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Guessy4 years ago(+1)

It's a functional platformer, though the difficulty on the shooting is all over the place. You wind up in situations where the guy with the machine gun is more dangerous than the tank, because the machine-gun guy has massive area denial and can stunlock you whilst the tank can't.

The main issue is simply too many bullets in one big line: there's no way to dodge because jumping just drops you back into the bullet conga trail. If they - machine gun guys and the boss - fired in shorter bursts it would feel a lot fairer.

The exploding bullets were also pretty eh; they mostly fired in a rough cardinal direction, but only mostly, so they weren't predictable and between them and the boss they give both little room and time to avoid. So, like the machine gun attack, you're forced to facetank. Something like a lobbed mortar that landed with AoE would have worked much better.

Enemies are also completely silent on death, which feels a bit off.

Whilst the weapon choices are nice... functionally, you're just going to use the machinegun and hold it down, because there's no reason not to. Shotgun range feels awful; you have to be close enough to the enemy for the enemy to shoot back (or drive into you, with the boss), which... well, see the stunlock comment above. I'm not sure when you'd ever use the pistol or the melee attack.


...gave creativity points for yakuza with abrams can you hear homura screeching in the distance

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Ran d'Reille4 years ago

I see. Really great feedbacks here. Reading it I realized how this game needs a lot more improvements.

I must admit I somewhat noticed the problem with the AK-47 guys.  When I tested it I do feel their attacks are indeed too hard to dodge. But are their attacks really do some stunlocking? I tried to make sure to give a little bit invincibility to try to prevent that, and when I tried it for myself I did not get stunlocked... hmm... but I will take note of it.

The exploding bullets... now that you mention it...  At first I made it only one bullet, but it wasn't "flashy" enough so I thought I would make it shoot three; then it got too hard so I halved the number of bullets they spawn while also constricting their directions a bit although not completely... I hoped that it would be somewhat more fair but I suppose it indeed isn't fair enough yet. The splash mortar idea sounds like a great idea! Wish I had come up with that sooner... (^.^;

Regarding weapon choice... oh wow I didn't know other players actually felt that way; because when I tested it I actually felt the need to continuously change weapon types. When there are mostly enemies that die with one shot anyway I always use the dual gun mode because I can move quickly. With the dual gun mode I can actually jump over the burst of 8 bullets the AK-47 guys shoot. And the shotgun... I always use the shotgun to fight the boss because it's actually far easier to fight the boss with the shotgun than with the assault rifle due to the limited maneuverability of the assault mode. I think the problem here is with enemy diversity -- I did not make enough enemies, and there should be enemies that encourages speedy maneuver (thus discouraging the overuse of assault rifle mode) and enemies that  are far easier to be attacked with close quarter combat (like the boss). I think most of the problem here lies on the enemies mostly attacking with "horizontal projectiles" that require jumping to dodge -- should've added stuffs that for example come from above like for example your suggestion of mortars

Many thanks for the feedback. I will take note of it and may make an improved version of it in a week ;)

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Guessy4 years ago (1 edit)

It feels stunlock-y; getting hit knocks you around and stops you firing, making you unable to stop the enemy from firing, if that makes sense? Even if you're not taking damage with every hit you lose a lot of control of your character.

...Honestly I never actually noticed you move differently with different weapons. Maybe that could have been made clearer? Heck, if the pistol-mode could double-jump that would encourage its use a lot. Though given you shoot horizontal projectiles you still need to be level at some point with the enemy to shoot them, which jumping around a lot hampers. Currently, the best 'strategy' to use against enemies is to just stand outside their range and plink them. You'd need to either break up the long sightlines in the level geometry or make aiming free-directional to try and combat that.

EDIT: Oh, and despite the screen telling you to use a gamepad... you cannot navigate the menu with a gamepad. Or at least I couldn't with an xbox controller in Opera.

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Ran d'Reille4 years ago (1 edit)

Wow I didn't realize that it wasn't clear how you move much slower (like 50% of dual gun mode) with the assault rifle; I thought the difference was obvious enough considering I used completely different walking animation for the assault rifle and assault rifle alone. Double jumping with the dual gun sounds like a good idea - I want players to feel like "swift ninjas" when using the dual gun mode.

Oh wait do you know that you can actually shoot downwards? I suppose I did not make a level that makes it necessary to use that move but... you can shoot downward... and shooting downwards somewhat gives the player a lift. My bad for also not making it obvious

I don't think I will implement free shooting... this, I must admit, is the main weakness with pixel arts... It is impossible for me to implement such a thing with pixel art. m(_ _)m

Regarding enemies... I think a solution would be slightly more complex AI. The enemy should not notice the player all the time and perhaps add a little element of stealth... I think this is the main problem. This solution tho... is easier said than done... T_T

I just noticed that I might be able to take a few notes from the Metal Slug series due to the somewhat similar gameplay... that game also has similar shooting mechanics and enemy attacks...

Regarding gamepad... you navigate with the left analog. The D-Pad is for changing modes in the game while left analog is for movement -- perhaps at least for the main menu I should've made it possible to use D-Pad huh... ;_;

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Guessy4 years ago (3 edits) (+1)

I did not! And yeah, just some tutorial messages in the background would have helped out a lot to explain all this stuff. My first experience was 'mess about figuring out the controls, discover weapon-switching, find the pew-pew gun, stick with pew-pew gun because it Shoot Good better than the others.

Free-shooting + pixel art is hardly impossible: you can do it with 6 frames (up, up45, forward, down45, down), flip for the opposite direction and as long as the bullets are free-aiming people generally won't care if the character isn't (though you'll need a crosshair for obvious reasons). You'd probably need to split the sprite into upperbody/lowerbody if you want to run-and-gun and still stay sane as an animator, mind.

I wouldn't say you need complex AI, just to build your levels around the AI you've got. As it is, there's a lot of open space, so the player can just outrange the goons, and the tank is only threatening when you can't casually jump over its shots. If you want players to be dodging attacks at close distance... force them to close the distance. Even giving the mooks a range boost would help as long as they can't fire from offscreen.

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