Great feeling and a lot seems to head in the good direction, including sound design. I would recommend having better highlight or differentiation for some sprites/scenery. Like the blue slimes I found a bit dull in terms of "shininess", or the green crates being too discreet. The weapons factory level had some passages where the practicable terrain was not instantly seen for me, playing with contrast would help.
Overall I enjoyed the playthrough. It's simple but it feels good and flows pretty well.
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Masquerader Z's itch.io pageComments
349 days ago(+1)
Thank you for going into so much depth with this review, I have a lot to think on now. I probably need to buy a 360 pad so I can figure out why the buttons I got from unity docs don't work for movement.
-That's right on the bug's function, long range single target lockdown
- I'll do another pass on camera confiners and spawn locations, thank you for pointing that out and the clipping issue.
- Interesting ideas in regards to metered moves needing better reward, I could play around with an ex kill bonus for score the same way I do for RB finishers or find some other way to encourage it. I could also stand to make the power dunk as flashy as it is in KOF or something with bigger hitboxes and shockwaves.
- Noted on enemy/player balance, I'm not attached to so many bullets being like that so if it's unfair I can fix that. I'll have to think about the strength of shoryu if you find that combo too braindead to be fun.
- Interesting to hear you find the other bosses less interesting than the Highschooler. Is it just that they wait too long to attack or that they move less than her?
-Also noted all the points on bugs and better feedback, especially on a tutorial. Maybe I should make that my next goal now rather than at end of dev
I probably need to buy a 360 pad so I can figure out why the buttons I got from unity docs don't work for movement.
I'm in unity too, I dunno if you are using the old or new input system, but the solution is super basic in both cases. D-pad is considered another input, so you just need to add it to your layout.
I'll have to think about the strength of shoryu if you find that combo too braindead to be fun.
The combo is fun, the problem is that all enemies (and almost all bosses) just stand in one place to be combod to death. For the first levels can be ok, but after that you need to resolve that in someway, otherwise that combo becomes a magic bullet. My easy suggestion is to do a rerun of zero+zx series and see how they have dealt with that (expecially for bosses). An example that comes to mind is copy X, and the green guardian that fly over the arena, so you can't combo them all the time
- Interesting to hear you find the other bosses less interesting than the Highschooler. Is it just that they wait too long to attack or that they move less than her?
sewer boss is fine, but if you get there at full life you can just combo him nostop and he will die before you. I like his atks but since I can just stand on top of him and kill him I'll do that.
fire lion boss instead I found just bad because he will just stand still and do an atk once in a while. since it's an immobile boss, make him hit way harder. In a sentence, make me want to dodge his attacks(this is a general tip).
-Also noted all the points on bugs and better feedback, especially on a tutorial. Maybe I should make that my next goal now rather than at end of dev
DD are for this. You have a certain idea on how your game works, then you see a streamer play it and you die a little (check fishking yesterday's vod, he clipped into a wall). In my experience tutorial is essential, and to make a good tutorial you need a lot of time and hard work.
GL.
Checked the new build and it seems like those issues have been fixed. Good work.
Playing through it again I found some additional things:
- If you have a charged attack when your Henshin is cancelled, the charge attack sprite and sound effect still plays. This issue even continued into the menu.
- During dialogue you can still transform(?)
Thank you so much for playing, I've been absent from Demo Days for almost a year thanks to other work but made sure to give myself deadlines again for these.
Thanks for pointing out the enemies being hidden by the hud, I'll take care to leave them out of that quadrant during enemy rooms. Also appreciate the reminder on fixing the results screen, right now it acts like pause and I've left it alone for too long.
Did you enter that soft-lock zone by dashing into that little crevice? I should put some signs there for the Transformation button because the Bombardier Form has a flight ability on Dash that can get you into and out of there. Actually I just re-read that and you mentioned being stuck in another enemy room and I found the problem, one of the flying enemies clipped out of the room. Fixing that now.
Good point on the bad telegraphing, I didn't notice how used to the enemies attack patterns I was and assumed it was fine. Which ones have the most bullshit attacks? Also where in the Factory Stage did you clip through?
From regular enemies the worm attacking with a spike is the only one that seems bad. I just discovered you get just a little bit of leeway by killing it with a plunge attack, but it's still overwhelming.
I'm retesting bosses and now that I'm more used to the game they aren't really that bad, but they are indeed very tight.
Now I actually can avoid attacks like first boss's drill consistently if I spam dash. It also has a bullshit frontal electric attack variant that's done without any visible hint, and the slam attack is a bit fast.
The shield throw in the first stage boss fight still feels too quick.
In the second boss fight I still can't avoid the 3 circle projectiles attack consistently - from time to time I manage to do it, yet it's so fast I don't register what I just did. Now that I think about it you can probably get out of the rolling attack by sticking to a wall (idk, it didn't use that move this time).
The bosses could be way more difficult and it would actually be more fun, but they need to be 100% fair as a trade off. I could be missing some important mechanics though.
The slide bug is here, thank god I captured it beforehand.
OOK i just looked at it again and i was so confused because it shows ZOE's head on the moveset of the motorcycle guy, it never says what moveset goes to what character so i just thought the face of the char was the indicator of that
also it says i need 50 METER to do a move but when i had a big 50 on the left side of my screen i couldn't do any special moves, but i think its actually talking about the tiny meter under the health bar, which is confusing because the number 50 doesn't really mean anything to me in the context of a red bar, unless it says 50% METER, it's still practically invisible next to a giant health bar and giant combo counter thing tho
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