel a bit finnicky as it is. Conversely, it might feel better to have a bit LESS friction on the ground with no input. I'd pretty much just rip values straight from Quake for this.
I don't like how picking up balls gets rid of the power you have on that hand, I'd expect it to come back when you throw the ball.
The distance to pick up a power from walls also feels a bit short, I never felt confident in doing it while moving, which seems to be the point.
It seems like running up/down slopes has no effect on jumping, which feels like a huge missed opportunity. You could add a lot of depth and fun to the movement by making up-slope jumps convert some of your momentum upward, and down-slope jumps push you faster forward. Like Sonic, or Tribes/Quake/Source games.
Graphics:
I like basically everything about how this game looks quite a bit, except the player's hands.
I'd suggest moving/rotating/scaling them a lot more in the animations. You'd be surprised how much animation you can "fake" by getting good at that, without actually drawing very many frames.
I also think giving more life to the sway/inertia when moving around would look a lot better. I'd describe basically all of the hand animation as "stiff" right now.
FIGHT KNIGHT makes fantastic use of these two things. You maybe shouldn't be AS bouncy and over-animated as those are, but I think that'd be something worth experimenting with.
I hated doing animation until I watched this, check it out if you haven't:
Thanks for giving it a try! Glad you dig the style, me and my buddy are fine tuning a lot of things as we approach another beta build.
We've got some other challenges that will use the full map! Enemies will have full reign over the map instead of being isolated, and a variant of the race course on the way. We are focusing on player upgrades too; so grabbing powers from farther away is already a upgrade we're building in!
I'll take a look at Quake and certainly Tribes (R.I.P) You've got a lot of good feedback here, I appreciate you sharing that animation resource too! Animation is a pain so it's a bit on the backburner while we try to build the rest of the maps and levels. Thanks so much, and great work on V.B.H.S!!
Comments
Lovely game. I have 2 little problems that I'll share.
I find the lack of inertia when stopping movement a bit abrupt. Since it's parkour I'm thinking I need to go fast and smooth, but as soon as I let off a movement key, my character stops. I wish there was a bit of end momentum so I can change directions more smoothly. Maybe it's less present on a controller.
And then, I find the jumps to have too much inertia compared to what is used while on ground. The amplitude of air control seems fine, but the early part of the air jump looks too sensible to me after what ground level anchored in muscle memory. I would not be against a slower early curve of the air control sensitivity before reaching full air control speed.
Oh and I'm thinking, playing with noise around, but I'm not sure I heard a sound when climbing ledges. Is there any visual or sound feedback? Maybe I missed it, but would be cool to have some sound and a subtle "naruto speed/deja vu drift" effect around the screen.
Thanks for the kind words, I appreciate you playing the demo! Lot of good feedback here; we've actually added a *wee* slide when the player stops; hopefully this adds a little weight to the movement.
Will be taking a closer look at the air control during those jumps, getting the movement right is a priority. As for the climb there is a sound effect but there's a good chance it's getting drowned out, so I'll try to squeeze in a sound pass when I can. Thanks a million for giving it a try tell your friends and keep an eye peeled, should be some exciting stuff on the way!
Love the art. Gameplay is fun but it feels a little directionless. I understand you are skirting the line between parkour & shooter but it still feels rough. the red graffiti in particular feels completely useless outside of combat-based challenges. the pink graffiti is unwieldy. green is fun but only in a couple specific contexts.
Your difficulty curve starts way too high and you introduce too much at once. you could literally get away with having your entire first area (which you should engineer from scratch and place before the rooftop area) could have just plain combat or just plain parkour with only 2 or 3 of the graffiti accessible
You might not like to hear this but I think you should do away with the “”“open world, hunt for side quests””” philosophy and move towards menu-based challenge selection with a separate free roam mode. At the very least you need to do more streamlining of the process of repeating the same challenge. for example the grabbing tags challenge kicks you out to free roam mode when you fail. you could instead pause gameplay and prompt the player “try again y/n.
Some of your challenges have multiple trophies where platinum gives 3 records and some just have one all-or-nothing challenge with no better versions. I think it’s pretty easy to step your game up here to give people more. when people set personal records for challenges they want to share them too. you should record user’s best scores and make them easy to tab through and screenshot
nitpicks:
jumping feels great but walking feels really strange. a tad slippery to get up to full speed (fine just not to my taste) but you stop instantly. you should try and bring your acceleration and deceleration math to be more similar.
I immediately noticed the lack of +speed on shift (common for fps games with extreme movement speed to have shift-to-stop-sprinting) though I would only worry about that if you have precise platforming
Add bunnyhopping but never expect the player to use it
some of your symbol usage is just too hard to follow. the X means exit challenge when you are in a challenge, but quit to main menu when you are in hub mode
I want to install this through the Itch launcher, can you check the Windows box next to your windows build in the Edit game section to make it easier to play?
Done, I'm an airhead and totally forgot to do that.!
Shows a ton of potential, love the style. So I wrote a ton of notes while playing
Gameplay:
I did a "grab the grafitti" challenge and then a combat challenge as my first two and honestly didn't enjoy either at all, but then I did the "race across different buildings" challenge and liked it quite a bit! (Could have an indicator for what the next building to move to will be, though.) My favorite stuff in the game is definitely traversing larger platforms and not doing any precision stuff. Just bouncing and flying around the "open world" is super fun, but that seemed like the only challenge to lean into that.
The player should probably decelerate some in the air if they're not holding any direction input, the movement can feel a bit finnicky as it is. Conversely, it might feel better to have a bit LESS friction on the ground with no input. I'd pretty much just rip values straight from Quake for this.
I don't like how picking up balls gets rid of the power you have on that hand, I'd expect it to come back when you throw the ball.
The distance to pick up a power from walls also feels a bit short, I never felt confident in doing it while moving, which seems to be the point.
It seems like running up/down slopes has no effect on jumping, which feels like a huge missed opportunity. You could add a lot of depth and fun to the movement by making up-slope jumps convert some of your momentum upward, and down-slope jumps push you faster forward. Like Sonic, or Tribes/Quake/Source games.
Graphics:
I like basically everything about how this game looks quite a bit, except the player's hands.
I'd suggest moving/rotating/scaling them a lot more in the animations. You'd be surprised how much animation you can "fake" by getting good at that, without actually drawing very many frames.
I also think giving more life to the sway/inertia when moving around would look a lot better. I'd describe basically all of the hand animation as "stiff" right now.
FIGHT KNIGHT makes fantastic use of these two things. You maybe shouldn't be AS bouncy and over-animated as those are, but I think that'd be something worth experimenting with.
I hated doing animation until I watched this, check it out if you haven't:
Thanks for giving it a try! Glad you dig the style, me and my buddy are fine tuning a lot of things as we approach another beta build.
We've got some other challenges that will use the full map! Enemies will have full reign over the map instead of being isolated, and a variant of the race course on the way. We are focusing on player upgrades too; so grabbing powers from farther away is already a upgrade we're building in!
I'll take a look at Quake and certainly Tribes (R.I.P) You've got a lot of good feedback here, I appreciate you sharing that animation resource too! Animation is a pain so it's a bit on the backburner while we try to build the rest of the maps and levels. Thanks so much, and great work on V.B.H.S!!