This needs work but it's an interesting demo nonetheless. Movement feels good & I like the camera tilt on strafe. Nice to see leg-raising crouch-jumping actually being used. Combat needs attention though. I don't think combat is hard--towards the end I was plowing through enemies I was struggling with at the beginning--I think how to fight properly is not taught well enough. Incorporating mouse movement for attacking is interesting but I don't see the purpose. It seems like a weird layer between wanting to attacking and actually attacking. And it was initially confusing because the your notes in the cell say to just press/hold LMB to attack. Maybe limit it to just regular & charged attacks. I think health bars & damage numbers would help a lot. Especially the latter just to show how much more effective charged attacks are compared to uncharged ones. Towards the start of my playthrough when I was struggling in combat I would just mash attack when I should've been charging it. Finally, I suspect you're using ray/spherecasts to detect if an attack should hit an enemy instead of using attack boxes that mimic the swing & kick--there were a lot of dissatisfying "looks like it should've hit" moments. Other than that combat is enjoyable but getting to the fun is a matter of teaching the player how to fight properly. I'd love to see combat refined--not even adding things necessarily--because it has a lot of potential.
Other than that I don't have a lot of thoughts. Trinkets seem cool, I imagine you can get real creative with them. I appreciated the robust options menu, my only criticism here is that button remapping is finnicky at best. Otherwise it's GREAT. The map is VERY cool & being able to add your own map-markers is great--really gives me D&D vibes. Here's a video of my playthrough (I appended a 2nd part to the end of the first), I hope it helps!
No idea what happened there. It works fine in the editor, and I'm pretty sure it worked in all previous builds.
>I think how to fight properly is not taught well enough.
It'll be explained better once there's an actual tutorial. I probably shouldn't have told players how to block at all at this point, because you can only block enemies with weapons, and blocking isn't very useful against the skeletons due to their range.
>Incorporating mouse movement for attacking is interesting but I don't see the purpose.
Where you hit enemies and with what type of attack matters. Skeletons, for example, take a lot less damage from thrusts than from cuts, and you need to hit the turrets with overhead attacks or your sword will bounce off the metal parts. Overhead attacks also do more damage, but can only be chained into a thrust, whereas left and right attacks can be chained into each other.
>I think health bars & damage numbers would help a lot. Especially the latter just to show how much more effective charged attacks are compared to uncharged ones.
I might add some way to see (very) roughly how much health an enemy has left, but giving the player too much information would go against the intended tone. It's also not really necessary since all enemies should only take a few hits to kill if you're fighting them correctly and it's easy to compare yourself. Also, the amount of layers on the hit marker shows roughly what percentage of your damage went through to show what weapon/type of attack you should use.
>Finally, I suspect you're using ray/spherecasts to detect if an attack should hit an enemy instead of using attack boxes that mimic the swing & kick--there were a lot of dissatisfying "looks like it should've hit" moments.
You can't have locational damage with overlaps. The reason you felt that the kick wasn't working is because it takes two kicks to stagger those enemies unless they're in the middle of an attack. Did you feel the same way with the sword? If so, why/when?
What did you do to clip through the wall at the end? It doesn't really matter since it's just a BSP placeholder, but I can't do it no matter how much I try.
This game hard. I can't even consistently make an attack. Holding and moving doesn't work very well for me. The very first enemy keeps wrecking me. Also, I can't block. What is forward mouse button?
I can't figure out how to get past the gates. I suck at video games I dunno.
Combat to me boiled down to charging an attack, moving in, landing it, and then moving away before the enemy got theirs in. But the only enemy I defeated was the skelly. It felt very fast and twitchy. I see that if I move the sword in different ways it attacks differently, but I don't understand how that is meaningful in gameplay. If that was meaningful and I could feel like I was having a real sword battle, that'd be cool.
>I got stuck after I picked up the mace, the door leading to the crystal is locked and I didn't notice anywhere else to go
You can break the padlocks with the mace. Hopefully that will be a more obvious assumption to make once there's a tutorial level and you have a better idea of what the game expects from you.
I still have to hold LMB and then move the mouse to start an attack which is slow and feels unintuitive.
Just pressing for an attack would already be better.
I don't have a Mouseforward and Mousebackward button aswell, or I don't know what you mean by it, so blocking and cancelling an attack isn't a Thing.
Tried to fight the Guy in the Cell, room is too small to dodge or outmaneuvre, they take too little and deal too much Damage for me to even come close to beating them, not being able to block doesn't help at all there.
