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Hi, I just finished the Demo. It took me two hours, and well over half of that was owed to the boss.

What you made so far is looking great, I appreciate the many options such as custom sharpness to the pixels. All the particle effects (I hope that's what they are, I'm not really a dev myself) look really good, such as when you fire and when you vaporize small enemies. The sound effects are quite nice too, especially the enemy sounds. The ambient music is nice, but a bit of a short loop.

What I'm missing is the ability to shoot straight down and up when hanging from a ledge. It seemed to me that using the triggers might be used for that, like when you're in the air. Also, it's weird how you lose a tad of momentum when landing from a jump. Oh, and the screen tearing is unfortunate since V-sync does add a bit of input delay. But good on you that you put that warning on the option, since I would not have noticed it otherwise.

Now, the boss is a real killer. As I died a few times, I felt myself getting better at it and stuff that I thought I was going to complain about seems fine in retroperspective.

There are a couple of things though: I started crawling to avoid the super-quick overhead dive the Slither does, but I found myself getting hit three times by it anyway only when all of its eyes were gone. I might just have crawled a pixel too far to the edge, but I'm unsure so I mention it regardless.

And then there are the flies. Oh man, the flies. The varying distances they come out at sometimes meant that I would miss one because it barely ducked under my shot, and I'd get hit. Also the screen going all grey when you get to low health made me straight up not see them when I was looking out for the bright purple boss, resulting in the flies killing me. It's rough when you get hit by an unlucky fly and get ten energy or nothing at all in return. Or when you then jump in to collect the energy and immediatly get bodyslammed by the boss coming up the middle. By the way, do sometimes more flies spawn than normal? I think I was facing down ten one time.

But what gnawed on me more than the boss or the flies (pun sadly not intended, it was one of my better ones) was the way back to the boss room from the save point. Might there be a possibility for some sort of soft checkpoint outside of the room for when you die to the boss only?

You wrote that you unlocked all doors after the boss, but I found myself unable to go anywhere new except for the charge beam in the adjacent room. All the colorless doors are still locked. I thought I might be able to return to the starting area with the green door, but I couldn't jump up at the point where you get the Geo Suit. Did I miss something newly explorable?

And here's something that just happened as I'm writing this: when I tried to start up the .exe a second time, it didn't work. I opened task manager and found it just running as a background process, loafing around at 0% CPU usage. Killing it and trying again sadly does nothing different. I'm currently playing on Windows 10, if you want to know.


The characterization of our protagonist so far is minimal, and that is quite alright. Not that I'm saying I don't want her to have any character, but in this regard one can overdo it.

The environments are great and quite detailed. I like the glowing green spikes in subterra, and all the havoc caused in the facility. Of course the purple slime is a highlight in being so dynamic and truly looks goopy. It's good to see that the underwater stuff doesn't slow you to a slugs pace and make it a chore that way.

I think that's finally everything I wanted to say. I'm stoked to see what further things you'll do with Zordak. And thank you for what you've made and shared with us so far.

Hey, thanks for trying the demo.

The music will be reworked at some point so this will be improved upon, likely when the game is closer to being finished.

I'll add aiming straight up / down while ledge grabbing to the list and we'll see when or if this will be added.

The speed loss when landing is just another way of trying to make the character feel more heavy as I want it to feel a tiny bit clunky but not too much.

As for vertical sync, I don't get any tearing without it on but this differs from monitor and graphics card I would imagine so there's not much else I can about this.

So.. there are many things still wrong with the boss which I'll be trying to improve upon at some point.

The main thing right now being randomness, I'll be looking into making it less random.

Right now it's pretty much purely random in what pattern it chooses, this is why you sometimes get no flies and other times 10 flies for example.

And yes, the overhead dive does not work as good as I want it to, it's probably too quick with little to no warning before it uses this attack and the avoiding it is probably a bit too hard when it does the low dive.

So yeah.. as mentioned, will be looking into improving this at some point.

As for the screen going gray etc, I actually agree and will add this to the list, I'll be looking to make it less intense or maybe even completely rework it.

A checkpoint system will very likely not be added, but this is not to say that I won't add more save stations. So we'll see what I do about this, I do however, want there to be a bit of a "punishment" when dying, but this particular one might be too much.

The "doors unlocked" message just means the doors in this current boss room and exploration means collecting secrets you missed that are available in the demo. Maybe I should have worded this better, some people miss the entire text as well so yeah..

Never had that issue before where the game doesn't start up so not sure what is happening here, the only thing I can really suggest is going to "C:\Users\YOUR_USERNAME\AppData\Local\Zordak" and deleting the "settings.ini" file.

Or maybe editing the "options.ini" file located in the .exe folder:

CreateTexturesOnDemand=0 (0-1)
AlternateSyncMethod=0 (0-1)
VertexBufferMethod=1 (0-3)
SleepMargin=15 (1-30)

I do not have control over this file since it is included by Game Maker Studio so I don't know what value ranges are correct or if all of them even do anything, so the numbers within the parentheses are just my guesses.

SleepMargin does affect cpu usage and performance however, higher value = more cpu usage, so this is probably the one you should try changing.

I'll add this to the list but if I can't reproduce it there's not much I can do unfortunately.

As for the protagonist having character, I'm trying to keep this very vague and not super "special" since you are supposed to be something like an ordinary person, I don't know how else to describe it.

I'm glad you like the environment and detail since this and atmosphere is somewhat of a main focus.

Thanks a lot for the extensive feedback, very much appreciated. :)

Alright, I just tried to start the game again and it worked. Seems a PC restart fixed whatever was going on.

And actually I was thinking being able to aim straight down could be useful even when standing normally. I found myself trying that when standing on ledges. It could also be used when you're hit by a little bug, so you don't have to run away to shoot them. I know it's just a little thing, but it would be nice to be able to do it.

I do enjoy the "character weight" thing, it makes actions more deliberate. And it really isn't too much. Cheers!

Good to hear that it works again, no idea what would cause it to not start up. :/

I'll add aim straight down while standing/running to the list as well, same deal here: we'll see if it gets added or not.

Thanks again for the feedback. :)