Post by Skeppartorsk in CRYPTWAKE — Early Demo comments

Viewing post in CRYPTWAKE — Early Demo comments

Looks and feels like basically a straight up TinyRogues clone. Except without all the content. Which for a tech demo, the fact that the movement feels as smooth, is a very good thing.

But even the UI looks basically identical to what TinyRogues looked like before their UI bloated into the current monstrosity. So it feels a bit too much like a clone rather than an interpretation in that regards. Usual pet peeve of no outlines on enemy projectiles causing issues with visual clarity once rooms get busy (is that red blob at the corner of my eye an enemy or a projectile?)

I played without sound, which made there be 0 indication of if I got hit. So a visual representation of being hit would be nice. Having to look at my heart in the top left to see if I was hit isn't ideal in a bullet hell game.

Not really being given any indication of what the passive skill you're picking up is/does wasn't great. Maybe there was a way to get tooltips for them? But if so it wasn't intuitive or explained. Most of them seemed basically useless, while the purple orbs of death one was just absolutely destroying enemies.

JustAnOctopus8260 days ago

While I wasn’t aware of TinyRogues when I started developing the game, the simple room generation and graphics that I made to save time ended up accidentally making the game look very similar to TinyRogues.

So, I totally understand what you're saying about my game looking just like a clone of that game. But I’m very confident that, once the finished version is released, it will differentiate itself enough to be called CRYPTWAKE, and not just a clone of TinyRogues.

As for the visual clarity of projectiles and getting hit, I honestly never thought it was difficult to detect or dodge them. I probably got too used to them during testing, and in the end, I failed to notice anything wrong. These problems will definitely be fixed.

Regarding the passive skills, any normal player would expect a popup to appear when approaching an item, but in this game, you can see the description by hovering over the item with your mouse :) (I only explain that in the Controls section on the itch.io page) I’ll change that too.

Also, I'd like to ask you why you played with 0 sound. Just a personal preference or you found the music and sounds annoying?

Skeppartorsk259 days ago

I was waiting for my Pizza to get done while testing this. So had my earphones off to hear the timer downstairs. Never actually heard what the game sounded like. But even when I do play normally, I tend to have my own music on over things. Then there's the people who enjoy gaming but have some form of hearing loss to consider. Just generally nice to have both a visual and audio cue for things like that.

As for the projectiles, with the current number of projectiles it's fine. But knowing how these games go. You eventually end up with so many things on screen. That anything that can help make projectiles more visible, when in your peripheral vision, is just a nice thing to have. To bring back a TinyRogues comparison. There are some weapons in that game that have a red sprite with a while outline. Almost all enemy attacks in that game have red sprites with a white outline. Which means if you use those weapons, you cannot see enemy attacks. With enough enemies on screen and having enemies = red, projectiles = red. I foresee the exact same issue. Just a sea of red where you don't know what is what. This isn't an issue for everyone though, but usually it feels pretty bad when the source of difficulty becomes visual clarity. Rather than actual mechanical difficulty. Though admittedly a lot of very successful games in the genre, are successful despite horrible visual clarity. Some even have projectile outline as a toggle, since some people genuinely do not want the outline. Others just adhere to very strict color schemes where if something is a certain color. You know for sure it's an enemy projectile. A lot of ways to go about it.