Comments
This needs work but it's an interesting demo nonetheless. Movement feels good & I like the camera tilt on strafe. Nice to see leg-raising crouch-jumping actually being used. Combat needs attention though. I don't think combat is hard--towards the end I was plowing through enemies I was struggling with at the beginning--I think how to fight properly is not taught well enough. Incorporating mouse movement for attacking is interesting but I don't see the purpose. It seems like a weird layer between wanting to attacking and actually attacking. And it was initially confusing because the your notes in the cell say to just press/hold LMB to attack. Maybe limit it to just regular & charged attacks. I think health bars & damage numbers would help a lot. Especially the latter just to show how much more effective charged attacks are compared to uncharged ones. Towards the start of my playthrough when I was struggling in combat I would just mash attack when I should've been charging it. Finally, I suspect you're using ray/spherecasts to detect if an attack should hit an enemy instead of using attack boxes that mimic the swing & kick--there were a lot of dissatisfying "looks like it should've hit" moments. Other than that combat is enjoyable but getting to the fun is a matter of teaching the player how to fight properly. I'd love to see combat refined--not even adding things necessarily--because it has a lot of potential.
Other than that I don't have a lot of thoughts. Trinkets seem cool, I imagine you can get real creative with them. I appreciated the robust options menu, my only criticism here is that button remapping is finnicky at best. Otherwise it's GREAT. The map is VERY cool & being able to add your own map-markers is great--really gives me D&D vibes. Here's a video of my playthrough (I appended a 2nd part to the end of the first), I hope it helps!
>button remapping is finnicky at best
No idea what happened there. It works fine in the editor, and I'm pretty sure it worked in all previous builds.
>I think how to fight properly is not taught well enough.
It'll be explained better once there's an actual tutorial. I probably shouldn't have told players how to block at all at this point, because you can only block enemies with weapons, and blocking isn't very useful against the skeletons due to their range.
>Incorporating mouse movement for attacking is interesting but I don't see the purpose.
Where you hit enemies and with what type of attack matters. Skeletons, for example, take a lot less damage from thrusts than from cuts, and you need to hit the turrets with overhead attacks or your sword will bounce off the metal parts. Overhead attacks also do more damage, but can only be chained into a thrust, whereas left and right attacks can be chained into each other.
>I think health bars & damage numbers would help a lot. Especially the latter just to show how much more effective charged attacks are compared to uncharged ones.
I might add some way to see (very) roughly how much health an enemy has left, but giving the player too much information would go against the intended tone. It's also not really necessary since all enemies should only take a few hits to kill if you're fighting them correctly and it's easy to compare yourself. Also, the amount of layers on the hit marker shows roughly what percentage of your damage went through to show what weapon/type of attack you should use.
>Finally, I suspect you're using ray/spherecasts to detect if an attack should hit an enemy instead of using attack boxes that mimic the swing & kick--there were a lot of dissatisfying "looks like it should've hit" moments.
You can't have locational damage with overlaps. The reason you felt that the kick wasn't working is because it takes two kicks to stagger those enemies unless they're in the middle of an attack. Did you feel the same way with the sword? If so, why/when?
What did you do to clip through the wall at the end? It doesn't really matter since it's just a BSP placeholder, but I can't do it no matter how much I try.
Okay, well if that's how you wanna do it then ya oughtta follow your vision
>What did you do to clip through the wall at the end
My hidden talent that I cannot control. BSP is fucky that's just how it is.
This game hard. I can't even consistently make an attack. Holding and moving doesn't work very well for me. The very first enemy keeps wrecking me. Also, I can't block. What is forward mouse button?
I can't figure out how to get past the gates. I suck at video games I dunno.
Combat to me boiled down to charging an attack, moving in, landing it, and then moving away before the enemy got theirs in. But the only enemy I defeated was the skelly. It felt very fast and twitchy. I see that if I move the sword in different ways it attacks differently, but I don't understand how that is meaningful in gameplay. If that was meaningful and I could feel like I was having a real sword battle, that'd be cool.
I like this.
I got stuck after I picked up the mace, the door leading to the crystal is locked and I didn't notice anywhere else to go.
The combat is interesting, usually directional attacks are paired with slower movement, but I think it works as long as you have room to maneuver.
Although I would suggest either binding an attack to the "no direction" direction, or never resetting the attack direction in the first place.
Promising game, I hope to see more.
>I got stuck after I picked up the mace, the door leading to the crystal is locked and I didn't notice anywhere else to go
You can break the padlocks with the mace. Hopefully that will be a more obvious assumption to make once there's a tutorial level and you have a better idea of what the game expects from you.
Combat doesn't feel fixed to me.
I still have to hold LMB and then move the mouse to start an attack which is slow and feels unintuitive.
Just pressing for an attack would already be better.
I don't have a Mouseforward and Mousebackward button aswell, or I don't know what you mean by it, so blocking and cancelling an attack isn't a Thing.
Tried to fight the Guy in the Cell, room is too small to dodge or outmaneuvre, they take too little and deal too much Damage for me to even come close to beating them, not being able to block doesn't help at all there.
Didn't get past that Guy, gave up.