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(1 edit) (+1)

One-off notes as I was playing:

- Updated ui elements + loading screen aesthetics look really nice.

- Advancement of the tutorial fight against Jin is a little unclear. I found myself pressing the prompted buttons, parrying when it told me etc. and it would not advance to the next prompt. I'm not sure how I ended up defeating him. I was spamming jumps and then he suddenly got knocked down and I could finish him off.

- Speaking of spamming jumps, if you spam dodge roll + jump along a wall you can sometimes do a really weird long jump. In Nia's boss room you can basically float along the ceiling if you spam jumps.

- After I died against Jin I respawned behind the invisible wall so I couldn't reach him. Had to quit to title and start a new game to re-fight him.

- In the mountain region leading up the Jin fight you can run up the side of the mountain to get around said invisible wall.

- If the fps displayed in the top right corner is accurate, the game doesn't seem to obey the fps set in the settings unless Vsync is explicitly turned off. I tried setting it to 60 and 30 but it would only use the full 144hz unless I turned vsync off.

- After dying to Louise once her battle music stopped playing.

- I was able to cheese Louise by essentially spamming kick with E to stunlock her. When her poise bar is set to max I would just jump away and the jump hurtbox will knock her down, giving you a free finishing move. Definitely felt like cheating but I'll take it because I know my scrub ass is not beating her legit. The good news is this strat does not work on Nia at all lol.

- Might want to increase the height of that small japanese-style house in the hub world. It's easy for the camera to clip through the roof. Or just make the roof turn transparent when the camera is over it.

Overall thoughts on the gameplay:

Maybe I'm just playing it wrong but this game feels a little too punishing. The bosses do a fuckton of damage while it feels like every attack the player does barely scratches their hp bar. I also don't like how bosses never really give much breathing room. They will throw out an attack and then throw out another a few seconds later regardless of where the player is. It would be nice if they would also move around the arena bit or run up to the player before throwing out their next attack. My only reference for similar arpgs is the Kingdom Hearts series and I appreciated how those games will always let you get at least one full combo in if you strike an enemy during an opening. In those games an enemy's retaliation timing is determined by a "revenge value". Here it seems like I can get in at most 2 hits in consistently before the enemy starts striking back, despite Kimiko's basic combo being apparently 4 hits total.

Parrying, blocking, and dodging feel a lot better than I remember. I also like how recovering from a downed position feels a lot snappier than the last time I played.

(+1)

Thanks for playing!

  • It came to me in a dream (no, really, I was lying down and suddenly a design for the dialogue UI hit me and I just had to get up and immediately start working on it)
  • It's really unclear, but the tutorial works on a timer and a counter. I figured some people would get stuck on certain parts, and I didn't want to softlock them too hard. Basically, it's something like attack 4 times or auto-progress after 30s. It's been a real struggle designing a tutorial for this game. Jumping is really strong and versatile, and I haven't made any anti-air moves yet. 
  • Not sure about the long jump, but I do need to limit how the jump works. In the hub level, it's possible to just jump straight up a vertical wall by spamming. 
  • There's a lot of set up in that level that needs to be redone, so most likely I'll rework the entire level at some point. 
  • ^, it's really problematic lol
  • Unity's settings only allow for VSync or target frame rate, not both together. I've considered merging them into the same drop-down, but I think that would just be more confusing. Maybe disabling the FPS dropdown could be a better way to communicate this?
  • Known issue, will fix in next patch
  • Louise has always been weak to feet (unintentionally). It might  get fixed when I do another pass at her AI later, but I think it'll stay in some form as a weakness for players to exploit. She is only the first boss, after all, and the other bosses won't be as kind. 
  • Good point, but it's somewhat placeholder at the moment so I'll change that when I replace it.

Yeah, it's a bit too much. I can't consistently beat the game in one continuous try myself, so it's going to need more balance changes. Some of these problems are a result of having a very simple behaviour tree that just throws out attacks, so that behaviour of running up is something that I'll fix by changing the AI paradigm. However, my successful runs on each boss are usually around 3-4min, so I don't see much issue with the current HP amounts. (Sometimes, I even feel like they're too low...). Damage from the bosses is high, but it's not enough to outright kill you  in one shot (maybe unless you get caught in Nia's Fan Dance), so I might just increase the heal charges instead. 5 was an arbitrary number to begin with, and there were also plans to be able to fill it up mid-fight which I never got around to doing. 

At most, I might have to implement an easy mode, which I'm not keen on doing in the full game, but it might be necessary for demos. 

I've never played KH, but I've heard Revenge Values mentioned to me about this game before. I've seen a bit about it, but I'll need to spend some more time thinking about how to design and implement it. The 4th hit of the normal attack combo is also something I rarely use, but other abilities are planned to allow that to be used more often. Just like how you can do a Dodge -> Dodge Attack -> N2, I'm planning to have other abilities that chain into later normal attacks as well. 

Personally, I don't want this to be a game where you just wait for one single attack, deal with it, then unload the exact same actions every time.  Especially since the bosses are all similarly human-sized with flinchable poise instead of giants that can't be staggered by regular hits. My biggest criticism of Sekiro was that there's very little need to use the full moveset beyond the basic actions, so I'm aiming for a game that almost requires you to understand and use everything available to you. 

Ideally, this would be attacking, getting deflected, knowing that the attack combo isn't going to work and immediately switching to another move, but the current animation lockout giving a frame disadvantage of ~0.5s really kills that flow. AI learning rates might also be too high that deflects happen too often, so I might just cap it at 90% chance to block and test that out.