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Thank you for the thorough breakdown đŸ’Ș (We at @sagehartstudio are big fans of 'Astral Peak')!

We agree completely with your points on the liveliness of the game world, and are super excited to implement additional animations and audio/music in the not so distant future.

The dashes continue to be high on our priority list for reworking to create the most possible fun for the player. From your feedback, would you say that the variation in the dash was something you enjoyed, however it was the having to actually 'switch' that made it feel restricted?

Feel free to contact us on any of our socials HERE, or reply in this comment thread, if you would like to discuss further !

- S/G/H/T

The “switching” didn’t feel right for me. Having  the inputs mapped to the triggers or bumpers of the controller could make the gameplay more free flowing.

Holding a bumper initiates the charged dash whilst tapping a bumper initiates the short dash. There would be no need for an extra input when switching, stream lining  gameplay and keeping momentum when chaining dashes. 

I also didnt see the need to really use any of the other dashes, they seemed to function the same but with a slightly different flavour to them. 

The charged dash and normal dash could be the only two dashes in the game and there would still be a lot of room to explore puzzles and combat. But that really depends on the scope of the project. I personally think that designing by subtraction is better though, avoiding feature creep and focusing on the core game loop. 

If you really wanted extra dashes, maybe incorporate more of a spatial element, like when the player dashes, it leaves behind a point that chains to the next,  connecting together in a damaging area once you’ve exhausted your dash.

Or even simpler: just have pulsing areas where the player dashes, damaging enemies that touch it and  decay over time. 

Something like this could really help for wave clearing rooms with lots of enemies - just a thought. 

You should also check out the SONISS GDC Free Sound Archive, it is criminally under utilised and is a really good resource for high quality SFX.